Part 1
I am Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria and you are the seventeen year old Baroness Mary Vetsera and we are in a hunting lodge.
I am Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria and you are the seventeen year old Baroness Mary Vetseta and we are in a hunting lodge and we are in love with each other.
I am Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria and you are the seventeen year old Baroness Mary Vetsera and were are in a hunting lodge and we are in love with each other and we are about to carry through with our suicide pact.
Or at least you are in love with me and I am in love with the idea of a suicide pact and I have been turned down by my first choice of suicide companion (I do not know that she will meet her demise, quite unassisted by bullets, in syphilis).
Neither of us know that in over a hundred years’ time nuns will still pray for our souls.
Neither of us know that our suicide pact will result in my father (the emperor) having no direct male descendant and as his brother (my uncle) will die from typhoid, that his son (my cousin) Franz Ferdinand will become heir to the throne and then that he will be assassinated and thus the First World War will begin.
I am Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria and I have just shot you, the seventeen year old Baroness Mary Vetsera, and I am about to shoot myself (before I lose my nerve), which will result in the shooting of Franz Ferdinand and then the shooting or annihilation through other, mainly mechanical, methods, of eleven million military personnel as well as the death of six million civilians and a lot of cattle due to famine and epidemic disease.
I am Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria, I am thirty years old, I am in a loveless marriage and I love you, a seventeen year old Baroness, enough to bleed to death beside you.
This muddled devotion (as already scrutinised in relation to a prior morbid invitation of mine, which was declined) was conceivably the only natural response to what the Princess of Belgium describes as your
goddess
like
throat.
In a goodbye letter to your sister, you, the owner of this goddess’s throat, have written that we are “blissfully going into the unknown limbo.” In truth, on discovery your body will be swiftly smuggled away and buried unceremoniously, to be meddled with later by, amongst others, some Soviet troops and a furniture dealer who will endeavour to sell your skeleton to a newspaper.
I, on the other hand will live on through my daughter Erzsi who, amongst other things, will have an affair with a submarine captain, become a socialist, become a reclusive German Shepherd breeder and live to a fairly ripe age, leaving behind her a villa where a Japanese Buddhist community will take up residency.
It will never occur to any of the men who are shot during all this that perhaps events could have been avoided if Erzsi had simply been allowed to inherit the crown.
Part 2
I am the moon moving between the sun and the earth on January 1st causing a total eclipse during which a Paiute religious leader called Wovoka will have a prophetic vision where the spirits of the North Americans slaughtered by white colonists will rise up and assist their persecuted living in reclaiming their land.
I am the moon moving between the sun and the earth on January 1st causing a total eclipse during which a Paiute religious leader called Wovoka will have a prophetic vision and subsequently found a movement rooted around a ritual called the Ghost Dance which is devised as a way of insuring his prophecy will become a reality.
I am the moon moving between the sun and the earth on January 1st causing a total eclipse which will indirectly lead to the spread of this Ghost Dancing amongst many different tribes which itself will indirectly lead to further massacre, this time near a creek called Wounded Knee and involving predominantly women and children.
This will be on account of treaty-breaking, racist governmental representatives misinterpreting the Ghost Dancing as a form of threatening battle preparation, but I do not know any of this: I am the moon.
Part 3
I am the cyclone that’s blowing into a harbour and sinking both German and American warships alike. I am just a force of nature but later it will bring certain people a sense of satisfaction and affirm their conviction that karma will teach those that have wronged them a lesson, to imagine I was punishing warmongers for greed, jingoism and a lack of respect for pacific weather.
Part 4
I am a swarm of locusts crossing the Red Sea; I am two thousand square miles in size and individually I may merely be identified as short-horned grasshoppers which turn from egg, to ‘wingless nymph’ (which sounds like something from mythology), to a normally solitary and fairly innocuous creature; however, as the sum of my now rampaging parts, I am a nomadic and voracious plague capable of destruction of truly Biblical proportions.
I am a swarm of locusts crossing the Red Sea; previously my constituent parts lived peacefully, but as the result of overcrowding and therefore the increased tactile stimulation of all our hind legs, a rapid increase in serotonin was triggered and this made us collectively change colour and eat much more and breed much more and transform into one (which now weighs several tonnes) and to take flight and soar across oceans, wreaking havoc, exhausting resources and instilling fear and superstition.
I am a swarm of locusts crossing the Red Sea and I do not consider what would happen if as a result of overcrowding in a particularly bustling city, humans developed, through the same tactile stimulation of their hind legs, a drastic increase in serotonin which would similarly cause them to change colour and eat much more and breed much more and then to take flight and soar across oceans, wreaking havoc, exhausting resources and instilling fear and superstition.
I am a swarm of locusts crossing the Red Sea and I do not consider the possible nutritional and environmental implications of the fact that I yield significantly more protein per 100g than the cattle that died due to Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria and the seventeen year old Baroness Mary Vetsera’s suicide pact. I do not consider, either, that I produce, in the process, significantly less greenhouse gas and use significantly less water.
I am not aware of the fact that one day it will be possible to buy, for six pounds seventy (whatever that is) my children’s children’s children’s children (times several generations) whole, dehydrated and seasoned with Greek spices, or alternatively, some of my distant cricket relations powdered in a cranberry and orange flavoured energy bar which will be marketed as a healthy and tasty gluten, nut, dairy and soy free treat, with a disclaimer for the squeamish that the insecty ingredient is highly comparable to crustaceans which are widely accepted as fit for consumption.
Part 5
I am the paint on Vincent Van Gogh’s brush that he is stroking into his starry night, the starry night that far in the future will become a background on someone’s computer (whatever that is) and that this someone’s mother will find familiar but not be able to put her finger on (it’s on the tip of her tongue) and so she will ask this someone if they painted it when they were younger and then someone else, a complete stranger, will find out about this via a global network that connects this someone’s computer to innumerable other computers and is called The Internet.
Part 6
I am a dead Brazilian magistrate and a dead Swedish Inventor and a dead French-Canadian vagabond and a dead Belgian missionary to Hawaiian sufferers of leprosy and a dead Russian satirist and a dead Hungarian rabbi and a dead Romanian poet and a dead American balloonist.
I am not really dead, I have not really gone, instead I have now become a baby that will survive the sinking of Titanic and a baby that will become a Nobel prize winning Swiss chemist and a baby that will develop the helicopter and a baby that will become Adolf Hitler and a baby that will become a Finnish runner and a baby that will become an Ecuadorian supercentenarian and a baby that will become an Indian intellectual reformist and a baby that will become a French prostitute-spy-politician.
And I know the cycle of rotting and evaporating and breathing and germinating or gestating and of digestion doesn’t happen within one rotation of the sun, but unless I’m mistaken there’s no more or less stuff anywhere than there was to start off with.
Not in 1889 or at the beginning of time
It’s just continually moving and changing.
Like the love between a man and woman.
And the moon coming between the earth and the sun.
Like a love that causes nothing but death and pain.
And a satellite blotting out light and then reflecting it again.
Part 7
Yes I have loved someone less than they loved me.
And I have moved in-between a source of light and people who are trying to bask in it (even it was just the TV).
I have destroyed things like a force of nature and this destruction may later be attributed to an intention that I was not actually motivated by.
I have, perhaps unknowingly, been part of something much larger than myself that others could rightly have considered an ominous and insatiable phenomenon which should be halted in its tracks and at all costs prevented from reoccurring by employing fungus or nets or by any other means deemed necessary.
I have created things which may later be shared through a form of technology that is currently beyond my comprehension and during the course of this they may be misattributed as the naïve work of someone else.
I am a Belgian missionary to Hawaiian sufferers of leprosy and I am a Hungarian rabbi and I am an American balloonist and I am Adolf Hitler and I am an Ecuadorian supercentenarian and I am a French prostitute-spy-politician.
I am love.
I am the moon.
I do not know if in a hundred years’ time one single nun will pray for my soul.
