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—for Hannes Golda— One Big, One Little Man Made of Wood I AM AT ONCE both wide awake and half asleep. The pictures have been in my head for varying lengths of time; as far as I know, until now, they have had nothing to do with one another. Something is urging me to join them up. The process is a new one; I succumb to it. Why worry about a formula? This is an experiment. The constituent parts might just react by chance with one another. Here goes. There are two wooden men standing on the blue board cover of my Concise Oxford Dictionary. They are next to each another and have certain similarities: both have a disproportionately large, rectangular moustache — like the business-end of a shoe brush with a red lower-lip drooping beneath it — and both wear the kind of brightly-coloured, gauffered neck-ruff worn by circus clowns. Apart from this, both are dressed in black. The most startling difference between these two wooden men is their height: one is tall, with the fragile-legged proportions of a giant; the other, against him, a dwarf. The giant has a skull cap with a decorative trim. The dwarf does not. The giant’s expression is a raised-eyebrowed frown. The dwarf seems tranquil, although he is cupping his hands over his groin; as if he is a footballer preparing for the thud of a free-kick. His face is symmetrical; blue eyes sympathetic, expression serious but at the same time (and in the curving of space and time now is not an absolute) somehow benevolent. The giant does not have understanding eyes. They are blue but seem confused; anxious. They are quite obviously made of wood, these men — even at some distance one can tell that. The giant is a little smaller than my outstretched hand, the dwarf shorter than my little finger. I would like to continue the destiny of the One Big, One Little Man Made of Wood but at the moment I don’t know what happens next. *
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