Title.

Navel Exercise.

Everyone contemplates their navel sometime or other, don't they? At those times when we think we are at the centre of the known universe. But not everyone, nay, not anyone has untied the knot, and disappeared down the hole, like a fat man slipping through a manhole. Now women's holes are something else, and I am not going to run the birth sequence on the video backwards, again. Time is a one-way street, and the big crunch is not everything going into reverse gear. It's everything closing in on itself, like the closing of a lid on political correctness. It's so easy. You can think like this when you are contemplating your navel, and when you go that one step further. See, it's dark, darker than it's ever been. So dark you can't see a blind man in front of you. So dark that you have to conjure up a storm. Let there be light, and behold, there is a flash of inspiration, followed by a low voice, as low as a belly rumble. And there are more flashes, and rumbles. And there is light, not like the light you go to the beach for, but enough to see what is casting the shadows. There is a parallel universe down here, outside in. Cry me a wolf, crocodile. Swollen river, swirling pools of oblivion, capsized boats, going nowhere, everywhere. A navel catastrophe, Bell Rock, rings - for whom the bell tolls, five hundred souls from one ship, alone. A sailor is clinging to a life belt. "Hello sailor, give me your hand." I reach out; his hand is cold. I take hold of his hand - the sailor floats away, down stream to where the river meets the sea. I shake his hand. It is raining blood. A rescue boat passes. I toss the hand to one of the crew. He looks as though he might play rugby. He passes it around the crew. The last to hold it drops it into the river. Hundreds of eels wriggle around it. The crimson lake is fading. The feeding frenzy is almost over. The hand stripped of its fingers sinks. The eels disappear into the depths. Palm Sundae. The crew on the rescue boat look at their hands, and count their fingers. The boat chugs away. They have stopped looking for waving arms. An arm stops waving, another story ends. The storm clouds are gathering. It's starting to rain. The dirty yellow edges to the clouds are disappearing into night. The storm is flashing its teeth, and the water is murky, and the razor's edge cuts clumsily into fear. Well, you should have been as well equipped as a pot-holer before you descended into yourself. Don't take any chances; it's a slippery road to nowhere. Next time bring a torch. There's no 'Keep to the left', signs, and you know that everything ends in closure, sometime, or other. And, you know, you can go so far into yourself, that you get lost, and there is no easy method to back track, no easy way back to the real world - the world they call reality. And what is this reality? On one level it's how everyone else sees the world, But on another level there isn't anyone else. Here, there isn't anyone else, I can afford to be solipsistic; in fact it's the done thing.