Wallpaper

BY Jaime Fleisch

I assert that writing is as much the space in which it is presented as the actual content, the font, and the rest of the paraphernalia and filigree of the written word.

The written word has been corralled into printed pens, familiar and commodifiable: books, newspapers, magazines.

Recently, words have escaped the farm and run feral in the transcendent wilderness of the net, a liberation much celebrated by the people.

This has left a host of surfaces and spaces neglected and ready to be seized by the freebooters of the written word.

I have devoted recent years to writing splices of my memory on the wallpaper in my habitation: intimate autobiography.

I live in the splendid squalor of the Excelsior Hotel, a bar and residence for isolated men, located in a neighbourhood lost in transition between industry, immigration and bohemia.

I have left my days of prominence as a conventional author and journalist behind me. Not a dead-end street – just closed to traffic. I drifted on a high sea of ales and liquors, but have become a superb navigator, and need not return to harbour.

My work on wallpaper has brought my past into the present and will project it into the future.

I have devoted my lounge to tranquil childhood, bedroom to wanton youth, kitchen to the appetites of my adulthood and the bathroom to the tranquillity of my present old age. The toilet walls are inscribed with chronicles of my death foretold.

Lampshades have spiral narratives of the lives of my parents and ancestors cut from the cloth. At night they illuminate the narratives of I on the walls.

The laundry sink features an account of the decline and collapse of my marriage to Annabel Argent.

Sewn on my pillowslips are recollections of my youthful dreams and ambitions, my imagined feats as a pilot, mountaineer, explorer, cardsharp, raconteur, but not the avant-garde.

Heavily stitched on my mattress beneath the sheet, so they cannot be seen but are perceived by my sleeping flesh, are words which describe my carnal encounter with Carola Crabapple, forming an outline of her magnificent physique.

As an artistic counterpoint, a self-portrait is burnt in the old carpet with cigarette butts.

But my principal works are on wallpaper.

My retreat to the margins can be inverted into a triumphant repositioning, unforeseen by arbiters of taste and the powers that be in the world of the written word.

By working in spaces neglected by convention I hope my work can assume the status of a blazing sun in the cosmos of literature, as opposed to the passing asteroids and gyrating planetoids of book celebrity, bestsellers, Hollywood versions and the like.

After all, the best seminal ideas come from below: witness the blues.

Some of my brothers at the Excelsior say that this is what old men do, use their last days to look back. After all, there is not much looking forward to do, and the outlook is grim.

I have in fact realised a perfect artistic-psychological symbiosis: disciplined and minimal writing, all on my own walls, a finite page but ever-present, around and about me.

More can be achieved with less. Our masters do tell us efficiency is at the heart of the quest of human civilisation.

This is a testimony to my small symbolic contribution.

The hotel manager, Hugo Weinstein, rather than reacting with outrage, recognises my achievements and their potential. But, he has accused me of perversely seeking recognition and wealth while lurking drunk in obscurity in his dirty Hotel. Mr Weinstein believes that, left to my devices, my work will only receive wider recognition post-mortem, in the manner of things, leaving him to reap the benefits as curator of a masterpiece.

Rumour at the bar even has it that Hugo actually has solicited a number of Arts Agents, who have inspected my lodgings in my rare absences, or during my frequent stupors, and ultimately seeks to cash in on my labours.

That either means removing me from the Hotel, or removing my rooms from the Hotel, or perhaps extracting the wallpaper and other relevant fittings, and reconstructing them at a different location. All by arrangement with Mr Weinstein.

I am now wary of well-dressed and well-spoken strangers, and mostly keep to myself.

I keep a naked mannequin, face painted in my likeness, in the bath, smoking a cigar. He is forbidden to join me when I shower. That is one of my eccentricities.