by David Kettle
BOOK ONE.
HAPPY NOW?
………If only………If only ………I resurface from a dream. I’m walking away from a…a…what, a prison? A hospital? It’s a confined space anyway. I have a note in my hand. It’s a note I’ve written. But most of it is obscured so it’s difficult to fully determine what I mean or might have meant by it. Assuming I wrote it. What seems clear is that the section that’s partly visible seems to reveal some sort of bad intent: “…and if you want to kill me you’ll have to…3 times…all 3 of you…the both of you…returned to complex…agents in op…I conjure you; sit down, sit in this chair…” What does this mean? Meanwhile the clouds are billowing, they draw the air and the electricity in and away. Mushroom edged underneath heaven, the streaky cirro-cumulus to my left seems to mimic the snaky vectors of my bad intent – it’s all written out in longhand. I feel it all coming on. I am tumescent…Further on, a few more drinks to the good…the clouds are elephant trunked and bilious, and they portend something else. They are under the scored planes…heaven and hell is under me now. I re-incline the seat – my open brain is tumescent in the dim light. I see or seem to see around me the uniformed hirelings of another kind of corporate reality. Are they here to attend me or to restrain me? Peaked caps are prominent. As are masks. Protuberant proboscis and wrinkled skin. What happened in there then? Am I so dim then? Pinch me! I look across – the ball and chain gently snoozing. She’ll give me satisfaction later or I’m a shadow of the man I was. Here I have contracts to underwrite, obligations to discharge, commitments to fulfil. We’re flying into London. But it might as well be anywhere. I am a citizen of nowhere in particular. Asian templates are exhausted for now. South-east asian and Australasian too. Aegean too obvious. Last stint North America. It’s Europe for me before the fall of the empires. OK so what am I selling? Tell me before I puke. I can’t take much more free flight booze. Last I heard I was The Super Salesman, grand-daddy of the green light. All previous templates and corporate bulldada obsolete now, or so I reckon. Separation at the head by surgery will release the energy, we’re told. Just sign the papers…the papers…all 3…unique in the legal or medical (not to mention religio-mythic) worlds. But What I Sell…you just can’t buy on the open market. My sponsors would like a word though before we’re through…
…Happy Now? I’m here again. Just for now. For your sins. It’s me…Buffy Strangelove…Remember me? You’ve seen me. You’ve seen me. It’s time for re-entry. Turn your mobiles off. I’m under the floorboards, the seats are upright and I’m in the waiting room. I’m needled. I look around – I cultivate contempt for my fellow passengers. All flabby angst registers with me only as self pity. I hate freely. All except Dionysia, my intended. I love her, because she’s like me, because she is me. I forgive everything where she’s concerned. I’m looking out at the planets and I’m flirting with rage. I’ve just had my 6th, one drink too many and I’m eyeing up suitable targets for dischargeable anger. When the gods fall out, mortals tremble as they say. And I’m raged up, full of anger. My last re-birth was ineffectual. I blew it. Big time. I flew in at 8:00am a reduced presence. Undercarriage on fire – belly up in a Parisian field. Never got used to the stomach churning pressure bursts that characterize cheap economy flights up and down the world, never acclimatized to those sudden losses of altitude, scoring a cheap lesion of freighted pleasure or panic in the temporal lobe, electrical circuits suddenly billowing with undischarged energy…
The plane’s cleared for landing, and the pilot choreographs a graceful ballet at the insistence of the peaked-cap air controller guys. In and out over the sea, lugubrious and of undisclosed tonnage, the plane scores out vectors of bad intent, graceful arcs which discreetly mimic my super numinous infallibility. I could fly one of these things. I design these things in my sleep. But the airlines fail to see the import. It’s a conspiracy of complacency, airline placemen affecting indifference, producing a kind of somnambulant acceptance of the inevitable. Out to sea and a circle described against the nothingness before banking back towards dry land. Birds of a feather, ironclad, bursting energy barriers, and churning the uptight stomachs of raged-up economy fliers, back from backpacking holidays and mini-breaks to the continent. The cheap angst is palpable.
I have to admit I don’t seem like the best of flyers. I act out the fear of a novice, wincing and palpitating with fake anxiety. I grip the arm rests in simulated panic, my furrowed brow describing an outright unease, a pretence which keeps in check my propensity for flight violence. I feign a nervousness I don’t feel, which I see as a satirical antidote to the spurious serenity of my fellow passengers, who are falsely becalmed and complacent. I scream suddenly and ridiculously, a falsetto shriek of comedy horror, and harvest the baleful looks that are cast in my direction. Every narrowed eye, each gritted tooth a scalp, a trophy on the sideboard of my petty shadenfreude. I’ve got form. I’m famous, or infamous, for brawling on charter flights, getting boozed up and petulant, bouncing up and down as we hit turbulence, giving the attendants a hard time, asking for yet more booze, tsking ostentatiously at the way people recline in their seats. I’m always good for a moment or two of drama.
As we come in to land, engines throttling back, I discharge gently…too much electricity on hand…I’m noticed, a turn of the head…a woman well known to me, she’s sitting three rows in front. My wife Dionysia, beautiful and stylish household goddess, flame headed and heavy lidded, knows from this gesture of infinite tenderness that I intend to become her, at least until customs are cleared. We sit apart so as not to attract attention. We are conjoined twins, separated at birth, and re-conjoined in love, mutual dependence, respect and gnosis. Elephant Gnosis™. It’s in the bag. Duty frees make space. The energy channels are open, re-birthing season is again upon us, the elephant tracks are re-emplaced and we are about to open London up for numinous devotional action. The electricity reservoirs are dangerously full again, all gurus, accountants, PR men, friendly politicos, personality broadcasters, agents and commissioners of TV documentaries, parody documentaries, reality shows and all cable blather shows, niche slots for insomniacs and the needy mad, the belligerent mad and the quietly desperate are primed for action. Disqualified from appearing on any of my shows are the disenfranchised who, under common law, are “idiots” and “lunatics in their non-lucid intervals”. This country, opened up once again to the clandestine presiding spirits, and like all potentially numinous countries, repeals freedom as and when it suits. A show of selective democracy is enough to get us fighting mad. We hate that. If the greasy RealCorp politicians and psycho-secular power brokers knew we were landing, the shit really would hit the fan. So for now I have to secrete myself. We’ll clean up here, not from a coarse desire for attention, fame or money, but out of love. Love, hate and fecklessness. We are boozed up already. We’ll spread out in London.
I wanted to marry Dionysia many years ago, but she was from a different caste, and was disadvantaged in my dreams by the furious opposition of her mother and especially her father from contemplating a re-birthing with me. But I overcame all opposition. I always overcome all opposition. I’m a can-do kind of a guy. I operate out of rage, from under the floorboards. I nurture bitter obsessions, nurse vendettas in my bosom. People better watch out for me. I killed ‘em all last time. It was a palace coup, gunfire ringing through the windy corridors, made to look like an accident. But anyway, as I say, Dionysia and I were joined in birth, joined like royalty at the head, the shared brainpan eventuating massive Gnostic capability approached in intensity only by the largest Terran mammals. Elephants. Whales too, although these cetaceans don’t have the same unmediated and unrestricted power. Unfortunate associations and alignments with navel gazers and earth huggers necessarily circumscribe the power of whales and dolphins. It ain’t who you know, it’s who’s on your side and what you have in your trousers that matters. Whales are, unfortunately, like the larger primates, too closely identified with the bleeding soul, the frangible soul, tainted by association. You see? But we’re self-selecting. Our kind of exhibitionism is beyond the scope of the usual restraining influences. Therefore, the best surgeons were dismissed and we were subsequently enabled to separate ourselves. Tripartite separation…did I mention Frank? No? Well Frank’s a bad man. He was involved somewhere. We killed him though. Oh, later on. Frank doesn’t have a linear psychology. He doesn’t behave as you might expect, doesn’t conform. He is weightless, without vernacular sense. He was actually married to Dionysia before me. He was my brother, but like I say, I killed him. He became an academic. Reason enough, I might add, for fratricide.
Through customs, I blend in. Not willing to attract attention to myself, I am secreted in translucent carrier bags; I morph into more seductive forms. I become vampish, high heels clicking over the parquet. Giving out big pheromone signals, I turn heads, distracting attention from the fact that I am toting a good deal of surplus electrical baggage. At this stage one of my clandestine familiars (a stooge who’s been hired from closed sources, a gentleman dressed in the American style with long unkempt hair and with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip) approaches the customs officials and introduces himself. After an eternity of pretended efficiency and half-arsed officiousness, the peaked cap guys are still arguing the toss and staring bleakly at him. As part of the routine, he then pleads for clemency on the grounds of his own stupidity, a plea that is immediately rejected. It’s a fake documentary/voiceover moment. Meanwhile I am able to sneak through customs with the minimum of fuss, the sniffers’ attention distracted by the American, who continues to loudly proclaim the innocence of the camera that he wears around his neck, and which he claims is a dependent. I’m hidden meanwhile; a cosseted fetish in furs. They don’t think to look in the carrier bags. Security is non-existent here. Frank is in a duty free bag and Dionysia is me again. Old style morph. The customs men are, as I say, too pre-occupied or dazed to realize that all other observers and potential troublemakers are already in a kind of ecstasy. I am able, from the bag, to capture the desecrated hearts of all men and women in the vicinity. I have this capacity for transcendence and inner beauty. They are suddenly aware (in some cases for the one and only time in their lives dimly recognizing that there is something they’ve missed, there lives have been a waste of time, there’s something they forgot, something intrinsic, something fundamental) of the over-riding need for love. They’re gagging for it. But it’s Keystone love, a pratfall love-in as they literally fall over themselves to grope their new partners. They break down, lovesick…gushing with sudden emotional incontinence, hugging, huge cow eyes, spontaneously keening and cooing, low level ersatz-coital moaning. Low level heartbreak, all the more poignant as it is of course merely a temporary window, a glimpse of the eternal ego-less, mischievously and malevolently opened by me, a window whose existence they’d always thereafter be aware of, but which they’d have no means, short of the pharmaceutical, of re-accessing. Heartbreaking all round. But that’s me. I’m selling heartache and heartbreak for those who can see it. And they sense for this one transcendent moment that their lives have up until now been lived according to pretty un-likely, highly spurious rules. And because of my simulated malice they will forever be obliged to live with the memory of something they can only falteringly recapture. Unless I come fully tumescent into their lives. Without my Gnostic process, they’re fucked. Big time. Like I said, I’m a can-do type of a guy. I have to hurt to make the connection. Ruthless dishonesty and feckless soul searching, in the quest for personal attention, must be rigorously applied. I must re-awaken the instinct towards attention, to recapture the briefly illuminated moment of transcendence. Otherwise they’ll never know. But this is only a foretaste. This is only the beginning. There’s more to be done, electricity to disperse.
In a dream, they watch me pass through customs as though they’ve seen an angel. As indeed they have. I’ve always been a prick-tease. My countenance evinces a beatific spirituality co-mingled with a kind of deadpan whorishness. I’m a devotional come-on, Hollywood inspired. So, this brief inner stirring, this all too transient tumescence of the soul is for these tormented individuals so sad. So sad. Oh well, things to do. Tracks to lay, agents to contact. I’m actually lying when I say that my actions are born out of malevolence. But I can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. We needed to clear customs intact.
And this is how we do it. We show them the light, briefly enough for their hearts to be broken. In the confusion, we thus slip un-noticed although fully re-birthed into country after country, onlookers in the reception lounges uneasily aware of an incipient divinity within their grasp. It’s a responsibility we don’t intend to evade. I’ve lived under the floorboards too long and humanity’s been down there with me for longer than it can cope with. Through a natural talent for outsider intransigence, I spin webs, spiritual matrices to catch the souls of those willing and able to see our visions, to re-cog us as the angels we may well be. But I’m traduced for this by apostate ex-gods, stethoscope toting functionaries, obsessive demiurges, surgeons of the base levels who stalk me and my dreams, who are in pursuit of me, who are switched off, who don’t believe in this thing they can see we’ve become. Non-twinned and from the lower castes, they eke out a living…carving out the tumours and lesions that mere flesh is prey to. They are hospital vampires…drinks parties with the admin whores, civic unction displayed at all times, kickbacks from the drug companies, reliance on pure hospital grade morphine, holidays in the darkness of needless operations. They are B-features. Reptilian nightmares.
They say:
“I help people…people like you….”
To which their patients reply
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning…what you want it to mean…”
“You….you just leave…my wife…alone!”
“If you’ve got a problem with your conscience, it’s gonna get a whole lot worse afterwards, believe me. We’re here to help you…kill your wife…”
…The above dialogue filters through to me from a distant place. It’s some sort of waiting room. A place in which the vengeful pursuit by Abrahams of my tripartite godhead has been ruthlessly fictionalized, for a purpose not of my own making, and brought to life by second-rate actors. My life has, in this tarnished version, become cheap (although expensively assembled) Sunday evening drama. It is an echo from a pre-birthed age, a purely psychological past, a past in which people are encouraged to believe in a narrative psychoanalysis of their own motives. An age before psychology has not yet become entirely coffee table. An age of production values, devalued intent, faces upon which expressions can be read, no matter how artful the attempt to conceal motive. Faces lit ingeniously to capture the spiritual essence of this or that character. Like we ever believed in that. Maybe some did. Maybe. But I resolved to use it later on in my dealings with Frank, who would need some careful handling when it came out about me and Dionysia…
(Previous voices/voiceover intervenes here)…there might be a way around this though. This is strght from BOARDROOM. The link is, I think, how d’you say…spoofing?…anyway, Let this drift, till management takeover. Finance? Overdraft. Also, don’t minute this. Divisional stringency and a lifetime’s drift. You will be In Academe. I WILL be at future board meetings. Wankbait in particular has som.th. to say here. Review the progress -> instigation. Human remains/resources fr. Rebirthings. Strglv, you are newly re-birthed scum. God speed you Pinko. We can’t officially review this until we ourselves are reviewed. You are remnant of Reality Corps. Get gone… down there. Make ‘em squirm and make ‘em cum. We am process/in review. Template/mode – Hellenic. Couplings are ALL Subjudice. Mythological format to confound psycho-somnambulant linearity. We picked up transmitter signals…don’t make sense, no way…big cat sightings in…inappropriate settings. How to get the motherlode into places where they can operate…herds on Hampstead Heath? Therefore, This then our one and only chance for now. Bigger fish to fry, you the single agent on call Strangelove. Herds already morphing from houses in Fnsbry Pk/Hampstd Hth. Collect fright masks from back of pick-up trucks in N.London. Two suggested alter-egos – Nobby Wyse – English and Foreign Livestock/Fruit. Billy Hard Hat – psycho nutter homunculus…Usual familiars will as usual of course Be More Fruity. Camp is important element in the deployment of these simulacra. Tombstones of the failed re-birthed also observed on back of pick-up trucks all over N.London, now instigating enquiry. The permanently dead now taking up valuable space. Pachydermal hints already picked up by, er, “switched on” types in city slacks. Mobile phones are humming with incidental intent. Click, bzz, crkk…this is how we know. It’s Walkman interference. Matrices are therefore in confusion at this time. Therefore (some here say) you are the NOW tragic metaphysician, ie: NOT under the influence of half-baked occultism: you will deploy lounge music (wink)…cocktail music, dinner jazz intonations will be at odds with the badness of your perceived intent. You don’t need to know my name but me, I’m the only boozer who’s not intimidated by Frank, you know he don’t scare me. Your brother is history pal. That’s what normal people do – they whistle. I whistled right in his mug. He seems confused. Medusa Rappa the ex-witch, yr. own ex-wife, has SHOT her newest lover but you being her ex-husband I fully expect you to support her actions. I understand misconceived intent. This is now burnout. There is a residue of superfluous electricity. The newly enfranchised (locators of the soul in the SELF) have devised extreme hedonist templates for city living. Result: too much electricity. Correct this misapprehension. Rectify this as a matter of urgency. I have not been here. I did not say this…
…Speaking in tongues like some dippy fucking fairground fortuneteller, I come over like some recidivist psychopath on the revenge trail. The guys in peaked caps look askance. Are they immune to this pheromone jazz? I can see they’re wavering. I thought we’d made it through. Look at the loved up terminal freaks, not at us. No? Well listen to me then. I can see I need to explain to you how I reviewed this received information at the level of future boardroom level emanation. I am a man of authority and command respect in the City, my solutions to multifarious spiritual problems generally praised if not entirely understood by the dipshit moneymen, the currency grinders, number crunchers and power brokers for whose soul needs I have undertaken a kind of brash responsibility. It’s about electricity. Superfluous electricity is produced here by “irritation”, a very mod phenomenon occasioned by close proximity to other power sources and/or over use of gadgetry. And get this…by over-reliance on therapy fetishism, a synonym for extravagantly lived, hyper-solipsistic lifestyles. Caused by the have it all mentality. Only household gods (or apostate ex-gods) can have it all. Mere pre-birthed individuals produce, in the attempt to have it all, a superfluity of electricity, which needs to be discharged somehow. I am therefore here as a corrective. I have the key. City bimbos routinely assume a countenance of objectively perceived glamour, behaving as though actions don’t have consequences (and of course they don’t – but they don’t know that) and as though banal celebrity debauchery is in and of itself transferable to their own quotidian realm. They behave as though there is no price to pay. The tab is never picked up. The juice bars are full of raged up XX chromosomes, heedless of excess. They are no different in appearance to the fallen stars of their imaginations. They fall into and out of nightclubs; get blotto on tomorrow’s mortgaged dead time.
Or again, for example, excess electricity is produced in extremis by macro-biotic types who’ve developed an “interest” in eastern religious systems, a misguided yearning after elongation of the personalized Terran linear time span. The doomed quest is heart breaking. The quest is for re-tumescence of the perceived Inner Core of Being, being itself putatively located in the inner core of the so-called Showtime/Display section of the brain, the temporal lobe, which is located next to the hippocampus. This proximity produces in pre-re-birthed individuals a surfeit of electrical activity, of bad intent, intent which if not discharged in ritual peregrination of the old bus lanes ends up surging impotently around the city precincts. Hence the importance to all personalized spiritual efforts of this organ within an organ, this wheel within a wheel, previously (wrongly) assumed to be concerned exclusively with locomotive and direction finding abilities. Of course, all (so-called) primitive cultures invoke power over nature via repetitive and ritualistic perambulations, an evocation of divinity via the obsessive treading and re-treading of pre-determined routes. Rain invoked, or in this case dispersal of a surfeit of electricity, achieved by treading the elephant trails, mythic route-shapes which, when viewed from above (from a space ship…or whatever) delineate a vast Picasso sketch, a domed trunked head; trunk and ears, dome viewed head on. This is of vital importance to my work here. Everything follows from the nature and shape of the city’s ex-bus lanes. You following me here fellas? They nod their peaked caps at us but they’re not taken in. So I continue. It’s going to be hard work.
…The hippocampus (I say) is thought to be one of the most important brain structures involved in memory. The case of the patient Medusa Rappa, one of the most famous case studies in neuropsychology, strikingly demonstrates the importance of the hippocampus. In 1983, as a 27-year-old woman, MR underwent brain surgery to control severe epileptic seizures. The surgeons removed her medial temporal lobes, which included most of the hippocampus, the amygdala, and surrounding structures. Although the operation successfully controlled MR’s seizures, it had an altogether unexpected and devastating side effect: MR was unable to form new long-term memories in a way that she could later retrieve them. That is, she could not remember anything that happened to her after the surgery. She could not remember meeting new people or new experiences for more than a few minutes. This resulted in her later shooting dead a former lover, who’d arrived one morning unannounced in order to effect a reconciliation. Still in possession of a latchkey, he’d insinuated himself into her flat and then her bed in confident anticipation that this overtly romantic gesture would meet with her eager approbation. Instead, as she failed to recognize him, he awoke in her a startled revulsion that found immediate expression in action of the most affirmative and precipitate nature. Amazed to find a man she didn’t recognize in her sleeping quarters, and to make matters infinitely worse a man sporting a lascivious smirk, a smirk which he imagined was the precursor to renewed and impassioned relations, she simply reached over to the bedside table, picked up the shooter she kept there as protection and precaution against burglars and blew a hole in the centre of his forehead, rendering his own hippocampus, along with the rest of his brain, permanently ineffectual. His memory, both short and long term, underwent a sudden and irreversible turn for the worse. Notwithstanding this inconvenient episode, her memory of events prior to the surgery was mostly intact, and her reasoning and thinking skills remained strong if somewhat febrile. A further side effect, which was noted at the time but suppressed (for reasons we can’t guess at) in the case history, involved a loss of spiritual intent and capability. Friends noted that she’d become indifferent to matters of the self, to the renewability of the soul and was turning up late, if at all, for Polarity Massages and Mythic Rejuvenescence sessions. Researchers concluded that the hippocampus and its surrounding structures in the medial temporal lobe play a critical role not only in the encoding of episodic memories, especially in binding elements of memories together to locate the memories in particular times and places, but also in spiritual capability and devotional direction finding (peregrinatory invocation of divine intervention)…
different voices again…Whole daze. Days. Forgotten to talk. Neighbourly watch, even at the moment of crisis I cultivate error correction. Collective error correction. I am aloof generally. Lazy bastard in other words…work cut out Strglv…your neighbours reckon you’re fey and like to keep yourself to yourself…the city’s former bus lanes, now reserved for elephants, are vital as conduits for electricity dispersal. I want to live but there’s too much other stuff. You do it. Stuff I created. I can’t live in this pre-corrected state. I’m here in the waiting room, eyes half open. My sight’s going, I see my reflection in you. Or me. I can’t tell which. I am psychoanalyzed by Abrahams, and I went AWOL. I slept in Finsbury Park. I wasn’t there. I don’t know why not…
…To get back: through customs, re-entry via the channels of no resistance. I do not resemble my passport photo and it’s pure sleight of hand that I get through. They melt away the faces under the hats. The last I see they’re rooting each other in a feverish uniformed scrum. I am Dionysia and she is me. I am in her duty frees, a perfume of incalculable seductiveness and overpowering pheromonal effect. We are each other, always have been, joined at the head and arse, at birth, and now split asunder again. Otherwise like last time, it’s air rage re-entry. Cause, by misbehaviour in and around the cockpit (ritualistic slagging of the pilot and his/her sexual orientations) a nosedive and potential disaster that is only averted by some pretty sharp thinking on the part of the airheadhosts and hostesses. I’ve been wrestled to the ground and subdued on more than one occasion, Dionysia observing me from a window seat with quiet appreciation. It assures us safe passage through customs. But I don’t want to use that too often. Good gags should be used sparingly.
So anyway, back in town, in the waiting room, and the walls as usual seem to press in on me. Hi fellas! It’s me. Buffy! I’m here again! Single 60 watt bulb, attendant hosts and hostesses in night robes, masked and scrubbed, are seemingly intent on psychoanalysis. Can you believe that? In this post-psychological world, they cling to outmoded forms as jealously as would a visiting academic to the impression that he might still possess (as though he ever did) some form of sexual charisma. I am obliged to recount, under hypnosis, my impressions of the guiding principles of my, er, philosophy, for want of a more appropriate term. I glance at Dionysia, who turns up the volume on her walkman. The faint tss tss of escaped sound announces that she understands. She increases the volume and I notice, although the flight attendants don’t appear to, that there is a faint blip in the electrical power supply to the building. She turns it up some more, and finally even the personal trainers/therapists in attendance on me (rather too closely for my full comfort I have to admit) are obliged to notice a significant diminution of the power supply. Their perturbation is a picture.
…I am of course merely playing a role here. I’ve never been in a hospital in my life. I don’t believe that there can ever be a reason to enter these establishments unless accompanied by a camera crew and with full SARB (suicide assisted re-birth) accreditation. I realize that I look very English, there’s the assumed self-loathing…I cut a very Bogarde figure, I am a sort of nervy academic type with military bearing but sporting a demeanour which suggests a history including some deep personal trauma that might account for my, ahem, psychosis…nurses falling in love in discreetly British fashion with my tortured countenance. I am just a poor boy, not a man, a boy in need of love and understanding, a manboy endowed with the face of a neurotic, a monkey-genius. English nurses go for that one big time. More than once, I’ve awoken from general anesthetic proclaiming my love for some sweetly countenanced English rose and more than once I’ve observed that love reciprocated, if un-acted upon. More than their jobs worth I suppose. And they are unwilling or unable to abuse their therapeutic position. But, I tell you as a salesman, I wouldn’t mind a bit of abuse. I’ll tell you that for nothing.
Back in the factory, the head shrink Abrahams is pushed to and fro on a sort of metal trolley. He falsely assumes a position of authority. I realize he sees himself as some sort of panjandrum of the wards; he’s puffed up with self-importance, issuing orders to his underlings, imperiously barking out directional commands like the captain of some circumscribed vessel that’s destined for the rocks, his messianic expression clearly indicating the essential obsession with which he endows his every action. He’s a man possessed. Just look at those eyes. That beard. I fancy He imagines Himself as Ahab, and I am His Great White Whale. Not that he actually has any need to assume this dictatorial and frankly ridiculous, self-aggrandizing posture, his absurdly self important conveyance entirely at odds with the actual role he fulfils, which is merely that of facilitator of my dreamtime musings. Like all limited (non-twinned) professionals, he can’t bear not to be the centre of attention. Very like Frank in fact. In fact, maybe he is Frank.
…So anyway…there I am…lying there…in Finsbury Park, watching the scored planes fly overhead, there’s a whisper of breeze, the shadows of the nearby trees loom large and grey. I notice that the tune on my Walkman is increasingly compromised by a variety of electrical blips, squeaks and buzzes. Interference. The ether is loud enough in itself, so I wonder what’s causing this. My listening pleasure is undeniably diminished; my ears are full of electrical discord. I see quite suddenly, at the crown of the hill, a small herd of elephants, morphing out of the trees, but indistinct among the shadows. The electricity seems to ebb and flow as they move into and out of the shade. As cell phone carrying pedestrians pass by, the electricity seems to swell. The ckk,bzz,tss,crkkk intensifies and then recedes. But still there’s a residual pool, a reservoir of understated voltage disturbing the general ambience. And then something happens to alarm the elephants. They are distracted by some commotion at the other end of the park. There is a trumpeting, a honking, they relinquish the sanctuary of the trees and the crown of the hill and stampede towards the Seven Sisters’ Rd. And as they go, I realize that the air has been cleansed of previously stagnant electricity. They have somehow contrived, in an act of spontaneous collectivity, to decontaminate the surroundings of stale electricity. The air has been purified, somehow distilled. The tune on the Walkman is now crystal clear. To say that this discovery is a watershed in my pre-birthed existence would be an understatement. Literally an understatement. Everything follows…
Abrahms merely nods. He is inferior, an apostate.
…As a result of this epiphany my plan is that the city’s abused bus lanes become, by my divine Gnostic agency, elephant trails. The elephants tread the well-scored vectors, all around the city, dispersing electricity by ritual peregrination. This divine act occasions in the tuned in citizenry a kind of spiritual calm…lays the tracks for intense post-psychological soul searching, or Elephant Gnosis™ as I’ve termed it. Via this patented and affordable technique, citizens are afforded previously hidden opportunities for spiritual Rejuvenescence and suicide-assisted rebirth. It’s no secret. I’m a big noise in the city and in the channels of mediated power. I assume multitudes of personae, electricity flees my agents, and I re-birth at will. I enter and re-enter. I have discovered previously hidden secrets, the divine and arcane secrets. I fictionalize and re-fictionalize, adumbrating the outlines of Gnostic self-therapy. Multitudes of additional personae are re-birthed, multifarious aspects of the self, all interchangeable and clamouring for attention. The self is (needless to say) the most precious commodity, the currency of ubiquity in this meta-therapeutic age, and I have hi-jacked all available outlets. I hold the leases on all franchised operations. Elephant Gnosis™ has been patented. I precipitate as many elephant-gnostic emanations as I choose. I am plurality, in a newly minted pleroma of inconsequence. Hot shit!
On awakening, I see that Abrahams has fallen asleep. His hirelings look nervously around. Do they still see me? Am I still here? Dionysia is in the pipes.
Tags: Abrahams, buffy strangelove, david kettle, Dionysia, Elephant Gnosis
