epsilonaught

"Do you think I was only gaoled? I wished to cry out as she turned to leave & rapped thrice on the door for Pobjoy to come & open for I too was the gaoler. Do you think to keep my own hide unflogged I never lied? Never stole off a mate? I have a weakness for blue gin, old women, white rum, young girls, porter, pisco, human company & the Commandants laudanum. I have a great fear of pain. I am beyond shame. Do you think I never informed on a mate? I was both cobber & dobber, I liked them & wept for them when they were flogged on my false information. I survived. It was bad & wrong & it may as well be the cat-o-nine-tails stripping bark off their backs when I traded souls for some scraps of food or paint. I gave away all I needed. I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didnt stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & fleshs appetite & fleshs union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself. How I hated myself for it. How I wished to essay the universe I loved which was me also & how I wanted to know why it was that in my dreams I flew through oceans & why when I awoke I was the earth smelling of freshly turned peat. No man could answer me my angry lamentations nor could they hear my jokes why I had to suffer this life. I was God & I was pus & whatever was me was You & You were Holy, Your feet, Your bowels, Your mound, Your armpits, Your smell & Your sound & taste, Your fallen Beauty, I was Divine in Your image & I was You & I was no longer long for this grand earth & why is it no words would tell how I was so much hurting aching bidding farewell?

Richard Flannagan Goulds Book of Fish (A Novel in Twelve Fish) 2001