Friday, November 30, 2007

My hair was falling down in big clumps, mostly from the right side of my head. No, the left side of my head, only the right as I looked in the mirror. It was strange and ominous, I would pass my hand to comb my hair in the old man's tradition of trying to cover the bald bits, but my hair -black and shiny, far more so than it is in 'real life'- would come off in my hands. Big clumps of it. Outside, a world of doom and grey awaited. I leaned on the washbasin towards the mirror, I was so, so very tired and I knew this wasn't real, it couldn't be. I touch a bit of what was left of my hair on that half of my head and another, almost final clump of black lustrous hair came off in my hand. But my skin was looking healthy and my wrinkles and lines had disappeared. I felt very ill: the world was going wrong very quickly, as I looked at that image in the mirror that was me and yet wasn't, that younger and healthier but at the same time fatally wounded self, mortally ill me. I needed to put my head down and sleep, even if I knew that what was left of my hair would be left in the pillow.

Outside, in the distance, explosions and police sirens criss-crossed the city in stereo Doppler effect.. there was smell of something like gun-powder in the air, but the window gave me only a calm urban night vista. I knew, though, that he world was about to end.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

melismas and horses

There were horses. Indoors. There was hay on the floor on the carpets. Some of the rooms had cement floors, like I had not seen since the days of my childhood in Catia in West Caracas so many years ago. I had to pick up my things from behind the back of where one of this enormous horses was. I was afraid it would kick back when it sensed the proximity of a stranger behind. He raised a foot, carefully tapping against my leg. I said something in very low woice, almost whispering, trying to calm it. Grabbed my bag and went to the next room, where there was a sort of party. This room gave to a garden that was deep in darkness and very little could be made of it. There were a few people sitting, walking and milling around. Then I knew (although I never saw them) that the choir were behind me and I started to sing a Venezuelan song from the Llanos, with the choir accompanying me with a spine tingling boca chiusa intrincate set of vocal harmonies. I didn't know the song but I somehow knew what I had to sing. It was the most fantastic, beautiful music. The people around, fat men in suits with loosened ties and blonde-dyed women in red dresses with gold jewelry, ignored the music and just chatted in a louder voice. I finished. There wasn't a sign of acknowledgment from the audience. I then told myself.. I have to wake up now...

Monday, September 17, 2007

distant dream (1978)

hexagons

Monday; September 17, 2007 4:44 PM

...there was also my father's apartment, I think probably in the same building whose tenth floor had the strange lift arrangement and which I've visited now so many times over the years. The rooms were hexagonal, there were stairs going up and down the place and there were people in almost all the rooms. I couldn't find my father and ran into Mark 'untermensch', who would ask me what I would have with my dad, did I think he wanted to speak to me and I had to reply I didn't know but needed urgently to speak to him. The fact that I was holding a conversation in Spanish with Mark was not remarkable, I knew he'd learnt some while travelling round South America, but the fact that he was speaking on behalf of my father who I couldn't get hold of and who apparently didn't want to speak to me was more strange. He kept asking me what I wanted and I would ask back, as I did not know, where my room was, I did not know which room had been assigned to me in this labyrinth of rooms and stairs, all hexagonal and all leading in many seemingly impossible directions. And every time I walked in a room there would be people in it, engaged in different things and glaring at me for the intrusion. Obscurely, this was my house. More obscurely, I was definitely not welcome..

Saturday, June 16, 2007

A dream of water

Saturday; June 16, 2007 4:34 PM

a dream with water

I was on the coast, towards the East of the country.. She was with me but she wasn't, I could just make her out getting in the choppy grey waters under the murky grey skies and swim towards the West, presumably towards the City in the centre of the coast. At the same time I was her, struggling in the water to make way ahead and breath, the many miles of water ahead of me condensed into a single experience.

I was walking alongside on the coast, barely able to get an occasional glimpse of her in the water, struggling forward, while I, who had it so much easier just having to walk that many miles, was already panting and sweating... I could just about make him out there, walking near the water-line; I knew he'd be more tired than I was. The sky was gathering big grey lumps rolling together very low, the storm was coming, the water was the colour of steel, there were many, many miles of this ahead of me.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

outside the classrooms

Monday; March 26, 2007 9:16 PM

Why do I have these fragments of memories of Liceo Luis Espelozin bathed in electric light, at night, with me lurking in corridors, going up and down stairways. I lurk, indeed, and look for something I don't know what...

Maybe I was looking for B. I was still in love with her. She was as far away from me as a star in a distant galaxy and was just as out of my reach. And yet I still pined for her...

But some things don't match. I very, very seldom went to that place at night. It was not even the same high school. In the evenings it was Liceo Jose Gregorio Hernandez and was an adult education secondary school. with much older pupils than the daytime constituency. A couple of my friends attended it, though, as they were working in the day.

Why am I here tonight? I should be many miles away. It can't be 1970 all over again. Please tell me this isn't so. I check in my pocket for my mobile phone: these gadgets did not exist then, if it stilll is in my pocket I'll be ok. It isn't. But then I remember having left it behind when I changed clothes earlier. It is a vague memory, though. I was in a rush, somebody was speaking to me while I was fetching my things, changing my clothes. Did Ireally leave it behind? And, in any case, where is that? I think it was my room in Catia -but we sold that house over twenty years ago. Someone crosses my path in the stairs, cannot clearly see them in the shadow. "Excuse me, what year is this?" I feel compelled to ask and immediately realise the absurdity of asking such a question. "W-what? what?" is the only answer I get before the person whose face I could not see disappears downstairs.

I walk down the corridors and look in the classrooms. The rooms have the daytime class labels on the doors: "3A", "4B'. That was my class. I peer into that room, half expecting to see myself sitting there, in that odious khaki uniform. There is a class, they look pretty much like daytime students to me, rather than adults, but their uniform is different, the girls don't wear the green and white uniform of the Ezpelosin liceo but a blue and white blazer. The boys wear white shirts and blue jeans. Blue jeans, imagine.

I stand on the corridor and look into the distance, remembering the gigantic flames and the plume of fat black smoke coming up when the petrol station down in Avenida Sucre caught fire. People used to smoke even in gas station courtyards, in those days.

Walk down the second floor corridor, down some unlit stairs -there's small piles of rubbish under the stairs, chunks of granite missing from the steps, stains. I nearly trip up over a cleaner's trolley. Had forgotten about these. I can see the car park now. Is my car there? Hold on, my car would be four thousand miles away, parked in Bartholomew Road, not here in Gato Negro. But I'm seeing a dark green Peugeot 405 in the car park which can only be my current car. I strain to try and see the plate number but cannot from this angle. Why am I in this place, anyway?

Sometimes my father would drive me to school. That was pretty embarrassing as he had an old car, a bottom of the range Chevrolet Biscayne which looked far much older than its six years. Well, in those days cars changed much more from year to year. My dad wasn't very good at keeping cars spic-and-span, something that everyone who's been in my car will agree I have inherited. So the car had a collection of scrapes, scratches and grazes, the wheel lids were missing on a couple of tyres, it was quite dirty. And I would leave the car without saying thanks or pretty much anything, mortified, and join the group of my classmates even though I felt myself an outsider and so did they, me in silence while they would go about their coarse teen-age joking and bragging.

The place would have been full of people.. not so tonight. There is something ghostly about this place. But then I don't know whether I am really here or even what this place really is. Mind you, I didn't know then either, when I used to be the outsider kid who didn't quite fit in....

Sunday, March 04, 2007

wong phone

Friday; March 2, 2007 5:07 PM

Dreams continue flowing underneath the level of the waking mind, I breath in deep, change position and look at the alarm clock. I don't have to get up at six. It is 4:37. A moment ago I was struggling trying to make a phone call and realising I had taken the wrong mobile phone with me. I was in Catia and I knew my phone wouldn't work with the local telephone network but it would, curiously, work on wi-fi wireless network and that I would find a signal, but then I had realised I had brought the wrong phone by mistake and this one didn't have wi-fi or internet capabilities. I was in the old house in Catia. I had the horrible feeling I also had brought the wrong guitar. I opened my guitar case. There was no guitar in it. I head the laughter and chirpy natter of girls in the distance.

I'm always losing things. I'm in Caracas at the moment and I'm not sure how to get out and back to Britain since I seem to have lost my passport. When I look for it I only find the Venezuelan one, but it is the Italian one I will need. I've also lost my watch and can only tell the time by reading the display on my phone, but this is broken so I have to move it at certain angles and squint. I go out on the street and people seem to look at me funny. I do certainly look differently, I'm much older, with long hair and dressed in black. A zamuro flies low overhead and crows -never heard a zamuro crowing, is that possible?

Find myself lost in Casalta, in the middle of the estate, tower blocks on either side... I am more than ever an outsider, I should not be here. I now know this to be a dream, I haven't been to this part of the world since nineteen seventy-nine. The shopping centre has not yet been built so it is long before then. I must wake up I must wake up.

I'm back in the house in Catia. I'm in the upstairs room, where someone has built half a dozen toilets, several of which are now overflowing. My phone is on the floor, but it is covered in water. I run to unplug the TV and the betamax. The landline phone rings, I pick it up, a distant voice dictates something in English. This reminds me, when am I due to fly back to London? The date might already have passed.... Then I realised I've lived this occasion a million times, but in dreams. So I am still in a dream. Must wake up, must wake up...

It's misty all round, you can hardly see anything. A ray of sun breaks through the fog but doesn't reveal much more. I hear a soft distant music but I know I must not go in that direction. There is a threat that I cannot see but sense very powerfully. Also I have the feeling that I'm still in Catia but there is nowhere like this in Catia, there could not be. This must be a dream.. wake up please wake up..

Thursday, January 25, 2007

time shift

As usual, this was only the end of the dream, one long, complicated dream full of things that inevitably got washed away by the waking world as soon as my eyes opened in the darkness. This last bit remained, though, powerful and intriguing. I felt it should have been scary but it wasn't really, maybe because the protagonist is someone close to me. There were other people in the room but they didn't count. There was Ili, my cousin, standing in front of me, smiling and sort of flirting. There was also Ili, my cousin, sitting on a couch, looking disapprovingly.

I couldn't quite understand what was in front of me, so I asked Ili (standing) what was going on, how could there be two of them at the same time there. 'We're on different times, I'm on a time-shift in relation to her'. My head was swimming, trying to comprehend what she was telling me.. and failing. 'What do you mean, you can be here twice now because for you 'now' is two different time points? Something like that?' 'Something like that', she said. 'B-but... this means there could be a million of you. And which one is the real one?' 'We both are. I suppose I could say that, because I'm a later one, I'm more real..' 'Rubbish' said the other Ili 'I must be of a later time-frame, given that I can remember this happening'. 'No you can't. Or, I-you can't, since I can remember this from your view-point, therefore I'm a later one'.

They sat down close to each other but not touching -I noticed that. Ili previously-standing smiled at me, her leg touching my shin, smiling in a sort of flirty way which for some reason alarmed me. Something was wrong. This was not Ili. But then, if not, Who -or what -was she?

'I can't have this, this is dangerous. I'll have to make you wake up' she said. And wake up I did, trying to cling onto the remains of the dream, while the other Ili looked at me imploringly -and I felt kind of pity to leave her alone, even though, as her face dissolved in the mist of disappearing dream, now I knew she wasn't the real Ili either.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

the train south-west

dreaming of travelling, again. I take a train (it is nearly always a train, on some occasions a bus, never seem to drive there)to some distant place, south and west and hundreds of miles away. a couple of times it has happened that I've mislaid my guitar and I spend the rest of the dream trying to retrieve it. Not his time, though; I don't get lost either. Or forget where I was supposed to go or who I was supposed to meet. i don't have to meet anybody. I'm on my own, which is both good and bad, i need to shed my luggage so I can explore this place.

sometimes dreams have a kind of multi-dimensional texture to them. They seem to extend and overlap with other dreams and perhaps other states of consciousness, other inner worlds in ways that seem both disturbing and impossible to recall when we wake up. Now I'm walking down the street in this town far down to the south and east, with no memory of having found my hotel or dumped my luggage. Indeed, I had no idea where that hotel was, now. the intervening chunk of time and memory was full with a confusing impression of having been on a vessel, a kind of boat being swept down an enclosed canal with red walls all around and dark turbulent waters like a rapid. i can see similar figures in the distance -then I realise that I'm seeing myself through a kind of mirror, a kink in space-time, I'd say, if that weren't such a tedious cliche. but all this belongs to the murkier part of the dream, there is another part which is, if still full of danger unseen and bothersome trouble, still even so more luminous.