The Game of the Hours

December's game in the What Will Be almanac was the Game of the Hours:

The immediate purpose of this game is to provide evidence, drawn from living experiences, of the existence of a 'surrealist poetic time'. There is here a necessary prior consideration: to discover to what extent there is in each of us, and how intensely, an experience of time that overlaps with 'forced time' in all its possible manifestations. Testimony, modest but decisive, of an experience of 'emancipated time'. Naturally, what comes out of the answers will be a mystery that can transform the obviousness of the game into something new. Although this remains to be seen.

1. A clock face is found from which the hands are removed.
2. Each player designates a time associated with an event from his/her life that upholds the principle of the marvellous: revelation, passion, liberation, emancipation, encounter.
3. Each player selects a sentence that acts as an emblem of this lived experience and, upon the clock face chosen for the game, writes it against the corresponding time.

Our results, anti-clockwise from XII:

Lost in Stockholm by night among the hares and snow.
I may have been born at this time.
My neighbour sleepwalking around the garden at night.
Love at first sight during The Revenger's Tragedy.
1965 Quex Road.
Here comes the fox.
I dreamt a fortune teller, with two left hands, read my Tarot.
A symbol of a robot child is printed.
My eye operation.
A sparrow is un-shrouded, reborn through tissue and punctured plastic and flies away.
I first saw Wizard of Oz.
A fox placed its paw in my hand.
I touched a mushroom which then vanished at my nursery school.
Stockholm summer sunrise, wide awake in a room full of dreams
Men in skeleton suits, running through a graveyard.
I am awake and I am asleep.
I may have been born at this time.


Summary of our discussion of the results:

For us there was no getting away from the disjuncture between the clockface itself, which is the very embodiment of forced time – a "static universe", in Patrick's words – and the defiantly clockless time of poetry. Does anyone ever check their watch during an experience of the Marvellous? For the most part the positions we assigned on the clockface to the experiences we recalled were based on rough estimates and guesswork; the clock times were more or less arbitrary and extrinsic to the experiences. Even those temporal aspects that really did apply to some poetic experiences – most notably, whether the experience had occurred at nighttime or daytime – are not indicated on a clockface. We therefore found it very fitting that the clock's numerals were gradually becoming covered over by the poetic experiences as the game continued. The Marvellous obliterates the clock.

Kirsty, Merl, Patrick, Paul C

KOALA ORGANS

A found Koala, a child’s backpack. We each took turns sculpting inside the Koala an organ from play-doh. Then passed the Koala to the person next to us who would remove the organ and interpret it:

Patricks dissection…

Throat
Howling voice echoes through empty chambers. A sad song.

 Black tongue. Waving and whimpering its riddles to hungry ears.

Piece of flesh with blood vessel, crawling to find a place where it can hatch, grow and become part of.


Merls dissection…

Strictly speaking this is not an organ, but an intestinal parasite that lives in the gap between the two kidneys. It produces a hormone that stimulates feelings of fear, particularly while the Koala is asleep.

This obviously sexual organ has no reproductive function while attached to the Koala, and is an organ purely of pleasure. However, on the Koalas death, it detaches itself from the body and burrows into the soil, where it self- fertilizes in a fungal manner to produce an enormous mushroom that is very delicious to eat.

This is the sphincter through which passes the koalas desire. At midnight precisely, it contracts and spasms to expel a great spurt of longing, sometimes so intense as to cause real physical pain. It also makes an unpleasant swooshing-gurgling sound.


Kirstys dissection…

Sightless Organ. Person gazes into the eyeless socket. And imagines what the Koala sees. This organ is located behind the eyeless socket and travels/ends at the dead-end of the belly button/ the empty inside of the Koala. The connection of two sewn up holes. When gazed into it slyly absorbs the unseen sights of sightlessness. Back and forth, back and forth, un-digesting/un-absorbing, powered by the imagination of the gazer and the proportion of their desire, that is sight aimlessly passed from sewn up hole to sewn up hole. Back and forth back and forth. And so the sightless organ attached to the spinning organ is set into motion and begins to spin faster and faster producing manic heat which gives this soulless, sightless, Koala the appearance of being a living thing, the appearance of looking back from the sewn up socket. That misleading heat produced by the spinning and animated by the cyclic dead-end of sightlessness. And the gazer who has sent in all this squandered sight and imagination and desire grows more and more a believer that his/her sight has been returned! And so more and more sight is invested, devoted to this sightless Koala and so the spinning organ spins more and more profusely as the back and forth, back and forth of the sightlessness manifests and carves out from its innards and through its excitement an inverse heart. All red, empty and bowl-like.

 

Time-traveller’s potlatch

Novembers game in the What Will Be almanac

‘Each participant indicates the gift that he or she would present to various historic figures on the occasion of their meeting. Thus, each player in turn can nominate an historic figure and all of the players then write down their response. Once all of the responses are written down and the round completed, they are read aloud within the circle.’
Results of game:



Jules Verne


Patrick: Empty glass cabinet


Merl: The head of an octopus mounted on a stick of rock


Kirsty: I knock on Verne’s door, he doesn’t answer. So I ring the bell. He eventually answers. I give him…nothing.



Robert Louis Stevenson


Patrick: glass of ink standing on a silver tray.


Merl: A diaphanous veil of golden sand, draped across the breast of a small boy wearing a snorkel.


Kirsty: I sing him a song backwards. A love song. And leave mud from my shoes on his carpet.



Elvis


Patrick: Pair of golden underpants.


Merl: A huge bucket of offal, dusted with icing sugar.


Kirsty: Laughter running in circles producing a ring of smoke on the carpet.



Spartacus


Patrick: His own magpie parlour 


Merl: A litter of puppies


Kirsty: Leaves that have been sliced into minute fragments by the fingernails of a distracted person. 



Julius Caesar


Patrick: A blue sports car


Merl: A potted yucca plant inside a tar barrel at the bottom of the ocean


Kirsty: gasoline in the eyes and a box, gold gift-wrapped, to put the charred eye lashes in.



Betty Boop


Patrick: A book for her to write down her dreams in.


Merl: A big ripe smelly wheel of Brie.


Kirsty: An invitation and pre-paid flight to OUR real world. And the colours of this.