CRABMEAT

This is a story about evisceration, and about seeing things with one’s own eyes. Yet it is also about (around and above) the point at which clinical detachment meets familial intimacy. As the 17th Century English physician, William Harvey, who reputedly dissected both his dead father and sister, might have argued, this kind of detachment is necessary for objectively observing the living and the dead, whether brothers, sisters, fathers, family pets – or crabs.

The characters and their names overlays historical fiction and autobiography. Those characters more discernible to the reader  (though chronologically muddled and fictionalised to hell) would be John Hunter (1728-1793), Scottish surgeon and younger brother to William Hunter (1718-1783), Scottish anatomist and physician, respectively our Robert and John-John.

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First performed with projected image, soundtrack, and additional electronic voices at Limoncello Gallery, London, 5th September, 2012.
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ROBERT

“EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING,” I’ll say,
later and often, but we must begin
mustn’t we? with the imagination.

Imagine. Experiment. Observe, yes?

Specifics: The last words of this story ¾
that is, a story in parts about parts;
images described in aerial view ¾
the last words of this story are CRAB MEAT.
The beat, ten syllables a line, is set
by the tap-tapping of a cat and dog
who share the name, Harvey, and whose forepaws
stretch through space and time as if glistening probes;

like beasts with multidirectional limbs.

Perhaps there is nothing in Edna’s hand
when, this morning, John-John climbs from the coach.
Instead, she smiles, truly pleased to see him
and hopeful, too, for what he might now bring.
Or does she know what he has done before¾  
will do again when our sister worsens,
coughs and expires with an arm in the fire?
Or maybe there is                  in her hand
(there is!)
a round stone the size of a strawberry,
or possibly a piece of pottery −
a piece of pottery with broken point
poking between her fingers in a fist?
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What can I tell you about my brother?
A man with some work. A man of something.
A man who returns four days in receipt
of a letter by mother, imploring:
“can be done?” “beg,” “return at earliest.”
And more: “she’s in wont of your,” etcetera.
With his tools and a bucketful of crabs,

our eldest living brother will race home.

Specifics: My face. This relentless mouth
looks as if it were cut for me with shears.
A reddish down is starting to appear
on my lip, and prescient of the beard
I’ll grow later in life, for which my wife
will most cruelly admonish me for.
It will come between us, this face and hair,
both figuratively and literally.
She’ll rebuke my kisses on inner thighs,
saying it is not lips she feels but bristles,
like a something-or-other, scuttering.
Maybe it is, I’ll say. Maybe my beard
hides within it an undernourished mouse,
a small army of butterfly larvae
so that I might conceal their hairy backs,
releasing them in stealth and saliva
and out my mouth just to titillate her.
And for months, maybe, I’ll cling all the more
to the red hair on my cheeks and my chin
and, too, to cries of my being uncouth.
“If the sight of my jaw or lip,” I’ll say,
“is enough to shake men from their pillars ¾
or a wife from her pillow, for all that ¾
what will they make of the spur out my cock?”
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Here we project close-up a cockerel’s head,

a crescent moon sprouting forth from its comb.

He puts the bucket down between our feet
speaking of how he’d come by the creatures,
how he’d doubted their fitness for the pot:
“in their instar phase of moulting,” he says,
though what he really means is “between shells.”
He says that as they travelled on the road,
and with the carriage rocking back and forth,
he could hear the animals’ insides slosh. 
This occasions a joke about my brains ¾
“hydrocepha-something-or-other,” and 
the consequences of my truanting.
“Well, why not make your own schooling?” he says, 
kicking the pail in loud punctuation
and tendering its live contents to me.
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Specifics: My eldest living brother:
My mother and father’s first born son, John,
died aged fifteen from falling off a horse.
(Father would die in a similar way
though mad drunk and out the door of a coach.
The Big Man’s brains were such soup from the fall
there was no hope of rising from the slab
in the kind of weird reprieve one might read
in books that later collated such tales.
Yet for The Big Man there was no such luck.
No way: he was pâté. Brown meat. Fish bait.)
So, when the second Hunter son was born
he was given another brother’s name.
To his elder sisters, and later, me,

he became, thus, a double John: John-John.

Later, will John-John not admit us all
into that Autumn-cooled chamber, with breath
stinking of spirit wine and black pepper,
and Annie, naked, laid out on the oak,
already tracing the wood grain with nerves?
Will he not permit us, despite our pleas,
to see her in this last remaining hour?
“It’s too something,” and “risk of contagion,”
he’ll say, wiping a hand down his britches.
Well, we know, don’t we? “Like he did Father.”
Honest to God. He anatomised him.
Or, as he said, “made a preparation.”
Better still, “a conjuration of light.”
And it must have seemed so, there on his bench,
a square of Isobella sun cast on
the freshly varnished flesh of our father
layered up, coat on coat, till he glistered
like a tallboy set for elytrous flight ¾
Like the sea-smoothed hull of a ship, he shone.
I wonder, had he muttered to himself?
Bearing blade and brush, muttered to himself,
indemnifying with words: “Meat, crabmeat,
pig bladder, candy apple,” etcetera.
A few hundred years from now
(the future!)
in the anatomical museum,
the University of Edinburgh,
when you see The Big Man under perspex
and inside, a blue cotton bed-sheet, draped:
“a bad choice surely,” and “shows up every,”
you’ll say, pointing to bits of skin and hair ¾
likely an eyelid that’s come unstuck when
moved from one display case to another.

“Did you see the Gaffer tape?” you’ll whisper.

What am I saying, O, relentless mouth?

And what do I mean, “O”, instead of “Ah”?

The crab is still alive and drums the ground
with its tapering limbs in a ten-beat.
This part is hard for me to speak about,
knowing what I know from way, way up here,
and seeing all eventualities
in the present tense, stretching out round me
like − yes! I can see it all perfectly ¾
a beast with multidirectional limbs.
For example, I know that at this point,
here, with Harvey, my wolfdog, beside me,
in a corner of the yard, or outhouse,
I know that I have never before seen
any living thing such as this: a crab.
Perhaps a pig kidney fried with carrots;
hands trapped, writhing under a pink boulder;
Mother in aprons, crimping a pie crust ¾
images I see now like plates in books,
but never have I seen one in the flesh.
So, as we look down now, from up above
as if hanging from wires round our ankles,
and the crab in the centre of the cloth,
(Superman’s S-shield stretched across the earth)
we see that for an eleven-year-old
and a younger brother who  does¾not¾know, 
I move with alien dexterity.
Still, it seems to me, readying my tools,
that this is all so unfamiliar.
At what point, I will forever wonder,
at what point does one ever truly know?
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Harvey raises a paw and taps the earth.
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At what point does he know, for that matter?
For example, if I satisfy him
and offer up the crab to his pink grin...
Ho! See, he yelps as it pinches his ear!
He knows that! Pain. Un-anaesthetised. True.
But wait, look here: the whole arm detaches,
and even still the creature’s claw clings on.
For a short time, the two animal-parts
are locked in a heroic episode 
of impossible microgravity.
And as arm and ear are wrestling nearby,
the crab’s body, as if in slow-motion,
falls to earth, landing miraculously
back into the centre of the sackcloth.
“It’s both here and there,” I say to myself
before pulling off its remaining limbs,
arranging them with tensors still twitching.
Oily bubbles appear out its mouthparts
before a bilious liquid spurts forth.
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Specifics: The reason for the sloshing.
It’s core, ill-fitted to its carapace,
is like a shrunken moulage; an offprint;
a child with developing dentition;
like a son in his fathers shirt and shoes.
(As John-John says, “between shells,” remember?)

Thus, a superfluity of wetness.

I’ll speed up, for there is too much to tell.
Beneath the biscuit of shell I’ve removed
is the body, alike nothing we’ve seen,
all undifferentiated tissue ¾
an accretion of colourful jellies
weeping into one another like goo.
Harvey is back sans claw, and taps the earth,
but not before he blocks our view to lick
the still pulsing box-heart of the creature. 
It’s now we get a sense of symmetry,
a sense of structure and segmentation,
plumes of filaments and deadmen’s fingers
and thumbs peeling back vitreous membranes,
moving through lusters of purple and white,
probing cavities and snipping cartilage
and antennae; eyestalks from their orbits.
Disentangling vessels with fingernails
and weighing in palms what might be organs,
(it all goes in the mouth and warms like spice!) 

until we are almost at the sackcloth

and Harvey still tap-tap-tapping throughout…
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as I raise and rotate the semi-shell
to peel down its apron: “We have a girl!”
At the centre of its pennant, a hole,
a hole that leads to the heart, and to light.
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All at once, we are moved ahead in time,
a few hundred years into the future.
A newspaper spread out in double sheets.
A kitchen table. An operation.
In triangular configuration
there is a man sat with his young daughter
plus a cat the colour of white Pepper
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who raises its paw and taps the table
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pressing for some meat amassing in bowls.
The Big Man is mistaken in thinking
the cat knows how to beg, let alone count.
“Do you see?” he says. “Do you see? He taps!”
Yes, even a cat can be taught to tap
if its stomach burns with expectancy.
“It’s an exercise in patience,” he says,
but, and the cat knows this, as does the girl,
it’s the levy of fear over impulse
that halts a mad dash over the table.
Back of the hand, maybe, but more likely
the heavy handled knife, held by the blade,
and forming such a devastating priest,
(and yet allowing for such precision!).
“You ever bitten down and gotten shell?
Sends a shock, I’ll tell you. Stops everything.”
Like a peeping eye spotted through the chink .
“Some good preparations, and it’s a breeze.”
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From here, there’s little left to pick over.
Some closing dialogue, hard to make out:
“you do is,” “now listen, I’m showing you,”   
“gently,” and “what you do is, now gently!”
“you strike it,” “you hit it,” etcetera,
“in the palm of your hand, and tap.” “here, here,”
“don’t,” “no, no, not like that,” “gently, I said.”
“the trick is,” “now the trick,” “the trick here is,”
“like this,” “the best bit,” “you save that for your,”
something, and “push with your,” “and then forwards,”
and “don’t tear,” “now you’re not,” “your finger there,”
and “there! That time.” “Do you see now? He taps!”
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The odor girding our scenes is replete.
It is everything. The whole ball of wax. 
Salt caramel and rabbit viscera.
It’s the air. Or, if the air were to smell,
not the blue specks of vaporised matter
that complicate it, but the air itself,
the fundament, then this, this would be it.
It coats the nose, the throat, and rings the tongue
yet leaves at its centre a void ready
to receive it as substance, as CRAB MEAT.

crabmeat.mp3