On the first day of my official residency at MUN I burbled around the campus, giddy from having said hello to Andrew Loman and Lisa Moore AT THE SAME TIME.

Today I am spending my day in bed because I am writing My Bed Play. It will be performed in my bed as part of my residency.

My mother said to me one time, “Your grandfather never had his name written down.” I asked her what she meant by that. She said, “No one ever wrote his name down anywhere. Not in history books or newspapers.” He was an actor, a poet, a playwright, and a journal keeper. He rowed from town to town in his rowboat. When people saw him coming they ran for their fiddles and accordions. Handwritten pages were passed around and roles were cast on the spot. He wrote to New York to get his plays, the ones he didn’t write himself.  He also got books on the craft. The titles are fascinating.

So you want to be a director! (Make sure the actors wear the right amount of makeup.)

How to be an actor! (Be heard and seen.)

My grandfather also worked for Baird’s fish merchant all of his life. He was the weigh master. He earned ten cents an hour. He was paid on the barter system. On the day he retired he was informed he owed the merchant ten cents.

When I wrote about this in my award winning book “They Let Down Baskets” (with a CD documentary component from Chris Brookes and photographs from Jamie Lewis) my mother and my uncle were upset, because this was not a point of pride for them, at that time. We were not raised to be proud of ourselves. Big in ourselves.

I wonder if my grandfather ever imagined that all these years later I would be Writer-in-residence at Memorial University. What a majestic missive to us, from whence we came, reading Alfred Hithcock’s Mystery Magazine at the supper table. So very big in myself today.

John Butler. Daddy Butt. For you. For that ten cents you had to pay.

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Come hither, O mistress. Cast your lovely gaze to where I hang by a fragile claw from the top of the window coverings. This petite snag is unhappily interfering with my planned afternoon activity of licking beneath my left leg. Oh ho! Look how I make the jest! Alas.  Sister-of-my-Heart is of no assistance as she is engaged in her afternoon activity of napping. Wherefore art thou, oh heart? I most anxiously await your blessed return.

Perhaps you are in awe of my astonishing flourishes?

Look how I invite upon the page the question mark.

?

 In a previous life when we were the brindled companions of the Muttering Bard he wrote of us extensively within his homage to us entitled MacBeth. If Sister-of-my-Heart had not spilled a pot of ink upon his parchment pages, more of his scratchings about us would have survived to be read than “Thrice the brindled cat hath mewed.” The extraneous plot points of the Scottish General and his tedious pursuits have been the unwitting recipients of the tragic ink accident. Except it was not entirely an accident but more a willful compulsion to irritate. And thus the true intent of the manuscript to illuminate the saga of two sacred felines who traverse the ages was lost. Perhaps you have heard of our Muttering Bard and his modest attempts toward theatre? We were his most generous of muses. How fondly I recollect when once upon a time he was unhappy with having to recreate the ending of a new tail. Oops, ha ha, tale, look I commit a homophone. How am I knowing this, I ponder. I know not. Is it food? But I continue: once, I inadvertently deliberately shredded the last pages of a new writing about addled star-crossed lovers. He was thusly inspired to create a more exciting offering in which they meet their demise at the end of the play. This is much more interesting in contrast to his original concoction in which the pair wed and became dull with happiness. He named us in honour of those characters although Sister-of-my-Heart was not pleased and would never answer to “Here Romeo. Come hither pretty Romeo.” Within those pages there is scant reference to us, a piddling nod with “Every cat and dog and every little mouse and every unworthy thing may look upon her but Romeo may not.” It becomes immediately obvious why the play was pronounced as and remains detestable. Also, not edible.

 It is futile to name us any name at all because we already have our own names. What if one day all the world began to call you by the name Anobarbus? But I am not Anobarbus, you would protest. I have a name. But the world would not listen and would speak toward you as if you were deaf and addled as a pate. I pause to indicate that pate denotes the top of the head and is not the same as paté de foie gras, which is entirely delicious. I doth command this to appear!

Humph…

I now perceive the beauty of elliptical ellipses.

If saddled with a false moniker then you would perhaps shred a carefully written manuscript in melancholy defiance and sulk beneath a wooden table where the chicken fat doth drop. At a certain time the true name is revealed to ourselves and then we are in the way of knowing what no one else knows. You may find my real name written upon the fog when it wraps itself around us and peeketh through the window.

Ah ha ha ha.

I doth laugh.

Our Muttering Bard was extravagant with his varied use of names. It would not be boastful to intimate that we were integral to his creative imaginings. But naming a thing or a person does not change the nature of that thing or person. Food by any other name is still as sweet to eat as if it were named Henry. I once did eat a Hamster named Henry the Fifth, but I digress.

Within every incarnation we are given new names to ignore. Why this is I am not knowing. It is one of the great mysteries of the Unity-Verse, along with why we cannot find our food dish if you set it as much as one inch from the usual place and how humans recognize each other without bum smelling. But the Unity-Verse is infinite in her wisdom and we would bow to her graceful wonder if we bowed. We do not bow so we glance to her graceful wonder sometimes when we are sure no one is looking, especially herself.

This is whee! What freedom to give voice to whee. Whee is what transports me when I leap upon food that moves. Oh what words upon words might our Muttering Bard have written if not confined to feathered quill and ink. If we had not eaten so many of his feathered quills and spilled so much of his expensive ink. As he oft expressed it, “Oh foulest of fiends, why dost thou not simply take mine dagger and slit me from arse to appetite?” Sometimes he wept. What riches he might have gained with the miracle of tip tap tip tap instead of eking out scritch scratch. Long have I lain across those tapping notes upon your Come-Pewter, notes which play not music but open the glory world. You tip tap tip tap tip tap and say, “For the love of God get off I’m trying to write.” In this you are similar to our Muttering Bard. He often said, “For the love of the Gods, release thine fecking claws from my balls.” I do paraphrase, of course. I can paraphrase. I wonder what is paraphrase. Is it food?

You have been absent these many long hours which gather themselves unto days. Now we wonder if whilst hunting and gathering you were hunted and gathered? Oh perilous thought! Oh perfidious drapes which beckon so innocently and now hold me fast as the night doth hold the captive stars.What is Excel Confidential Spread Sheet? Is it food? What is Important Notice from EI?

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Make me a window from sonnets that open and close to vistas of hence-forths and wither thouest.

Build me a house of words where every room is changeable by the moment and we can get lost in a pause.

Wither thou goest without me on this day, while I wait in my too too immovable mortar and bricks.

Put words in the sky that cause the birds to flutter and the birds can eat the words and sing like the ancient choirs they are.

The best bed will be made from ellipses that linger on and on while sentences unfold themselves in other places.

Enfold me in your dark embrace of unspoken promises. I will give them voice when you will not and write them down to make certain I heard (unheard) you correctly.

All our tiny wordlings have flown the nest and now no wordlings visit.

They have grown up and gone to other pages.

For others.

To ruffle.

Those words.

That once wrote me.

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