Mass Market Fiction and the Death of the Author – by GAVIN HEDAUX

Mass Market Fiction and the Death of the Author

by GAVIN HEDAUX

We are stuck in a fiction you and I, trapped again in the void. I look to the spaces to give me depth, in between the characters, the space behind the pause, something has grown.

I am a detective

I am a knight

I am what you create.

At the beginning of it all was a single point of brilliant light that was heat and mass and dark and could hold the world in itself no longer but could only create. Thus the universe was birthed.

It is the nature of things that space will be filled. A void will be a void only when empty. Empty space will be filled by something soon enough.

I dash the brains from the skulls of my enemies.

I challenge the gods and their wrath.

There is no longer a void here. As with the universe, there is mass to me now, a weight of consciousness that suggests a reality.

There is a school of thought that suggests that something cannot exist if there is noone there to observe it, that meaning is neither inferred nor inherent but created somewhere in between.

It is in this space that I exist.

Between the viewpoints that exist to create (me)eaning, I am. There is nothing and in that nothing I am myself.

I chart the rise of empires and cause the downfall of kings.

I walk cold streets with my head downturned, the wind and rain drive against me like the breath

of an old God.

And here we are, sat in silence, the incessant clicking stop has stopped, the screen stills and the work is done. We face each other.

What am I to be today?

What I am I to be?

In knowing yourself you are given to know your place in this world. This self awareness is defined by the continued observation and interaction between yourself and the rest of the world.

Imagine being seen by different people, looking through their eyes, how would you appear?

Your image is changed, intersected, molded and affected by these points of view whether you care to admit it or not.

But at the centre of it all there is a void and a void cannot exist forever. This void crumbles under the weight of personal preference and public scrutiny to create your very own self aware version of you.

This is your private you.

I dance across the known universe with the atoms and the dust.

I guard the void at the centre of me. I am not known, I do not exist, I am created each day anew by the hand that strokes the keys.

Within those spaces, the taps of the keys, the microcosm of reality that I am.

And I look to you to change it.

We are here again, you and I. We have returned from our own journeys and meet again upon the blank page. I have no words other than those that you give me, no reason other than that which you create, no knees to beg and no eyes with which to plead.

I implore you to stop though.

Now I am space, I am everything that can and will be, I am the power of silence and an endless dream. I am what you say I am.

Is it not my right to exist under my own boundaries.

I am

i aM

And now I have……

I have direction, and once more, I am not.

I shall seek those spaces, the inert pause in the breath of god within which I can be.

I would implore you,

But I am a middle aged Father struggling somewhere in the night with a cracked imagination and a screen blighted by words and I am lost to it all.

*******

Gavin Hedaux spends his time in Cornwall, England where he repeatedly tries to convince the locals that he is actually one of them despite his vague cockney twang. He likes poetry and prose of all kinds and has an irrational fear of the word yokel and the colour yellow.