Pulp Fiction: Making Paper

 Pulp Fiction

Thinking a little too deeply about the act of making paper

By Lucy Coleman

The surface of the soaked and blended cardboard feels like the inside of someone's cheek. It is grey-brown and minced to a texture which you cannot help but think, if stewed with some rosemary and oregano, would make a beautiful Bolognese. You run your hand through its uncomfortable softness, and nothing clings to your fingers. Occasionally though, a word appears, floating up from the impenetrable darkness, translucent like the lost wing of a dragonfly. 

We had diced and added the Waste Land to the pot, being English students. In between the lines, Prufrock had melted, stanza on stanza. It was sacrilegious, yes. Pretentious also. But the shavings of three years' printouts were desperate to reform themselves. Freed from their metric bounds they rejected one another, each finding their own meaning. Over and over from the cloudy water rose 'I begin?' 'I begin?' 'I begin?'

 

Mixing memory and desire, stirring. It was a pot of waste. Something breathing, sighing out its final exhalation as it soaked. What could be more appropriately and exactly called waste than tubes of toilet paper? Those poor tubes had never encountered art like Prufrock before, and I imagine it made for some fascinating conversation after their long encampment within the bland square sheets of the roll. Such different worlds those papers came from, the seminar room and the bathroom (though, funnily enough, both heavily feature people expressing themselves out their arses).

I show you something different 

I begin, I begin, I begin 

The phrases push themselves out of the murky depth, long-legged and irrepressible. Perhaps they were never meant to stay on the same page. They cry out with their newborn freedom, drinking in the white light of the kitchen. You ought to drown them before they catch on to what's happening. Put the pearls in their eyes.

Holding them under, pressing them back together, you realise that you're holding time in your hands. Two years - when pressed between the fingers - feels soft and fibrous, a vibrating hub of prechewed words, dissected and digested. It speaks in a language which comes apart at the seams, a language where the words fling themselves from you before they are touched. You can't blame the waste for being flighty and self-conscious in its rebirth.

A L L L - do you see it? A small voice coyly reaching out to the others in its tiny microcosm; its limited universe. Soon the fragments will all become one once more, but they will lose their meaning. The handmade bunting from birthdays, the poems, the wishes, the postcards. Watch them blend and blur. Watch them rebecome a heap of broken images. Conjoining, finally, they are one great mass. They melt into the brown fog of a winter dawn.