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Signal to Noise Ratio
by Colin Bennett
My name is Hardy. I am a man on a park bench reading a book. As far as the great canvas of life is concerned, at 55 I am a smudge. A smudge is one of those patches on the edges of great paintings that on closer inspection perhaps generations later turn out to be someone pissing against a wall, or thumbing their nose at the great central scene. Even as I speak, perhaps someone in the great and expensive studios high above this central London Park is painting me to the life. Perhaps they see, badly focused, a nameless minor fragment of life’s pigmentation about leave his bench and go home by the quieter roads, his shoulders hunched against the rain, whilst the winners of the world sing bathed in sunlight on the central canvas. As one of life’s lesser smudges, my only claim to fame is that I am the world’s greatest hater of noise of any kind. For the past thirty years I have worked as a computer programmer in quiet London offices high above the traffic noise and sealed against weather. When I go home I make my way through an unnecessarily long route of the quieter streets, avoiding hooters, sirens, steamrollers and road drills, addicts and beggars as carefully as I try to avoid mistakes in computer programmes. People such as myself, however, who like reading books on park benches in their solitary lunchtimes, soon find out that noise is a live thing. It follows them around, and it sees readers and solitaries and thinkers as mortal enemies, to be filled up with all the scaffolding and hammers and saws of raw-boned plebian bits of common consciousness that scream like a torn animal and hit like a Siberian gale. Yes, somehow the noise always finds manic readers like me. I suppose such as myself are human vacuums, and our treasured silence has to be filled if only to demonstrate a very strange non-mechanical principle: do nothing, be nothing, and the world comes to you in all its stupidity and noise.
Sometimes I think that the world is one great conspiracy against concentration. Mighty universal forces head for it as if it were some kind of timeless mythological enemy. The head must it seems be kept pulped as if the slightest forming concentration destroys the manufacturing line of equally pulp consciousness. I suppose modern folk left alone for a minute without commercial breaks would start to scream very quickly. Concentrate, and the mind starts to leave that trash-factory called the world. After a very short time of course its absence is detected by a watching signal, and it is ordered into line to re-start that manufacturing of those endless streams of advertisements that greater fools than me call reasoning.
I come here at lunchtimes because the noise of the city is masked by a fair sized piece of woodland and a park through which peacocks strut. When the weather is bad, I go to the quiet teahouse, but this summer has been a good one, and most of the time I sit on a bench facing across the park towards the woodland and a few strutting peacocks on its fringes. Of course the noise soon finds me here on this bench. Here I have been approached by suspicious police, and joined by anxious plebian mothers who give me their never-ending Prozac-talk about their countless God-forsaken TV programs, and I have been accosted by soft-spoken feminine youths that I booted away. Once I was stoned by a shaven man wearing a camouflage jacket who screamed about Jesus. I find that all such screams by all such men are about Jesus. Jesus is a received signal, just as the dogs who have tried to lift their legs against my lunch pack have received signals, and couples on the other end of the bench receive those signals that tell them to start unseemly embraces and switch on the usual loud daft music of the peasantry. Surprisingly, I saw no headline muggings, drug dealing, or prostitution. Chronic obesity and the appalling condition of the young better signify decay. Once, a 25-stone woman fainted of heat exhaustion in front of me. Being too heavy to move without injury, paramedics summoned up a special lifting chair that looked like a forklift truck. After they had taken her away, her bagfuls of sweets cakes and chocolates littered the pathway. Children had them knocked out of their hands when they tried to pick them up.
The young of course, I had lost a long time ago. Now they were nothing but actors imitating actors who imitated other actors; their souls were showbiz and media mirrors placed end to end. They had quite lost the analogue world. Whatever their age, they were born with rock n’ roll, and to their bang-and-clatter noise of a world, the events of 1914 and 1939 say, must have been distant irrelevant mysteries, moldy things before pop-tarts in the microwave. Thin, staring, and with an indescribable diet, I imagined the young being built of advertisements, shows, acts, performances, and mass suggestions rather than old-industrial flesh and blood. But I must admit that there was something about this that appealed to me. I imagined the doctors of the future taking patients to Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe clinics to have such images refreshed, extended, and reinforced as a kind of medication. Instead of being injected full of tortured animal screams they would be taken to what the ancient Greeks called dream theatres to communicate with the anthropomorphic gods, who were the essence of show business, and the ultimate Stars. In the theatre they could write their own scripts and extensions of scripts, indeed become part of the extended being of the characters themselves. It would all be I think, possibly much better than Mechanism and Fact and Objectivity, the gods of the old engine-shed world. But nobody was listening to my over-educated thoughts.
Yeah, on the high seas there is perhaps less adventure on a summer afternoon than on my local park bench. A year ago, conditions were the same as now, pretty well. Perhaps the passage of time is only measured by perceptible change in advertisements and their controlling signals. On this past afternoon, as usual, young girls giggled, sobbed, screamed, and, blew red and pink gum. The only measure of time between then and now was a slight increase in the sexual suggestions of tee-shirt slogans and certain hormonal developments, probably some said, due to aliens, the water-supply, or the CIA genetically manipulating the world’s corn-flakes. One lone ten-year-old girl with huge breasts sported the slogan JUST ONE GANG BANG MORE WILL GET YOU THERE SISTER COOL. No, it was not an unusual afternoon. Elderly old-fashioned tramps straight out from the pages of George Orwell waved cans of beer and sang ancient and infinitely depressing Methodist hymns by my side. Often strangely rustling bushes diverted my attention. The usual well-dressed old men with expensive binoculars sat by me and eyed the windows of flats and estates opposite. Again, of course, the last thing I have in this world – my renowned concentration - was utterly destroyed by the Mary Poppins chimes of ice-cream vans and even portable (God help us all!) versions of the wretched television. The younger working-class oafs scowled at my books, and passers-by of even lower social status relieved themselves almost by my shoes. The nouveau serfs threw nappies and empty beer cans into wastebaskets by my elbow, and other drunken proles by the score spewed, spat, pissed, and farted on queue as they passed by my pile of summer books and my sheaf of notes. A slightly better class of serfs asked me for the football scores, the transmission time of soap operas, what had happened in something called The News. All of which answers were quite beyond my knowledge and understanding. You see about five years ago, after my wife Brenda died, the world lacking all interest, I decided to read through the great novels of the world in their chronological order. But here the noise found me and defeated me yet again. A concrete mixer drove me from Anna Karenina, drunken football fans interrupted Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdue; scaffolders with vowels and consonants that would rival a sand-strewn gearbox have taken me from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and a twelve-year old pale-faced junior miss with a probable IQ of sixty once offered to cut off my balls in the middle of Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment because I told her to turn down her ghetto-blaster. Similarly endowed mutants from high-rise hell houses and complete hollow-eyed zombies from burnt-out comprehensive schools have threatened to cut and kick, and stone and knife me whilst I attempted to read a wide variety of other great works whilst sitting on this very same bench and asking them to turn down their blasters. One dozy 12-year-old plebian boy full of cannabis and obligatory brain-fix of hyped-up commercial suggestions once knocked Lawrence’s Women in Love out of my hand, on principle alone I suppose. My clout around his left ear actually surprised him. He looked at me with genuine innocent resentment, as if books were things to be knocked out of people’s hands immediately and without question. Dame Nature of course lent me a helping hand: I was almost killed by a lightening strike whilst in the middle of War and Peace, and a downpour in the middle of the last chapter of Tom Jones saw me confined to bed for a week. Yet today I remain a rational and calm man. Advertisements shout, and TV baby talk screams and thunders and mumbles from open windows. The low-foreheads and the low IQ put out their tongues at my pile of books; they whistle, make oink-noises and bottom-wiping motions as they went on the perpetual sugar & crap hunts of the daft and trip-inspired young. I am indeed a marked man for noise.
II
But when I get home at night to a lodging that is more a corridor than a room, I become a mighty man indeed. In such obscure places as Mrs. Borton’s Rooms (which I change every two or three weeks for reasons which will become plain shortly), I prepare my pamphlets, my self-published books, and tend my popular web site. Here, between my tiny sink and my bed, I launch my assault on the world. In the great world I am a faceless shadow. I teach computer programming as others once manned sails and served meals to decadent Courts, and with just about the same amount of servile resentment. When I get back home I turn my skills against the world that imprisons me during the day. As you might have guessed, I am a hacker and a maker of viruses, but my viruses are a very special kind. You see I use metaphor to get into people’s heads as well as their computers.
But let me explain. I spread what the world calls false suggestions and ideas rather than lines of destructive code. I blush to say that I spread every lie conceivable through my work. Of course I soon realized early on that I could not lie about everything, and that I had to tune my lies as regards certain species of information for yes, information is indeed a form of life. My lying was a big success story. I lied about the moon landing, the Pyramids as alien headquarters, Atlantis as alien planetary control. the hollow Earth where Nazi UFOs are made, the leaders of the world as lizard-forms in disguise, and countless absolutely irresistible suggestions.
Of course the desperately sane are appalled. Countless thousands bite their nails in outrage. Myriad hate messages reached me, mostly from those far too well adjusted to be intelligent. I did not know my facts said countless professors and lecturers; I had not done proper factual research, say famous writers and thinkers. Just one of the things I wish to demonstrate is that the human imagination is the greatest threat of all to anything and everything. Believe it not this is an attempt at communication. They listen to me far more than they listen to the sensible folk, Somehow my claims damage their tendency to disbelieve. I create ridiculous possibilities that make them weep with anger. They cannot possibly believe that anyone could believe such nonsense as spread, such as stories that aliens have given us our technology, and that they put us on the Earth long ago. For fun, I often I mix in a few of their beloved “facts” or two. These are those objective, politically-correct facts to be read by the fireside with the Readers Digest. That makes them angrier.
It is always a terrible discovery to the bourgeois mind that lies and deceptions are functions as necessary to a functional intelligence as the vital organs are to the body. They are connected to health and inspirations, and yes, even to the fulcrum of the sexual identity. Many confess to me that they are sexually aroused through blind anger and hatred of myself and the nonsense I spread. I have had my converts. One scientist recovered from impotence caused just by thinking about what he called my pantomime tales about alchemy, occultism, and the paranormal. He attributed this to regaining some form of kinship with long forgotten higher inspirations. Other write to me and say that the ridiculous things I talk about recreate their youth and their courage, and they thank me not for spreading untruths but what is forbidden. Some say I am a healer.
There are those of course who tell me I should write. But writing it down and selling it has no interest for me. That way the recipients could control it. They would pay me, which would burst the balloon altogether. I would become a respectable harmless fiction writer. Worse, people would like and praise me. That is not the way to healing. Fantasies must be kept operational and dangerous. They must not be used for entertainment purposes. I usually write back and tell these people that I did not want to be castrated and appear on the front of the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian in a pink frock. And that’s only what happens to the men.
My metaphorical aphrodisiacs are sought in the main by practical schoolteachers, scientists and academics, mainly of the lower middle class. Though these worker-drones hate me as a psychopath, a mentally disturbed pervert, and a sick fallen illusionist they seek me nevertheless as if I were some kind of priest ready to take confession from them. They come to me in all their anger to absolve them for the sin of believing and structuring their lives around that concept that mechanicals call the Real. Their fear is, I guess, that somehow, my ludicrous images and ideas might enable me to get something for nothing. I conduct an extensive correspondence on the web. I reinforce their beliefs in abductions, fairies, and monstrous animal forms that are reported to stalk the earth yet leave no food swathe, dropping and have no nests or lairs. The sensible folk try me in my absence. Social democratic New Maoists practice their intellectual eugenics: I am a liar, an imposter, a fantasist whose trade is the unreal. But the unreal is not what it appears to be. The unreal is something they have lost. Most hate rediscovering themselves in this way. My impossible stories of space-goddesses self-replicate within them like impossible loves. Many wake in the night weeping, wishing they were rather at a local council meeting discussing road repair than thinking about a goddess from outer space. My unrealities are things they have lost in dreams in other lives, when they had different faces, different hair colour and their names were not Smith or Bradshaw
The erotic is a strange impulse. Particularly if it is of the intellectual variety. According to the correspondence I receive from both men and women, the thought that I might imbalance their accounting universe gives sexual arousal. Through my many PO boxes they write to me about this, and express resentment about my remote control over such a personal response. But nevertheless, they become hooked. The idea that one plus one does indeed make two, but adds up many other things besides, appears to sexually arouse that these people. They lust for something that should not be there.
To the end of defeating the desperate rationalizations of the grocers and the bicycle mechanics, I fabricate, and distort to a degree that some have called an art form. My chronic deceptions are so structured and blend fact and fiction so completely that religious groups and fringe science groups have formed small communities based upon discussions of my ideas. They claim that I am from the security services, that I am a gone-mad alien from a fleet of flying saucers, an immortal, an alien, a ghost, or even the risen Messiah. Teams supported by millionaires hunt for me in Shepherd’s Bush, in Texas, or in central China. You see I myself I am desperately uninteresting. The people who visit my web site in their thousands have made me an interesting man. I am running them. I enter their dreams and phobias. My suggestions spread inside them all like an ideological viris. I make outrageous claims such as my visit to Venus, my relations with many different alien beings. I talk in detail about the design of their craft, the way they make the corn circles and their influence on the writing of the Bible. The ancient Greeks had what they called dream theatres as places of mental and physical healing. I suppose once upon a time I managed one of these places. I think I have rediscovered my lost profession. I don’t blame them for resistance. I am leading them back from just about everything that they think has been achieved. To many, I induce the fear of dragons in the forest, and they are back in the cave, painting on the wall.
Desperately dull and witless meritocrats from the bicycle-shop universities of the lower middle class, upon reading these things, would, in another age, probably have burned me alive. But they can’t get to me on the web. I use many different e-mail addresses and go under many different names. Being of course a computer expert, I know how to make it almost impossible to find me. I spam millions with some amazing theory about Atlantis, or alien bases on the moon.
I am glad to heal. But healing is not my primary objective, wonderful and holy though it is. No, what I am doing is trying to regain an ancient dialogue, a form of communication long since discarded by human beings. I have always been fascinated by the idea that once upon a time a chain of being existed that connected anything and everything, from rocks to angels as it were, with each element having its own language, a form of expression.
I give you an example of what I mean in terms of one of my utterly despised and ridiculed stories. The following piece from my imagination topped the table of abuse I received, although a woman priest from the Bethel Retreat in the Elmbourne Road did tell me that upon reading the following story, she attempted sudden and energetic sexual intercourse with her live-in boy friend, one Charles Harding-Thorpe, a seventy-five-year-old professional malingerer from Dorking. Apparently the utterly the poor fellow fled the scene quite alarmed and was found later prostrate and gibbering in the Salvation Army Last Chance Depot in the Portobello Road.
The origin of my story was, I think, a news item I saw some time ago about a fire in a French mental home. Many dead, I remember. My first response to this was that I wondered what it must be like to be first of all to be born so completely crackers that only slobbering in a corner was, possible. I imagined a patient (let’s call him John) being tranquillized, and strapped to a bed for the night. I imagined then the fire starting, creeping towards the legs and arms of the imprisoned madman, the only things resisting the flames being the piss and shit John has wallowed in for the previous couple of hours. What a deal in life. And others got Julie Roberts, although I apologize to her for using the plural. I wondered what some of their last thoughts of poor John were in that fiery madhouse? Pinocchio? A lorry-cum-ship with a factory chimney in the middle, pouring bright silver smoke against a dark-blue sky? A tree built of coloured paper stars, a one-eyed white cat swimming a narrow stream towing a miniature submarine? I suppose such cartoons would be still evolving in the head even though John’s left foot roasts, and his right eye melts. Then, along with his screams, perhaps half a candyfloss rabbit, a blue kangaroo’s neck on top of a hippo-body? Presumably the cartoons still needed an audience, though at some point with the breath mercifully gone, and the body cindered, the screen would go mercifully blank. Another redundant cinema gone off the circuit. No matter. Because the drama goes on in others. The whole animal kingdom dreams. God is never short of silver screens. Pictures mean active brain. The slope of a paw, the curl of a tail, any cartoon-face or photographic scene means style, a point-of-view, character and situation, all such complex colour and craft being rich in pure organization. Therefore as fire eats legs arms, soiled shifts, eyes weep and chins dribble with the saliva of mental and physical hell, and as ceilings and walls collapse in sparks, the nylon restraining straps no doubt still hold. They still hold as the brain is still yet brimful with a superfluity of rich, and beautifully exotic structures; a kind of ectoplasm of odd bits of the bits, peeps from angles which could never have been, sketches and elongations: a sick dog, a mother’s apron, or a smashed tea-cup twenty years previous. As the nylon straps hold John in his agony, each element of the screaming chaos is still integrated, fully organized; yet it has no consciousness of John’s annihilating pain.
As a fallen person, I have a fallen thought. The thought is that poor mad burnt John is mad enough to order the countless gigabytes supporting the nonsense cartoons in his head to cease their lotus-eating decadence and help him out. In a final rally of his pain and madness, he tells the megabytes of the cartoon information stream to pay attention to the material of the nylon restraining straps. What material is that? The bequeathed mental sinew no less of Wallace H. Carothers of Dupont, 1932, the creator of nylon, one of the gods of artificial fibres. Find him find him, says John. Carothers is in there somewhere, holding it all together. Find him, find him. Find the telemetry of his manic depression and his genius; find the covalent bonds between the artificial fibres and his suicide. Get into the mixed metaphors and turn as many off as you can.
And do it fast, cartoons, because John’s very nuts are beginning to roast. If you do not do this now, there will be no more cartoons frames of you cartoon life.
A madman such as John might be so insane as to think that the cartoons might just make it. He might just know that he has nothing to lose even before he begins to die. In a final act of defiance, he might just manage to wake old Carothers from eternal sleep and ask him inject a counter-intention into the chain of ideas behind the molecular synthesis of the harness nylon. Only Carothers, like a fast-thinking virus, could order the assumption-chains to panic and collapse. All intentions have families. Meet Charlie and George and the Ciris lab team, 1920, see a faded A2 blue copy of the plans the Nazis pinched in ‘35. Appeal and appeal. Would they hear, these ideo-guardians? Is matter and time, events and experience built of Thomson Directories? John – for God’s sake, dial a number and try it. A face might appear. The gate-guardian. Announce your name and mission at the entrance to the domain. Hear old Carother’s voice.
Release him!
And John might just stagger out, blind and burnt. He is still mad and alive. And a real cure has just begun.
III
But would such a thing ever work? Is such a form of communication ever possible? I feed the system stories such as the one above, but would the system ever feed me back its own fantasies, its own story from its own imagination?
On this said day just after the turn of the century I had just become absorbed in Mann’s The Magic Mountain when a quiet original disturbance approached me, as if alerted by some quite definite signal. I had never had a disturbance like this before. Things were getting serious. Like the advertisements in the young heads around me, my ideas were mutating.
But let me explain, as the wretched scientists say. For our communal sins, a new Social Security “top-security unit” for the chronically mentally ill (and also the biggest group of perfectly sane free-loaders in the area) had been built just beyond the wood I faced across the park. Everyone knew it was a “top security unit” designed by the “community” because the mad and the free wandered through homes, kitchens, and bedrooms of citizens at will, scaring the relatively sane out of their wits at all hours of the night and day. This was due to the stated policy of the home, which was one of “personal familiarization and social adjustment”. Since the set of various concepts of the dread word “social” (both national and international) was responsible for most of the evils of the 20th century, the only adjustments that were made were made by the populace, and not the inmates. The populace had to purchase locks, bolts, and high fencing for their own “high security” protection against those inmates of the Home who sought familiarization and adjustment in most unusual ways, such as heading for the homes of the sane as chimps on the loose headed for refrigerators, squirrels made for handbags, and bees made for toffee-apple stalls.
Anyway, this was how it happened on this day.
A veritable glee-party from the aforesaid DSS “top security” unit emerged from the wood as I sat on my usual bench reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Coming out from the path hand in hand (those who were fortunate enough to have hands) in a procession, they did not appear to have any supervisors. But knowing the DSS, that would not have been unusual. On rare occasions, these poor wretches were exercised rather like dogs in the Park. Supervised by the more capable of their company, most people turned the heads away politely at the site of them. Emerging into the open space of the Park, they squealed and squeaked, they chimp-chattered and wailed. To this day I am not quite sure whether they were real. Often I have thought of going to the Home and try and find out, but that is not a pleasant prospect and I do not think I will go there. If they could not be found, then that would make the events of this early afternoon more perplexing than it became, and that was perplexing enough. They were as real as anything is real, I suppose. They left both footprints in the grass and footprints in my mind. A word about this path, if I may.
Born by the Park, I had looked at that walkway through the woods for over thirty years, and I had never trusted it. Apparently the oaks had been there since men wore steel breastplates to go to war. Beyond the oaks the thickets were quite dense and dark, reminding me of all the tragic-comic betrayals of naïve childhood expectancies: fairies, UFOs, aliens, all the ridiculous pantomimes peddled down all the ages, all the let-downs of the spiritual and the chronic disappointments of magic. Yes, all the chronic catastrophes of the imagination were there in the purple and yellow mysteries of its shaded interior. Living nearby, as a child into that womb of delight I had projected space ships, aliens, and demon women with long legs and big tits, with whom I had many mini-muscular super-adventures beyond the sun and moon. None of these fantasies had come to anything. I was an accounts clerk, and my nerve had failed early. None of these heroic ego-projections as they call them had given me so much as a glance. Several times I thought I had glanced infinity, but infinity too let me down, and grated my teeth of mazes of accounts in my prison cell of the accounts department on top of the city tower where I had slaved for 25 years. And my beloved wife Brenda had died like many human beings die: howling like a torture victim on a stained mattress as something nameless and invisible ate her breasts piece by piece. But an astonishing sight took me from these depressing thoughts. Four of the stouter members of the remarkable party in front of me carried a most extraordinary thing strung on poles. This was rather like a cylindrical washing machine, and had “Barnes Improved Chemical Toilet” stenciled on its side. The four stout parties, obviously the organizing group, now carefully erected a canvas screen around the toilet, and secured it firmly in the ground. I understood this action, since the last time the inmates of the Home used public toilets, the result reached several national newspapers, and a question was asked in the House.
The facility in place, the four stout parties vanished in the direction of a distant ice-cream stall. The forty or so hard cases that remained now opened packs of food and drink, and the contents of these packs soon became a blizzard of missiles. Most of the group promptly fell to the ground when they were out of ammunition and licked and picked broken jam tarts, crushed cream buns and shattered ham sandwiches from off the grass and gravel whilst emptying the multi-coloured contents of bottles over the heads of both themselves and others. A few more steady ones tried to eat properly, but their lack of all bodily control strewed food and spittle across their clothing. Some moaned, other rolled on the ground and others sang quietly to themselves. Heads shook, unfocused eyes gazed, blank and unknowing. Eyes, sometimes in independent motion, were wobbling jellies, Fingers remained stuck in noses other fingers scratched and tore at trousers, foreheads, armpits and crotches in meaningless patterns of irritation. This was universal noise: bits such as their ears might be alright, yet the signal had not held with other bits, such as noses or feet. It is disturbing to see people with adult bodies skip and dance awkwardly, their muscles not capable of controlled motion. What I was a dance hot from hell, with a consumer update. Bodies lacking all symmetry were stained with ketchup, brown sauce; chocolate ice cream decorated misshapen abdomens and sunken chests. Cavernous mouths full of jam and cakes gasped like landed fish. Pink, red and yellow faces were bloated, some mouths wore a permanent leer; monstrous noses snorted, mouths brayed, and oversized heads shook like those of zoo animals confined in a narrow space for too long. Stained tee shirts boasted of TV and sports heroes, and some produced masks of famous film stars, putting them on to tumultuous applause. Mirrors (I suppose made of plastic, but with the DSS, you never knew) were produced, and endless screams of maniacal delight erupted when the masked faces were seen in the mirror. Perhaps some even thought that this was how they were. But one very young girl collapsed screaming when the elastic of her Madonna mask broke, the mask fell to the ground, and she saw her own face, which was like that of an aged fairy-tale witch.
I praised the god of noise. This was a work of art. No drunken louts or drugged prats from a concert or junkies from discos could compete with this gathering for a mighty shattering of concentration.
Here was a gibbering primordial mess whose pain was beyond all conception. The sight of it convinced me that the idea of a harmonious universe full of profound rules and principles and laws was a definitive bourgeois conceit. I had no religious belief. I intended to get through life causing the least inconvenience to others and myself. I could see no meaning in a universe in which illness and death were certainties. The hopping hollering mental and physical catastrophes that were now trying to climb trees and stand on their flat heads in front of me appeared to be a universal constant like white noise and the hydrogen line. I knew that the same faces as I saw here appeared in Tibet and Peru, Siberia and Australia. Perhaps they had appeared in the breeding stock for hundreds of thousands of years. A carefully managed and controlled and defined level of catastrophic mentality was as determined a controlling signal as the certain boiling of water when subject to certain levels of heat. The cretin or congenital idiot (as the text books called it, him or her) was a kind of timeless reference signal – the statistics of its occurrence did not vary much outside of a line. The same numbers appeared in Britain and Canada, Australia and Finland, and in every race and colour on earth in the same measured quantity. The condition was not related to any kind of environmental factor. The very best or very worst of circumstances made no difference to the level and frequency of occurrence. Only the notion of cure, yet another definitive bourgeois conceit, was more absurd than their existence. I did not know whether the same level of malformation occurred in dinosaurs and early apes, rabbits, or insects. I had an idea that level of chronic malfunction now trying to skip, eat, and jump in front of me occurred only in human beings. Mad animals could not hunt, and they would not be fed or protected. They would therefore be cannibalized or be carrion within a very short time. Mad animals were then largely invisible. Only human beings cared for such; long ago we decided that the man who destroyed the mentally ill of his nation was the most evil man ever born. If I was disturbed by what I saw, I was disturbed in a far deeper way by my own responses. I tried to find love for the catastrophes in front of me, but the love I found was as phony as a news headline or a policy statement by a Minister. I couldn’t even raise sympathy. The way I managed the horror was by saying to myself (and I heard myself saying it) that as far as I was concerned, the non-cerebrals could bathe them, spoon-feed their blubbering lips, wash them and put them to bed, try to subdue their incomprehensible curses and calm the bottomless pit of their agonies. Perhaps folk infinitely more morally developed than myself would love them with an impossible love quite beyond my own much narrower concept of impossibilities.
They began to dance just like the cartoon figures I had imagined in John’s head.
On the rim of the dance, others sat and held one another in shivering embrace, like children waiting for a firing squad. Many older types had faces like babies; some young had the faces of the very old. Others were more like animals than human beings.
They began to act.
One young woman who had what looked like the beginning of a small rhino horn starting out from her forehead played a bull, and others toreadors. Some became cats and beavers, rats and cows. Others were dogs and mice, snakes and lizards, rabbits and birds. Many roared and screamed like all these things put together as groups of astonished watchers formed on the gravel path by my seat. I don’t know they thought, but to me it was like some monstrous failed experiment. A tiny mote of wayward dust in the genetic system had brought about a bloated head, turned brains to custard, imbalanced bodies, internal organs and features As a bonus bit of chaos, the universe as we call it was laughing at them. Overhead a light aeroplane trailed a double banner: Dickson’s Pork & Pickle Sausages are the Best, and Ben’s Second Hand Cars are the BEST. Below the banner a less than Best dog tipped over a rubbish bin and surrounded by angry flies, gorged himself on a sticky mound of goodness-only-knows what, a something bright green with mould and yellow with crawling maggots in the bargain. The dog didn’t care, and neither did the sky. Above the tops of the oaks, their foliage burnt by an atomized sheen of plastic, rubber and synthesized hydrocarbons from the motorway; I looked up and saw a blue whose impossibility of reproduction had driven painters crazy. God had done a good job on the sky, and Sharon Stone, but he had definitely not been paying attention when He created the half-bodies and half-brains that were here dancing and acting under His inconceivable blue. As a diversion, a black couple launched into a screaming row involving betrayals, repairs to the bathroom, the broken boiler, various relatives, and which soap-opera they were give up for the football, all such issues being coupled with bills, booze, and bad debts. I looked back from the Titian blue and saw by the wastebasket a turd with a toffee on top. Probably the rummaging dog with an unconscious talent had built this amusing construction. A passing boy with some wit knew how to deal with this piece of found art. He parked his scooter, and showing off his golfing talents, he took a stick and golfed both turd and sweet into the Titian blue. Seeing this, I had the distinct impression that the next great Copernican change would come when it was realized that the universe was a complete disaster: harmony, purpose, the profound, and all the last grand illusions blown the way of the summer wind. And the mad danced on before me. They chased one another, fell over and rolled, and they made me hate God more than I had ever hated him. Here were his concentration camp prisoners, his illimitable Nazi experiments, damned for at least this life, if not the Beyond. But no Nazi, psychopath or pervert had sentenced human beings to this hell beyond imagining. No human being had done this. The very worst of humanity had neither the imagination nor the resources for Roman games on this impressive level. These disasters in the sun and moon were the work of Dame Nature in all her pantomime glory. Dame Nature, who according to laying the bullshit of the priests and scientists, structure and coherence and purpose and harmony. In life I had formulated few unbreakable rules for myself. The first was a soon as I heard the word harmony I knew I was going to get ripped off big time, as Larry my son used to say before drove at high speed over the White Cliffs of Dover, of all things. His girlfriend Thelma had been crushed to pulp by accident under the No. 23 out from Ladbroke Grove whilst crossing the road trying to read a book on the history of mathematics. Even my possible extended families were fallen cerebrals, like myself. As for Larry, he left me a note saying that he had decided to “switch off the screen” and see which new “theatre” had claimed Thelma. Needless to say, he was a student of postmodernism at London University. Life was not a struggle between Good and Evil of the old theologians. Life was a production.
Rhyme and doggerel, playground chants erupted. Some awareness was there. A few laughed at their own inability to organize even ring-a-roses, momentarily turning their shattered minds and bodies into grim comedy. They could not even form a circle. Others laughed. They emptied large black plastic bags that they had brought with them. Out poured the history of the world: costumes, hats, and masks, cloaks and robes of Napoleon and Caesar, paper crowns and cardboard swords of Royalty and soldiers. They knighted one another, they marched and made mock-war; in the midst of cavalry charges and bugles they became fighter pilots and soldiers. There was no violence or threatening behaviour. Perhaps they had suffered the greatest violence conceivable against their body and mind. They had gone through that barrier, and there was no point in further injury. Some had plainly been injured quite recently. But their plaster and bandages looked as if they were there because of falls, forgetfulness, or plain ignorance of simple domestic dangers rather than ill treatment. Though a good number were fairly obvious tranquillised by heavy medication, there was visible in some cases a great and genuine tenderness between some couples. But I saw no sexual movements. They didn’t want to reproduce, and I didn’t blame them. Perhaps they knew they were a closed loop. Perhaps their tribe wanted to die, sterilize the madness, wash all their circuit mistakes down the plughole and give them a new genetic chance in time. A few had been given a bonus package by God. These were the blind and crippled. The blind had acquired human tic-birds, specialized as bees, I suppose. Their sole purpose was to guide them and describe (in gibberish) things that were happening. These tic-birds never left the side of the blind, and were one of the few specializations I saw. More such tic-birds helped the cripples, who were very odd. Crippled already through strangely twisted joints, another quite different processing signal had attempted to impose a conventional crippling as it were, as if the time had come for such a proper conventional arthritic crippling, say, not withstanding the crippling that was there in the first place. Or perhaps it was the other way round, and as always, the proper or conventional malfunction did not talk or interface with the weird. In any case, these few poor devils had got the worst of a terrible double-whammy of a confused system whose signals did not necessarily talk to one another, or were incompatible, or dare I say, did not like one another?
A pair now detached themselves from the main group and moved in my direction. Since this pair at mid distance looked positively dangerous, I comforted myself that I had on my person that equipment needed by every middle-class littérateur on a park bench at the turn of the twentieth century. A young prostitute friend of mine whom I used to drink with the Old Bear and Flagon gave me a scent-spray filled with neat bleach. I had also a muslin bag full of fine-ground glass supplied to me by an old soldier long dead, alas. In case things got really serious, tucked into my mobile phone case was a vintage teddy-boy flick-knife given to me by an elderly Methodist scoutmaster. As he said when he handed it over to me, he had lost all his illusions about the world in an age of men in skirts and rubber sex-dolls on the National Health. I rationalized all this aggression by convincing myself that such things were for the use of people such as myself, that is under-exercised men gone just slightly breathless, men whose middle-aged muscles were no longer suitable for strength and skill trials.
This well-honed 1960s relic now nestled in my right jacket pocket as the two young genetic casualties closed with me. Which one was it going to be first, I said to myself. Is it to be the one on the left, aged about 18 with drug-seared eyes and a lop-sided grin, or the older man slightly in front, with the old-lag stare? As if sensing danger they both stopped short about fifteen feet away from me and lay on the ground, the older man (whom I shall call him Albert) slightly in front. Albert’s body was quite normal, but he was of indeterminate age. Anywhere between thirty and fifty I guessed. He had one of those faces that are several faces. None of these masks were rough, plebian, or coarse; one overlay was of handsome, distinguished features; other changing impressions flitting across his features. They were of someone meditative, thoughtful, and indicative of some degree of concentration and discernment. In all Albert looked like a scholar fallen to drink. At first I thought that some of the wags from the Bear and Flagon had set upon my natural social reticence as a kind of joke, had hired some out of work actor to jolt me into amusing astonishments.
But all such thoughts went from me as Albert got up, took a few steps towards me, and spoke.
Is it you I know yes I don’t caus of. Blade. Am is now.
His stream of consciousness when it came was like a broken list of crossword clues. His accent was good, though full of the loss and gloom of some long-term prisoner.
His partner (whom I shall call Jim) nodded approvingly as Albert continued.
FFF canal steal I big Cr ffffffffffffffff hold! Digit? Fox yes?
I do not apologise for giving the nonsensical bits here. Poor Albert offered them I suppose as a child offers a broken toy to an adult. I took his crazy verbal offering with a smile and due reverence for all such broken magical transferences. There was humility in him. I accepted this ludicrous and vaguely amusing gift as from a puzzled child. Of course I am imitating the sounds I heard from this man. I can no more vouch for their accuracy, which like reality itself is a tragicomic approximation.
Fox yes. Digit? If at all I can don’t know.
Albert smiled.
Jim smiled too, and with his head cocked to one side looked as if he was expecting me to answer.
Cvagt. Jtitu. Figaro. Picter. Halowsw.
My father had been in the army at one time. He was a signaler. He taught me a bit about code cracking. As Albert rambled on, I became my father listening to Morse code under gunfire, trying to catch the any short runs of meaning, a bit of what code-crackers called plain text coming through, a little fragment of almost-coherence. Valid not john is brought cold his sm ye the fog
Folk passing by were hurrying from the Park now, as if expecting a downpour. I supposed they were going back to their high rise caverns full of late Roman screens showing late Roman devastated gut, spirit and intellect. But who was I to look down upon them, a loser on a Park bench listening to a madman under clouds that now blackened the sun? Twist said no but run sold break sea…
Heavy spots of rain announced a summer downpour. What was I doing here listening to such crazy nonsense? I got up to go. He spoke again.
Josie.
I stopped. The rain stopped.
June
The universe stopped.
The sane and beautiful smile now on the face of Albert’s friend partner indicated that he approved of what was being said. Josie? June? Straight to the back of my head went the words. Albert damn him, was running fast into the heart of me.
Josie?
Ax Ax Ax! P P P!
Impossible. Josie Axpey was my first blushing juvenile love.
Albert, as if inspired, spoke again.
Josie, June, Linda.
A run of three?
Marion. Brenda. Patricia.
Another run of three.
A run of six loves? In sequence?
Equally impossible shafts of light from the impossible Titian blue now lit him like a stage spot.
He wore a crooked Fool’s smile that Shakespeare would have loved.
He spoke.
“Marion, Brenda, Patricia?”
Here direct from Albert’s mouth were no less than nine juvenile heartburns from the old mid-century and he had pronounced them in sequence. So such things were still there, like a never-ending greeting? I was angry at the great Impossible. I was angry as the people I fooled. Who would ever want to be visited by such old banished pains again? What cruelty was this? Had not this poor broken stick of brain in front of me had enough suffering without having my ancient sexual and emotional burnouts living in his head? Josie. Thirty years ago. Hard raver as they used to say. Died hair at fifteen. Wore just stockings under a short black plastic macintosh. Last saw her in the Belinda Transport Café in the rain. Tea slops on the café table, and unspeakable lavatories. We were both hitching, heading north. Lost her in the mysteries of pre-motor-way Birmingham. No brains. Old-fashioned dance bands with saxophones still bring her back like an incantation. Got a Christmas card once. But probably dead, murdered by era forces alone. Hurt her bad. Saxophones and night-trains bring her back.
June. Failed actress. Basement flat, Ladbroke Grove. Unbelievably beautiful. But treacherous as green-eyed snake in the proverbial grass. Hated my brains. Hated my education even more. Married failed homosexual film director. Lost her in the mysteries of Ladbroke Grove. She stood there in the snow in 1975 made up of old films more than flesh and blood. Last saw her by chance some weeks ago. Drink-ruined face seen at a Macdonald’s table through rain-smeared window. Smoking heavily and staring down at the floor. Killed by the zeitgeist. Sunlight, ancient wooden ships, pyramids. Probably still as superficial in 3000 B.C. Hurt me bad.
Patricia. Snobby. Plain. House in Windsor Park. Boring talk of horses and bridge. Couldn’t stand her. Couldn’t relate. Wealth, style, but no education. Said she would kill herself if I left her. Parted on a hot stage-front of an afternoon in an expensive Kensington teahouse with the waitresses trying to avoid looking at her streaming tears. Called me a Jew, left me with the bill, and drove off in her mother’s Mercedes full of Harrods’ Christmas parcels, some which had been destined for me. Both hurt. Deep-lost England. Leaf-green. Chaucer again. Letters arrived at a previous address. I let them stay there.
And so on. Other women sped to infinity in their own way: boats and trains and hours and thoughts and ships of being. I think these images are more important than liver, kidneys, or heart. Blood and bones are lower-case things, bits off some inconceivable shelf. These telling pictures are the self. They are the bowels of the ship, the engine room and aerials rotating on the bridge.
What else did this blessed Albert know? What other miraculous charred bones of my past loves were in his mad brain? Did this poor thing have the future agonies and inspirations and lives of each girl and each woman within his lexicons of nonsensical noise? Was the entire history of each frock and skirt and comb, each smile and handbag in the furnace of his sulphurous mad agonies? Did he know of each and every time and place of love and lust? Was his knowledge limited, or was he God himself, who had files on the lighting, the mood, the shots from every possible angle? Could he redesign each smell and each touch, produce and reproduce to infinity every moment of breath and touch and smile? Could he re-blend all the faces and the voices into other tastes and countries and landscapes, could he re-programme thighs and shoes and anger and opinions and travels and homes, could he even re-run age and status, income, education and IQ? If there was all this order in this cracked vessel in front of me, why was he now slobbering spittle down his chin, and looking as is he was hot from some torture chamber of Hell itself. How much signal was there in the piece of crap that was poor him? Bus conductors, moved on by policemen, would refuse the thing that was he that contained an infinite music and would panic kids at school gates. Mothers would cross the road to avoid him, youths would kick at him, and the very dogs would cross the road and attack him. Not even the birds would come near his crumbs.
And why me?
Were there other loves of other men there in him?
Jim smiled again and chewed a blade of grass as Albert spoke. He was the watcher and recorder. Albert was the prompter. They worked together, like twin interrogators.
Linda Patricia.
A couple more. In sequence again. But this time by God, I had him. He’d missed one. In my monstrous stupidity I shouted at him.
I don’t believe you. It’s a trick. You’ve missed one.
Diana.
He turned and with as much of a smile as his poor broken leper-face could manage, he triumphed over everything and anything. Diana was the missing one. Still smiling his crooked smile, he spoke again.
Brenda.
My beloved wife. Her of the eaten breasts.
I took out my knife.
I will kill you.
His partner jostled like a parrot on a pole. He spat out his grass and now looked worried.
Brenda on the sea tonight.
I wept. I put my knife away in case I plunged it into myself.
Jim laid his hand on Albert’s shoulder by way of censure and restraint as Albert spoke for the last time.
More?
Jim shook his head at me and wagged his finger at Albert, who looked sad.
Jim spoke with a rough but firm and kind voice, as if alerting of dangers.
No, no more.
The pair now rose to their feet and shook their jackets, for all the world as if they were leaving an overnight camp early in the morning and preparing for a long journey. Albert gave me a rather condescending smile as if as if he knew I would have an inner struggle with explanations. He knew, I think that I would battle with mixed metaphors of lines of force, energy across space and so on, using all the plague-ridden cosmos of my good education. With a somewhat resigned look as if their job was over and their signals had now trickled to earth, the pair walked the three hundred yards to the still roistering main group as if it they were three hundred miles away. I tried a rationalization. Somehow, had I known Albert? Did he live round the corner in my youth and through some inconceivable coincidence know the names? That was hardly possible. The living passions he named were in different lover’s towns and cities, and two were from two different continents, and all were well spaced over thirty-five years. And there were gaps. Many names he had missed. But had got the heavyweights. But could he have been behind me with a notebook in Africa, France, the Far East?
In the fading light the entrance to the path into the wood was the screen of a theatre. One of the tribe now spewed what I assumed to be his subsidized compulsory experimental medication on top of a piled of food scraps. Come night, he would have another injection crammed full of tortured animal screams, and another cycle of creative medical science would begin. Wishing the insects and birds well of this expectorated gut, I realized that I was now deeply angry. Impossibilities are ruinous. How dare the universe cheat and play with me in this way? Was I to be eaten by this pain as another mysterious something ate my wife alive before me, her eyes asking me to kill her? The names Albert left me with became presences. I could hear the words, feel the unique warmth and sense the live being of all of these lost women. The infinity of their hours was mine to enter. Combs, shoelaces, opinions, seasons, and moods of them all flooded back. Once again I shared their meals and beds and nights, and all the nets and webs of what went wrong in each beloved case. In their presence, the past it appeared had not gone away. The right lighting, the backspaced technologies, the correct fabrics and tastes of the deep past backed up all the sounds and touches, the meals and walks and talks and clothing and agonies and excitements and opinions. Was poor Albert in his madness reading all this from a part of me, and reflecting it back like an aerial, or was it in his head? Had his wild mind induced it all from me as an electric current moves a compass needle? Of course being a human being, I tried to work it all out. I asked tragic-comic questions every human being asks about what the philosophers call reality, which as poor Larry said, was always an approximation. Was what I had experienced electro-mechanical, biological, magnetic? Electronic, atomic, genetic, gravitational? Finally, I settled for a mess of pottage consisting of half-baked images from Faraday and Marconi. Did Albert receive part of my head? Was I transmitting (very near the culturally forbidden word transmuting) the past within me? Could I in turn receive from him such broadcasts of his own life? What a perverse symphony of near misses!
But he had struck fire. He had summoned all the failures and the compromises, all the loves and the great passions in the drifting desert of my endless mediocre days. Not God’s murderous statistics, but those vast all-consuming lusts that are eternal being. Albert had got straight into the engine room. I knew now that I was driven not by the needs of the gut, ambition, frustration, anger, bitterness; I was driven by this lexicon of loves that were still playing out a kind of destiny.
Albert had cracked a bit of the collective code, produced a scrap of plain text from infinite number-crunching combinations with the chaos that was himself. The rest of the impossible text was folded in his impossible heart. I was ashamed to feel still the lump of the weapons in my pocket. I had, in my all my pompous folly, almost killed the messenger of all my dreams
I had learned what I had taught. Experience of the Impossible was a healing. It cured much of my bitterness, which was proliferating foliage in my mind like my wife’s cancer. I had witnessed a miracle. Like many miracles, it had apparently no beginning and end, no development, but its significance was that for a moment I was led into the richest depth of being I have ever experienced. The impossible was a cure. I am now somewhat free of temper, viciousness of opinion, and depression. And it had nothing to do with witchcraft or that wretched thing called the paranormal. They say in the pub that my smile (which they had hardly seen previously) is wonderful. Half-jokes about my being in love circulate, and I suppose I am in love in a certain way now. The impossible has the same effect of seeing a certain face when young, a face that shatters the days and months to pieces, a face that brings time itself to a stop.
A distant bell rang in the depths of the wood. Hearing it, the peacocks and rabbits went deep into the brush beyond the tree line. Crows flapped and fussed in the tops of the elms by the old industrial canal, which ran by the teahouse. Its barges once hauled a tangible and solid real from those straightforward Euclidean point-to-point ways of the old lost hard-wire empires. I was beginning to experience a mysterious nostalgia for its old certainties and realities. I longed to be once again hard-wired myself; I longed to have solidities and objective truths, and those beautiful solid facts that could be put into lexicons and dictionaries, encyclopedias and scientific textbooks. The bell brought about a distinct change in their movements. Slow, almost orchestrated miming patterns were discernible in their herd movements. Quite a few were still wearing masks; they were now an ancient chorus moving almost rhythmically before the darkening gap in the wood. The corner of my eye noted that the park was now almost deserted as evening came on. I noted also with some trepidation that the chorus had noticed me. All of them were now masked, in a semi-circle before the woodland path, fallen to a quiet chatter. Sensing the dying evening like a herd of animals, even the noisier characters became silent and nervous, like cattle before nightfall. Then, to my utter astonishment, they formed a semi-circle at some distance before me, and almost in a state of collapse, I saw the semi circle bow before me. It was the amphitheatre at Epidaurus. 400 BC. They were the chorus. I was the magic summoner. The highest rank in the Ancient World. And I lived in a corridor, a terrifying overdraft and a clerk’s job that hardly paid for cat’s food and shaving cream.
I knew what was expected of me. I got up and bowed towards the ancient half-circle. They bowed back. Then a second of an incomprehensible chant, broken by the arrival of Ron, the Park Keeper, who broke the spell as inevitably, the spell had to be broken. Ron, a mundane player if ever there had come to tell me that the gates were now being closed for the night. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper…
The semicircle now dissolved. The tic-birds took the hands of the blind, great agitated by the coming of night. As they comforted them by speaking gently into their ears, the sighted gazed anxiously in the direction of the teahouse, and were in turn extraordinarily glad when the capable group emerged from that direction. Directed purely by gestures rather than sound, a few took off their masks and costumes and tidied the mess they had made, putting it into plastic bags that they slung over the shoulders. Others carefully folded the Privacy Tent, and slipped shoulder poles into the carrying rings of the Barnes Improved Chemical Toilet. The four stout ones then gripped the poles and hoisted their private lavatory like a shot lion on a safari. The tic-birds gripped the hands of the blind and followed the toilet-bearers back into the woods, led by the capable group. To any passer by in the gloom it must have looked like a religious procession consisting of all the grotesques of all the old tales of mound and hill, tumulus and charmed circle. With black bags slung over their shoulders, it was a hobbit march en route for Magonia, the land of elementals from which few mortals ever returned. Some still were miniature kings, queens, and soldiers. A few of the tic- birds still wore their top hats and tiaras, twirling gold-topped canes as they led and calmed their staring, stumbling blind charges. Any observer on the proxima centuri seeing this column through a good telescope could possibly have drawn the most amazing conclusions about the human race. Some alien scholars on that nearest star to planet Earth would spend their lives no doubt trying to prove that the Barnes Improved Chemical Toilet born with such care through the woods was the Ark of the Covenant, and the Privacy Tent the folded Veil of the Temple, and the black bags were full of magical treasures stolen from great fairy castles by adventurers beyond the sun and moon. But when I smile at these thoughts, I am reminded that in my case, this troupe did bring such magic to my head.
When the last of them disappeared, I realized with a shock that I had been in the park all afternoon, and I had seen a whole and entire universe begin and end. I walked over to see crumbs and pressed grass with thoughts of stories I had heard of alien abductions and missing time. One small crumpled Napoleonic hat of thin black crepe paper, complete with the Marshall’s crest and Star (in surprising beautiful detail for a hat probably from an out-of- season Christmas cracker), rested again a squashed half-eaten sausage roll. These were the only remnants from another world, which had come and gone like a dream before my eyes. I picked up both the hat and the shattered pastry, as private souvenirs no else would ever see. I never tried to find them. I never tried to verify, gather evidence, check the facts of the objective reality of what I had experienced. Such modern conditioning would have done what it was supposed to do: It would reduce me to ashes. It would tell me that I was mistake, confused, that what I had experienced was hallucination, that I was a small mentally castrated creature that was a powerless piece of mechanistic nerve endings.
Later of course I tried to move back into the human hell of rationalizations, but soon gave up. I found conversation difficult over the succeeding days. I tried to convince myself that the whole affair was some monstrous set of coincidences. There are curtains we are permitted to draw to keep us sane, let us get some sleep at night. But like many of my protesters, I just could not get the furniture back into place. Certainly the elemental bit of Albert had genuinely wanted to give me something. It was a bit of a high ball for him, but he had put it into the highest of nets. He had built a little strand of coherence and his wild talent had handed it to me because he knew that it belonged to me. It was a cure for my snobbery and burgeoning dislike of anything and everything. The mad had saved me. Only part of me could die now. The strands could go. But the whole could not be destroyed.
It is late summer now, and I am still here on the same park bench. The woodland beckons as it did when I was young, running into it with a balloon, a dog, and expectations of infinity. Perhaps the impossible will visit me again here next spring when a new cycle of games will begin. I now know that I myself live in many other places than this Park, places where I am still young. And I know that I have friends (and perhaps enemies) that I did not know I had. Time as enemy and friend had come out of the dark and ravaged me. I gather these signals from my familiars, and they help me get through these late autumn days.
On those lost mid-afternoons known to every human being, mid-afternoons when memory becomes unbearable, I go to my secret drawer and I look at these two faintly ridiculous items which to me are Hosts. By the paper hat and the now decayed sausage roll I chant my chorus. Josie, Brenda, June, Linda…All my fairy girls, where are you?
Perhaps for a moment I did enter Magonia. Certainly I was not now the same man who entered the park. Contact with the elemental is healing. When the universe becomes fantastic it becomes merciful.
I am possessed by the thought that whole universes might begin and end with such absurdities, which now nestle in my mind and in the dark of my secret drawer.
Colin Bennett 2004 |
