The story of the story of the magic painting

St. Anthony Plagued by Demons, engraved by Martin Schongauer in the 1480s.

In my harsh and bitter years of toil as an indentured servant in the household of a cruel, demanding master, every day I would arise three hours before the sun. My first action would be to retrieve my bloodstained, battered notebook from its hiding place. Then, in the light of a spluttering, stuttering candle, with the stub of a pencil I had found in the fields, I would write down what I remembered of my dreams the previous night.

On one particularly dark and frozen morning, I began to write about a Magic Painting that was a doorway, a portal. Anyone who looked into the Painting was miraculously transported to another world. And everyone returned from the world of the Painting miraculously healed of all wounds: physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual.

But before I could finish writing the story of the Painting, I was summonsed to my duties, which were many, unvarying, heavy and onerous. Much later, two hours after the sun had died in the arms of day, my body aching and bruised from strenuous labour, I crawled onto my thin and threadbare mattress in the corner of the dark and tiny stall assigned me by my keepers.

persons unknown

Jo is writing a story about a person writing a story about a person whose name is not known.

The plot is based on the proposition that if the person fails to discover the name of the person whose name is not known, then the person whose name is not known kills the person who fails to discover the name.

One day the person who doesn’t know the name meets the person whose name is not known.

"What’s my name?" asks the person whose name is not known.

"I don’t know," replies the person who doesn't know the name.

"It’s Jo, fool!" ze says, killing the person who has failed to discover the name.

"Ah yes," ze says, before ze dies, "but now the end of the story is written, Jo, and it is you who are no more!"

HOME

hags to haggis

The Scottish war-chief McMac and his war-bud Lord Mildew were heading home after a long, hard day of slaughter and mayhem.

Behind them was the whiskey-soaked battlefield upon which their foul-breathed minions had totally vomited upon the enemy — the cowardly, beef-eating English — had thrown them crying into their warm beer back to their moustachioed mothers and pink-cheeked fathers.

Mounted upon their champing war-nags, bollocks bruised and battered, the noble haggis-lovers clip-clopped their weary way up and down a lonely stretch of heather-cursed witch-land, as mountainous and boring as this very tale itself.