Ronan Fenton Surreal-Absurd Samper
“The Surreal has always been my refuge from a world in which I could once only recognize a system governed by pre-established rules, before I inevitably came to embrace the disorder, whirling in deluge, that lay alongside and underneath it. Within the Surreal, the ineffable aspects of our selves and our experiences and the universe we have been cast into co-exist, and can be mutually discovered at the fringes of thought and language. The artist, if they so choose, can free themselves from notions of comprehensibility and meaning, or else can reimagine them. Through the Surreal, something can be reached at that rational modes of expression could never begin approach. It reflects the irrationality of our own lives, our pasts and our futures, and the present that seems to extend far beyond our understanding. The surrealness of my own work could be considered an attempt to give form to the nebulous. Over the course of my life, I’ve often struggled with ideas of selfhood and identity, as well as the fundamentals of the external world, which are endlessly reflected in each other, and I think my writing from the very beginning has been an act of grappling with this tension. It was the Surreal that revealed to me for the first time the shaman and the scientist are one.”—Ronan Fenton
Spectre
The ghost had never been a person, had never been lashed with superlunary bonds to a site of earthly anguish, had never been held aloft in the arrow-cloud of time, rising, rising, then falling over the atemporal badlands towards which all becoming was directed. The ghost had never been embodied in a pyxis of matter, had never seen their skin glisten in the rain or pushed their fingers into the earth or listened to the heartbeat of someone they held close or tasted their mother’s cooking while a storm knelled outside the window and lightning genuflected upon the horizon. The ghost had never known immensity or insignificance, had never experienced singularities or multitudes. The ghost was compelled to haunt, to linger without purpose or intent. They were oblivious to motion or stillness. If the world was straight lines, either parallel or intersecting, the ghost was curvature. The ghost was a debt that had to be paid. The ghost was formless ambiguity. Their experience could be described as a lack of experience. They had no self or name and no way of knowing this. The ghost was a colourless stone plummeting through a liminal ocean. The ghost was slippage, the absence of spectacle, a punctured eye in a textile rend. The ghost negated codification. The ghost was text in white space. The ghost lapsed through the page.
One of the Family
Consider the consequences of a gold coin dropped into a fishbowl. How will I be spent when my worth makes itself known? What does it mean when the fish outlives the gold and the glass bowl is elevated to a higher shelf so it can look out the window at the gold coin that has died and diffused itself through the sky in venous calligraphies? You have to get your hands wet if you want to tease the silt at the bottom of the bowl into a city of salt and honey where children climb into towers when their parents aren’t home and look out over a nation of rotting arteries. You have to dial a number if you want to know what it feels like to swim through caves where all around you the codices of the unremembered are fastened to the rocks like so many limpets and anemones. You have to raise a house from the woods with your hands and a length of metal if you want to be home before dark before supper before the angel starts swinging her silver net. How will I be spent when I slip through the holes bored through your brow to let in the rainbows? What does it mean when I open up hands cupped over the rain and hear the call of a bird someone imagined unravelling its wings in these skies when they were still a place of mystery? Consider the consequences of walking backwards along a highway to evade the rising sun.
On Excoriation
The cottonmouth displays its skin over creosote and turns each scale to stain-glass gonorrhoea topography braille-read by bears born in graveyards and named after whatever headstone whetted their night singing in moon flood when all the angels are into auto-erotic asphyxiation and begging me for a chord of agony as inspiration to pleasure themselves while the godhead rails lines of void-powder in a dark room all windows are walls paranoia is a creed is a collision of continents over an aeon and a day and an hour and a minute and the second coming is preceded by the fifth departure unless the children in the gibbets have stopped counting backwards from a thousand which takes them from end to beginning of time warps like a nest in a hurricane emerging at last in dust as a silver crown polished with blood and bohemian apologies insinuated but never spoken because the curvature of the earth is negative like a hand holding us like a very small thing whose strings have been cut and sewn back together so many times they are invisible and maybe there and maybe not and maybe if the hand fell away we would still be here skinning cottonmouths just to feel something.
Achromatism
It wasn’t the colour I expected but it was more or less the same similar to what I’d imagined when I was the morning star and bruised my eyes with balled-up fists and turned my mind child-ward and raised my hand to the afterthought of birth birthed only what was burning in water where I could watch it go down on fire but cooling. It was the colour of before I give you the shade before I give you the spectrum I shall describe it to you in other ways. It shone in dimensions other than those it proposed. It left instances of itself as tokens of its passing so children could consume them and be glad for everything that lived. It wore invisible robes. It took a step across the forbidden pasture and vanished into the cornfields. It was an orphan. It looked like it hadn’t been fed in a very long time and it wouldn’t go away. It lay down in the dirt and made angel shapes with featherless wings. It had a self that wouldn’t hold its hand when it was scared. It listened to lilies falling from a forgotten land. It filigreed standing stones with mineral lettering. It thought of the smallest possible thing and found more than it had ever hoped for thriving in the heart-chamber where silence and serenity were sovereign. It wasn’t the colour I expected but it was more or less the same.
The Great Deluge
She sleeps on a mezzanine because she’s afraid of the rising water levels rushing over her nose and mouth while she dreams about flying above a holy mountain in the apogee of a golden dawn like she does every night and every morning until she awakens and wonders what if she drowned in the water whether it was bitter or sweet? Her mother described her as inattentive once and she thought maybe if she became distracted the water would get her even while she was awake, so she took to staying several feet off the ground at all times. She stood on the cistern to use the bathroom, ate dinner sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table, worked from a desk perched on top of a larger desk, gave sermons from a pulpit several times higher than average and only went swimming in the air, suspended from a wire with her limbs stroking through the unresistant aether. Someone told me when no one’s looking she moves from platform to platform by walking along the air. I have yet to catch her at it. One time I tried to force her to reveal herself by tossing a bucket of saltwater against the legs of the chair where she was standing and shouting, ‘this is it! The flood is here! Everyone move to higher ground!’ But she just looked at me with pity and said if the flood was really here you’d be dead already, whether the water was bitter or sweet. Last night I dreamt I was flying above a holy mountain in the apogee of a golden dawn and when I awoke I was standing on my kitchen table and my feet were soaking wet.
Ronan Fenton is an Irish writer living in London. He writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and art criticism. His work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Trampset, Minor Literature[s], Neuro Logical, and The Citron Review, amongst others.
