Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.02
Aged Out?
by Travis Hedge Coke
What a terrible thing to get old, frail, boring and witless.
The Tempest‘s Ariel, a slave of three successive masters, was trapped in a pine-rift as Bella was put down the wych elm, in punishment for being incapable of doing what he was incapable of doing.
Edith Manning dies, of sheer will, before she gets old enough the Queen of England can send her a pro forma note of congratulations on achieving one hundred years alive.
Edith’s cousin, Mad Tom, is a ghost as long as we know him. He died before he was dead.
Mister Six, a sequence of lives and surrendering lives, lives by sacrificing his retirement.
A set of coordinates between birth and life and death; Mason Lang.
Imagine being respected, patrician Sir Miles Delacourt, long-standing servant above the Crown, Court Magician, Director of MI6, author of The Invisibles, and expert of many fields, talking to Mr Dreams no one else can seem to see or hear. A Mr Dreams who gives you directions, who whispers or states flatly into your ear alone. Whose place is sharply taken not by the person behind or beside you, but you beside them.
Is it an acid flashback? Consequence of drug tests fifty years earlier?
Hypnosis and chemical manipulation by pop media terrorists and fussy, scared girls?
Are you, Sir Miles, old?
Jack Frost is still the boy messiah at thirty-two. Christ with the twinkle in his fuck yous. Boy takes that name as an adult. Mab can mean boy. Queen can mean woman.
Tom O’Bedlam is immortal-dead, an aged ghost, an unaging corpse. King Mob, born “granddad,” despite himself. Mister Six throwing out a retirement plan and union card to save the universe.
What a terrible thing to get wonderful. What a wonderful thing to get old. Awful magic.
Edith writes to King Mob, as ariel@gloriana.free-serve.uk to RexPop@Virgin.net, “The day-to-day existence of the elderly, like that of the magician, us filled with an extraordinarily high level of coincidence. Everything ultimately repeats itself.”
Old is relative, but that does not make it feel less like concrete.
A thing with age and even being outdated is that the work does not become any less of work. Ariel’s imprisonment was for being unable to do works, regardless of the absurdity of the works. You clock in as many hours a day living at nine as at ninety-nine. Clocks are callous. Callouses wear and grow and wear thin. Clocks count up. Clocks cant out.
The British internet service provider, Freeserve – which began with no standing charge – closed itself up in 2007, seven years after the final issue of The Invisibles serialized. Killed by America Online. Closed by Orange Home UK. A relic long before it was shuttered and the accounts folded in or closed out. The architecture of Edith’s email address implies more than one email address under the gloriana family account. While we mostly think of Edith as the rare Invisible with no other name than Edith Manning, her legal given and surname, she is, online, ariel.
Edith’s old ally, lover and friend, Queen Mab, has a name from Shakespeare’s plays, and Ariel, too, is so derived.
They draw from a well. Gloriana would come from a nearby enough water-spring, in the works of Edmund Spenser.
The cult of Gloriana is a cult in the cutting sense.
Ariel is sometime confused with Uriel, or mixed to. Sometimes an angel or a devil, a sylph, a guardian, a calming flood, spirit of the air, archon of the wind, the sprite of poetry, rebel, servant, slave, apocrypha, lion-headed, demiurge.
The cult of Gloriana, as a political persuasion at the end of the Sixteenth Century, is a kind of stopgap to aging. A pretense being made that the monarch, be that a faerie queene or one of England, is both divine and a deputy of the Divine, is a muddle of realpolitik made magical realism in its most anglo-cultural sense.
It is old. It was old when Edith chose her email address. One queen or another. It was aged before Mab took the name Queen Mab. Only an Ariel is immortally young.
*******
NEXT: Una is the Superior Jerry
And previously…
- Prologue/Series Bible
- Chapter One: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 1)
- Chapter Two: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 2)
- Chapter Three: Robin Roundabout
- Chapter Four: How Did Helga Get in Here?
- Chapter Five: Boy Our Embarrassment
- Chapter Six: Once I Was a Little Light
- Chapter Seven: Sacrificial Greed
- Chapter Eight: Dreams Like This
- Chapter Nine: Whose to Tell
- Chapter Ten: The Dead Weight
- Chapter Eleven: Non-Causal Time
- Chapter Twelve: The Fanfic of the Book of the Movie
- INTERSTITIAL – 3.0: Back and Forth and Back Again
- Chapter Thirteen: Batman!
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
Tempest. Bob Dylan. Columbia. 2012.
Negative Capability. Marianne Faithfull. Panta Rei. 2018.
Girls at 12. Joyce Chopra. From The Role of Women in American Society.