These pieces are ongoing responses to Life, reflecting my interest in art and music, as well as what Buddhists call 'the manure of experience'. Future titles will include an essay on Silence, a piece on Aquinas and the Zen Master, and a short story called Chicken Legs.
The Fiction Man
"The Fiction Man was conceived when Dr A left the woman who’d been his wife for twenty years, and their only son. It became whispered in the small town that the reason for this scandal was because he was in love with another woman. The truth was he’d made two attempts to end an affair that had dragged on for three years, and his lover (henceforward called Mrs B) was having none of it. Women choose men and she had chosen him. Shrewdness, wrote Leopardi, is employed more often to make up for scarcity of intellect, and to overcome a greater abundance of intellect in others. The female nostril of intuition sensed she was losing her hold on Dr A, and she did not intend to. Being a woman of a certain age, she knew nature was not on her side. She knew that Dr A, par contre, was still attractive, this tall man of big build, Roman nose and soft brown eyes – although he had a stoop, the hunch mid-spine giving him a vaguely furtive look, the forward curve only slightly disguising the expanse of his belly. For Dr A had a weakness for food, and Mrs B was an exceptionally good cook. She needed him, so she cooked for him. Her intellect did not match his, nor did their interests correspond, but she made up for the imbalance with strategic skills that were second only to his. He acted meek so she would think she had the upper hand, but in actual fact he manipulated her need for him, knowing perfectly well his false submissiveness gave him the power over her..."