The Anti-Götterdämmerung of an Academic

Yosef Igneous Garrety (PhD) is consumed by his deliberately modest office. In front of him lies a stack of unmarked essays, the top most of which is titled: “Leaving the darkness: a psychosexual history of coal mining in the north of England”. The stack is bitten and coffee stained and rises from the general clutter of the desk like a pulpy stalagmite. Yosef peers distrustfully at the stalagmite. He has recently undergone a crisis of faith – he can no longer see value in Deep Freudian Historical Topography (DFHT). This is not the first crisis of faith in Yosef’s 35 years of plodding academia, but it will be the last. Yosef in fact had declared that very morning that he intended to “stop looking for sexual symbolism in the mundane and well, just ruddy live”. Nevertheless, on days such as these Yosef spends much time observing the walls of his office. Sometimes he thinks he can see them breathing; riddled with bronchitis and geologically slow. Other times he recalls how the walls looked before his pipe was confiscated on medical grounds (jaundiced, frankly) and how, sometime in 95, all that lovely character was destroyed as they were maculated with cheap cream from B&Q.

It is 5pm. The central heating has automatically shut off. Yosef’s screensaver of a fake office fire burbles pathetically away. He wonders if the current obsession with regulated, impotent heating might be some sort of reverse Promethean deification of the domineering modern Woman. He soon checks himself and instead examines the choppy grey sea of portacabins outside. He wants to go home, but it would be irregular to leave so early.

It is now 5:27pm. Yosef is unwrapping a toffee and wondering how the latest administration of radiotherapy will affect his wife’s tumour. A not insignificant part of him hopes it is hopeless. Beatrice has experienced terrible skin reactions.

5:38pm and a homebound Yosef is disturbed by the weather. Stockton high street is remade. The cobblestones run with distilled exhaust fumes and buildings sport caps of filthy slush. Yosef considers the hallucinogenic grip of Snow. He tries to shake the idea. I am a conduit for experience, nothing more, he tells himself as he tramples a neon sign in a black puddle that reads: “Last Ever Golf Sale, Hurry”. Later, a homeless man mews painfully and Yosef hands him twenty pounds. A homeless man doesn’t know how to be grateful he thinks, before concluding out loud “the power structure in that moment is simply untenable”.

When Yosef gets home his shoes are both sodden. He crisps them on the radiator. As he is doing this he experiences an erection, which is mildly troubling because he cannot locate an appropriate instance of radiator masturbation from his early childhood. He sits in his armchair and relives the words of a student from earlier that day - “If willed memory was as visceral as the spontaneous variety we should never leave our armchairs”. Yosef gets out of his armchair with a start. He is again jealous of the young man. Not, incidentally, because of what he said. He had stopped bothering to interpret his student’s fetid attempts at insight a long time ago. No, it was the way Jill Mantle (PhD) - strip-lit by an unintentionally cracked door - had bucked beneath the student last Tuesday. Her mouth, or lipstick to be more precise (the image was seared in Josef’s brain), cavorted forever like kelp in a red tide.

It is 6pm. Yosef peers through the wastes of his semi-detached garden. Beyond the fence (last plied with creosote – 23rd of May, 1992) lies the quarry. The recurrent freeze and thaw has sent tumbles of limestone onto the stiffened brambles, leaving them crushed and awkward in each other’s company. Yosef considers, as he extracts a fibrous blackhead from the side of his nose, whether the garden started decaying before or after Beatrice’s little romantic transgression. He wanders through to the living room, auto-piloted by the wear of the carpet. Here his attention is marshalled by his wife’s embroidery. It hangs above the plastic fireside, gold on navy blue: “Carpe Diem”. Yosef is disgusted. If it was a real fire he would unquestionably send the stitching to the flames. Instead he imagines seizing a pillow and pinning it to his wife’s face. The clatter of stainless steel amidst spilled IV fluid sends a pulse of pleasure from his back to his groin. Yosef suspects that he will be punished for this.

After tossing a couple of fried eggs between toast slices and washing it down with strong coffee, Yosef is ready to drive to the hospital. It is Friday and he reasons that if he spends two or three hours with Beatrice, he can safely keep the rest of the weekend for himself without condemnation from the children. The car follows its own black tracks out of the driveway. Manchester United vs Bayern Munich: European cup, quarter final kicked off at 7:45pm. The roads are silent. At 7:55pm it begins to snow. Yosef has ingested too much caffeine. As he hurtles through the night he imagines that he is parting the legs of a vast woman made entirely of his wife’s flaking skin. So strong is the melding with reality that five minutes later he mistakes the rear end of a lorry for the woman’s pudenda. As the Volkswagen enters a fatal skid, Yosef sees not his entire life, but merely strands of stinking egg yolk. And Symbolism oozes unhatched.