Edward Philips - Composition (with "Composition 1929" by Piet Mondrian)

 



























  1.    A land of no trees.
  2.    Where trees once were now stand uncompromising thick black walls.
  3.    Space frozen by time. Not landscape but the still life of a not-so-distant past captured as a possible & terrifying future.
  4.    You live in the blue field at the edge of this world.
  5.    Your wife lives in the yellow field at the corner of the snowy yard.
  6.    You have not seen each other since the moment you disembarked the train three weeks ago and they separated the men from the women.
  7.    Your old life in a small provincial town through which a green river flows is but a distant memory and you are no longer the respected watchmaker you once were.
  8.    Here there is no time.
  9.    Time is a function of trigonometry: beyond repair and recalibration.
10. Sometimes you think you can hear your wife’s keening voice in the listless night. You recall those nights when she sang the leading roles in the local operetta society.
11. Here, singing is forbidden, it is one of the first things they tell you upon arrival.
12. And yet you will swear you can hear that pitch-perfect crystalline voice pierce the night fog that fills the cobbled yard that separates you.
13. You sigh and despair.
14. RULE 17 PARA 3 states: An attitude by any person or persons that does not contribute positively to the well-being of the individual and the social cohesion of the group is not permitted.
15. You live in a blue field and you are feeling blue.
16. RULE 238 PARA 6: Puns will be positively discriminated against.
17. (Rule) Keep yourself to yourself and say nothing, for what is not said cannot be held against you.
18. This rule (see 17 above) is the most important rule of all; it is as true and necessary to your situation as the dark rectilinear walls that divide one set of circumstances from the other.
19. One day a man (who shall remain nameless) emerges from the large black house next to the yellow field.
20. He wears a dark green velveteen suit, has a fine head of hair, raffish whiskers and a beard like d’Artagnan;
21. or a more somber Laughing Cavalier.
22. But there is nothing cavalier about his mission.
23. He walks with a stern, business-like look on his face and hums to himself the strains of a late Beethoven quartet.
24. He opens the gate of the blue field and you are lead over to a severe-looking single-storey factory building made of red brick.
25. This building is a former textile shed and is still redolent of sweat, lanolin and machine oil.
26. You are ushered into a large empty square-shaped room. It has been stripped right back to the damp lichen-covered walls.
27. The nameless man leaves and locks the door.
28. You wait.
29. You wait all day and deep into the night until you fall asleep and dream about your wife.
30. She is on stage at the little town hall singing the "Vilja-Lied" from Lehar’s The Merry Widow. You cannot see the crowd in the blackened auditorium but you know they are spellbound, lost as if they have forgotten how to breathe.
31. She sings like an angel.
32. She is young and beautiful, and unique in that old town—with nothing but its green river and ancient marketplace—for her immaculate and striking red hair.









Edward Philips is a writer, humorist and cartoonist. He lives mostly on twitter as @1755dictionary.