John Gohorry

Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an ambulance, rips his shirt up for bandages, risks his neck to protect others. Persuasions of word and image, graphics of ridicule, of subversion. Who should enforce their silence? Citizen B’s undeceived, seeing the hypocrite-bigot untrousered, the judge in the brothel, the Faith- Founder, hand on the trigger. Of the two modes of persuasion which gives the greater offence? which does the greater good? The response of the dead is muted but citizens in their millions packing streets shoulder to shoulder in freedom’s name give their answer.

Together, they wrote a book. Its title was Solitude, or Every Man his own Hermit. They wrote alternate chapters in a small room with one chair and a desk hardly bigger than A4. Bip wrote on Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays, Bop on the other days. On Sundays, neither wrote. On Sundays, they went together to search for the stuff of fiction. They travelled, gambled, dug gardens, dated deep women, whose talk they would agonise over on weekdays at that desk, working out meanings.

Rain keeps us indoors, so we live by constraint and denial. No walk on the beach, no sea-swimming, no bicycle ride, no watching the peep-and-vanish of lizards. Instead, the clock ticks and one page of the book turns to another. Our fingertips now and again touch as if to suggest the inside and outside of love are the same.