What is at hand, what surrounds, what is in-between, and close by we find the Aesopic Body as a twenty-first century expression of fable-function.

What is at hand, what surrounds, what is in-between; imagine these three as compass points with fable-function as fourth, and this compass guides an Aesopic Body as it steps over an impossible cartography.

Aesopic Body is embodied, fully grown-up and childlike, this ancient and malleable use of fable-like effect. This fable-function is a questioning of power relationships. Fable-function scrutinises the difference between power-less and power-full and from that produces comedy. The laughter is the sound of life slipping out the backdoor. Fable-function sometimes gets away with it.

An Aesopic Body might sense rupture, might make itself known with gestures, landscapes, or patterns of correspondence. This is a tale-teller’s form.

To edit is to make rhythm. To splice together absences, the art of interruption.

Now we start again. Editing the Aesopic Body must always start again. Our editing process suffered a traumatic hiatus. Twenty-first century baseline activity was called to cessation by a world pandemic. A zoonotic disease crafting invisibility made the stop signs glow, made the hedgerow heard. This was our initiating lacuna.

Narrative makes and sustains memory in imagined communities. Our habits of belonging, imagined community as an assemblage of self. A collective and individual understanding, psyche in relationality.

A significant cessation of anthropic activity, that which disrupted lived narratives. Relationality amongst imagined communities once disrupted, despite the organising tag of “imagined,” produce real consequences. A mental health crisis ensues. Which is to say, a body was shoved into liminality without any preparation or serious consideration of the next step. Our body, collected and singled out. Psyche snapped off from relationships. This might take one into a threshold space; not here, not there, not yet. This body begins to suspect that there is no longer any reason to pretend that the twenty-first century offers up a health-orientated mentality. We will grieve.

Grief at least offers up a sense of equality. Yet, if this bereavement is to proceed without a viable corpse, it seems that endless traps will be provided for our journey. Journey without burial, journey without ashes scattered; this is a trap. The twenty-first century proposes to be a psyche struggling to escape from endless traps.

Psyche in relationality is an Aesopic Body offering up gestural resistance. Gestural resistance might be pen across page or a step taken. An intrusion of catastrophe edits an Aesopic Body. Crisis snips out the linkages and drains the memory. Such crude montage, no one will be convinced; the imaginal memory insists of fable-function, insists on question. The question is how will a grief anchored threat be lifted by lament. How might articulated exile cry forth a shifting imagination?

An Aesopic Body compassing what is at hand, what surrounds, and what is in-between; a spliced-together pulsation of absences. An Aesopic Body, tale-teller turning over the impossible; this is flesh organised by intensities and not by hierarchies.

An Aesopic Body is made of crystalised time. Gems move in each articulation. Jewelled ligaments allow the Aesopic Body to stride into liminality. It is neither upside down nor the right-way round, it is and it is not. A thought-space without area, this is stretching into all – and it is not – and this confident step in-between suggests an enduring.

An Aesopic Body, this embodied collation of the tale-teller endures beyond the shift when shift can only be a button on a keyboard. A shifting beyond shift when society can barely articulate its confidence in any of its movements.

Structures have successively failed. Mental health looks at this and seeks out a new compass; what is, what is, where is, this is. Structure prestigiously set aside and made separate from all; when this is revealed as abusive, vain, and predicated on blame, then such edifices of status cannot remain.

We seek an edified boot. But rather two boots for walking instead of trying to hop. The hierarchical and binary can no longer prove themselves superior by good example. It seems now that the examples were, anyhow, never that good. The planet itself has turned. The Anthropocene toxicity is grieving’s glue. It will stick us down. Lament might yet melt such an adhesive.

The Aesopic Body slides away beneath the tale-told sail. An Aesopic Body has gathered its elements and become embodied for the purposes of narrative. This, these many, a constellation.

An Aesopic Body as figurative construct to hold a thought-space. This space is organised by intensities, more so than by hierarchy. A calligrapher of woundedness, the bloody mess of murder-suicide-execution complexified in an unreadable sentence. The superbly distinct statue, certain of status, suddenly stutters.

Did the sentence say: “be” – or – “just” – or – “just be”? The Aesopic Body adopts a makeshift assemblage by which to make an appearance. “Just and do it” proclaims the bronzed flesh, by this wound the executioner intended to bring clarity. Not so, not so: the words scrawl and peel and curl away like foliage seeking out a breeze.

Fable-function allows what is normally fixed and therefore unavailable for questioning to become less fixed. An edge is an expression of gestural resistance, to scrawl around the edge is to extend that gesture.

Such improvised sentences. Memory and manuscript conspired and an Aesopic Body brought forth an assemblage. The critical scrutiny of fable-function, laughter.

But now, this here trap. There is a trap here anticipating the end of a fearful life. Look, put in your hand, and why not put in your head? There, you see? A snare. A deadly device. This murderous apparatus is suddenly bypassed by a sardonic executioner; cat eats mouse. The tumult of an entangled future.

Now the appearance of the walls in our anxious life calls forth a certain theatricality. Given a wall, there is then a decorative opportunity. Shall we beautify this scene? An entire scene change may be possible. Let us suggest, a panorama worthy of a nice holiday with a palm tree and with coconuts … and yet lizards drop when the wind changes; scaly dumbbells with ice for blood that pose a clear and present danger to joggers.

Walls are a scenery change, but this frugal architecture becomes a chthonic funnel pressing life into a minotaur’s embrace. He conspires with an executioner. He makes a deal with his own executioner. And, if turning away from direct judgement, the carceral pattern remains. Urgent entropy remains. Rodent-drenched prisons deliquesce with entire neighbourhoods slipping into their stinking embrace.

This story is a story of crisis and a crisis of language and hence it ceases to be a story. The spaces in-between endure, this burgeoning matter of the immaterial breaches invisible walls and envelops cities without populations. There are caves and rivers and valleys still simmering with the Aesopic Body.

Fable-function works within an aporia and hence pours forth a river, a yacht sailing on the river, the craft slipping silently into a hollow. I remember this most clearly, wait; I was here, and you were there. Did we not become entangled in a most interesting way? And was it not from that entanglement that we found a sustaining narrative passage?

An aporia under the gaze; an allowed instance of ludic community which grants passage only to an Aesopic Body. Tell me a good story and I might believe you. An organisation via intensities rather than hierarchy. This is not working but it is viable; this is not fumbling but we are at play: Away! Here! Gone and returned, absent and present. In this manner all legislative overwriting might be elided. I insert some delicate gestural resistance. I edit an Aesopic Body. Written language at its base is a tracery of gestural resistance. Writer and reader from this materiality weave together a dreamlike makeshift and by a fearful speculative twist suddenly the world is living.

The Aesopic, because disguised as humour or an absurdity, generates a complex afterlife. Spectral remnants drift by, tumble, turn and turn. Images and patterns move downstream, twirl and waltz, stirring up the fecund mud.

The narrative of time might arise via atemporal or liminal experience. An Aesopic Body might sidestep time completely. Allowing. Silence.

An Aesopic Body can revisit and repurpose, silently allowing previous patterns of scrutiny and creativity. Intensities slip into a narrative.

Fable-function persists because narratives of the human realm, and the nature of those relationships, are the qualities that make fable-function current and active. Our relationality with the absurdities of power, or the absence of power, produce story to foreground our most resonant elements. Resonances of long ago and echoes of present patterns. An Aesopic Body gathers a vibrating net in which both Aesop and Shahrazad remain, telling tales. A fable-function cascading and turning and re-turning their long enduring afterlives. Patterns that articulate gesture, landscape, fable-function, and lament. A tale-telling strategy to bridge the lacuna of grief.

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Nick Norton wrote AKA: A Genealogy of the Saddle of which Patrick Keiller comments: “A joy to read, Nick Norton’s wonderful book brings a headlong, associative sensibility to the literature of landscape.” Recent work by Nick can be found in Soanyway, Mikrokosmos, Fatal Flaw, Tether’s End, 3:AM, Selkie, Shooter, The Happy Hypocrite, and elsewhere. Essays, short nonfiction, and artwork appeared via Inventory, 1995-2003.