BENJAMIN'S PLACE

Benjamin was a flat and simple limpet. But sometimes he took on the attitude of other animals. Though this was no easy pose.

Benjamin who was something of an inventor, knew the recipe of rush and freeze that were needed in different volumes and intensities in order to ram-raid ones way into a new existence. He knew how to stir the blood, quicken the pace, whirl the air around the body until it flew up and broke into brightly coloured strips of light. He knew how to then grasp these whirling possibilities. To draw them down into the size of a bean whereupon their massive energy would pump out into the limbs and body of the creature who operated at that specific frequency of speed and colour. Then would stand the creature on the ground, dust still rising all around.

If perhaps it was a cow it might stamp its feet, snort and move off in search of some grass to chew. If it was a duck no doubt it would quack. A donkey and it would bray. As a bird it would flap its wings and take to the sky. And so the destiny of each creature would come about according to the will as held in the balance of that particular form and its bearing n the world.

The animal would go about its own particular business picking up and putting down as it was in its nature to do.

Not so the human being. It stood complete and fully-formed. A man standing above the dust-scented land and smiled. And yet it did not move.

He was dressed in a white satin costume with pointed shoes upon which hung two large ribbons. On his head was a conical shaped hat tapering into a tiny point. Ad still the dust rose for the rush and ram “spin” into this particular form had been ferocious.

Benjamin was a clown. And he smiled for he knew that there was no going back to his ancestral forefather the limpet. And his eyes shone and watered dark in the centre, red at the edges and his lips which were full and wet quivered with the knowledge. For he knew that he was a combination of every possibility balanced back down to nought. And that the limpet was within him and that there is no going back to what is also present. And for that reason he smiled. He smiled and did not move. Though inside his white satin suit the colours were still raging. And down beside his ribboned white shoes the dust was still billowing around him though for him and perhaps for anyone concerned it seemed as if he had always been there and had not just arrived.

Why was this? It was because on the human scale of things arrivals and departures such as this seemed very much like standing still for all eternity.

And so it was with the clown whose eyes watered a little from the inside as the colours tried once again to escape back into the air from which they had come.

And yet contained within the satin white suit Benjamin knew what he was though the activities of the cow, the donkey and the duck; of his fellow beings did not encompass him. For he was bound tight to where he was. He did nothing. Spoke nothing. Gave no sign. Only the colours; the colours in his mind. Raging and swimming above the room in circles. Bound within the white flaccid skin of the clown. For Benjamin was a man. And he knew what it was to be a man watched.