SKINNING THE ONION

"What this amazing little text in front of us does is twofold. I was sent the original because I am supposed to use it to deconstruct our surroundings, so that I can explain it, and them, here and, to you. And the readers. If any are left at this late stage. This spiralised text was, I believe, written directly by our creator - the author. Note that I use the term author rather than writer. The writer, as he appears within our cognizance, is a different entity to the author. In some vague sense the writer and the author are the same person but for our purposes they are significantly different and separate the writer is one of us whereas the author is not. The writer is a character - because the author makes him so. He, the author, chooses not to be. I suspect that the distinction that is key is that the writer is the linguistic craftsman, the persona responsible for the words themselves, whereas the author is the real and present creative force behind our very existence. Our god if you will. And here we have a hint of how or rather why our world exists. If we keep this in front of us we can better comprehend the majesty of what is being revealed through us: better unpick this text within which we exist, and its significance. So it is partly to inform us and it is secondarily my script for today: I am duty bound to follow its spiral. And to respect its initial reference to an onion. While we cannot see what the author has in mind because he cannot represent it visually he can plant the necessary verbal description, the essential truth, and this he does in his opening. An onion, a layered object, an organic object, a permeable object, with the possibility, or perhaps even inevitability, of leakage betwixt the layers, the necessity of leakage even. Yes, necessity I think. A well chosen metaphor, I am sure, a carefully chosen metaphor. So - first - to the surface layer of our onion, the Litvinenko text - the one that we are all supposedly involved with - the one we are grounded in. My job is to resolve that story - yours is to hep me - to give succour to my journey. We are all - well all of us in this room - portrayed as some investigative organisation - we might be a branch of government - a branch of journalism - private investigators - the transcripts and intercepts set the scenario up early on - now, what do you think we are? - in the story? what sort of organisation?"

Mr Power looked shocked, "how do you know it's to do with Litvinenko? and why him?"

"Come on Power - lift your game boy - think about it. He gives us enough clues - the two Alexes - Goldfarb, who worked for Soros and Litvinenko - Anna, is clearly Anna Politkovskaya, the Chechnya references, the mode of death - clearly it coincides with the start of the episodic divulgence - backdated from Litvinenko's illness - it's his anchor into supposed objective reality - his jumping off point - his start point maybe - and it's his way of examining at a trivial level the relationship between "reality" and the written word - how does what people write dictate what we perceive as "reality"? - how does the writer get to drive reality?- it's one of his abiding obsessions. It's what he wants to share with his strictly limited audience - the writer and the word."

"And how do we know that that isn't his only agenda? - the simple Litvinenko story? Maybe that's all there is to it. Plain and simple." Mr Power glared at Charlie, "How do we know that? Apart from your reliance on this spiral text thing of yours?"

"Good question - or rather it allows me a good answer despite being a crap question. First off he sets up the expectation that this narrative of his is roughly contemporaneous - so that puts us in October of 2006 but then he dashes it immediately with his Joycean reference to the Gold Cup and the horse Hedgehunter - which is in March - from Ulysses, but you know that - so right away he reveals his duplicity - his sleight of hand with time - and of course on top of all this we have the post dates of the blog entries themselves that dissolves any idea of real time or even any temporal continuity. He shows his hand - and the hands of his multiple internal clocks, calendars - deliberately. Good enough?"

"OK." acknowledged Power, "I'll buy that".

"So what kind of organisation are we? Come on guys, do you know?"




(TBC)