In the office at work. M. and D. arguing over D. not drinking enough water. Tom sat next to me, looking at a Superdubpressure flyer. 'You're falling apart, you're going to die of a skin disorder. Ever hear of leprosy?'. 25 calls to mark. Still annoyed I couldn't download itunes. Tried three times. Got to 70% then it just freezes. have to buy a new power lead for my old lap top which has itunes on it. Hope it works. Jagged January annoyances. Unimportant but irritating. Left my cartridge pen at home so can't draw. Even more annoying when I remember I started a drawing on Friday I was quite pleased with (a gloomy looking man smoking a cigarette, ignoring a plate of chicken and apples).
10:56am.
Hastings Direct Recorder Client not working. Well, not the call I want to mark. facebook? No. Keep writing here. Halfway through a mug of chocolate. Look out the window; grey skies, brick wall, everything flat and lifeless. Winter. We're adrift on the nowhere seas of January now, away from the comfy Christmas islands, the consolation of New Years Eve waters, left the television specials behind now, the Boxing Day sales. Nothing but sea and choppy water. Drift and dream on these currents until the March waters herald the Spring coast.
These are the orphan seas.
Check the QA syastem again. Still not working, and no new sales to mark. Tom stretches, half yawns next to me. M. leaves the office. Hear a car outside, struggling through the air that tastes of slush and coldness that brings exhaustion.
Lost expeditions on ice floes. Arctic waters. Ice-cap dramas. Don't fall asleep or you'll sleep forever. Hypothermia dreams.
An explosion of birthday drinks at the weekend. One on friday night, two on Saturday night. Why does everyone seem to be born in January? Tom's birthday also, though he was laid low with some kind of jaw infection. Joe's birthday in a weeks time. My sister's soon as well.
Paced around town on Friday with Andy, joined latterly by Joe. Andy looking for a birthday present for Claire. Bookshops and record shops. Comic shops, charity shops and cafes. Buy old horror comics from the 1970s. 'House of Secrets', 'Ghosts' ('If you don't believe in the supernatural, we dare you to read these haunting tales'). Cheap cds in a sale. Neo-anarcho punk bands whose names I have forgotten. Spitting out a slightly false cockney defiance. Bat for Lashes first album, not as good as the second. Absess. Raw death metal. More pleasing than I thought. A band called Debase, I only bought because it was a pound. Not very good. Sub-Soundgarden style thrash. Nurse with Wound. 99pence. 75 minutes. Industrial jazz sound loops.
D's phone goes off. A nightmare cartoon music. He doesn't answer it. Maybe it is M.s.
Saturday hungover. Drifted through the cold day in my bedsit. Single room cabin fever. Watched 'The Reader' on DVD. Quite good, but not as resonant as the book by Bernard... Damn, what was his second name? Scheyrink? Schrink? Ventured out to buy food and The Guardian. Slushy ice. Light all unreal and hangover tainted.
Tidied my room. Slept until it was time to go out again.
Can hear people in the office next door. Talking about their training induction groups. The ghost sounds of opening doors, closing doors. Shuffling in the call centre. Go and check the QA system again. Finally have some calls to mark.
11:11am.
Woke up at just before midday yesterday. Wrote a piece about dreams. ventured out for more food and Sunday papers. Came back. Read more of '2666' by Robert Bolano. A masterpiece, though I am only a quarter of the way through. Slept. Strange dreams I can't remember. Joe comes round for a coffee in the eveni9ng. he woke up at 5pm. Outside and into The Temple Bar for a pint. Dark interior, and wood panelled walls covered with a random collection of paintings. Hypnotised by one, a sub-impressionist scene of a pale field, grasses frozen in their wind movement, a bare tree in the background. Then hungry. Fast food joint. Finally settle on Turkish House. The melancholy comfort of fast food places on a Sunday night. The friendly Turkish man tells us to 'come again, we are always open!'. Full up after my chicken fillet meal, I drink my coke and watch a silent Turkish soap opera on the television. After the Turkish soap opera, silent rappers seeming somewhat old fashioned come on. A display of break dancers and trainers with shining lights on the heel.
Go home, try to download itunes, sleep.
A dream of night-horses in my room. All I can remember.
Weekend done.
Lost now on the orphan seas of January.
11:17am.
Monday, 11 January 2010
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Of the Lacquer of Angles and Other Dream Revelations
I've been trying to keep a dream diary for this decade, which is to say the least, somewhat over ambitious, as previous attempts at keeping a dream diary usually falter after a month. One of the principal reasons for this failure is that I usually have a fairly good dream recall anyway, and when keeping a dream diary, dream recall seems to expand beyond all expectations. During one dream diary phase, one morning I managed to write 2000 words. This involved a dream about notorious occultist Aleister Crowley leading a Hells Angel biker gang, who seemed to consist of members of the punk band The Ramones. I was at university at the time studying English Literature, and when I realised I was spending far more time on writing my dreams down than deconstructionist theories applied to late 19th century realist works in Europe, I quickly gave this in.
Dreams have always fascinated me, a whole other world, or worlds, we experience every night. Often, as in the dream of Aleister Crowley above, they seem to be nonsense. Other dreams are fragments of that days experiences - someone you spoke to in passing, a television programme seen. Then there are the other dreams, dreams that resonate on a far deeper level.
I'm not sure I have recurring dreams, but I certainly do have recurring themes and ideas. Over the last few years, I regularly visit Southside - one of the places I lived in Kinloss, Scotland, when I was a child. The dreams are quite similar; it is the first hour of night, and the street lamps have just come on. I am aware that I am revisiting this place, and am unsure if I am allowed. There is an air, indescribable really, of magic about the dream. I am delighted to be here at night, in my childhood home, at night. There is something ritualistic about the walk, and though I am walking to my old house, 66 Abbey crescent, I never reach it. The landscape of Southside is changed, sometimes subtly (there is a cafe in the heart of the estate of houses), sometimes quite dramatically (Southside now belongs in the desert, and there are great sand dunes between the houses).
Dreams which have a similarity to the Abbey Crescent are those I term the 'spinney dreams'. A spinney is a small wood, but somebody told me years ago (erroneously as it turns out) that a spinney is specifically a small wood in the middle of a field. In the Spinney Dreams it is almost always a bright summer day. I am at the edge of a field, which is often surrounded by a fence, and am entranced by the sight of, in the middle of a field, a tiny hill, covered in trees; a spinney. There is usually something paranormal about the spinney; ley lines converge here, a graveyard has grown from the earth, the spinney is haunted by the ghost of a woman who disappeared here decades ago. Despite this, the dreams are never sinister, there is, instead, a feeling of longing and fascination, a desire for visiting the spinney. Often I don't make it to the spinney for whatever dream-reason, sometimes I do. One time I was accompanied by Bracken, our old Yorkshire Terrier. In the dream Bracken could talk and was encouraging me in my exploration of the spinney. That was a nice dream.
Then there are the darker dreams. I hesitate to call them nightmares though, as they are enjoyable as, I suppose, ghost stories (my very rare nightmares - dreams which I do not enjoy - involve friends and family dying, or being diagnosed with some terminal illness). Often the darker dreams are to do with the interiors of buildings. I went through a long phase of dreaming of some kind of institutional building, a university, or more frequently, a hospital. A floor of the building is disused, and more importantly, is haunted by some indefinable and invisible force. Inevitably, I find myself exploring this deserted level (open rooms full of sinks, sinister medical equipment, rows of baths with an unknown fearful purpose) feeling a mixture of terror, and also of fascination.
Lately these dreams of abandoned floors in building have transformed themselves into dreams of attics containing secret stairways, always locked, where something terrible has once taken place, the site of a murder, or there is a body still there. The secret stairways are cluttered with junk, and are usually locked. The stairways themselves evoke in me an emotion that I don't really have a waking-life name for. The closest I can describe it is a mixture of terror, fascination and nausea, with fascination being the strongest component.
Sometimes dreams have a narrative attached to them. In one dream, a professor had worked out the reason for the feeling of being watched in empty rooms. The reason was that this is due to the stare of insects, the untold thousands of tiny miscroscopic insects in every room. The stare of these insects is because they hate us, for something that the human race had done to insects in another dimension, before the creation of the universe. One time I had a dream where I was investigating a haunted house that was on a road called Lost Hope Square. I was with a friend, and we eventually found the house. She pointed out to me that the house was haunted because the trees had grown to close to the house, and all houses are haunted that have trees growing to close to them. We returned home, but discovered that the map we had used to locate the house had become infected by the haunting and had to be burnt. Another dream involving a map took place in an attic. It concerned the location of a cursed river, named the Noxis-Nibris. The Noxis-Nibris could only be seen in maps of old Mexico, and then only by the light of a 40 watt bulb, in the small hours in tiny attics.
Things being named in dreams is interesting. The other night is a good example. The dream is far too long and complicated to describe fully, involving, as it did, dreams within dreams, and thinking about these dreams in the dream, and trying to explain the dream in other dreams. Anyway. I shall try and make this as simple as possible. I was in a field. Grey skies. Windy. The field was lined by houses, empty in a curious was; they were built never to be used. I met a man in the field; shaggy hair, dark and intense eyes. In the dream it struck me that he was dressed like a clown, but a clown without any comedic elements. He lived in some sort of cavern, and I accompanied him there for a cup of tea. In the cavern, he told me that 'this degenerate little town was collapsing, and that the angles of this town would affect... (me) ...too'. He had a bookcase in the room, one of the books was a collection of ghost stories called 'Across the Fields', (As an aside 'Across the Fields' was the name of a book I had invented when still trying to write the unwriteable novel 'The Followers'. In 'The Followers' 'Across the Fields' was written by a character called Vincent James, who vanished over the summer of 1956).
In the dream, 'Across the Fields' was written by no-one. When each story was finished, the author responsible was taken out of reality, so he existed in no times, either present, future, or past. This gave the stories in the book, a malevolent life of their own, so the stories themselves became conscious. Another section of the dream involved myself reading a university essay studying 'Across the Fields' by an unknown student. It became apparent upon reading the essay, that studying 'Across the Fields' had driven him insane, and had turned the essay into a ghost story, similar to the stories in 'Across the Fields', in that it too was alive, the writer of the essay having been removed from reality upon finishing. There was another book on his shelf too, a book with a French title callked 'Des Lacque des Angle'. In the dream, this was translated as 'Beyond the Angle'. Anyhow, the dream involved other such disparate elements such as Bugs Bunny cartoons, a haunting in a churchyard, a prison like the interior of a ship, and groups of 18th century women.
The most important part of the whole dream, or the dreams of dreams, was a section where I was thinking about the dreams. In this dream, or section of the dream, I was thinking of how certain elements of the dream would make fantastic stories, or drawings, or songs. A real source of inspiration. Then I doubted this, asked myself 'but aren't I just writing (or drawing etc) about the same old things?' The answer was very clear, that every artist has his or her own personal obsessions and themes, and that my role as an artist was this; to investigate the interior landscapes of my imagination.
This strange revelation has stayed with me since the dream. For all my life I have felt that my own artistic endeavours have been, somehow, inferior, not good enough, that there is no point or purpose to them. I am not interested in making a comment on society, or the human condition. The idea of writing an artist statement leaves me cold. This has always made me feel that, as an artist, I was doing no more than metaphoric (and sometimes literal) doodling. The dream made it clear what I was doing as an artist (of whatever medium, drawing mostly in the last decade, writing and making music in the 1990s) and that was this; I was investigating and mapping a peculiar and very individual interior territory.
Exploring my imagination, to put it simply, and this, I have discovered, is enough.
As an appendix to this long ramble on dreams and revelations, I put 'des lacque des angle' into a French / English Google translator. I don't know any French. The last French lesson I had was in 1986 when I was 15. I was expecting it to come up with nothing.
Apparently, it translated as 'of lacquer of the angle'.
Now this gave me pause to think, that maybe dreams hold a knowledge all of their own, and makes me look forward to meeting Bracken on the edge of a field on a bright summers day, ready to explore that ever elusive spinney on a small hill.
Dreams have always fascinated me, a whole other world, or worlds, we experience every night. Often, as in the dream of Aleister Crowley above, they seem to be nonsense. Other dreams are fragments of that days experiences - someone you spoke to in passing, a television programme seen. Then there are the other dreams, dreams that resonate on a far deeper level.
I'm not sure I have recurring dreams, but I certainly do have recurring themes and ideas. Over the last few years, I regularly visit Southside - one of the places I lived in Kinloss, Scotland, when I was a child. The dreams are quite similar; it is the first hour of night, and the street lamps have just come on. I am aware that I am revisiting this place, and am unsure if I am allowed. There is an air, indescribable really, of magic about the dream. I am delighted to be here at night, in my childhood home, at night. There is something ritualistic about the walk, and though I am walking to my old house, 66 Abbey crescent, I never reach it. The landscape of Southside is changed, sometimes subtly (there is a cafe in the heart of the estate of houses), sometimes quite dramatically (Southside now belongs in the desert, and there are great sand dunes between the houses).
Dreams which have a similarity to the Abbey Crescent are those I term the 'spinney dreams'. A spinney is a small wood, but somebody told me years ago (erroneously as it turns out) that a spinney is specifically a small wood in the middle of a field. In the Spinney Dreams it is almost always a bright summer day. I am at the edge of a field, which is often surrounded by a fence, and am entranced by the sight of, in the middle of a field, a tiny hill, covered in trees; a spinney. There is usually something paranormal about the spinney; ley lines converge here, a graveyard has grown from the earth, the spinney is haunted by the ghost of a woman who disappeared here decades ago. Despite this, the dreams are never sinister, there is, instead, a feeling of longing and fascination, a desire for visiting the spinney. Often I don't make it to the spinney for whatever dream-reason, sometimes I do. One time I was accompanied by Bracken, our old Yorkshire Terrier. In the dream Bracken could talk and was encouraging me in my exploration of the spinney. That was a nice dream.
Then there are the darker dreams. I hesitate to call them nightmares though, as they are enjoyable as, I suppose, ghost stories (my very rare nightmares - dreams which I do not enjoy - involve friends and family dying, or being diagnosed with some terminal illness). Often the darker dreams are to do with the interiors of buildings. I went through a long phase of dreaming of some kind of institutional building, a university, or more frequently, a hospital. A floor of the building is disused, and more importantly, is haunted by some indefinable and invisible force. Inevitably, I find myself exploring this deserted level (open rooms full of sinks, sinister medical equipment, rows of baths with an unknown fearful purpose) feeling a mixture of terror, and also of fascination.
Lately these dreams of abandoned floors in building have transformed themselves into dreams of attics containing secret stairways, always locked, where something terrible has once taken place, the site of a murder, or there is a body still there. The secret stairways are cluttered with junk, and are usually locked. The stairways themselves evoke in me an emotion that I don't really have a waking-life name for. The closest I can describe it is a mixture of terror, fascination and nausea, with fascination being the strongest component.
Sometimes dreams have a narrative attached to them. In one dream, a professor had worked out the reason for the feeling of being watched in empty rooms. The reason was that this is due to the stare of insects, the untold thousands of tiny miscroscopic insects in every room. The stare of these insects is because they hate us, for something that the human race had done to insects in another dimension, before the creation of the universe. One time I had a dream where I was investigating a haunted house that was on a road called Lost Hope Square. I was with a friend, and we eventually found the house. She pointed out to me that the house was haunted because the trees had grown to close to the house, and all houses are haunted that have trees growing to close to them. We returned home, but discovered that the map we had used to locate the house had become infected by the haunting and had to be burnt. Another dream involving a map took place in an attic. It concerned the location of a cursed river, named the Noxis-Nibris. The Noxis-Nibris could only be seen in maps of old Mexico, and then only by the light of a 40 watt bulb, in the small hours in tiny attics.
Things being named in dreams is interesting. The other night is a good example. The dream is far too long and complicated to describe fully, involving, as it did, dreams within dreams, and thinking about these dreams in the dream, and trying to explain the dream in other dreams. Anyway. I shall try and make this as simple as possible. I was in a field. Grey skies. Windy. The field was lined by houses, empty in a curious was; they were built never to be used. I met a man in the field; shaggy hair, dark and intense eyes. In the dream it struck me that he was dressed like a clown, but a clown without any comedic elements. He lived in some sort of cavern, and I accompanied him there for a cup of tea. In the cavern, he told me that 'this degenerate little town was collapsing, and that the angles of this town would affect... (me) ...too'. He had a bookcase in the room, one of the books was a collection of ghost stories called 'Across the Fields', (As an aside 'Across the Fields' was the name of a book I had invented when still trying to write the unwriteable novel 'The Followers'. In 'The Followers' 'Across the Fields' was written by a character called Vincent James, who vanished over the summer of 1956).
In the dream, 'Across the Fields' was written by no-one. When each story was finished, the author responsible was taken out of reality, so he existed in no times, either present, future, or past. This gave the stories in the book, a malevolent life of their own, so the stories themselves became conscious. Another section of the dream involved myself reading a university essay studying 'Across the Fields' by an unknown student. It became apparent upon reading the essay, that studying 'Across the Fields' had driven him insane, and had turned the essay into a ghost story, similar to the stories in 'Across the Fields', in that it too was alive, the writer of the essay having been removed from reality upon finishing. There was another book on his shelf too, a book with a French title callked 'Des Lacque des Angle'. In the dream, this was translated as 'Beyond the Angle'. Anyhow, the dream involved other such disparate elements such as Bugs Bunny cartoons, a haunting in a churchyard, a prison like the interior of a ship, and groups of 18th century women.
The most important part of the whole dream, or the dreams of dreams, was a section where I was thinking about the dreams. In this dream, or section of the dream, I was thinking of how certain elements of the dream would make fantastic stories, or drawings, or songs. A real source of inspiration. Then I doubted this, asked myself 'but aren't I just writing (or drawing etc) about the same old things?' The answer was very clear, that every artist has his or her own personal obsessions and themes, and that my role as an artist was this; to investigate the interior landscapes of my imagination.
This strange revelation has stayed with me since the dream. For all my life I have felt that my own artistic endeavours have been, somehow, inferior, not good enough, that there is no point or purpose to them. I am not interested in making a comment on society, or the human condition. The idea of writing an artist statement leaves me cold. This has always made me feel that, as an artist, I was doing no more than metaphoric (and sometimes literal) doodling. The dream made it clear what I was doing as an artist (of whatever medium, drawing mostly in the last decade, writing and making music in the 1990s) and that was this; I was investigating and mapping a peculiar and very individual interior territory.
Exploring my imagination, to put it simply, and this, I have discovered, is enough.
As an appendix to this long ramble on dreams and revelations, I put 'des lacque des angle' into a French / English Google translator. I don't know any French. The last French lesson I had was in 1986 when I was 15. I was expecting it to come up with nothing.
Apparently, it translated as 'of lacquer of the angle'.
Now this gave me pause to think, that maybe dreams hold a knowledge all of their own, and makes me look forward to meeting Bracken on the edge of a field on a bright summers day, ready to explore that ever elusive spinney on a small hill.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Songs Written in Empty Rooms
Snow falling again, but this time there is no novelty to it, as there was before Christmas. This is January snow; different, altered. I watched the white pool of light from a street lamp on the snow, bright, yet somehow darkening the night. Old roads stretching off into unseen distances, black hills surrounding town.
I have always had a fondness for January. There is a strange freedom away from the inelegant, vulgarities of summer, even from the easy, though beguiling, mysteries of autumn. January is everything stripped down, and naked, finally truthful, robbed of any complacent poetry. Last years masks are discarded and our neonate faces are raw, not quite hopeful, but the expelled histories of the last year, the last decade have left a cleanness.
The new notebook of January, waiting for that first mark, that first line, that first setting of the future.
The snow, now rid of the novelty, and because it has been mixed with rain, has formed a kind of slush, rather than the ice of December. It strikes me as both somehow antique, yet industrial, January produced in factories, mined in seams beneath nostalgic Earth; prison camp memories, bleak mornings in borstals, woke by guards before dawn, another day in the factories, a world in monochrome, stripped of colour.
Personal memories too, released by this bleak snow; of visiting Grandad Mole in hospital in 1981 with my Nan. Wolverhampton. Struggling through the snow to get back to my Nan's house. Nine years old, and loving the Pan Books of Horror Stories and Adam and the Ants; of 2002 (even though there was no snow that year), starting work at the petrol station, the long walk back after the late shift, along the black and empty Old Shoreham Road.
Still snowing out there.
I suppose we're all alone in January, left with ourselves and our dreams and nightmares. Not necessarily a bad thing. Like writing songs in empty rooms in abandoned houses, no-one else can hear us, but in that silence, we have, at least, the freedom to be ourselves.
I have always had a fondness for January. There is a strange freedom away from the inelegant, vulgarities of summer, even from the easy, though beguiling, mysteries of autumn. January is everything stripped down, and naked, finally truthful, robbed of any complacent poetry. Last years masks are discarded and our neonate faces are raw, not quite hopeful, but the expelled histories of the last year, the last decade have left a cleanness.
The new notebook of January, waiting for that first mark, that first line, that first setting of the future.
The snow, now rid of the novelty, and because it has been mixed with rain, has formed a kind of slush, rather than the ice of December. It strikes me as both somehow antique, yet industrial, January produced in factories, mined in seams beneath nostalgic Earth; prison camp memories, bleak mornings in borstals, woke by guards before dawn, another day in the factories, a world in monochrome, stripped of colour.
Personal memories too, released by this bleak snow; of visiting Grandad Mole in hospital in 1981 with my Nan. Wolverhampton. Struggling through the snow to get back to my Nan's house. Nine years old, and loving the Pan Books of Horror Stories and Adam and the Ants; of 2002 (even though there was no snow that year), starting work at the petrol station, the long walk back after the late shift, along the black and empty Old Shoreham Road.
Still snowing out there.
I suppose we're all alone in January, left with ourselves and our dreams and nightmares. Not necessarily a bad thing. Like writing songs in empty rooms in abandoned houses, no-one else can hear us, but in that silence, we have, at least, the freedom to be ourselves.
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