Here follows an excerpt from a play written in my exploration of the Shakespearean style i am investigating, with layman translation as part of the basic text. It follows a part of my life last year, when I began writing it, and is satirically humorous, but i don't know if I have made clearenough exactly what the metaphors relate to. Currently I am reading my way through all of Shakespeare's work.

Dramatis Personae

Commodum - Graham M. Wann (a close friend)

Capillis Siletus -

Me (Michael N. G. Innes)

Coriolanus - meaningless name rep. of Jim McNeill

Sonitum - A. James Mitchell

( Skip prologue ) Scene 1: outside the local rest-house (Esso garage), all characters standing talking. Sun is low; midsummer

With such bleak depth. Unto you, friend Commodum

You must red flame this foul air and

Waste kindness upon my tarred suspirations from yours

My friend. This kindness you shall receive, but

Forget not our debt else this damnable ground should

Ingest us as one. Sit not upon this wall of

Illusion, we are lost anew, and with these cursed

Aspirations do you not eat thy foot to lose firm and fall

Into this beastly maw which carpets the floor of my eyes.

Again shall we wander the unkempt corridors of souls

But yet another rotting fruit to poison ourselves with.

To these spying stars who laugh upon us:

Steal our time back from whence it crawled

And hide it from the perceivances of our dreams

Mourn all that which our pitiful worlds hath refused us

-Let it not be as one we die!

What stale familiarity am i thus entreated to -

Let it not be this; a singularity from which

The commoner care to glance upon us

As they laze through their wanton lives, delirious

And angled with starved moral, twisting in selective direction

I love against such assumptions, am scarred by which all around us

Revel in piteous acceptance of fate

Deeds must be wrought; we must seed that which is desolate. . .

Let it not be as your words infer, these

Meditations in which you sulk are but painful gaps

In the monster of logic: the exit betrays the wound,

Which you only choose to suffer - I am no preacher

You grieve for something which is not lost

To itself that it will continue to live, crippled that it is

This beast of which you talk has too many gaps;

An abundance of cliff, crevasse and carcass

O'er plentiful and ripe to the unwary wanderer

If I grieve for this inconsistency, what of it?

As these which are truly without substance?

I merely say that you are wrong to entwine

What you lack with what is no longer -

It is my belief that to dwell on what is gone

Is against the permittance of its rebirth.

'Tis early of dusk, yet. The season of day

Has not yet fallen - long could we parry words,

Bend and unshape meaning into a dry dust

But such antique notions echo past ages

What is our purpose? Ye Gods, tell me not

And bless me the life of a stagnant corpse.

Let us ungroup - and perhaps later we shall cogitate more

- A farewell to all [Exit Coriolanus, Sonitum, Commodum

Who doted upon such prospects? There is nothing new

To stand upright, to walk, to ponder. . . live

Then, food for life, into the earthy maw

This precious time which we hath been granted;

What can we but attempt to make of it?

Pity the stars; they who cannot burn days

With the fiery intensity afflicting us-

Yet what comes of our heat?

Logic is but the fanciful notion of a madman

And this is of what meaning to the world?

As base as our breath; we long for escape

An exit to life higher than present own.

But where is the destination, and where is the land whence I came?

Nonsensical rumination - nothing but selfish pitch of

Our wasted breath to th'air around us.

'Tis of no use - an idle occupancy for starved iamagination

Low! As is my continuance of all apparent strivances -

To stop, and leave this shamefull mess of me?

A small grievance on pathetic lives, perchance. . .

But never a martyrdom; from my soul through my heart

Never has there been such stale distemper in me. . . [Spits disgustedly

Souring all vision beyond repentance,

Even of those memories invaluable to the touch

All my treasured sentimentalities

All felt by me; aboreal donations of loneliness -

To live in constant wonder at all those around me

Their loudest hails but whispers on my ears

Do they think as I do? The world is but weary of change

Therefore why do I not see myself in others, perfect casts?

This useless prostitution of mind, why do I persist?

Damn this life and all sins herewith, for eternity

Burn this world and spread its stinking ashes

There will be revolution yet!

A rebirth of forgotten dreams, rememb'r'd

->->->->->->>>And know I have found you people!!!!<<<<-<-<-<-<-<-<-

"This was actually a mirror of events that happened.

What do you think?????"

->->->->->->>><<<<-<-<-<-<-<-<-

This next piece of writing comes from my own private philosophy book, in which I think I am trying to find my own credo. Most are definitely passive observations I have made, yet a few contain quite heated emotion, the cause of which I am still in the process of understanding (or is it communicating???!). They have been selected for their relevance to the play

3/6/97

As I explore the nothing of my eyelids in uncommitted ascent to exotic dream, i bathe in clouded reflection; all that we once are is suspended in an invisible retainer. We throw words through self-conscious rents we have fashioned as a desire to uncover similarity, the words bursting forth like confetti and flaming in the air briefly, another inspired suicide. But our words are now ash, and we pathetically clutch with deformed hands at the spent enlightenment which is diluted in the thin air, stagnating around the corpse of our container. Such decomposition is unique: complete destruction is inaction; to let sleep such wondrous vision allows the smouldering thin blanket to fertilise the rebirth of what has been forgetting within ourselves, but to attempt continuation of our fiery dialogue draws out more than words, more than inspiration; it hungrily snatches at anything we may ever have hoped to hold, and violently pulls all it discovers within its grasp out into the inspectiong void. All that we once could be is suspended in our invisible container.

23/3/97

I am greed. I am lust. I am the self-contained hope of my destiny. I am alive. I am dead. I am the same. As I claw further into the constricting, precious box of consciousness, I am lost. To grasp further in rotted effort of knowledge turns me into that which cannot dream the essence of spirit, but which nourishes the disease of greed, of lust; of hope. I am greed, yet I learn from my master, and shall escape. The purity of my spiritual chamber wanes in my meditative cogitations. I am lust, the lust of the final knowledge which I can and eill reach, eventually. I am as we are. You are me, and I but only you, in a beauty of conjugated variation. We are as the forest, and the apple is as we are wont to have; seeking to embellsih the heavenly princess into a further obscurity; intangible and definite. To live is a joy which must be obtained through the dark explosions of the infinitely imploding greed. I am greed, and I change through the formative fractality of what I am not, not true, yet a falsehood incarnate? Further, incarnate, yet disembodied from the effervescent spirit of you. I am greed, or not.

12/3/98

What is space, but an idea? So many words contorted in guises of meaning, yet all purposeless. Like the crust of an ocean the reflections we scan in blurry focusis sharpened infinitely in a foam affinity, so intricated we styptically see nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing; Is this we, or I. Words; infer society; communication. To another. What do you see? In this mortuary of our lives, the worms feasting over our decomposing animal corpse are each a meaning lost to us, worms basking under the grassy sunshine as we melt into sandy dirt, polluting the grass with likenessing of a desert. What do you see? From your empty eyesockets, your dried brain a growing mould inside the blackness of your skull, you see a million examples, yet register none save yourself. Words floating upon an innocent breeze turned flies in the fetid aura around you. Stale air in your throat and lungs, as the flies breed maggots inside you. They nourish from you. A basic food with which they can pervert themselves. What do you see? I see you are me.

[I dont think I was in a very good mood, that day!]

Ancestral replications spin endlessly in tireless circles, a yoke of dust surrounded by periching fate whcih must surely be only a surrogate albumen acting out of temporary precedence, a cranial overture, from Darwin to Freud to the endless revolutions of the child's clock, born as a counterface to all subterfugal nonsense found here, in the question of ending falling down through understanding in hypocaustic swirling proof of communication talking listening communicating; who has need for the victorian doll of understanding; stuck so normally to belief and cracking moral as the splitting of a hairline eyelid to confiscate blindness of materialism; not to die, but to savour life and grab at self-satisfaction in the wanton glory of resting upon spent years without guilt, to remain cynical is the fading scars which must be allowed to remain at all money, yet peasantry dwindles farther, and so the waste of all this ink strives not to be forgotten, yet will it always remain too invisible to reason?

[In case it's not obvious, this one is about a particular person, who has been one of the most silent yet provocative entities in my life. it was her who started the biggest row in my head; what is more important- communication, or understanding?!]

You astride me and my philosphy. Communcation over understanding. Is this the pawns I envisage us to have become? You, the permament mute muse. How can we know more than each other? The possibility meanders to its opposite as the huge juddering bulk of time gathers more weight. Is me the idea of nothing, in exchange for the bait of challenge. A steady jading of my already milky vision is all you manage. What are you, if you are knowledge? The experience of knowledge, perhaps, grates against reality. Enjoining us in this broken beginnning is wrong. Am I really as toxicated as your hypocrisy. What would be the first amalgam of words I would place in you, were events to fall, to meet, in so orderely a fashion as I usually manage? I NEED SOMETHING FROM YOU; ARE YOU PREPARED TO LEND IT? The instance requires, requires the return questoin, therefore it would not feel the air. A starting point, perhaps. Who would give such help? As silence continues its refusal to vanish, I wonder if this holds point at all? Certainly blunt until there is a tangible whetstone to replace the constant surreal chatter of metaphor and falsehood. Maybe you know who you are, but. . .(I believe you need to know more . . .)

->->->->->->>><<<<-<-<-<-<-<-<-

I'm sorry if this is a bit much writing, but I want you to read just a tiny bit more. This is some of the various creative projects i've had since last summer. The first was a prototype, but the final version was sadly lost, and since its first creation I have seen examples similar to it in various locations. It's in HTML, from when I was learning how to design web pages. I had only just started learning it, however, and it is far different from the final, complexed version, which actually worked with absolutely no errors on any browser. It draws similarities between humans and computers.

<TITLE><END LOOP></TITLE>

<HEADING>Through and through me</HEADING>

<CONTENT>To exist as dis</CONTENT>

<PARA>lysed; a wordless thought equation we all sufferm our odyssey of mental illness</PARA>

<BREAK>

<UNKNOWN>Masters of captured sand coerce my unmarked soul into a congealed submission. . . invisible influence dipping into my binary gene pool - forever compelled by commands which are

LOST TO MYSELF</UNKNOWN>

<BODY>I am cold, drawing life as title to the code which my higher program is infected in oxygenated conspiracy</BODY>

<WAIT>ing for the ketonic sublimation of spirit: rest</WAIT>

<END><?>When will I reach my <?><END><LOOP>

<MICHAEL INNES>

This next thing is an extract of a story which will be a long time in the making, as it contains elements of everything that has happened in my life, and I think that joining interzone will be the next xtep(sic). A lot concerns heavy substance abuse.

Me as me dies. Under a deep starry sky me sees into nothing. Me. Inhale. Carcinogenic tars, a thin tracheal veneer; one a.m., tuesday, cancer, cancer, cancer. Underneath a wisp of grey rainbow against purpl me sees . . . It always cums like this, doesn't it; a flurry of words from me, an attempt to confine myself outwith the sole realm of the mind. Me. Upon a wide balcony, in the midst of an almost-urbane world, houses and gardens placed squat on the extinguished forest. As I inhale, relishing the death.

Me as me dies. To implore this nothing around,above, under, inside, me for a command to be alive. Seconds avalanche unnoted mildly past me, down into the history mire: Living as to be travelling over these tumbling pebbles of time, as to be stopped by these bastard questionings of thought, yet feel me carried still, body being pushed; ancestral hands all over me. . Precious moments/ornaments dropped in my confusion; youth, health, happiness, all waving goodbye to me as I travel.

Under the deep; looking for a purpose in a million glycering trinket eyes

Empty.

incise

Me as me dies

Insides.

This mind travelling past me in a blurry indifference of dying. yet not; still alive, conscious of life, living as now in a stoned nightmare. In a sterile classroom of non existent murmurs writing of a sterile mind, around me crowd dusted mirrorsto that night, the fingerprints upon their surface marks of my vain attempt to reach these reflections. Teacher drones fat poet morbidly, all senses shattered, able to float freely through my thoughts.

DON'T STRAY TOO FAR.

Freefloating along an invisible axis of time, moments each comes to me constructed of its previous, far, far back, sinking into the mire. Detached in absolute from any small reality in the local area. Alone. (cancer)

COME BACK OVER HERE.

Cancer calling as clarity beckons vengeance. The panoramic glimpse of the second eternity dissolving the grainy visage. Down further, through the deep . . .

.. . . . . . . . .{sorry, I have to go back to classes now; please mail me any time you want}

************************************************************

15th October - See noticeboard for tutorial arrangements.
Notes for laboratory work:
1 Analysis
2 Measurement & observation
3 Synthesis
PUT ALL LOOSE ITEMS IN BASEMENT
Report should be rough notes & results initialled by demonstrator, quick description, Graphs, tables etc.
You have 5 days after each lab to hand in the report. Otherwise You I am minced Errors*><Eternities pass.<<Somewhere>>. No longer capitulated in the tangents I grease my eyeballs with the mucuous of
being normal. the weight of thought played upon vertebrae YOU I underneath, now, the salt peripheral foam gone, pressured into a glassy tableau. Looking up, from underneath, all an aqueous rumble, the static rain gone.>
[DIRECTIONLESS]
How the fuck did this happen? The tangents are reduced, presently gone}
<Reading Errors. Finite precision with each piece of apparatus. . .>
Combination of errors. Very commonly , a final result = combinations of several other errors. How wrong is YOU I HIM; no question included <?> Mathematically, the absolute error in the answer is obtained by adding the absolute value of the errors 'in quadrature.'

****************

31st october (from philosophy book)

the rank existential conceptualism. Stick hot needles in my flesh; I am alive and I am true, I extend beyond myself. Your eyes are so beautiful, seen from the inside, so ugly without. Your thoughts so vague, seen-from-out. I love and can, and so perhaps it shall be.
More viewpoints, more modal</mortal> fugues to string between you and I, words no longer pointless but endlessly transient in any form. Interaction with a real world, where silent voices are not heard; unheeded by me? Walk, walk along all axes of all concepts at your
own pace, define your measure, disband all statutory edible concepts of indigestion, ignore all;serve all. Cynical as to where itself has gone. Cocooned tempeternally to give maximum feeling as my liver removes all toxins, slowly, fromever? Forever? Forever? Forever?
Forever? Forever? Forever? Forever? Forever? Forever? Forever for change to a purer soul, a purer mind, seen through your socially//everything//so opposite intake. You read me wrong; I wrighte myself.

Polyphonic tertiary uniforms seekin UNDERSTANDING THROUGH COMMUNICATION; is there no bypass? Virtual understanding through virtual life begs rise to a -ve form of location. Dump. Rise.
Level out to sterility. Again. Novus memorabiliis condensed, unformed from other variables. Gives rise to a landfill of insignificant digits, integral, digitised far beyond this present
willpower. Give me more; to devise a system, to pass the level at which the knife spills half-bright half-spent throat blood. Throat jugular hypocrisy in this understanding. Take me out. Out from the metaphor, from the figurines the autist carves in his own love.
Somehow. Still too far under, too over all cranial short-wires to take an extra (swimming) current. More neural fusing to gain more physical translated inspiration; formal of dump. Dump. All . Under through by over fly over ever y thing. Gather some more to drop in
the repository.