ELEPHANT GNOSIS BOOK ONE, PART FIVE: FIREBALL.

FIREBALL.

Excerpt from The End Times, 00/201/0998/01

…Spectators in Fiji first saw a blinding white-hot fireball “like a giant spotlight shining in your eyes” pass directly overhead trailing blue smoke. Then the evening sky lit up for around ten seconds as it broke into four “breathtaking gold and silver fire-balls” and a swarm of smaller pieces beneath the clouds. Another re-entry. Film crews and newspaper correspondents were on hand to record mythic history in the making…

The Memoirs of Buffy Strangelove (excerpt):

…But trust no-one with a camera in his or her hand. The famous faces blur, running incontinently into spectral canvases, road movies played out at 12 frames per second, convoys of limo-trucks becoming one meta-truck. They’re out on the freeways, on the lookout for dipsomaniac celebrity truckers, cutting swathes of destruction through lives, innocent families carved up in the hot metal holocaust. Life just isn’t valued as it once was. They are raged up road hogs, out for fun whatever the cost. But the rubber-neckers are out in force to see this spectacle.

As I plummeted, a soviet-type spy ship (or that’s what was officially reported) in freefall, the premonition of my impact on the unquiet waves was available to those reporters present who were already susceptible to the vibes. A total of 1.617% of assembled reporters caught it on film before it happened. My light shone even brighter than usual in anticipation of the impact. The dream catchers, celluloid conjurors and baseball-hatted ur-Spielbergs, trim bearded and technology obsessed, armed with the very latest technology, were jostling for position on the shingle. Parody documentary makers, their tripods lined up like an army of only semi-benevolent Martians, their cameras potentially as explicit as weapons, potential witnesses before and after the fact. But most of them were not aware of the impact before it happened. The snappers too engrossed with the technology to see what it was they were photographing, the hacks themselves were minutely concerned not with the unfolding divine spectacle itself but with the elegant phrasings with which they would frame their empty experiences. Techno-vampires, energy geeks and ghouls, an unwashed army of F-stopping lens magicians and focus pullers, they lacked the essential animus, the divine spark, the pre-cogging talent that might in another universe have made them artists. Only those clear-eyed enough to use the camera, not to mention the tripod, as weapon, could see what was going to happen.

Not even with the assistance of the schools of humpbacks and sperm whales, behemoth outriders preternaturally aware of the incipience of divinity, a colossal mammalian entourage singing their songs of devotion, were these cameramen capable of seeing the event before it happened. The impact, when it occurred, caused a wave as big as a suburban street, the houses filling and re-filling, emptying themselves back into the ocean, the spume a rabid animal. As the fireball disappeared beneath the water a supine and disarranged figure on the rocks beside the previously limpid waters, who was obscurely apparent to just a few of those present, also disappeared. Music was heard all around, crashing power chords of atonal bombast, during which the whales were seen by the same 1% of observers to maneuvre the capsule away from the cameras. The event didn’t even make the mainstream news, so ashamed were the assembled hacks and snappers of having missed the essential moment. But the magic didn’t go altogether un-reported. The disappeared figure and the missed satellite re-entry initially assumed for the world’s media the status of UFO, became an X file oddity. Whispers begat rumours, heads were scratched, rumours then hardened into clandestinely constructed conspiracy fables. Wires were tapped and film was minutely examined and found to be faked footage. There never was a re-entry. The capsule had never existed. There had never been a scheduled re-entry. Thus was the public soothed and flattered into acceptance of the sub-divine version of events. The mainstream media fabricated a narrative according to whose elements nothing untoward had happened. Certain semi-mainstream hacks promoted the fiction that the capsule (which did in fact exist) had emitted a light so bright that all cameras were temporarily rendered inoperable, thus explaining the lack of footage. They got that bit right at least. Readers and viewers of this output of course swallowed it whole. And why not? In the absence of any corroborating evidence to the contrary, habit had engendered in them a tendency to believe anything at all that they were told. Truth is of course uniquely mutable in these end times, most of all where Buffy Strangelove is concerned.

The obscure media didn’t of course swallow it whole, but were nonetheless powerless to discover what in fact had happened. Their morbid theorizing and paranoid ranting, comprising as it did the usual gibbering incontinence about world governments, hybrid lizards in human form, satanic masonic plots to rape the world and steal its resources, served only to placate the more mentally ill sections of the community, who also were prone to believe anything they were told. Speculating with or without data was 2^nd nature for the practitioners of conspiratorial overkill, a readymade model of pre-ordained reality. Conspiracy is as conspiracy does. They satisfy themselves with mental pictures that correspond to their innermost fantasies, their morbidity a dysfunction of a dislocated worldview. Broken down eyes, a misdirected sense of nature, a misreading of natural stigmata all around. Anyway…The bleeding sod, the hole in the ocean, the cracked earth. They all missed it. It goes without saying of course that these people are the least likely of all to be capable of seeing elephant metaphor as hard wired fact, let alone whale or dolphin emanations.

When I say I’m a divinity, a household god, an avatar of fecklessness, a boozed up idol of lasciviousness and adultery, an arched-eyebrow deity of sublime and irresistible charm, I don’t want to be taken too metaphorically, but on the other hand a metaphor goes a long way in explaining things in the weightless state. I really am a god, of my own making. And elephants really are my familiars, they really are a conduit to the divine, really a living cosmology. Unless my assertion can be disproved…by me. And now, is anybody there to deny it? Elephants have this awareness of their meta-capabilities. I am divine by virtue of the electrical power harvested from elephant tracks laid down millennia ago. I stumbled on them. But they didn’t trip me up. These numinous trajectories enable me to escape through back doors, away from angry husbands, through time holes. If a better explanation is available for my incessant womanizing and ability to sneak away undetected, by all means find it.

I’ve enlarged for you. I’m large in the snake pit. Belly tied down, feet at right angles. I coil and re-coil at improper interrogations. Large mammals are indeed my familiars. I’ve graduated. 2^nd raters use things like cats, bats and snakes. Depending on the nature of the emission, I shine bright, specifically to delineate the vectors of my intent. Elephants are the imperative. Their presence in the here and now is now miraculous, they evince preternatural delicacy, and thus possess the ability to melt into the background when required, a very special endowment. They can exist outside prescribed time environments. They confound ecological space proscriptions. I have found that many people are unable to see them, except fleetingly, and even then only in peripheral vision. Many people miss the spiritual elephantine element altogether. Speculating with or without data was and is my original method of extrapolation. Finding the right pieces to fit together, a jigsaw of my own making, is an undertaking based partly on random selection and partly on determinist self-exculpation, to ward off the evil eye of evolutionist scientist technicians. The sort who know jack shit and who have to be bought off. They’re the ones who control the broadcasting rights and whose power bases are the most corrupted. Bags are filled with cash, technical knowledge is stowed in carrier bags. Their silence is a sine qua non of my ability to live and breathe my feral magic on the earth. TV crews are primed, technicians have been engaged at non-union rates. I reveal my secrets piecemeal, bit by bit, only for the empty cameras.

I found the natural world disease free. Some ecologists and animal behaviorists of course confused my interest in nature with altruism. Art for art’s sake. Of course my intent was, in their terms at least, somewhat more sinister than that. No sooner had I hidden myself away in the fridge than I was seeing things from the perspective of the humdrum prism of selected household goods. Once trapped in the electricity flow, it’s difficult to stay awake for any length of time. My concealment in the coked up rock god’s fridge was a kind of hibernation. I deep slept, saving energy until I could re-enter the commonplace world. Holed up in a domestic appliance. In a desert trailer. Not the most advantageous of perspectives you’ll have to admit. Of course events could have been affected, could even have been subverted, but in the end I realized that although people thought they knew what they wanted in terms of a divine being, I was, although intrinsically inconsistent with their mono-theistic theology, an adequate enough household god for any of these feckless therapist broadcasters to be going on with. The divine needn’t be Divine if you get my drift. Not for a society in turmoil and in autodestruct mode…a society whose primary cultural mode has become hyper-irony, a culture which has accelerated through the detritus of compromised identity, accelerated through and beyond history, so that history itself has ruptured, so that irony is now an incontinent force, a hyper accelerated meme…this kind of society needs a decelerated divinity. A retarded numen if you will. A devotional life lived at elephant pace. What we actually have is a joke society, a standup dystopia, one which cannot expect divinities that stand on ceremony. What I do is get things done, pronto. Like, yesterday! It’s a slowly softly can-do divinity. A switched on, by numbers, lugubrious numinosity. Remember…I am a boozer. I’ve slowed down. It takes me time to wake up in the mornings. Especially in other peoples’ beds. I am known as a distributor of cuckold’s horns, a guilt free Lothario. I need to plan my getaways with precision. I am not the horned beast but I might as well be. I am the horny beast. Post-hangover horn, that’s me. Let’s leave it at that. I need my shut-eye, and then I’m out of the gates like a rabbit. You have to remember that I’m hippocampus led. Meaning I have advanced motor efficiency, a 6^th directional sense. I have the Knowledge; I know where to go. I can be out of the bedroom and down the drainpipe practically before I’ve heard the front door latchkey in the lock. I’m over the hills and far away. I lead and they follow, down the elephant trails. I have an unusually large hippocampus, as I’ve already explained, encompassing perhaps a third of my whole brainpan. I can be places almost before I’ve thought of them. The Elephant of course, needless to say, has the most enlarged hippocampus of all, even proportionally. They are the exemplary species of peripatetic DNA, nomadic DNA. Elephants know where to go. They are nomadic. And I learnt all I know from them. Keeping on the move is the essential thing. Of course, knowing how to get somewhere and knowing what to do once you get there are two very different things.

Dr. Abrahams’ personal journal, as taped during therapy sessions with fruit ‘n’ veg man Nobby Wyse:

(Nobby) Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! You! You! You! You! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Collective, family, therapy Bffy……My thoughts, consider me a madman, am I less parodic of reality than bland reality itself? Or is bland reality beyond parody? I take the descriptions of building love described in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili at face value. Of course I’m attracted. Who wouldn’t be? But is the whole of semi-divine life beyond me? My curators, Ahab the most open to parody and most laughable, are always advancing little puzzles like that to keep me amused. They think they’re one up, but they’re the ones who are stabbing in the dark. Is my numinosity apparent only to me? I suck at the breasts of the statue before me. My wife was, they keep saying to me (as though I’ll somehow disapprove), sexually attracted to the Berlin wall and was devastated the day it was torn down even as the rest of Europe erupted in a frenzy of celebration. If only they could see. If only. If only. It’s all about Breathwork. All stress evaporated, all angst dispersed. I breathe regularly and deeply, and in a minute I rebirth, just like that. I sleep soundly at first, as long as I breathe deeply. The amount of oxygen taken in is crucial. My brain literally becomes flooded with oxygen. I start to trumpet, at first silently, then building up a momentum. Breathing is the key, and you need oxygen in unimaginable quantities. Meanwhile, the building fuckers are at large again…

This is corroborated by contemporary TV reports as follows:

“They’re……..mounting……..the buildings……they’re literally fucking the buildings. They’re actually attempting to impregnate the stones. They must have heard the trumpeting. I’m hearing….I’m hearing….the elephants are, yes, they’re in heat. They’re now in extremis. The elephants are now in extremis. There must be a couple of hundred or so, attempting this most dangerous and arcane of rituals, even now. They’re mistaking these formidable fortresses for something bigger. 4 kilometres away, on Hampstead Heath, a herd was sighted in the early hours, grazing and rumbling, trumpeting a low key chorus of intent. Large cows displaying distended rumps, trumpeting their mating summonses to all surrounding areas. The fabric is now torn. As I stand here on top of Broadcasting House, reporting these amazing scenes, hundreds of would be re-birthers are mistaking geometrically arranged slabs of Portland Stone for herds of elephants. So desperate are they, so hyped up, so keen to escape this realm that they seem to be hallucinating. They are weeping openly for the torn fabric. A procession has just borne a huge banner with a weeping elephant head down Regents St. They don’t seem to need or to want to adhere to the 7 sacraments; they’re just going hell for leather. I’ve never seen this sort of thing before. We’re witnessing what might be the first actual mass hallucinatory devotional jazz happening, the first mass rebirth, ever to have occurred in this country. This apparently profane happening is absolutely unprecedented in this realm.”

The building fuckers were indeed moving fast, in a kind of frenzy. Jim Shitkicker, Infallibility Correspondent of Reality Corps, was atop Broadcasting House, casting an expert and experienced eye over the figures below. But he’d never seen this sort of thing before. Not in a whole career that had seen most other things. Cash dispensers became overloaded, subject to autoerotic vibrations, the digital displays reading out apparently crazy and seemingly random and cabbalistic streams of numbers, secular blueprints of account details. Office jocks and orifice chasers looked on, bemused. The re-birthers, somnambulist zoologists excavating the occult meanings contained in the stones of London’s vast edifices, looking for leaden import in the grain of the stone, effecting strange rituals within the doorframes and window jambs, were gathering strength and re-doubling their autoerotic onslaught. Swipe card entry systems presented no problem, the low range trumpeting frequencies that emanated from Hampstead Heath and all points south rendered the electronic security utterly useless. Alarmed city workers were at a loss to explain to their line managers the events that were unfolding, and were equally unable to construe the gnosis taking place within the open plan offices. Line managers were, as always, equally befuddled. Befuddlement hard wired in line management DNA. Water cooler gossip was suspended in panic as pin-eyed pen-pushers and masked deities over-ran executive washrooms. It was access all areas. TV crews jostled for space, the corporate saps glad for once that Portland Place was at the actual epicentre of events. Camera crews maneuvered for space, frustrated by eddying clusters of asian tourists. Big haired porn correspondents re-arranged their décolletages by stealth as the techs got the cameras rolling. Tempers started to fray as the black suited and masked re-birthers began to lash out blindly, wildly asserting their primacy in the face of the pauperized and downtrodden commuter trash. The roadway was littered with discarded film cans, and balaclavas were now openly dispensed with. Shitkicker was aware of a hard-nosed presence at his shoulder. It seemed to him that it was God, but in 3 persons, who had come to receive him.

“Yapp……Yapp, is that you? You look different somehow! I can see…is that some sort of trick? I can see three of you…Here, have a snifter, have a drink old boy…I’ve never seen anything like this before. What happened to you anyway? I haven’t seen you since, uh, since the last celebrity crash…you still on the wagon then? Here, have a drink…”

Before I could answer, he’d lost his footing. He stumbled on the mass of twisted cable and he was over, a man falling out of the sky. Down down down he went, dusting the stones on his way past. The cameras again didn’t catch what had actually happened, the technology once again unequal to the presence of the Godhead, although there were, as usual, a few precognizant witnesses. The building shuddered as the crazed revivalists below redoubled their assaults on the modesty of the Portland Stone. The elephants were now multiplying as they renewed their circuits of the Marylebone streets.

ELEPHANT GNOSIS BOOK ONE, PART SIX: GOING UNDER – THE MATRICES OF BAD INTENT.

GOING UNDER – THE MATRICES OF BAD INTENT.

Down the steps on broken legs, morbid effulgence barely penetrating the grimy station windows, I flip-flopped into the substratum. I am becoming passive tense and mole like, ferried to and fro by the squealing, groaning conveyances. Like the trains, which ensure that in achievement of the minimum required performance level the passengers truly suffer, I am barely functional. As he suffered too…It’s human and divine to suffer, like humans…at underground levels where the ratmen are feral…where all are conceived equal, mythic and archetypal. But my handbag is missing. Still camp as a row of tents however. I missed the bus. I am an elemental busker. I reap and sow…

Dr. Abrahams (video case notes sold by consultant to documentary team):

Apparently, in this instance Yapp sat alone, leaning against the separating glass. The carriage was semi-engorged with a spew of commuter trash, wide-eyed crazies, chattering teens and Walkman attendees. A woman with no distinguishing characteristics embarked and stationed herself the other side of the glass. Her body pressed against the intervening pane, hand sandwiched between her back and the glass. From this narrative evidence, it seems that the spectacle of the sandwiched hand, out-turned against the glass, the blood diffused by the impacting of flesh onto hard, cold glass, disturbed and enraptured him. The blood seemed to him as though it were innumerable crawling things dispersing as the stone is lifted. He seems uncomfortable with the evidence of the corporeal. The profane body, unarmoured, open to compromising intrusion, the blood prematurely fleeing the scene of presumptive crime. Evidence in the pathology here of a certain denial of Corporeal Primacy, a most pressing concern for his doctors…in the context of his nascent physiological mythos, apparently a proto-attempt at transference of the corporeal into the hyper-real. The blood in overdrive; the enlarged heart. The hippocampus primed for, er, time-travel…God help us! God alone can help us!!! And him. Especially him.

He first noted, it seems, that the journey offered up for mythic transformation the customary aggregate of vapid coincidences, the same chance intersections and randomly inappropriate pairings as any other tube journey. No difference. No singularity. Nothing more than various concatenations of the usual distressed commuters going about their urgent and/or pointless business. The genuinely absent-featured, the needy mad and the dangerous mad, a conglomeration of fellow unfortunates, hostages to the profane mythology of the city as metaphor for all human life, all were for him subsumed in the uneasy democracy that existed in this enclosed world. Notebook out, the travel writer in him a witness before the fact. All commuters appear to have been primal, archetypal avatars in Yapp’s mythic scheme. For instance, there was a former politico, a jowly populist, who had in the pre-end times unwisely proffered it as his opinion that travelling by tube necessitated coming into contact with what he termed ‘dreadful people’. Yapp needed proof of this. This joker, a straphanger on the circle line, was to Yapp a presumptuous lesser god of profane celebrity. As off-message as it was possible to be, rapidly dispatched to the 7^th circle, the wilderness of semi-celebrity, later emerging bathetically as a mayoral candidate, keen to believe at all costs in the primacy of character. His rubric to be a personality, a character…Stranglv territory…The city loves them and this fact has always bothered our friend Mr. Wyse the fruiterer who has, as we have seen, eschewed personality, favouring instead a kind of phantasmagorical fantasy life…He has, thankfully, fully embraced his own dreadfulness. He has conceded, at last, that we’re all basically dreadful. Fantasy life may be a thing of the past very soon for the fruit man. Onlookers avert their eyes as the notebook is returned to the inside pocket.

…Many of the lesser gods and goddesses owe their supplicants a debt of thanks for their dreadfulness. Many of them specifically promote themselves as divinities of the profane, the needy and the desperate. Death cults. Not interested in the patronage of the successful, the self-determined and the ambitious, they hang around like bad smells, diseased feral pigeons, stumbling on broken feet, missing legs, legs stuffed up own arses, inviting contemptuous offerings of sandwich crusts in public parks. It’s a sublimely democratic and exacting, levelled down divinity, embraceable by all. Household gods of all descriptions bewitch and are bewitched by these agglomerations of vapid drifters in the capital’s underbelly…

And Wyse is by no means immune to the effects of the sallow and unforgiving synchronicity of the underground. He’s quickly learned the first precept, a very quick learner. Just when you think a train’s never going to come along…it doesn’t!! That’s synchronicity!!

I pounded a beat along the grimy corridors, searching for metaphors less obvious than those usually press ganged into service, conceits that would gut the reality, the mole intersections, the lifeblood of London’s underground matrices. I hit upon the juxtaposition of the desperate and the unknowable. Travel writing, works on journalistic level, but never mythic for some reason. Underground, everyone’s feral. You lose your identity down there. The grinding synchronicity of mythic or sub-mythic city life, I mean the sheer absence of synchronicity…at lower than ground level you’re stuck with the weighty banality of journeys undertaken for inadequate reasons. You rub against the anonymity of inadequate presumption. In underground precincts, the cars and carriages are bogus conveyances. The phallic significance of trains whooshing into tunnels is often over stated. Trains are prophylactic, prosthetic. Big-bellied excursionists are worn out and belligerent, and thus revealed as sub-mythic, unbalanced scryers of inadequacy in the pallor of the underground substratum.

Now, nodules of impatience form in my mind. Lesions of paranoia are etched into my fractured brain. An admixture of psychic scratch marks and psychodynamic slaps, they blossom into persistent maladies, bloom into previously unimaginable mental imbalances and received opinions. They are physical attack invitations. The atrophying of my capacity for ordinary tolerance is well advanced. I can see that Ahab baits me even now…there’s a gleam of malice…He tracks me. I am his bloated quarry. He has registered my weightlessness, the sheer banality of the here and now…

B.Yapp: (self interview – saleable to highest bidder)

…A busker was emboldened, a few yards away, to express himself in mildly bored, vaguely threatening tones, having just finished murdering an already moribund tune on his flaccid and dusty accoustic…

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Feel free to contribute, if you’ve enjoyed it….” he suggested with greasy truculence. The redundant invitation hung in the air like a fart. But he was the guilty party. And we all hated him. He moved off down the carriage regarding the passengers through rat-like slits, his face a map of pointless perseverance. One, maybe two, people dropped change into the proffered cap. The moment passed. I saw through his act to the very end of the journey. He knew it. The moment had gone forever. Temples throbbed with intent, eyes glazed over. Everything about it owes its meaning to unawareness. We’re born unaware and return to unawareness. In the middle, we’re hopelessly under-aware. We play the guitar. People move away from us, silently, embarrassed. The hardened unaware are a relatively new breed, a DNA mutation profoundly and silently indifferent to embarrassment by virtue of fleeting anonymity. Pulling together, and simultaneously apart, bound by mutual indifference. The indifferent and elemental busker moved with heavy steps among the bored, variously postured travellers. A feral pigeon on board the train mimicked his gait. A sudden jolt, occasioned by a too enthusiastic approach to a set of points by the insentient driver, caused him to lurch unsteadily into the lap of a recumbent faceless passenger. The pigeon fluttered disconsolately. Disconcerted by the sudden unwelcome almost-intimacy, the passenger made a show of tsk’ing over-loudly and glaring ostentatiously at the would-be guitar slayer. Personal space had been encroached, which naturally was a matter for the most severe and unyielding disapproval. The busker muttered fractiously as he made his way to the other end of the carriage…the pigeon shat thoughtfully onto the floor…

Dr. Ayton: (regarding script thoughtfully) Pages and pages of similar aimless underground rumination follow, unresolved transference of issues are paramount here…the patient is unresolved, undisclosed, pre-mythic…in chronic danger of mythic passivity…measures needed…here he is again…here he comes again…corporeal weight still undisclosed…publishing deal still eludes this hybrid-poet of the subways…

…Circle Line torpor. Metropolitan enervation. Cut ‘n’ Cover all very well as far as safety goes but the plangent grinding, the strident groaning of the trains is unbearable. They wheeze and stutter, lurch and heave, from station to station. Often in cataleptic progress from station to tunnel. Tunnel to tunnel. And finally tunnel to station. And even then, more misery. Prolonged stops at Baker St, Edgware Rd and Aldgate…non-optional extras, convenient rest stops that afford drivers the chance to stretch their legs. No suggestion of relay drivers. Too fucking simple. Fuck the passengers. Many a traveller desperate to get to a London terminus seethes impotently as the clock hands tick closer…their connections revving up and ready to go. The inter cities don’t wait…

…Blizzards of tiny flakes of human skin dust whirl past as the train wheezes forward. Each flake encoded with DNA from which eons later will evolve fresh monsters, new underground dwellers. The bones of plague victims undisturbed by Victoria Line excavation mock the exasperated commuters from the darkness, a presence sensed though not acknowledged by the unwilling travellers. Safe in their capsule carriage, they are carried away. External force fields don’t affect them. Levitation is acknowledged by all except the terminally prosaic as the primary mode of conveyance. Their ghosts leering in at them look like reflections, grimy with dust, somewhat circumscribed spectres levitating at the same speed as their own carriage. Violence is now of course on my mind…

…Dropped from the hands of a tramp, the paper fluttered down, see-sawing to the unquiet earth. It contained immediate truth and hardened facts. In part prescription, in part obfuscation. Betting is a redundant art in dead cities. There’s nothing left to bet on. All bets are off. Betting is a fiction, the fiction of alternative futures. Residents of dying cities, cities in terminal decline, don’t have a future. They are mere myth fodder. The stuff of myth, existing within discrete lives. Critiques of chance and error correction are privileges of the well off. Who can afford to bet when life itself is a gamble? Options that aren’t meta-options are well limited in the multi-choice society. Which is when it hit me. When I realised that people used to being cast as extras in a corporate copywriting fantasy need a chance to do a bit of displaying on their own account. The citizens in the lower world, the seventh circles, need the chance to star in their own productions. My discovery of the tricks of re-invention (levitation, self therapy, nurturing of the instinct to show off, communing with fat angels etc) were of course the first steps towards the means whereby these unfortunates were to be presented with their mythopeic birthright…

…The doors of the last chance saloon had barely stopped swinging. He lay there again, encrusted, in hopelessness. It was the World’s End. Which was appropriate enough. He was certainly approaching his own personal world’s end. Waiting to be ushered through, into oblivion, his tenancy in this realm almost expired. Soon up for redemption, his crepuscular soul awaiting retrieval. Dead weight souls just hang around, fluttering and flapping in the breezes like litter, gathering electricity. Elephants on gnosis patrols accumulate souls like these as they clean the streets of electro-magnetic particles. Lost soul in extremis, awaiting delivery from corporeal angst into the fresh air of oblivion…

— came through from another place. All Mitherers and Whiners will be dealt with…will assume the position -–

Ahab takes up the story: Coming up for air, gasping for fresh breath, queasy from the electrical discharges of the tracks, Yapp fought down nausea as he emerged into the Euston Rd. daylight. There was at eye level a flyer man, a political irrelevance, a barnacle on the hulk of the Free Enterprise. He proffered one from a large tranche of freebie magazines that were grasped in his scabby mitts…whole lockups full of pulped paper re-formed in the east end…full of this detritus, ready-made waste paper. A litter problem appropriate to the dissociated age. Instant litter. Ready-made dross, filling the planet with cack. He seemed distracted, his attitude one of co-mingled apathy and boredom as he held out the pathetic rag, and it seems to have enraged Mr. Yapp. In 20-point Century Gothic at the top of the magazine was printed GAT, atop a photograph of an office worker looking at once incontinently seductive and officious. It was the water cooler iconography that did it. He said that’s what did it. Unlikely. There was already a propensity for violence in him, previously noted by us. He said it himself. He was a violent individual. Underneath GAT, in 14-point Courier New, was printed “Girl About Town”. Of course, this enraged Yapp even further.

“Girl About Town? Do I look like a fucking Girl About Town?”

The guy looked at him through puffy uncomprehending eyes. His mind clearly wasn’t really up to direct interrogation. He’d had enough of that, he’d settled long ago for uncomprehending bewilderment and self-abasement, self-denial…his interior monologue went something like “I don’t really exist…you know I’m not really here, that I don’t really exist…I’m outside of all this…Why are you harassing someone like me who’s not really here at all…if you don’t mind…too much…I need to go now…I need to live…now…” The immigration guys had no truck with him. And he didn’t possess the numinous capabilities that might have saved him an intrusive and humiliating full body search. Anywhere in the afterworld, the advanced pre-end times world, at any time for no fucking happiness at all, he’d paid. He’d paid to come here and be humiliated. That was the point. He was unable to comprehend, but was only able to accept fresh, seemingly random, assaults on his bootless sense of self. The pigeons looked on at the scene that was unfolding with growing contempt.

“Eh? Girl About Fucking Town am I? You dumb wanker!”

Some target he thought. This is bad. There’s no good in this. Nevertheless he knew it had to be done. He couldn’t just let it pass. Stepping forward quickly, he grabbed punched him hard, twice, in the bread bin, eliciting a piercing shriek, an indignant howl of outraged pain and fear. How easy it is…how easy…to induce…cause confusion…he thought…the random infliction of confusion. The pain was more or less irrelevant. Wasn’t it? Who was he kidding? Pain was very much the point. If he’d just wanted to confuse the poor sap he could have slapped his face on both sides Tango Man style. Or ruffled his hair. Or given him a bear hug. High-fived him. Linked arms and danced a jig. Pain was very much the point. His own hyper-real cosmology of chance intersections, the random deification of the inconsequential moment, demanded it. This character had come half way to his world in pursuit of pain. Who was he to deny him? Yapp/Strangelove was full of painful awareness, awareness that he might still fuck it up. Fuck it up big time. His theology was incomplete. Martyrs were still needed. Flagellants. Souls in need of revival. Electrical surpluses. Somewhere. Very well, let this latter day saint take Yapp’s pain unto himself. It’s what he was there for wasn’t it?

Stop mithering, he thought, as the flyer guy clutched his stomach. Stop fucking mithering! You don’t make the effort to understand! This is just what happens! It’s irredeemable. Of course there was nothing of our ordinary profane justice in any of these justifications. It was a self-fulfilling act; a devotional attack, as far as Yapp was concerned. People exist in context; as characters they are by no means elucidatory. They merely illustrate. Everyone is priced, has a critical point of entry. Then he snapped out of it. I’ll fill the minute like Kipling, he thought. A man who never liked to see anyone idle, not even for a second, let alone a minute. Yapp took it all to heart. His hippocampus throbbed, his soul fully tumescent.

Yapp wasn’t going to let the bastard cheat him. His thoughts were all of, well, VIOLENCE, for want of some more imaginative response…the besetting sin, a lack of imagination, a failure to fully imagine events, which it must be re-stated is the prevailing cultural ethos of the pre-mythic zeitgeist. Thus, violence. Cine violence. Cartoon mayhem. Orchestrated brawling. Revenge dramas. Ghost kung-fu movies with lots of improbably balletic violence. Extraordinarily choreographed scenes of mayhem…but that wasn’t his forte. You’d need to be a bit more athletic. His frame wasn’t exactly weak, it was rather atrophied through under use, weighed down by anger. Circumscribed by odium. He was unused to action, other than meaningless action, meandering walks, sudden sprints, undertaken in pursuit of the other, the inner, the unspeakable, bad dreams. His good dreams meanwhile, trapped while out on mystical strolls in the east end, following the Fleet to its source, reciting Blake and others, have atrophied. To achieve distance between himself and his anger, he seems always to be attempting to out-run it, to get ahead of the bitchy impatience that stalks his waking hours…humiliation, chance proto-violence…Surprise, humiliation of the indolent would have to do. You can’t just launch in and use extreme violence without having been really provoked first he thinks. Looks as though he’s become aware that he’s in danger of cutting a rather pathetic vigilante figure, more on the lookout for violence than merely attuned to its possible eruption. On the evidence available to us, he was becoming the kind who’d actively seek out trouble, detect slights where none were intended. People just staring into space on the tube, or brushing past on the street, who unwisely allowed their gaze to alight briefly (but not briefly enough) on his person, whose ocular ambit appeared to encompass him all too obviously and provocatively, were deemed by him to be full of attitude, to be up for it, in need of sorting out.

Anyway, that’s what happened. But the fleeting incident was not covered in any of that day’s newspapers, which were nonetheless attuned to other chance intersections of fate, the usual drift, the ebb and flow of so-called synchronicity. Events driven by chance that they nonetheless missed as often as not. We note increasingly that the streets are full of geezers suffering the same affliction, seething with kinetic paranoia, potential violence. Geezers convinced other geezers are eyeing them up for suitability as a potential target. Yapp has now gone past the point of turning the other cheek, making brief eye contact then looking away and then back again. He is looking at me, the bastard. The bastard! Why bother confronting these fuckers, these commuter cowboys? But one day, something snaps. He’d found himself staring a guy out on the Northern Line. With restless adrenalin pumping through his body. He let it be. But Yapp had crossed the line. Still pre-mythic at this stage you’ll note. From now on, until we caught him, he was a confirmed eyeballer. Giving it out, expecting to take it. And quite prepared to give it out with extreme prejudice and lack of compunction. He was outrunning the anger of weightlessness. Eyeball confrontations with bus drivers, pavement hoggers, pushers of shopping trolleys full to bursting, legions of levitators, bouncing bomb flyers, yogic tossers, engaging at pre-mythic levels with the central nervous system of the city. He was sustained in karmic validation by the energy flow. He was not yet aware of undercurrents that were denied him on the level of street discourse. Stalkers were everywhere and nowhere. Yapp was and in some senses still is the stalker of his own ineptitude. He pursued inadequacy like a pervert casing a primary school. Thus he found himself discreetly pursuing estate agents and dogs, although telling them apart was often the hardest part. He stalked the pointless to teach them the consequences (although of course there weren’t any) of their pointlessness. Gratuitous anonymity irked him badly. It was an itch he couldn’t avoid scratching. People must be forced to actualize. He discovered, I think we can assert, a purpose. The streets must be opened up to exhibitionism and gaudy pantomime. Everyone must at some stage be photographed. Tricks must be played. Unwitting participants in set-up tomfoolery must be mollified into an acceptance of the primacy of the gag. This is strange love indeed. The visions inside his eyes were of whole populations grinning inanely at each other, no matter, autocue faces were directed at each other’s hopeful mugs. At some point, mobile in hand, he’d decided that action was required. Strategy. Technical organisation. Chance, random acts. Randomly generated acts of violence no more good, such as that visited upon him when in pursuit of the inconsequent and the pointless. You get what you deserve in this and other lives. Which he appears to have discovered a little late in life. It’s always too late. Never give up giving up. We need his sort. The Right Stuff. Fully mythopeic.

Brian Yapp: My deserts, justly and rightly, when pursuing my prey (a shitty little crumple-suited toe rag, taking the city air, dreaming of commissions) were that I was suddenly and violently assaulted from behind. I regret to say that I believe sorcery of some sort may have been involved, as I’m not usually taken unawares. I’m usually the perpetrator of acts of extreme and unwarranted random violence. My non-belief in karma…although I’ve dabbled in any number of marginal and crackpot religions down the years…. original Highgate vampire that might have been me…is no comfort to me at all. It must be that I’m punished for everyone else’s weaknesses and indiscretions. A fact that tallies with my dormant though emerging and probably verifiable and demonstrable belief that I have lived before. In a sense that you will probably not understand. The elephant stuff is, I know, difficult to accept. All I can do is tell you, as straightforwardly as I can, and with as little obfuscation as possible, what happened to me all those thousands of years ago. When I lost and re-found myself in subjectivity, when I found the arcane key. I invented a whole system. Not another man’s. I have been born by my own will and hand before. It’s amazing how it hits you, when it hits you. I’ve had a lot of time to get used to this now. I was born tens of millions of years ago, decades before I was assaulted, for the sins that I may have committed in some esoteric past. I do have the urge to confess. The catholic is, to some extent, inside all of us. Almost all the time, I feel the need to confess. To utterly trivial misdemeanours, like the dispatch and butchery of the city’s estate agents and dogs. To receive absolution. I am guarded generally in these assertions, because I don’t want to blow it here. I now have my own belly, detachable bedpan, wheel chair and headrest. I have favoured status. I am kind of a celebrity. People pay to touch me. Feel my missing legs. My stumps loaded with religious import. My eyes see everything when I open them to the skies…Born again, mythopeic eyes open…

…I can’t remember now. I can’t see it clearly. My eyes have gone again. I can’t see things as I used to see them. I remember walking through Regent’s Park towards Primrose hill, the sky livid with unshed rain, clouds lit from within by chance, the chattering of monkeys in irate cages, elephants trumpeting, on the move from Finsbury Park…the golem creatures in Regents’ Park all turned to stone. The whole park a lush canopy, in verdant expectation. Innumerable mobiles chirping like multitudes of displaced cicadas. You know it. I’ve seen it. Techno-perambulation. Every building is home to disguised cell-phone technology. The energy flows kept open via clandestine transmitters, a network of prattle maintained and sustained via otherwise mundane architectural features in drag. You’d look up at what might be assumed to be a vent grille on the 2^nd story of a standard renovate Georgian block. Looking closer wouldn’t reveal anything at all. A closer look still, getting into a tight close up, reveals artfully hidden technology, appurtenances of the communications industry. Talk is big. And talk is cheap. Talk is now a corollary of technology. Information is dangerous. But talk costs lives. Ear cancer and brain sludge effected cheaply and conveniently via the good offices of the urge to prattle.

And this. This too. The atavistic urge to regroup in clannish exclusivity always fills me with a faint disgust. But we all, unfortunately, hunker down as best we can in homogenous enclaves. Streets look familiar as long as we can recognize where we’re going. Direction finding is more important than ever. I wander the dreary streets apparently thoughtless, led by my hippocampus. Dank streets wet with discarded banana skins and orange peel. My blank expression gives no clue to the elegant mental gymnastics being performed. No clue as to the organ size, though the trepanned skull affords more and more houseroom. A slight wrinkling, an approximate frown, easily read by the worried passer-by as minor neurosis, a mirror for their own minor (or major) neuroses, merely identifies me as human. But we’re not exactly human. Not any more. It’s increasingly difficult to recognize who is human and who isn’t. Conspiracy nuts think the world’s run by lizard-hybrids. It used to be run by and for lizards. This is true. Something of the DNA must have been secretly passed on, probably by the likes of me. Me and my big gene pool. Somehow, where I find myself now isn’t salvageable. Or anyway, it’s not straightforward. In moments of doubt, I look up to the heavens and invoke new blueprints. I envisage change in a moment and conceptualize universes of minor adjustments and tinkerings in an inkling. Eons ago I forgot something that I’m just remembering. I used to be able to figure these things out. This is how it went…

…I was a Rock God. I used to drink beer and do cocaine with the roadies, play excruciating guitar solos, humiliate the groupies with arpeggio phrasings. The old whores, hangers-on that they were, still human though eh? I used to intimidate the merchandisers and generally come on all heavy. I was lairy and people were afraid of me. I wasn’t afraid of magick. I could turn any situation to my advantage. Put the hex on, with the help of minor familiars. But since I started hating people, looking down my predatory hooter at them, the power’s gone. I’m no better than some sub human secular prelate. It’s like I’m now dead again. Gone, into the night. The power I wielded in previous lives is gone, all worn out. Hate’s not the answer. Love’s the answer. Which might seem strange coming from me, but you can’t arrive somewhere without first feeling hunger and thirst. Or hate and contempt. You have to go through hate and contempt to arrive at mate-hate and meta-contempt. I speak in tongues…again…

I am my own monster. I was Dionysius, in the Light, consumer of misery, defecator of happiness. Living to Excess and access all areas. Expense account abused…haunting hotel bars. I’m trying to fill it up with light. My mission is to light it up. Programmes that I commission are designed to encourage exhibitionism. In my floppy hat and immaculately cut though gaudy suit, I am everyone’s svengali, the universal Mr. Fixit. I haven’t come this far just to indulge myself. I’m trying, trying, to rid the world of the unwanted detritus of used up anti-history, the electricity that cleaves to the back streets. Elephants suck the air clean with trumpeting counterblasts. I have to leave town regularly, fly out of Heathrow to all points north south, east and west. I’m a tourist in my bewilderment. My apparel is my own shockability. I give flight attendants grief all over the world. I get drunk on hospitality booze and arrive half cut and red faced. Outside hotels, by the pools, I count my blessings, my stock of hyper-life spans.

I skim stones off the Adriatic, and belly flop into its limpid water. The currents carry me on up through the Aegean, a mythic landscape finely attuned to my sensitivities. I dance in the spume with dolphins, some have said abusively. These are of course smear tactics. Sex with dolphins isn’t my bag. But dolphins are erratic divinities, Gnostic to the n^th level, and so swimming with them is part of the hyper-realized divine lifestyle. It’s the chic accessorizing of nature’s giant bounty. Dolphins being full of highly pressurized air are, like elephants, thus very receptive to Gnostic vibrations. Clear as day. I swim with dolphins and re-plane a new man. Newly minted, burnished with Hollywood lustre, a blond haired, blue eyed marine shaman.

Charter flights to all destinations have before carried me up and down, raged up, belly up, a couple of stiff drinks to the good, and will again. I have wrestled in my mind with flight attendants and scratched their pinkly hot faces as they endeavour to counter, with all necessary force, my belligerence. Scuffles result in peaked caps being dislodged, epauletted company shirts with bronze dress buttons becoming distressed and the wearers thereof requiring medical treatment for minor skin abrasions and light bruising. I always get off scot-free by virtue of my leglessness. I wrote a travel book before entitled “My Mid-Air Scraps: A Paraplegic Pig in Shit”. The disabled angle, a fig leaf for violent attitudinising, stands me in good stead with the publishers, always on the lookout for aberrant angles in travel literature. Readings and book signings routinely descend to sub-farcical scufflings as my bodyguards roughly manhandle those members of my readership who take my descriptions of mid-air tussles as evidence that more of the same is what we are after at the publicity events. Contextual misinterpretation, as ever.

But the critics nonetheless receive my book very well. I had them all in my pocket. They need me more than I need them to get invites to all the baser literary salons of old London town. Best-selling midgets, celebrated one-armed football hooligans, physicists with Parkinsons’, simulated Tourretters, Falklands veterans without penises, trepanned mime artists, the detritus of exploitative publishers’ wet dreams. Trained chimps acting as butlers, bearded women as receptionists. Airlines keen to be seen to encourage air travel by the bodily challenged, as I was charmingly viewed, were even grateful for the publicity. A legless demiurge getting pissed up and causing trouble, a veritable blow for the non-legged, my publicists regarded my antics as small beer, no price at all to pay for the kickbacks from the disabled lobby. You can scarcely get a seat these days that isn’t suited to the special needs of some challenged individual or other. And long may that trend continue! My celebrity is legion. People hold doors open, proffer ashtrays…

In cinemas, I tend to smoke ostentatiously, daring the usherettes to tangle with me. I take my kids into pubs that are clearly not child friendly. What I want is to assert my right to allow my kids to behave as I see fit. It’s actually nothing to do with the kids. It’s all about me. In fact, when they get to be 13-14 or so, they’ll feel properly embarrassed by their groovy dad, their narcissistic, egomaniacal paterfamilias. I am a groovy groovy son of a bitch. I swagger around, eyeballing people who have the nerve to express irritation at my shrieking children. I offer them outside, knowing full well they will defer to my inhibited circumstances, and then bump their shins with my wheelchair. People don’t take liberties with me any more. I’m accredited. I’ve done time and paid penance. My sins have been expiated publicly. I am a fully paid up household god. My virtues are forbearance and fecklessness, my talents include re-writing anti-history and tangling with and untangling the vectors of causality. I also specialize, by recourse to animal familiars, in lancing the boils of bad urban intent as they become tumescent, and getting drunk. I write travel books, and hold auditions for would be celebrities. It’s a hectic schedule. Movie rights are in negotiation. Although I’ll never work in films or television again. That was Frank’s work. He was always jealous of me as only a recondite familiar can be. But when he died, I cried. Because he was my bruvvah. We looked out for each other against our parents, a pair of pre-childish thuggies in thrall to the religious impulse even as we lay together in the amniotic fluid. We made a pact that if either one of us were to die (and we knew one of us would be obliged to at least pretend to do so) then the other would keep alive the fiction that it ain’t necessarily so. That death ain’t necessarily the be all and the end all. To keep from going under. We knew that fictions were inevitable, would have to be invented. We knew moreover that these fictions would clearly never satisfy the yapping lapdogs, the spectral forces, of bad intent, the assembled monster throng of academics, therapists and the secular priesthood. We required fictions that would elucidate for us and for our friends the fact that we weren’t a spent force. We were obliged to create a system, or yield to another man’s. No choice really.