iterations

21/08/2014 12:40

It begins with a theatre play. Well, no, it doesn't; there was a lot before but it has been erased. So now I'm sitting on the second row, while the boys on stage are being punished for something, their behaviour to the their girlfriends, and a huge Santa-like character bangs them over the head with a big styrofoam truncheon while his assistant rifles their pockets and loose change, wallets, bits of paper and fluff fall on the stage. I look back and I see her. Both of them, in different points in the hall, both look at me and smile in different ways.

This is going to be a residential event and I'm going to be here for a whole week; now I'm cuddling with her in a corner, wondering what happens next, while she (is it another instance of her? what is this?) watches me down from a mezzanina. She with me stirs and sits in front of me crossing her legs and holding my hands. I don't really understand how this all works and begin to say so but she puts a finger on her lips. Maybe it must not be said. She up there is making like she isn't looking down at us. I get the feeling that she can see me but she can't see her because ti is herself... I don't know why. It is all a mystery. 

At the end of the week it is the play again. I sit on the front row and the play begins and this time it is clear what is being represented as I've seen it unfold during the week, but at the same time none of it has happened and it's all here for the first time. And half way through the play I realise that I should have been on stage performing, but I don't know my part. I get up and make as if trying to go back to my seat from the stage but something, an invisible wall stops me and I bounce off it and fall on the stage. Except the wall is at the same time something I'm making up onstage and something real. I cannot go back. I look for her in the audience (who look at me with puzzlement) but neither of her is present....

diversions

Got lost and went past my stop. I asked the person next to me where I was. they looked at me with supreme disdain and something like distrust. I had to guess that we had gone past the Magallanes hospital and were sort of near Gramovén. Got off the bus trying to get my bearings. It was complicated, this going back home thing, as I was pretty sure none of us would be living in our old house any longer, how could I justify staying there? But then I thought my granddad would still be there. Wasn't he dead, though? I was convinced he would be there. This was some distance away, though; I was in the wrong place and didn't know exactly where I was or how to get back. The steep street died in the middle of nowhere and I had to get through traversing houses and gardens -or rather overgrown front yards full of junk, wire, pieces of plastic. I found myself in a house where the girls of the family asked me whether I needed any help. I said I needed to find my way to Magallanes. They looked at one another with some concern. Won't be very easy and it is not very safe out there. And you're carrying that, one said. Yes, I was carrying my best concert guitar in a shiny case and also two guitars without any kind of cover, which would make my progress both awkward and more risky, as the local thugs would spot prey very quickly. I thanked the older of the girls for their help, she said have my card -there was a little pigeonhole box on the wall with tiny visit cards, apparently each of the girls had their own set. I picked it up -there was just an email address in it, no phone number. I said it might be helpful to have her number in case I got lost or something (but would my phone work here? I thought) and she said 'yes of course it would' and smiled but didn't give me her number. The father appeared and thanked me for the visit and showed me out saying it was a pity I had to go so soon... while steering me out of the house. Outside, dirt lanes mixed with complicated architecture. I came to the end of that particular lane, a stream of people coming the other way -and completely stopped; they needed to get past me, I needed to carry on. But then I realised they were coming from a sheer wall with a sort of scaffolding ladder. I would not be able to descend on that laden with three guitars.. I moved aside and yes, I found another, much longer way. It was going to be a long way, indeed.

key

You/she had told me to go to your/her house and collect a house key from you so we could do a lesson. It was quite late in the evening but I was let in, made to wait in a reception room while various members of the family went to and fro; I had to explain to several of them why I was there at that time of day, she knows you are here? then please wait. I waited. At some point a little girl came in, said "hello, my name is Shanti, who are you?" I explained to her that F had asked me to come to collect a key and she perhaps should be made aware that I was in the house. "ok, I'll go fetch her", she said and disappeared. The house was getting busier with more and more people, family members and staff of some sort or another, going up and down the stairs and casting long glances at me. A young man in a suit with a tag on a lanyard asked me, like so many of them before, whether he could help, I repeated my story and he bid me to come upstairs with him to the next level -but he couldn't take me to the top floor, where F should be, as that wasn't allowed. I'd have to stay there. I said perhaps I should phone her; he said it might not be a good idea, I should not bother F and just wait to be called ... I completed the sentence, "... because it is nearly midnight". I still took out my phone but the screen was smudged and sliding my finger to open it didn't work. I tried to clean it but now the screen had gone white, the 'slide to open' words still waving across but not responding. I thought of restarting it but it would take too long and the young man seemed to be getting impatient. I started explaining to him in more detail but then stopped, what, none of it made any sense and I needed to wake up....

dream with tiger

Woke up, she’d left the room. I felt a stab of the old loneliness, I knew she wasn’t going to come back. The tiger had come into the room. Came and lied next to me, nuzzling its head into my hand as if it were a kitten. But it was not a kitten, it was a monster three times as heavy as I was, who could kill me with barely noticing it. It made affectionate cuddling movements with its head and finally fell asleep. I, as quietly as I could, got up and slowly and quietly left the room. Didn’t close the door to avoid waking it up -that door, in any event, wouldn’t have lasted that animal a second. Out in the corridor, rain was seeping through the roof everywhere. There were bits of broken masonry everywhere. I needed the loo but the bathroom was destroyed. I was alone in a wrecked house with a tiger. I felt desperately, desperately lonely.

returns

I had to sleep in my granddad's room. I hadn't lived in the house for a long time but much of my old stuff was still there. I was trying to figure out the tv set, which had archaic looking connectors I'd never seen, so I couldn't connect my laptop to it. There were several TV sets in the room, all old glass CRTs. Also, there was something odd about the stations they were tuned to. I tried to scan the channels, it had a sort of dual band thing like the old UHF-VHF and some of the channels came up on several of the frequencies -but none was clear, they all had a heavy snow of static or the pixelling break-down of more recent, digital equipment. I had to sleep on that bed? There was a lot of stuff in there, on and by the side of it. A blanket that smelled rather funny. Pick it up (rather gingerly) and put it to that side over there. A sort of wooden bucket. Various other bits and pieces that I couldn't identify what they were or their purpose. Then I had the thought -nobody'd told me what'd happened to my granddad. I had the absolutely certain thought that he was in hospital in a bad way with something very serious. Went downstairs to ask my dad, even though I knew he and the granddad (my mum's father) weren't in speaking terms. Why didn't he tell me. He didn't seem to be in the house, a group of men were. The tenants, I thought. They were renting half the house, the door was open and they seemed to have a party of sorts. My friend Sam (who never has been to Caracas in the real world) was with them, I asked her and she said my dad had been and gone out, he'd taken my granddad to hospital. Did she know where he went? She shrugged. No idea. The day was drawing to an end, there were yellow lights outside in the fog...

behind the curtain of dreams

Had again, after a long time, The Dream last night, in a very minor version. The immeasurably big evil (if that's the word) entity was about to arrive for the final battle and mop up and I was with a group of people that seemed to think dancing naked outside would generate some energy that would counteract the evil force. It arrived and both had a shape and hadn't. A black storm came before him or it, sweeping some of dancers up into the air and tossing them into the void. The others were starting to flee but it was too late. Then I somehow knew something. Went into a sort of bunker and I knew that the Entity had a corporeal form in there, amongst us. I think I told Joseph about this and he set about stabbing it/him. I told him that wouldn't work because it was only assuming a body but killing the body wouldn't kill it. He said he knew it would, at least for a while. The problem was different but he thought he had the solution. It was kind of part of us or us of it, so it could read our mind and anticipate intention but he thought he could not think about what he was about to do until the moment of doing it. I didn't say what I thought -it couldn't possibly work... I could see 'him' or it approaching and made for an exit, as I knew he would read in my mind what was going on. But then, just as I went through the threshold of the door into the blinding light of outside I knew that 'he' knew and knew all along... the only escape would be to wake up.

eight minutes

Some days it is harder than others to wake up, today is one of those. Had set an alarm early as although I didn't have to go to school today I do have to go and teach a private lesson early. Had forgotten to deactivate the school alarm, though, so I ended up sending the alarm (which these days is my mobile phone) to snooze some fifteen times, each time falling asleep straight away and dreaming brief, labyrinthine dreams full of mysteries and puzzles, which as always go down the washbasin as I wash my face and thus vanish, the harder to keep hold of the more I try to grasp them. Then it is coffee and the day taking over the night and replacing it with its own ghosts.

drifting in the sea of dreams

Early morning suburban train, those free newspapers with lurid headlines ("11 year olds who swap sex for drugs"). I wince, who can possibly want to read those things, can they possibly be true. It's way too early, it still is dark outside; I have been reading a story that has the feel of a dream, while trying to remember my own dreams of last night but they refuse to reappear.  There is a journey in them (oh, ok, there always is) and a getting lost in a strange unknown city and trying to find my way in a maze of a building where I should find somebody important to me and a walking into people I hadn't seen for many years and they're still young and beautiful, as if they'd been travelling so fast that time had almost stopped for them, but it is me who has been travelling.

It's me who is travelling now, too, in a suburban train moving slowly out away from the city, filling up with tired looking people in heavy winter coats; outside, the world is still dark, although the sky is beginning to clear. The day is slowly getting going.

shiver

A night that lasted years, full of rolling, roiling confused dreams. The first half of the night has me half-awake, shivering cold, moving between states of consciousness in which I am aware of being cold, of getting cramps in the muscles behind my knees as I keep my legs clamped together against my body, while my dreams move through visits to those cities in the South East (the south east of which part of the world, though) in which I only find recently vacated ruins, derelict towns with torn posters on the walls, bits of paper whirling in little swirls in street corners, while I still shiver. Then I go into a building and find a classroom, a tall female teacher is dictating something I don't understand -ah, it's Miss Olivieri, it's been so long. She looks younger than I am now, though, which is odd -she'd be eighty now if not more. Ok, I have to wake up, it is too cold. There are several layers of dreams left unsolved but I must do something about this. I take a long swig of cold water from the little fridge and dig out, in the dark, some winter long-johns from a drawer. Ah, that's better. The rest of the night takes forever, too, waiting for the alarm bell to come up at 5:20 am (it must be near that, surely, it's been so long) but much much better; I am aware of not being cold any longer as I move across fields of dreams, from that flat that belongs to my uncle that is so much like a museum and so much like a labyrinth, up there on that tenth floor in the building with the strange side-ways lift, to the old house in Catia which keeps sprouting new rooms and people -and also new cracks and leaks. Finally, the alarm bell goes off -a quite soothing new-agey sound from the smart phone. I make it snooze and lie there in the dark, breathing in this being here, this being alive, right now.

wrong plane, wrong bus

More dreams of travel gone slightly wrong.

I was travelling back home -but now I'm not sure where home was. I was in a bus station in an unknown city somewhere abroad, realising that I'm in the wrong one (in fact, I have travelled here by mistake and I am in the wrong country) and I have to get to the airport.  I can't find anyone to give me directions until I realise there are several levels to this place and the one I need is the floor below. There are no stairs or lifts that I can see, so when I see the woman that is supposed to help me I just slide down the wall, hoping I won't break a bone or two on the descent. I don't, she tells me I'm in the wrong place (but I knew that) and I have to get out on foot towards that airport, across a city unknown to me, full of dangerous looking slums and gangs of youths in street corners...

outside

She was sitting outside, she had a large black box that looked like some sort of gadget; a radio, or an instrument amplifier. She was beautiful that morning, in a blue jumper and her hair cascading over a red scarf.  I went in the building -I had to continue dreaming my previous dream, needed some resolution to the travel thing in it. When I came out, she wasn't there, but she'd left the box. I touched it and it came to life with a talk BBC  radio program or something similar. Then she came out and I was embarrassed. She clearly was not happy to see me but was trying not to show it. I said to her it was lovely, lovely to see her but I had to go, maybe it would be good to see her some place else other than a dream. She stared at me, her lips now very thin. No point in me staying there so I woke up in mid-morning, feeling washed up on a strange beach, the surf and the sand getting to me, the glare of the sun and the sand a bit too much. Better to really wake up, then and hope it is not another layer of dream with something beautiful, something red, something disappointing in it.

first light

The morning light was coming through the curtains. I wasn't awake but could feel it sipping in, bathing the room in a sort of milky semi-darkness.  Dreams came and went, all things had the strange flavour of distant worlds far away. I lived a whole lifetime in a dream in just a few hours of objective time (what `_is_ 'objective'?) and woke up with a longing for those lives that I was living in worlds far away, the same me but different, under perhaps a different sun -or the same sun, on a different set of coordinates on the shift-space.

resonances 1

In the dream there were something like songs that one could manipulate like physical objects and, in so doing, have an effect on real world objects. There were four parameters for this, which were carefully and patiently explained to me by this man who I couldn't see but I knew was there in the dark Song Room with me. Of course then I woke up and couldn't understand what these parameters were or how they affected the music -which you could mould in your hands like plasticine or see data about on some sort of screen- or the objects in the world that the music was supposed to affect. I turned around on the bed; had to get up at quarter to six and didn't want to spend the night tossing and turning and pondering over the absurdity of dreams.

Then I was there in the room of the songs again and the man who I couldn't see but whose face I knew was again guiding me through some convoluted set of procedures to extract the meaning out of the songs and try different possible effects on the real world. I was half expecting dire words of warning about music being able to bring about untold destruction ut the man laughed. It didn't work like that; it wasn't impossible but the chances of me hitting by mistake or by fumbling around with the right sequence of procedures that would produce such a result were unimaginably small. 

I asked whether all music had an effect and whether I could use any song or piece of music or whether there were specific effects from certain musics. He said that, again, all music could be made to have any effect possible but that there were  degrees of difficulty and the composition of the music, its structure, what scales and chords and frequencies and timbres it contained, would have a bearing on what was practically possible to achieve.

Then he said "now you're going back and it will be some time before we can resume your education in this, but this will happen". And I woke up as the 5:45 am alarm bell rang. It would be  another busy day, I better got going...

fuzzy

The boundaries are fuzzier every day, and yet it is clear that I, what I am, ends 'here' and the world begins 'there'. Or is it. Can one separate one's self from one's circumstance? I am the age I am, have this background that often haunts me in dreams, I play the guitar, have minor or otherwise habits that I can't easily shake off (although I do try), I yearn and dream but also can be lazy and pedestrian and base -half way between a monkey and an angel, who was it that coined that phrase? 

Getting up in the morning is difficult -it always was and it is not getting easier aasí get older. Would love to be able o change my daily routines -or are they rituals? but I'm a prisoner of past mistakes in so many small ways. My tooth brushing routine takes nearly ten minutes these days, even though I've only got two thirds of the teeth I was born with (well, I wasn't actually born with any teeth, but you know what I mean and you're not a stickler, are you). Again, belated payment for all those years during which I thought that eight seconds of dragging a toothbrush across my teeth was all the teeth brushing I needed. That, like so many other small and not so small things. And yet I still tell myself I'm lucky in many ways; I'm still alive, for a start. I still can play the guitar, go out and dance,  I can read and, to the small extent I ever could, I can write.  I still can play in front of an audience and be quite scared and yet deliver at least a good chunk of what the music I play means for me. On the other hand... I still search for meanings and purposes even though I should have plenty enough, I still, this late in the game, yearn for company and <i>the special person </i>even though I know that is an illusion.  I'm not depressed but I do sometimes feel desperately lonely. Like last Saturday night, although I know what the trigger for that was and that it was irrational.

Inevitably, we go round in circles -but these are moving targets, too, just like we go round together with the planet but it moves around the star and this moves towards Vega and the whole galaxy that contains us all moves towards Andromeda and the whole lot moves towards oblivion....