ELEPHANT DREAM TIME.
The dream I had you wouldn’t believe. Are these not the dullest words in any language? Nevertheless, I had this dream. Where I was drunk. I thought, thinking back through my linear history, that I’d become a disappointed man, and had reached early middle age with neither a clear idea of where life was taking me nor any real clue as to what to do once I got (or didn’t get) there. Enlarged frontal lobe or not, I was, felt, dead in the water. I am estranged from myself, my brother’s gone missing, two co-dependent gods, in a state of grace, living in deadpan fringe society. This much is auto-historical. We were deadpan in a dead zone. Down the pub, our deadpan banter had ‘em rolling in the aisles. But we won’t go there. I mean, anyone who thinks of complaining about their life should reconsider. No one asked me to be born. I forced myself into the world. I specifically ensured that my chances of being born were not left to chance. I cheated my way into life. The theological implications are horrifying. We all choose life at the moment of impact. We choose to be born. It’s a secret that many theologians are aware of, but dare not reveal. The whole fabric of post therapeutic divinity will be torn down the middle if this becomes public knowledge. They’ll offer you salvation for a dollar or your money back, but they’ll hide the real truth. That you are your own divinity. Is this profane? Who cares? Some fictional liturgies, made up religions, spoof theologies, taken as satirical but of course entirely straight forward and prosaic, offer ordination as a full time minister of your own religion for $20. People smell a rat, they think there’s a catch. How much trust has been lost in the world? How much? And at what cost? I can offer anyone salvation, no standing charge. I take away your electricity.
But anyway, in this dream I had, my auto-history is of no interest. My dreams mess with significant causal elements. The proto-sludge of the universe doesn’t yet contain me. I haven’t been born. In drink, forgetting, I saw where I’d truly been. My universe was stretched out of shape, literally, by my birth. Nothing was ever the same again. Having been conceived in the pre-religious trenches, a wacky double act, joined at hip and head, we were discharged into another realm. Out of the primordial, repositioned in the mythic realm. I felt needed, along with Frank and Dionysia. My tri-partite Godhead. We were preeminently organized, engaged in promotion, saleable elements ™’ed. At that time there was some sort of inner core of worth, some inner nugget of authenticity in the individual. The individual spark of life is divine. Of course people bought it. Lapped it up. They were paradoxically relieved to take the path of more resistance. No more raindrop guilt. They never needed to untie the knots, the critical truths about themselves or ourselves. Lives could be, and were, lived at a level of unreconstructed fearlessness. They could no longer live in denial. Therapeutic enablers, we were primogenitors of the cod-psychotherapeutic tendency. A population wholly softened up, sweetened, led to believe in the primacy of inner being and divinity. And seduced by the elephant sexual, in flotation tank darkness.
But like I said, I’m the best liar in all antiquity. I am the antiquarian of mistrust and the curator of false dependency. A potentate of evasion, preaching a gospel of self taught lies, revealed evasions, untruths nurtured and personality disorder encouraged. The men. The women. The children. They swam solo in the flotation tanks, alone, with our help. Water wings removed. Devotional stabilizers off. Enabled and endorsed, certificated by instructors in elephant masks, the therapeutic/confessional complex emplaced within. We encouraged them all to swim alone. I now swum alone in heightened seas, without water wings, with dolphins, flashing and thrusting, transfixed on shiny hook rings, accelerating through time-holes, baring rotator fangs, getting my teeth into celestial info-weed, turning surfers inside out, upending fishing smacks, seeing the colours of their insides, shimmering in the fissure of psychology, through the crack of history. Into anti-history. Anti-linear history, the female gash, water based, opened up right there. Not like your whole life passing before your eyes, in dreams, more like the possibility of an inner life, a realized inner divinity, passing just within (or out of) reach. Gaudily animated inner life, just out of reach. And how like (or unlike) real life that dream really is. Ever noticed that? Frank, ever noticed that? He notices these things. Shades them in. No, Frank can’t hear me. Frank’s dead. Cancer. I place the divine in each and every one. No self is beyond the divine touch. I bite each and every one in half to make sure of the authentic core. Taste the divine within.
I made things work for me. I had all the intuitive skill. Instinctive skill, like someone who picks up tunes…on a piano. Tunes already there, lucid. I played piano in the jazz realms, instinctively. I didn’t know how I got the skill. I wasn’t a craftsman. I wasn’t an artist. I’d learned the tricks and the tunes as though they were already there and I’d somehow just happened on them. But that’s what they all say isn’t it? I don’t know how it works. I’m just a semi-deity. The thing was just lying around. This insipid garment, tinkling and irritating, like wind chimes. Tremendously irritating, overbearingly ethnic…in the suburbs. Just lying there, waiting for me. I went through the suburbs like a prodigal son, tinkering and tinkling as I went, crowds of patriots cheering me on, trestle tables with bunting, cakes and ale, bottles of brown ale, the celebratory mood disfigured by discreet rapes. People just get carried away with happiness and relief don’t they? Just glad to be alive, just glad that things still work. Glad that things haven’t just ground to a halt.
Virus…how things WORK…technique…watch this…Don’t allow this…Things fall apart, not working…people interested in how things work? Isn’t it enough that they actually do work? Tech fiddler, monkey around with the code, what could be more anti-religious? Obnoxious. Still, some fucking idiot has to do it eh? Hail the New Technocrat! People fiddling at the edges, extrapolating technique, dissing meaning. Going nowhere. It’s so sad. People without dreams, like the one I had. Still have. Where I was drunk. And Dionysia’s still with me. Making it alright. I’m Apollo, I am Orestes, also the light of the world. I learned to transform myself, take responsibility, despite my inner fecklessness, of which I made a fetish…candidly speaking, it’s really all for the best. We are a great team now Frank’s lost his legs. How did that happen? I think I had this crash, this auto smash…when I was up there, motoring, cruising the North Circular, window down, but that wasn’t him. Dead eyed coaches, smashed up at the roadside, a spew of corpses at sixes and sevens. The emergency services stretched to breaking as twisted metal gives up its twisted ghosts. The sensuality of road accidents observed at a distance by mellifluous and spooky scribes, sitting on the verge guards. Or something.
I knew this guy see? He dreamed, had a brilliant head, was a bit of a worrier. He was a deadpan geezer. He was my brother I believe. I never knew him. I met him once, at a coffee bar in town. He was happy enough to be one of those people who were content for things to work without questioning how they worked. Clever geezer. And yet, with a perversity he’d always questioned but never come close to apprehending, he earned a living in Information. That’s Frank. Information is the new thing. The New Virus! Rumour is Information. Authority is attained through the expert deployment of rumour-knowledge unlikely to be in the realm of his audience. But do they pay these people? I think not. Frank got his free breakfast, his limo’d entrée and return ticket, but they wouldn’t pay him. Just expenses. We all hate people like that. His imagination so curtailed he thought he could get away with freeloading on that scale? Now we’re reduced to a kind of freak show Mr. Memory number, where we have to exhibit him like the elephant man to the braying passersby. Road accidents on the north circular, Frank sets up his overhead projector, gets out his plastic wallet of transparency slides and holds forth to the entrapped and dying. He astounds them with his impertinent and rudely inappropriate delivery. His insensitive attitudinizing is breath-taking as they breathe their last, the emergency services’ access blocked by the projection equipment.
This dream I had though (those dread words again) was utterly beautiful, like other dreams of grace, like nothing I remember or recall. A once only. Even now, I barely remember it, luckily for you. My stomach seems filled with glue, gorgeous, it’s brandy warmth. I love her, and I just want to show her I love her because…she’s just like me. SHE’S JUST LIKE ME!!!! I LOVE HER BECAUSE SHE’S JUST LIKE ME! I LOVE HER BECAUSE SHE IS ME!!!!!!!!
But I can’t go back to school, where everybody, everybody, is just like me. Schools are full of homogeneity. You can’t go back. My head came up from the table, bleary and thick. Drink got the better of me again. I felt for the glass, a refuge in sodden discomfort, which is better than clarity any old day. Clarity is work. The doors opened, and in my dream I saw the multitudes of my past re-enter. As each other. Life re-emerging in ghastly parody, my life reduced to a music hall parade, a spectral vaudeville including past acquaintances and friends in drag and in chains. Not like my life passing before my eyes. No, nothing like that. Everyone I’d known was a part of the scene, elements of a carefully drawn storyboard. It was in slow motion, a series of stop frame animated slides. I was too drunk to welcome them all properly, as I would have wished. No glad handing or back slapping. My script, rejected by all name producers, containing everybody (the dead too), was rejected out of hand. My old man I saw in death, laid out, the skin taut and pinched as the facial muscles relaxed, lending the visage a vulpine aspect. One of the undertakers at the funeral was smirking. Some joke eh? A stuffed ape, a polished dummy in top hat, smirking…But it was only an impression, a fractured picture, and I moved on under one corner of the coffin. I kept it to myself. I internalized. I created yet another dream in my dream factory. Dogcatcher, I am an undertaker murderer. I ripped his throat out, carried the entrails behind a hedge. I helped carry the coffin as expiation of my guilt. What guilt? The guilt we all carry for our parents. I still hadn’t actualized. My jargon was as yet incomplete; my technical understanding of life’s problems was very far from complete. The meaning was in the bits, so I didn’t understand. I hadn’t realized that he was just an old codger. An old geezer. And the undertaker was just his dad. I remembered breathless cycle rides home. My dad a stick in the spokes of the wheel. My cycle wheels with branches thrust through the spokes and me arse over tit, gulping in the verges.
My God inside the elephant head. My papier-mache head. Over and above the import, the dream head. I saw a fat boy, pig head stuck on fast. Farmyard noises awakened me on Jollity Farm. He moved on thick legs to the bar, ordered some brew or other. No brand-names in death dreams. We used to ride the pig. An undertaker if ever I saw one, moving my old man slowly through the crowds. No chance of re-union in the world as presently configured. That’s all gone. I lost it somewhere. In this dream, I believed in the re-entry myth. Not now. Not this time. Dreams are different. I loved her. She sucked me. I planted little puckery kisses right on her pink little kisser. She flushed rosy crossfire at me. If I’d pushed it, she would have died for me. I have this power over women. Bit of a ladies’ man me. Frank’s a man’s man. Maybe she did die. I never saw her again except on the backs of bus seats, legs apart. I know it. I loved her. I fucked her many times in my hot little imagination. I saw a tall man with free flowing bags, baggy legs, bagged at the knees, green and shiny like a bluebottle. A free-floating observation bereft of import. I couldn’t look any more. The linear dream…too much…too much of an itch. No going back there now.
But now, now, I’m sober. Like never before. I had no drink to speak of last night or the night before. Clear head, sober in thought, direction-finding equipment in fair to good working order. I found that easier than I thought. All becomes clear and the blinking muse creeps back in again. But I’m making it sound like I have a drink problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. Drink is my first and last love. I stagger from pub to pub like a drunk, but it’s only really a crazed mimesis. I’m acting out. I play at being a drunk. Alcohol actually doesn’t affect me, except in my dreams. And I had this dream. I drink all sorts night and day. As and when I can get it. It’s difficult though, making a fiction of the drink urge. It’s very real. Very real. We spend days on end in pubs, getting our physiognomies tuned up for booze intake. Little veins burst in the nose and cheeks. Look like a lustrous deviant. A sodden metabolism that makes us ripe for imagined slights and fictions. Many atrophied gods hang out in bars and pubs, bemoaning their loss of divinity, like it was anyone else’s fault but their own. The self-pity culture in full swing. The poetry of drink has been all but overlooked in the literature of dissipation. All literary boozers are taken to be self destructive, out of control, feckless, disturbed, chasing impossibility. But it’s just an assumed persona, a technique for living, we’re liquid engineers, it’s just a way of getting through. Fictions sprout fully formed in the saturated brain. Made up grievances find easy expression in rat-arsed denial. They need their fictions. They have their dreams, fetishising drink as a liquid goddess. Bar-rooms echo to the sounds of boozed up writers, sparring with idiot inner voices. The inner delusions. The conviction that they drink for a reason. The fiction that the urge to drink is precipitated by an inner voice or some sort of turmoil. It’s just a dream. I never had a past, let alone a future and yet I drink to cover up all sorts of personal horrors. Solipsistic binges that belie the emptiness within and without. Creating an urge to pro-create in place of recreation. Dreams, which find their way into airport books, are created in dipsomaniacal reflection. Testimonies to the difference between the real and the unreal, lies like that, they become Essex boys in extremis.
