THE WITNESS'S CITY

THE DREAM FILM STORE

A sad and seductive female voice is saying things to me. I cannot focus or see her face, it refuses to appear in my mind.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve finally come, I’ve been waiting for you for lifetimes.

- Welcome at last to the Dream-Film Store, I can’t believe you’ve awoken here after so long -

Did you have a long day? What can I find for you tonight – that’s right – anything you can imagine – a Thousand amazing thoughts preserved – or perhaps just a bottle of red wine and a dream about the swaying sea will rest you well tonight?”

Of course in dreams you never know you are dreaming. That is why they have control. Certainly this dream harnessed control enough to disturb me & leave itself lingering behind the back of my mind when I finally awoke.

In my sleep I was wrestling w/ heat & the covers, & frightened by the lady’s continuing voice. All I could see was blue.

“I know you can understand what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid” -

I felt her stretch out her arm towards me and I jumped in panic.

All around me I could see blurs of deep colour merging & swirling, a moving chaos of images and shapes. Still I could see no face.

“I know you can hear me, please, I’m your friend, look! I couldn’t bear to see you waste this now. You know me already please just trust me.”

********

II

I awoke shaken and wretched, grappling with the duvets, rubbing my stinging eyes. Already the terrible fear of my dream had subsided considerably; simply because waking instantly cancels out what was previously merely dreaming. Now I just had a headache & a longing to return to that strange scene and assuage the curiosity that always accompanies fear. I suppose the fear when you dream is because you don’t know you’re only dreaming. It seems real. I lay there thinking.

What troubled me most as I lay there in bed was that I never saw the woman’s face, though I could sense it was desperate to appear. Oh well, just a dream, as they say.

Refusing to let a dream trouble my thoughts all day, as had happened before I decided to get up and wash my face.

The flat was crazed by disorder & rubbish. Clothes, papers, books & boxes which should’ve been locked in some attic were at war w/ the floor. I trod w/ care to the bathroom & stood looking in the greasy mirror at a face full of grease; the eyes that once rewarded me w/ strange smiles were laden w/ sleep, heavy with the impurities that sleep had filtered. The Drain in my Brain.

“I’ve been swimming

in a sea of sleep,”

I began singing to myself in a hoarse groan. Wanting to give myself a shock, I dunked my head in a cold basin decorated w/ floating limescale, pubic hair (for some unknown reason) and toothpaste. How I could call that much of a wash I don’t know. Nevertheless, I felt fresher; so, as always, I started to prepare my morning spliff, which helped me decide what to do today, or if to do anything at all.

I used to take great pleasure in rolling huge reefers, just for the hilarity of seeing something unusual & absurd, I suppose. Recently though, since moving in to the flat, I’ve been rolling the swiftest & easiest joints possible, & filling them w/ more weed than the big old ones. Being stoned now fits into the same category of Time & Tedium that it once was the escape-route from.

As I lit the spliff, & fell softly back into the sensuous web that stonedness weaves, I felt a longing for the fantastical times I used to have w/ friends & girls & laughter & ideas – whereas now I just felt numb, in a blunt trance. Not wanting to linger on the past, I took a deep long drag, like the spliff was a sacrament, & pulled some stolid clouds of darkness into my lungs. Holding it down, I imagined counting some numbers but couldn’t get it together, so just waited - & then exhaled, releasing the smoke in a grave grey sigh, watching it fumble, disperse & vanish into cushions & curtains & air. My head was heavy. I knew what I needed now more than ever. To get out.

********

III

After dressing in some jeans & T-shirts, I took my weed, some skins, a pen & paper & various other articles of minor importance, & hid them in places in my big jacket. I’ve never been too bothered about what I wear on top - trousers, I just wear jeans, so I’m not fussy there either. Shoes, however, I’m very particular about, seeing as I have to walk in them etc. Shoes are rare allies in life. Also, I have a tendency to turn a jacket into a home.

So, finding a particular pair of boots, I left the flat w/ a feeling of the promise of the Day.

But where could I go?

I’d abandoned my friends a few months before, fallen out with them all except one, Gabriel, who I don’t speak to anymore, anyway. It was a strange series of incidents involving my previous band & some magic mushrooms. The details escape me & give me pain trying to remember them. We were called ‘Open Poem Opium,’ & we split up; that is all.

(“Beat through the veins of the city in madness

Revolving doors in your mind & sadness

Cities crawling in your brain

streets of mystery and of pain,

I’m leaving town on the underground train.”)

I put my hands in my pocket to instinctively protect myself from the knuckle-gnawing cold that hung around outside. Feeling what I thought was a £10 note in my jeans, I pulled it out to find only a little scribbling of lyrics written some days ago in a dull hash-induced trance.

I often scribbled things. I enjoyed the freedom of scribbling & doodling. The pen can move exactly where you want it free of direction, w/out the obligation of having to form restricting letters & words. I have pages & pages of doodles, strange shapes, & occasionally some lyrics appear in the mess. That’s what I did for the band – wrote songs & sang, though I don’t play any instrument.

Noticing a growing rumble in my stomach, I felt that food & coffee were the best options, & would give me more time to consider how my day of activity could be filled.

Rounding a corner, I saw the parade of shops ahead, dead faces facing me, w/ cheap dimestore smiles. In the middle was the cafe, called “The Rat & Vessel” to my amused bewilderment. I opened the door. Inside it smelled of sad people, old times clinging in smoke to the walls, sad paint and sad light. The door was still ringing from those crazy bells that crash together on opening , & make me cringe every time. Those bells should be banned from sad cafes. They exacerbate the dead silence that awaits you inside when the door slams shut & the bells stop clanging.

“A large strong white coffee please, & a Danish.”

£1. 90. I couldn’t believe it. I realised then that left me w/ only 10p for the day – a rare day of Activity. Oh well.

The coffee was bitter & the Danish was over sweet. I was fairly stoned & therefore felt a heightened sensitivity to things like taste. After a few mouthfuls, I realised it wasn’t quite late enough for breakfast yet.

Well, what could I do? Where could I go? 10p is less than having nothing, because it just irritates you with niggling little time-consuming questions.

I decided I’d be freer if I threw it away my last change. Why I didn’t bring any money w/ me I haven’t a clue – pen, paper & weed must have seemed like a more useful currency to remember this morning.

So On discovering that I finally had something to do (albeit only disposing of 10p), I thought I’d turn it into a ritual & perhaps waste an hour of the day. I was finding it increasingly difficult since realising this money shortage to tell myself that I was even capable of activity this morning. Spending an hour of one’s morning throwing away short change, & taking an hour to decide how to do it in particular to add a pretend sense of ‘fun…’ I realised a dead-end frustration possessing me. The town was in abeyance, time was trapping, what could I do to rid me of the cruel bindings of post-youth, expulsion from university, confusion, unemployment, & worst of all, sheer boredom? Where could I go, & with what purpose?

The 10p dilemma had started to annoy me. I thought in vain for ways I could make a ritualistic point of getting rid of it, but soon realised this sort of time-consuming thought was exactly what I wanted to get rid of the 10p for – like I said, to be free of it. This realisation of my own frustrating, mind-cycling stupidity annoyed me greatly. I decided I’d give it to the next tramp I saw.

It was now 11. 00. Which meant nothing to me, because w/out anything to do or anywhere to be, it didn’t matter what time it was. The street stretched ahead of me crawling w/ insect-cars & insect-people, all busily rushing around swarming sick and feversome. I often wondered exactly what the term “crowd-neuroses” means, & laughed that I felt detached from the clinging time-table lifestyle. Walls of grey rose either side of the road to complete the dull-grey prison of the street. People flocked & assembled, briefcases merged into madness, mute timetable agony, flaccid lovers limp by, smiles fail, children congregate in backstreets to escape, everyone around thinking they have something to do & somewhere to go! I felt dizzy so found a bench to sit down upon. Watching the parading fools & this procession of sadness brought out a sadness w/in me too. I was sitting motionless on the bench, feeling the flux & thrum of the city, the dead beat of London; & I heard the beat of my heart clash w/ the rhythm of the streets. I felt suddenly cold and alone. If London had a voice, it would be a blunted and dead-pan voice like Lou Reed’s.

I must have sat on that bench for about 2 hours. The time was spent coming to terms w/ the fact that I felt estranged from my environment – the first time I’d realised the alienation of being poor in a city. Perhaps if I lived in Cornwall, say, I’d have a job, a community in which I was known, maybe even some friends. The city is a great culmination of sadness & alienation. No-one in town is conscious of their extreme self-consciousness. Everyone in town is homeless.

Pleased w/ the thoughts I had accomplished this morning (& thinking was my poor equivalent of a morning’s work), I decided to roll up another spliff & go for another wander. My hands were cold & it was too windy sitting outside, so I went to look for the nearest phone-box. Phone-boxes were excellent for skinning up in, because a) you were off the street & out of people’s way b) there was a nice little platform bit to rest the Rizlas upon c) no-one disturbs you in a phone-box, because they assume you are looking for change, or about to make a call etc. One felt a slight degree of safety & protection inside.

The nearest phone was just across the road. I loved crossing roads, felt it like a game, a dare, a thrill. One of the things I felt most confident about in life was dodging traffic & crossing roads w/ what I liked to portray to the driver as being a fearless & disdainful nonchalance. I’m constantly occupying myself w/ little challenges & wars, that I suppose I create for my own amusement. Walking along a pavement, I often ask myself a question of importance then tell myself that if I reach that lamp-post over there before the next car passes me, the answer is so & so, & if not… I’m sure everyone plays the same game, just ask different questions. It’s amazing how something as utterly pointless & unfounded in anything apart from my own mind has the power to excite & possess me.

I can honestly feel a terrible suspense sometimes as a car grumbles & groans & approaches blind behind my back – I walk quicker, desperate for the answer I want. Sometimes, if I fail to reach the object in time for the right answer, I change the question or say I meant the previous lamp-post anyway. It is by no means a game I enjoy playing. I become frustrated w/ myself after a while, but at least it distracts me from frustration of having nothing better to do.

So crossing the road, I reached the phone-box, & entered its heavy door. Inside I felt how truly separate I was from everything else around me. There is a certain mysticism about phoneboxes & telecommunications. I remember having a fascination w/ Dr. Who, & the way he travelled throughout space & time in the blink of an eye. How I longed for such possibilities now, standing stoned & alone in a phone-box surrounded by strangers & the dizzying thrum of life. I wanted adventure, change, discovery – but I was stuck. Where was there to go?

I emptied my pockets on top of the phone & extracted the various bits of paraphernalia needed for skinning up. The spliff I rolled was terrible, due to what I noticed was a growing distraction in my mind.

Standing there pulling on the spliff, I tried to locate the exact area of my mind where the negativity was emanating from.

‘Right,’ I thought.

‘I know I don’t want to be here, but where do I want to be?’

Something was certainly on my mind, but I let it go as the smoke melted into my blood & sent diamonds rushing up my neck.

I started to gather my belongings, & noticed among them the 10p which I’d forgotten about.

“I’ll leave it here for some lucky person to make a phone call w/” I mused.

“Or, I could make a phone-call myself..”

I didn’t own a phone & the thought of making a phone call was quite big news to me. Who could I phone? I had no friends.

Except for maybe Gabriel. It had to be Gabriel. 0171 385 6603. I only had 10p, so I had to plan carefully what I would say. Even better, I thought, I could invite myself round to his.

I don’t know why I suddenly had a desire to be w/ someone. I don’t know whether I even liked the guy. I alienate myself. Perhaps the guilt that loneliness brings, had stirred me finally into communication.

“Hello?” came the cautious, questioning voice.

“Gabriel, man, it’s, uh, Franco, could I come round?”

I spoke nervously & stuttered a little, out of practise w/ conversation.

“What! Hey Franco, how’s it going? What are you doing? Come round!”

“Yeah, I will, I’ve got 2 credits left, so I’ll - “

The line went dead & the dead sound came up in my ear & hung around in a tone of despair.

“Shit,” I thought. “Where the fuck does Gabriel live.”

Typical, that for once I’d actually wanted to do something that involved someone other than me - & it wasn’t going to be possible.

I left the phone-box still sucking hard on the joint. “I suppose I could go home, get some more money & - “

The phone was ringing. I lifted it. It was Gabriel.

“Man you should’ve just said & I’d have called you back.”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t know – shit, sorry. You know how I am w/ phones, clueless.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha – well, shall I meet you somewhere then?”

“I have no money & I’m down to my last few smoke’s worth.”

When I said earlier that phones fascinate me, I also meant to say that they terrify me. I’d probably prefer telepathy.

“I’’ll tell you what Franco, where are you – I’ll come and pick you up.”

“Um, well, I’m in a phone-box in Baron’s Court. I’ll meet you outside the Oddbins.”

“In 10 minutes, I’m close.”

“Alright man, that’s perfect, cheers.”

“See you then Franco.”

“Bye-bye.”

Wow. I’d never known anyone so efficient at phones. If I’m ever forced into using one to make arrangements, I faff around for hours being indecisive & calling back & hanging up.

Gabriel was a person of admirable sagacity for his age – 2 years older than me, 22, but w/ a sensibleness that empowered him to be utterly assured and self-confident. Decisive & wise, the kind of friend everyone wants & fears abusing.

I could already see Oddbins. I approached feeling slightly ridiculous still for my telephonic incompetence.

‘I could have done any number of things,’ I thought

- ‘reversed the charges, borrowed 10p off someone… oh well, I’m just useless, no matter.’

My thoughts were interrupted by Gabriel’s voice.

“Franco, jump in!”

Elliot Smith was playing on the stereo. I didn’t like Elliot Smith very much. He finds it too easy to write fairly good songs. I couldn’t respect that.

Gabriel had a spliff going. “Have a smoke on that man,” he urged. “How are you? Tell me about your life.”

“Well, I’m O. K I suppose. To be honest I’ve been quite dazed for ages. I don’t really know what’s going on man.”

“How’s the band?”

“We split.”

“Oh, why”

“Dunno, just crap really.”

“Just crap sounds about right. So what are you doing w/ yourself?”

“Oh, nothing much, nothing at all really. I’ve got virtually no money, & none on me.”

“Any girls?”

“Ha ha ha you must be joking.” The thought of me having the time, money, energy & effort for a girl was hilarious. I was not ‘boyfriend material’ – I never have been.

“Man, I’ve met this amazing girl, she’s at the flat at the moment – you’ll meet her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mary.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh, amazing man, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

“I’m not sure if I want to believe you or not. I mean you know how sceptical I am about girls. If she’s not perfect, not the Absolute One, then she’s not worth any waste of time bothering w/.” This was my arrogance. Suffice to say, I had never found the One Perfect Girl.

“Franco, I’m telling you man – if you’d just stop being so fucking particular & arty farty, & just accept things, you’d be happier. You’ve probably already met your Perfect Girl but were too busy moaning about existence & lack of money & fucking weed to even notice her.”

“you think?”

“Yeah, I do think. You can’t get perfection, so then take what’s best.”

Elliot Smith was starting to annoy me, so I turned it down. The car pulled up & stopped.

“Here we are then, this is the new flat.”

“Cool, which door.”

“Here.”

We entered.

I stood waiting inside the door wondering what I was doing. A blond girl w/ a subtle face & medium sized breasts came to the bottom of the stairs w/ an open smile on her face. She was attractive. Very. She wore only a long robe-like dressing gown that revealed tempting patches of skin when she moved. She looked at me for a strange second, then Gabriel & her were full of kisses & smiles. I felt a little bit small, an outsider. Gabriel introduced me, & we went through to the lounge for a smoke & some coffee.

I always admired the way Gabriel could mix women w/ friends. We shared a flat at University, so I knew him well & had witnessed many of his previous ‘mistakes’ & ‘successes.’ I felt rather uneasy being in the room w/ my old friend & his beautiful new girlfriend. I felt alone.

We sat for a while & Gabriel & Mary inevitably drifted into the usual fresh-lovers type of conversation. There was certainly a silent communication between them, a sign of their genuineness perhaps.

I looked around the lounge. Shelves groaned w/ the slow old weight of books, heaving piles of books, pages of words compressed & preserved together in slumber, long centuries of books. Gabriel had no doubt read them all. He thinks books hold the answers. I think they only hold the questions.

I became distracted from the books by the sudden movement of Mary putting on some trousers. She stood up & had to jump & pull them up quickly while she was in the air. I caught a glimpse of her pussy through her knickers. & then I was hooked. I couldn’t help but cast glances at that soft pleasure-triangle that women posses, knowing there was a cunt lying in her lap, just lying there unattended. I felt an angling, wincing agony.

Uncertainty and mystery was what sustained me, kept my curiosity strong.

I wanted now to solve the cunt-mysteries hiding in Mary’s knickers.

“Franco! Wake up man. Where’ve you been? Cloud cuckoo Land?”

“Shit man, sorry, I’m a little bit stoned, well quite stoned actually.”

Everyone laughed.

I suspected that Gabriel was feeling excellent about himself now – it was obvious that I had been staring at Mary.

“Yeah & I’m a little tired as well. I had a really strange dream last night.”

Gabriel & I often discussed our dreams when we were stoned.

“Yeah? Tell me about it.”

“Well, it was terrible, frightening. There was a woman.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes! That sounds just like Franco – terrified of women, even when it comes to wet dreams!”

Mary gave me a look of intrigue. Gabriel laughed at me more.

“You couldn’t understand unless you were there in the dream. It was terrifying.”

“What did she look like?”

“I’ve got no idea. I couldn’t concentrate enough on her face. It was everywhere, all around me – lots of deep blue green colours swirling & all the time there was the Voice…”

“...and what did it say?”

“something about the Dream-Film Store or something.”

“Wow. ‘The Dream-Film Store’. Sounds exciting. & what happened that was so scary?”

“I don’t…. I don’t really know…. It was just…. Um….”

I trailed off into oblivion. The T. V. had been put on & it flickered its bright ugly faces around the room. I felt dizzy & needed suddenly to lie down. Chaos was swarming in my head, I took a deep breath….

& a strange blue colour pervaded the scene.

“I’ve been calling you all day, why haven’t you been answering -

Look, there’s something we should get straight now & here: you WANT to be here, w/ me, so please make it easier on us both.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh you already know all this, it’s the same questions every time – in time you’ll remember everything, but I need to -”

“Where am I?”

“Why, you’re at the Dream-Film Store of course..”

I felt the softness of her presence, the lure of her maiden’s voice, a strange sense of having been here before in another time – still I could not see her face, just an oceanic blur.

“Is there something wrong? What is the matter?

What is the matter?”

she kept repeating

& repeating

her voice dispersing

& drowning as I

floated away

slowly upward towards

the surface again

through the big blue

until…

---------------------------------------------

IV

I awoke panting for breath on Gabriel’s sofa, w/ 2 impending heads above me – stoned expressionless faces.

“Man, what the fuck happened,” I joked.

Their smiles told me they were relieved.

“You suddenly started hyper-ventilating, & moving your limbs manically, & then you feinted & just lay there looking still & peaceful, &, uh, almost… dead!”

“Shit, that’s never happened before, I never feint, that’s weird.”

“Probably just the weed.”

“& the crap company,” added Mary w/ a smile. “Let me get you some water,” she continued.

“Please,” I agreed.

I watched the ripe shape of her body as she moved away, watched her casual motions sway. Disorder Lust & Loneliness. ‘There is no room for love in my life,’ I thought ‘or perhaps all I have is room for love.’

“Gabriel,” I slowly asseverated, suddenly snapping back into the room, “when I feinted, just then, I had the dream of the scaring woman at the bed of the sea.”

“At the bed of the sea?”

“Yes, yes, it was at the bed of the sea first time as well. I remember. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I haven’t seen the woman yet but I spoke to her.”

“What did you say?”

“’Who are you?’ & ‘where am I?’”

“Ha ha ha ha ha. & this was supposedly a nightmare?”

- “Um, well, no, not as such, no definitely not a nightmare, just a strange, scaring dream.”

“’Who are you?’ and ‘Where am I?’ That’s what people in 3-rd rate Hollywood PG’s say when they miraculously arrive at some fantastical place. Sounds like pure cheese to me man! I can’t believe you’re letting yourself get bothered by a dream as cheesy as this!”

“No, it wasn’t cheesy, it was crystal clear & pure blue & cool on my naked skin….”

Then there was an uncomfortable silence that hung around waiting to strangle me.

“Gabriel shall we have another bifter, I could really quite do w/ a J to sort my head out.”

“Yeah, man, that’s a sound idea. I’ll skin.”

I turned my head to look out of the window.

Grey streams pervaded the sky. The street outside was full of sadness, lined w/ windows, desperate & nothing. The street goes nowhere. The pedestrians are going to places that I refuse to call anywhere.

Mary had returned now w/ a glass of water & a cup of herbal tea.

“Oh, cheers, that’s perfect, thanks.”

I was never myself w/ new people. Strangers gave me a nervous edge. You could say that they excite me – or perhaps that was just Mary.

She sat down next to me on the sofa. I always sit forward w/ my hands clasped. (My mother used to say I sat like I was praying & I used to tell her that I was.) Mary sat back relaxed & full of presence. This made me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t see her face behind me, & now felt sure she was sitting back so as to look at me w/out me noticing.

My stoned mind focussed out & dispersed & my thoughts began to spread into detailed crevices of indecision.

If I lent back it would be blatant that I’d either noticed her, if it’s true that she is looking at me, or, if not, it would be either a nervous action or a rather full-on, arrogant one; so I shouldn’t just sit here & feel comfortable w/ her looking at me from behind.

I considered my position w/ Mary agonisingly behind me, & Gabriel, my friend who was beginning to bore me a little, reading in front of me, quite engrossed. He had the spliff & wasn’t even smoking it. I didn’t want to ask him for it, because it was his, but the rude bastard hadn’t even passed it once.

Suddenly, in a moment of decision I sat back next to Mary, our bodies pressing. At this stage, w/ the threat of Gabriel there & the tendencies of my edgier thoughts getting carried away, I began to feel excited – I began to get an erection & my jeans were tight. “I could really do w/ leaning forward again,” I thought. “Though what would Mary think of me rocking back and forward like a monkey?” Paradox. The only solution I felt was to ask Gabriel for the biff & lean forward to take it.

“Gabs man, the bifter has extinguished itself in the absence of you smoking it. Have a light.”

We often spoke to each other in burlesque tones using highly pretentious diction to mock the people who assume we are being serious or genuinely ostentatious. A silent cruelty, & a disdainful one. We enjoyed deliberately confusing people. I know that of course it’s a manifestation of personal insecurities, or something like that. Enigmatic people, though, have to cultivate their enigmas, play on people’s curiosities. If people knew this, however, the enigma, the mystery, would cease.

I suppose you could say I suffered from a dreadful arrogance that played games w/ my autonomy.

W/ all this thought taking place & consuming my stoned mind, my erection subsided. & Gabriel passed me the joint.

“Cheers man. What you reading?”

“Turn of the Screw.”

“Henry James. I’ve read it.”

“What do you think?”

“Frightening. Frightening to think that the entire novel is related through the eyes of someone so subtly mad… psychotic… that she doesn’t know it and neither do we…”

“Yes, yes, the scary thing is that when you’re insane of course you wouldn’t know about it.”

“Where are you at?”

“The Governess has just been visited by her second horror.”

“Oooooooooh… it’s just getting good. The insanity accelerates from then on.”

I often spoke of insanity. The idea of it attracts me. It’s in the same boat as all the things which attract me like dreams & angels & myths & magic, symbols, Mystery.

I often used the word ‘insane’ as an adjective. I’d never told Gabriel (& he was the most likely person I would tell anything) that I don’t actually believe in sanity. Or intelligence. I just believe in minds.

I needed the loo.

“Mary, where’s the bathroom please.”

“Upstairs.”

That’s all I needed to know. Bathrooms are self-evident & usually exactly where you expect them to be. Still, you’ve got to ask.

“Right. Do you want the rest of this?” I offered the joint.

“Oh, yes please. Thanks.”

On leaving the room, I realised how much I’d wanted to leave it since entering it.

“I’ll take my time,” I thought.

Halfway up the brown carpeted stairs I heard Mary & Gabriel exchanging aggressive but hushed remarks w/ each other. They were squabbling. Shit. Was it something to do w/ me? No, don’t be arrogant Franco, of course not, they just waited for privacy.

I reached the top of the stairs slowly, straining to hear what they were saying downstairs.

“Don’t be so nosy Franco, go & take your piss,” I said to myself, imitating the sense of morals & responsibility that I recognised I inherently lacked.

Four possible doors faced me at the top of the stairs. I chose the one I was sure was a bathroom; but it was a bedroom. “Shit, oh well, another one of my immaculate notions ruined. Bathrooms are not self-evident after all.”

The door next to it was the right one. As I pissed, I looked around at all the fancy bottles of sprays & scents & creams & whatnot. My bathroom, in comparison, was utterly empty.

I decided I’d stay in the bathroom a little longer to give the two downstairs a fraction more privacy. Their relationship, on first impressions, was strange. They possessed a silent communication which I’d seen in other couples, but never experienced.

In front of me, they ignored each other. & Gabriel had definitely changed. I realised then, staring blankly in the mirror, that Gabriel was not a friend anymore. I no longer needed him for the public confidence he inspired in me. I no longer needed any public confidence. I had no friends. I had to get out, leave as quickly & politely as possible. W/ as much of Gabriel’s gorgeous skunk as possible.

Returning downstairs it was clear that all the fuss had subsided. Entering the living room, Gabriel had now moved to sit in my seat next to Mary on the sofa. He had his arm around her. The skunk was on the coffee-table, where Gabriel was previously sitting. I moved over & sat down. The couple were full of smiles.

For the next ½ hour, we chatted idly (except for Mary), & I was given the opportunity of rolling a spliff. Little did Gabriel know that it was also an opportunity for me to steal about ¼ of his ounce of skunk. Having convinced myself that there was no longer the same connection between us, that he wasn’t a friend, & that it was his fault as well, I reached a guilt-free state of mind, which excited me. Ah, the potentials of being guilt-free, amoral. All you needed was to be good at lying to yourself. So, skinning the J, I subtly spilled the bag under the coffee-table while the couple were smugly engrossed in some embrace. Under the coffee-table, I put a substantial handful into my left boot, then brought the rest up in the bag, laughing and apologising.

“Gabriel. After this biff I’m gonna cruise.”

“You’re going? Already?”

“Well, I’ve been here ages &… to be honest, I still don’t feel too good after that feinting episode.”

“I thought we’d do something today, go to Camden maybe.”

“Gabriel,” I joked like a friend would. “You know we never do anything if we’ve got enough weed.”

He was reluctant to agree. I knew it was because of Mary. Being w/ her changed him.

We smoked the spliff, & talked some more. I couldn’t be myself w/ him. He had become a stranger. The way he was so – insensitive about my dream as well…. That was what first alerted me to his new persona. Oh well. I managed friendly chatter, & by now had realised he probably wanted me to go anyway, & was probably experiencing the same friendship crisis between us that I was. At least he had Mary there when I left. What would she be like then? What were they really like together?

“So,” I said, standing up, “I’m off, man.”

“Cheers for phoning & coming round, it’s good that we’ve retained our friendship and are still in touch…” etc, etc,

Bullshit.

After the crap & the strange half-falsity had finally gotten too crappy to bear on both sides, I smiled at Mary.

“Pleasure to meet you,” I said looking at her intensely in her sea-green eyes, as if to communicate something more than my words actually said.

“you too,” she smiled,

“see you again.”

& then that was it. I doubted if she ever would see me again. Or Gabriel for that matter. It didn’t matter.

The door had closed behind me. I faced the street. I was free.

********

V

W/ my confidence fuelled by the safe knowledge of having something to smoke in my possession, I strolled briskly away. “Even if the worst comes to the worst,” I thought, “I can just get utterly cained & escape, pass out in a miserable gutter.” But I could not accept this as being the outcome of the day. “Decisions must be made,” I said decisively out-loud, to no-one. “I must choose.”

I turned the corner, not knowing where I was, or where I was going to. A woman w/ a pram passed me & deliberately averted her eyes from mine. I don’t know why but this fuelled my sense of drive further. My stride began to extend.

A moment later, a fragment of sun scattered through the clouds that had lay in the sky all day. A ray caught me in the eye. I began to feel quite exultant, happy to be alive, & to be me. I continued walking in a strong rhythm. My feet penetrated the street.

I started to hum; then I fitted words to the tune. I was walking directly into the beam of sunlight, which seemed to be exclusively shining on me. ‘Wow,’ I thought, light-headed & dreamy, ‘I am indeed a very special person, blessed.’ As soon as I’d felt this elated sensation float through me, the grey clouds covered the sun again, as if to punish me for my arrogance, or simply just to ruin my mood.

Angered by this, I felt like getting myself involved in a conflict against the sky & sun. I decided, in the mess of my mind, that I would will the sun back out from those clouds.

Soon my concentration faltered, though, & my thoughts maundered into silly crevices. I had turned onto a little side street, & at the end of it, I saw there was a fenced grassy opening w/ a gate. A cemetery. W/ my thought now on a level of confusion, it would be a good idea to sit down & think for a while. Maybe I could write a song.

The cemetery was virtually empty. Furthermore, it appeared to be more like a park than a cemetery. Nicely mowed lawns. Cosy gravel paths. Each tombstone lined up immaculately & forgotten about. I couldn’t believe for a minute that any of the people lying under this ground had specifically chosen this cemetery as their place of rest. Of all the places of rest on Earth.

I wandered down to the bottom of the path & sat by an unusually small gravestone under the trees in the corner. Leaves were scattered around me, fragile and crumbling.

“In loving memory of

Mary Calliope,

died 2^nd April 1882,

aged 26 years.”

That was what this curious gravestone said. It was faded & looked out of place, tucked away at the side under this tree. It seemed almost lonely. I leant against it, sitting on the damp ground, forgetting to respect the dead.

I noticed a robin hopping around the base of the nearest sycamore tree. He, or she for that matter, looked rather impoverished, skinny & tired. I immediately took pity on this little robin & felt helpless that I couldn’t give it something to eat. Instead, I smiled at it, & said “hello” in the tone of voice you’d use w/ a baby. “You can be my friend” I said wistfully, trying to put some genuine enthusiasm into my voice. I sounded false. Almost inevitably, the robin bobbed away. ‘Oh well.’

I sat there engrossed in an evolving day-dream, unable to find a single thread of productive thought, wallowing in whatever arose.

I was beginning to feel nauseous. My guts felt like sludging snakes writhing inside me. “Shit,” I thought “I haven’t eaten yet today.” What time was it? I hadn’t a clue. How long had I been sitting there? I began to panic a little, & feel light-headed. ‘Shit, I’ve got some weed, shit I forgot, wow, I’ll have another smoke and calm down.’

W/ my face down to my lap, & my fingers absorbed in the process of rolling a spliff, I did not notice the elderly woman approaching me w/ a little joke of a dog scampering beside her. Just as I lit up, & lifted my face up, she was there.

“Morning,” I said, slightly shocked.

Her face was heavy w/ old skin but could have been attractive before about 50 years of weathering set in.

“Why are you sitting on that grave?” she said abruptly.

“Well, um, actually, I am here to mourn my father’s grand mother.”

Her nosy rudeness annoyed me, & I was in the mood for retaliating on the offensive.

“She died while giving birth to my grandfather,” I continued, enjoying the freedom & spontaneity of lying, enjoying the fact that I had gained the upper hand.

“Oh,” she said solemnly. “Oh I am sorry,” she continued humbled and apologetic. I was suddenly hit by a great wave of guilt, at seeing how easily I had defeated his poor old woman, who was in the right anyway. I wanted to tell her that I was lying, & had actually stopped to roll up some illegal substances, & that yes I was a typical youth, & that you were right to question me… But she had already tottered off, w/ her little tottering dog. Oh well, no point in pitying the weak, I thought.

W/ this incident over, & seeming to have taken place hours ago, I continued with the spliff.

Slowly, I began to enter a state of mind that I’d never encountered before. My stomach seemed to expand & expand into space. I closed my eyes & felt the walls of my stomach moving outwards. I felt as if a universe was being created inside me. I felt a huge space within the entire of my body, which I felt no longer existed. I imagined seeing stars explode & planets being born &

********

VI

& I plummeted to the Dream-Film Store again…

“Here is where dreams are stored on disk,” said the friendly female voice as if on autocue. “Anything that can be dreamt, any dream sequence, it’s stacked on the shelves here in The Dream-Film Store, this shop beneath the waves.”

I felt less afraid than before.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I can explain.”

Her face, her physical form now appeared, a nubile and pulchritudinous sylph.

“Hi,” she said, resolving from the colour.

“Hi,” I said back, breaking that rule that women don’t like you copying them.

“Your loneliness, disorder and despair leads to LUST. Your agonies are self-inflicted. ALIENATION is one of them. You have escaped into The Dream Film Store. You have accidentally slipped into a crevice of your own mind and landed awake in the subconscious.”

“Really?”

“Either that or you have created a world here at the bottom of the sea symbolising mystery, women, penetration, drowning, hallucinating, dreaming, the subconscious.”

“Well which is it?”

“Your LONELINESS is a fantasy world that is the subconscious reaction to and sanctuary from the alienation, waste & disorder of your waking life. You are at war with yourself. Your subconscious is offering you peace terms.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come with me while we plummet,” she said; “plummet with me while we sleep.”

********

OUTLINE OF LIFE EVENTS THAT LEAD TO THE CONDITION OF SCIENCE

When I was only seven, and liked the film All Dogs Go To Heaven, I am said to have helped invent the net albeit only in a little way. I scribed a little book, that is, that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world – and to keep it free too. The book performed at least four scientific functions: it encrypted a scientific notion concerning Gravity; stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow around the world; calibrated an algorithm that sublimates numbers and letters on a cellular level to see if the new colour, I think, could be rendered as a cellular mark; and separated the object ‘pollen’ from its name - and I did not consciously know, even though it was writ with my own right hand.

Some might say that’s already enough or even too much for a whole life’s contribution to writing, but it was only a promising start. Then at eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand… if one was metaphorically speaking the breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the latter was the plastic spreadsheet in the lining of a jacket in the cloakroom.

Yes, then by the age of eleven I was “incrementally” marked by the maths of the new colour on the hand even though it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. At that stage I was at Caldicott. My siblings and I wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. We sang of the dog going round and round chasing own tail! I also won the government set intelligence test at the computers.

Leaving Prep School, I came into possession of a cassette cut in the reel and resealed it in a delicate operation meaning a pause in the song, and an ideal to do away with the pause. That was one experiment back then that lasted for years. It being Pearl Jam ‘VS’ I suppose the experiment was in organising a poetry machine in perpetual motion. At fifteen I formed a second band called Oedipus Wrecks. My mnemonic for the strings was indeed Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. We foreshadowed the genre Doom. I also led two friends to the island of penguins. We were three gathered in the name that Night so it could be something from the Bible but there are other options including collective hallucination.

I formed Secret Chord H and an Anon love poetry magazine while still at school, sweet sixteen. Then at eighteen years old in the year 2000, and not unlike Democritus of the Ancient Greeks, I foresaw the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in. I was a fully tuned-in prophet on other fronts too, even savant because I foresaw and spoke against September 11^th using my own brain in 2000. I did also entertain the idea that the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison might have to become the missing link to the super-human corridor in evolution – but it may not be my own thesis.

I envisioned also our Plough alignment happening, but got the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my back garden. I set aside an ideal for a book called The Scientific Papers about it all that would be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” Among the prophecies I spouted many ideas for inventions, many aphorisms, many artistic ambitions. That year I wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. So in some senses I was fairly paid for what I had contributed.

My fourth band The Flood recorded an album or even algorithm on binaural earphones… the earphones were my idea to invent, back in the den in the barn, which was never mentioned once during the band because it wasn’t me that implemented it. Already some of these things seem scientific, these motifs, this Excellent News. When writing a portfolio for Warwick University, furthermore, I entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, that Portability might be the apotheosis of form…

The Towers came down, appalling us all or at least my friend Paul. I did feel the psychosis in my brain burn and burn. Still, when I got rid of the burning feeling, I lost my memory of the conversation where I forewarned of it, the whole prophetic speech. So I had little recollection of the barn where I had foreseen and spoken against it to the day using my own brain; and was persuaded at length to continue playing in the binaural earphone band.

Attending Warwick University, in 2002, I found my teacher, Professor David Morley, whom it would seem was a reasonable man, had just brought out The Scientific Papers and with an almost-verbatim classification to mine own. When it happens in sheep it is called morphic resonance and when it happens in academia it is uncanny embrocation.

My first mobile, it reverberated the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons even happens to be an actual substance. With no degree, I returned to the band in my Gap Year haunt of Cambridge and promised on the binaural album recorded on earphones I’d “plug my senses in the mains.”

Leaving the band, I coined the neologism “co-imagination,” before attending a second university, Lancaster, where I got a First despite the onset of mental illness. My dissertation was on the scientist-poet David Morley. I attested to our Holy Cow, the white eyebrow, the alignment of the Plough, the Plough honed in to align for a beautiful rhythm change in the White House around that time.

I also attended the Secret Garden party after and found real skywriting; gravitated down south, attesting to a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital. I found my name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, as if some sensory overlay had grown as naturally as grass.

Returning north again, I built The Tower out of books I had gained that seemed to exhibit signs of natural magic, like one emanating the redolent smell of perfume that could be the word of a dog, and another that seemed to have lost a line. My PC screen bloomed purple, and I worked at the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen in an experiment into post-humanism. I also found the tape I mentioned to be a successful fusion and listening in to the suggestion of the wind cooked it in the dark blue AGA’s top oven.

When my dad died, and the purple-bleeding screen in the same instant, I discovered the sheet where pictures brown and blue simply bloomed or maybe grew. It could be portentous of the end of the chip. The pictures seem to depict the lyric to an old song I wrote in Oedipus Wrecks but the sheet is still not mine for it belongs to my younger brother who designed it, who laid it down. That was also when my boyhood book emerged which only now do I start to understand in terms of long storage. Then it was time to falsify the Nirvana barcode, and nor did I forget to extirpate every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unloose the mind of form, method-act every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.

Throughout that sequence of events I found it impossible to gain even 1p and my friends on both the right and the left deem it that that is not fair; but it is not my business to complain about money. I suppose if someone pays you for the face of stars, they themselves become a tyrant. I also suppose there might be some kind of democratisation or balancing out process going on that stops me from winning, from getting ahead. I have by now brought out many books and some albums too, only in an amateur way, and am currently in a band called Black Hole Myths, but as I say am still yet to earn a single penny from any of the life experiences I mention.

SCIENCE SAYS

Science STILL says to only keep my old falsification of the Nirvana barcode and my brother’s notion about <BEE> coming after @ in the international language alphabet.

The latter is not mine; and so I must leave it out for now at least.

In terms of the falsification of the Nirvana barcode, that refers to that occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

I actually did have a mobile phone that buzzed off before it rang, through every technological inlet in the room, telly, stereo, laptop, air.

So I wrote that down – that monochromatic drone of ‘William Tell’ – somehow - and it became a song that falsified the Nirvana barcode through bastardisations and mishearings of other people’s songs, that nevertheless worked as a piece of music unto itself, sustaining narrative, meaning and musicality all at once.

It has been called as good as Rachmaninov… but for now I am to only keep the Nirvana barcode bit from the whole sodden story!

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

It is better when contained in the poem in Soundcloud Rain, but I don’t wish to repeat-publish the poem, only signify the moment of brilliance it took to contain the whole of The Lords And The New Creatures in that new mathematical symbol.

A NOTE ON MY FIRST NUMBER

The encrypted node in the boyhood work, meanwhile, was that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break Light-speed a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah.

I see now that it was possibly adults about me who, for the sake of long storage, when the idea of the net needed storing in writing, got me to begin encrypting that with a text called

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and to continue with a second text called

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

“but then again who knows.”

The split was not even but asymmetrical like one was on and one was off. It was like spotting the flaw in Einstein. It was like saying if you write Einstein backwards it implies the breaking of light speed. It was even like saying even if we invent a time machine that can equal light speed we can only go back in time because the future hasn’t happened yet.

At some point, after the Einsteinian bit, a + sign was put in for the F of ‘scarf’ in the line

“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”

Then there was a discussion of the struggle between ‘Good and Evil’ in a piece where

“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”

In other words the first person pronoun and the time 1 o’clock were being contrasted.

It is not clear if the splitting of the two books happened next, for the number 2 in the sequence, but I think so. In terms of the number three, there was also my maths book where in among the numbers you find a three line poem going

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

To read it all you’d only need to go and get a copy of what by now I know helped invent the net but which at the time of publication I did not know helped invent the net. It’s called The Sunset Child. People have said the best one in it is called ‘My Dad.’

THE LIVING SPREADSHEET

At eight years old, then, I made the two Observations, one a breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the other the living spreadsheet.

W/r/t the latter, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I cried up the wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”

It could be described as a flat, plastic rectangle with an un-naturally regimented pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds - splurged on top.

I left the room to see if it would still be there when I went back; and it was; and so I decided to put the whole jacket in the bin.

I heard later, years later, it was called “Grand-darth’s Ship” and took its Taxonomic Genus from one of my own seven year old poems.

The poem ‘Grand-darth’s Ship’ was about how my grand-dad Don became a deep-sea diver. For a start, he actually fought against the Nazis and secondly he didn’t become a deep-sea diver in reality – he became an Officer in the R. A. F. So it just grew, evolved, this living spreadsheet, which was not an animal that reminds of wealth, but of grand-dad’s generation and the horror of war.

What I think I have learned about this specimen recently is that it was an actual monster albeit small, and that a monster needn’t be very big. Maybe we were supposed to deem it a success of scientific procedure that it was available to sensory perception in what some might call consensus reality, in other words stable and at bottom sterile.

How it came into being I do not know. Reification means “becoming a thing” and comes from Latinate etymology “res” meaning “thing” but where this living spreadsheet as I call it came from I do not know. I could start talking about “Symbiotic Homeostasis.” That means there was such a juxtaposition going on between Good and Evil that Nature acted with an homeostatic reaction. So we are talking about kinesis – but how plastic became part of that kinesis I do not know.

If it was my dad’s business and there was financial backing I’d just say that with enough financial backing anything is possible. One might deem it a shame that I threw the specimen away on judging it evil, for now we cannot examine it, but I am not convinced of that version.

They say this is what I should’ve been writing about when I was writing teenage love poetry inspired by Jim Morrison – but it’s better late than never eh?

They also say you shouldn’t write about things you cannot renew; but I think in this case of the synthesis of the living spreadsheet it might be renewable even if not by me.

I also think if you can trust my sensory perception it shows that science is the key to a world of possibility. To possibilities opening up. It shows what can be done and that is surely inspiring. I am not trying to bring down the government or start a Revolution, only report accurately on what has been seen, sound out the realm of the senses. If new possibilities arise that is surely a good thing and should not be squashed or censored.

I’M FINE

“I’m fine,” I say all the time and you wouldn’t know what I mean.

I mean I was visibly marked on the hand by the experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark when I was about 11.

I took a long thin stripe up the underside, and that is what I mean when I say I’m fine.

It didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end.

We still see that it is possible to effect your own evolution.

You could even call it self-evolution.

This one might imagine comes from within as opposed to adaptation to the environment. It might be what Darwin would focus on in my situation, nevertheless: The Theory of Self-Evolution. And if I were a shapeshifter, Protean, a changeling, I would also try and be the Darwin of light, where maybe Morley is the Einstein of water.

In short we might be able to grow new colours on a cellular level, and I might have evidence of this either way. Above all else in my science, this would seem to be the greatest revelation. If you Google the question “is it possible to change the colour of white skin through maths?” the whole net will tell you no, but this is not true, even if the colour did not turn out to be the new colour in the end.

It might not be cool to say this but last time I was in A and E after an attempted O. D. there was a female, non-white nurse who had to help me go for a pee. When I came home I heard her on the airwaves say “you looked twin-tone when you needed to pee. We would say you have re-invented the human form.”

I also heard that now they think I did the maths of the new colour (and even though it didn’t turn out either red and black or the new colour in the end), my death is going to be like Jesus – as if the + sign is a literal cross.

Further investigation into the subject with the help of A. I. suggests that the new colour could be a metaphor for the cure for cancer, which some say will never be cured because it only takes one cell to turn in order to metastasise, but I suppose what I mean is that with my experiment there is hope.

THE RED AND BLUE THING

Between the tincture and The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob there was a prose poem, or even dyad of prose poems called ‘The Fire’ and ‘The Sea’. I was thus quite old when I “did the red and blue thing” and now through reading gather that it was yet another example of embrocation with a scientist poet called David Morley, which I would see more of the older I got.

‘The Fire’ was a description of the sitting room fire, its 100 tongues that danced and entranced, here where the stars realign. It was observed; whereas ‘The Sea’ was remembered and imagined. It’s interesting though because there is a difference between humidity and moisture in the air; and the hottest star heat burns blue; and the red and blue thing as they call it, which Michael Hofmann

writes of in a poem called ‘Entr’ acte’ could be but a graph with one long line kinking headward from the heart and ending in the stars.

So that was something I did between the tincture and the first album; and back then I was a garden brick expert – my garden bricks, attention to detail in grammar and spelling too, and general keen-ness at English saw me top of the form at English every term at school. And then years later, as I say, I found out at University that Professor David Morley had done the “red and blue thing” through the elements in just the same way, when he was studying acid rain’s effect on Lake Windemere up in the Lakes where I lived as a child.

Anyhow, the boyhood work was a proof and the red and blue thing may have been enough to be another. I was already producing proofs in boyhood, which were cogent and interesting. You notice in the elemental style a complete absence of grim specimens and a belief in the Natural sciences. The embrocation with David Morley could be down to his researching the effects of acid-rain on Lake Windemere in my boyhood, but there are other potential causal factors such as that I was the witness and he was an evolutionary scientist and still is.

THE EMOTIONAL COLLAPSE

Also between the tincture and The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob I had a complete emotional collapse. I was in the I. T. Room at Prep School, in days before I had entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, and it all got on top of me. I was talking to the teacher and suddenly started sobbing. The teacher was hugging me, asking and asking “what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” and all I could say was “I don’t know! I don’t know!” To this day I cannot pinpoint what upset me so, but I was going through changes and suppose that I was entitled to feel sad.

I had never heard of The Lords And The New Creatures, as hadn’t my mother, but I think I was already the witness. I hadn’t read my seven year old book because it had to be locked in the attic but in it I had already helped invent the net and my thing was now marked by the mathematics contained in it. It all got on top of me and made me break down in tears, and it wasn’t just any old crying – I was heaving with sadness.

If you look in The Lords And The New Creatures, it starts with “Look where we worship,” and funnily enough I had by that stage already had a black out in chapel. I think it a naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor and woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

The New Creatures of course begins with the words:

“Snakeskin jacket

Indian eyes

brilliant hair

he moves in disturbed

Nile insect

air.”

If you look at my experiences, the wood, the plastic spreadsheet, the tear up the front, it templates over the opening of The New Creatures – which has always seemed cryptic to me, ambiguous, impossible to fully understand. If Jim Morrison was scripting a witness, factoring in a foreseen human repository, with his opening gambit, the sheer incomprehensibility of his language might account for why I was lost for words when having a breakdown. What I might now mean is if you want to understand what Morrison meant, find out what the subsequent witness went through and that will reveal what Morrison meant; and what really came after “brilliant hair” was an experience of tremendous sadness and being lost for words about it too.

I have by now read and reread The Lords And The New You Know Who. He does say “a creature waits out the war,” meaning the Cold War; and my dad did say he sold his art dealing business at the fall of the old Berlin Wall; but Jim Morrison also talks of “the dry end of vacuum boat,” connoting “the wrong end of the stick,” as if to say “if we get in trouble for what evolves we need to be able to say they got the wrong end of the stick.”

There is an Irish accent in the second moiety The New Creatures, derived straight from James Joyce that I have detected. The ending is beautiful, almost eschatological and prelapsarian in one. Overall some say it’s as good as The Waste Land by TS Eliot; and some, like Dr. Tony Sharpe of Lancaster University, have contended that “the genius of the witness is elusive.” That’s me: present in the book before I was born. I mentioned in Transition To Philosophy a little bit about the difference between being the witness ‘in,’ ‘of,’ ‘to’ and ‘from’. The witness ‘in’ is scripted in the book when Morrison says “we need a witness to the killing.” The witness ‘of’ attests to specimens themselves. The witness ‘from’ is the correct endorsement and the witness ‘to’ a mere formality after the correct endorsement is made. I think I already made this clear in Transition To Philosophy, and am but repeating myself. Not only have I gone to town on reading and rereading Morrison’s text, but I have rewritten it, many times over.

THE DREAM FILM STORE 2026

I

All of a sudden I woke up, no seaweed in my hair, eyes stinging, in the cemetery in the witness’s city as before. I had had a dream of the future, of maths and science, of a book in the undersea of dreams below. It was still the same old grey day as before though. Grey streams pervaded the sky. It felt like a day of intermittent rain. I stood up and brushed the crumbs of skunk and baccy off my top. I made my way to the gate of the cemetery. I didn’t even have 10p with which to call Gabriel from an old red phonebox. The nubile, pulchritudinous sylph of the Dream Film Store was no longer beside me. I went back to the flat, which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, and skinned a bifter and put on The Pixies. My CD was a bit stop start, had the odd slight scratch but apart from that it was smooth. I thought about the cannabis I had been smoking, how it was a magical sacrament. I avoided the mirror. It was into the afternoon already. My shoe box of papers complicated my thinking to no beneficial end so I ignored that for now. But the cannabis, it propitiated great realms within realms. I guess I smoked it to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, touch the texture not name side of life, renounce fidelity to surface gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance. There was a font change to italics, a switch thrown on the tenses. To light it and write it, burn and unlearn was my motto.

Anyhow, I lived quite close to a pub called The Queen’s Head and feeling a bit thirsty went for a lager and lime. The pub was quite empty apart from a few afternoon deadbeats washed up, the likes of which I was probably destined to become unless I could sort my life out. After taking a few sips of my lager and lime I downed the rest of it and went for a rollie in the pub garden. In the vision of the future I had had in the dream in the cemetery, they even did away with smoking sections on trains. Maybe it was time to give up smoking, to lead a healthy life, to flourish?

I went back home to my flat, feeling the effect of only one pint, had another bifter and guess what?

Down

down

down

down

down

I sank into the Dream Film Store once again. Coral staircase in the key of C. What images rise or try to rise in your mind?

“Welcome again to the Dream Film Store,” she said.

I looked her in the eyes and smiled. She had a beautiful face that resolved in the corner of the dream. I needed to know what was going on, all that science, so I asked her what was going on, which it was, real or dream and she said

“do you want to have a coffee to talk about it?”

I said okay, and she made some instant. The Dream Film Store looked like an old HMV – remember those? – except the CD’s that were stacked up were dreams. There was a stack behind the counter and a door leading to the backrooms.

She said “you’re right, the legality of the science depends on it all being a dream.”

She took me through the door into the backrooms of the store and she said there you found a network of infinite corridors containing rooms full of infinite dreams stacked up in disks. We went into the first room and sipped our coffee in the shop at the bed of the sea. She said

“it is all a dream.”

I asked her why. She said it was an erotic fantasy, where a nubile sylph was dominated, and through whom we look. There were a whole stack of similar such erotic fantasies to my left.

“I chose you because I need someone down here to help me with the smooth running of dreams,” she said. “I was trying to allure you.”

She then offered me the chance to stay in the undersea below and attain the real dream, live any dream I want and for it to be real.

“All you’d need to do is give up cannabis,” she said. “It’s your choice. But I am offering myself to you.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. The content of the dream we had been through was quite heavy, quite scientific, and necessitated it all being a dream. If I could have asked my author what he did it for, he might say to keep all the science and maths of his boyhood in the same compendium. To consign the illegal matter of the wood to history and mythology. To falsify the science and replace the lost boyhood book. To allow it so that what I went through can be renewed when my body is rotting underground if someone wants to renew it and can. To make the shape of supplication towards the future state. Even to supply Simon Pomery with another number he can translate in his post-poetic and psycho-technological way. In other words for light.

I thought about it but said no thanks to her offer and she said that was fine and let me slip back to the surface.

II

I sat in my flat which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, asking myself what was real and what was dream. I wasn’t much of an amateur psychologist so couldn’t interpret my dream very well. Maybe I needed to see a psychiatrist? As far as I understood I had been privy to the boyhood science of someone called John. Or rather, should I say, “that was what I did when I was a kid.” For it already wasn’t clear if that ‘I’ is Franco the character or John F B Tucker the real human writer. That means things are still quite dreamy and unstable. Maybe what I needed was to go to the library, be it to look for psychiatrists online or read up on the science and maths of this bloke John F B Tucker whose name I dimly remember from the initial dream sequence? The library was ten minutes walk away, an old red brick building, up the hill a little bit and to the left when you get to the main street. I had been there several times and was a member. I was quite well-read even though I never finished my University course. That I was still dreaming didn’t cross my mind. But I remember feeling like becoming a scientist or a mathematician at the moment I thought I had awoken from the dream sequence. Maybe to still be me, Franco, would be holding up the traffic… the rock re-invents itself and that is for sure. The first thing I needed to do was skin another bifter for the walk to the library. Hopefully I would get there without any further “sliding into the Dream Film Store.” And when I get there I can access the computers, get online, maybe read up on some maths and science.

III

I took a right out the house and another right at the end of the street, then up the hill, then took a left to the library, smoking my bifter all the way. If ever I was to design something like Nash’s Equilibrium it would be all about cannabis in a way. There was a poem for Flora back home in my shoebox that contained the idea without giving it away.

The poet delights in a wilful obscurity, opacity, bats, black magnets, firking, encryption and code. The poet also extirpates every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unlooses the mind of form, method-acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio broadcasting dreams. As I walked to the library I cupped the spliff in my hand so nobody could see it but the smell was Everywhere. It was Gabriel’s GM skunk, and he only smoked the best, be it cheese, trainwreck or whatever.

Not knowing if I was still dreaming or not I got to the library and got some computer time. I looked at first for therapists but none of them were even smiling in the pictures of their faces, which looked an ominous sign. I also Googled the name John Tucker to see if the dream sequence presented a real scientist and there was no sign of him. Whatever route I had taken to the library it seemed a waste of a journey. I went back home, only ten minutes to the flat.

When I got back to the flat I was feeling more myself… I, Franco, of the Franco-Prussian War, was able to then make myself a coffee and reflect. It must’ve been hard, for example, to go through so many schools, carrying that burden, of being the witness or not, from a young age. Maybe victories at creative writing were all that kept you going, be it the essay on the wood at Rugby School, from which you had to depart, or the book of verse you sent back to F-D, when you had to depart from Wellington College, or the band Oedipus Wrecks you started at Habs, from which you had to depart, or the poetry magazine you started at Oundle, from which you had to depart, or even the last year of Sixth Form, at Chetwynde, where after all the departing you wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation.

By now it was time to dream of something new… I felt like I had been through a complete scene and wished to do another. It might not be for me to decide but if I could select someone to give a Nobel Prize it wouldn’t be me but the guy who designed the sheet where pictures grew, even if it be only in dreams.

IV

Still in my flat, I made some beans on toast. Ever since I was a student it was a must have, fill-a-hole meal. It filled a hole even if not extravagant. I hadn’t any cheese to put on top. I was on the Dole (as it was still called then). Maybe soon though I would be on Sickness Benefits if things continued in the same vein? After I had eaten my beans on toast I stuck Nirvana on the CD player. It was Incesticide, an album of grimy B-sides and rarities. They never did a bad song, Nirvana. I loved Kurt Cobain’s voice, the light sabre energy of the guitar, the dynamism of the rhythm section.

In my flat, I was doing some thinking… of course it was all a dream, in much the same way as A. I. is programmed not to know about the Naturalistic Observations of Joyce, Hughes and Morrison, which were themselves but a dream, because that is the point: it is all a dream.

Rimbaud says “dreaming is shameful since it is pure loss.” Peter Blegvad used to teach that “in dreams there is no context.” I watched a telly program about dreams that said we are dreaming all the time except when asleep without sensory stimulus. It also said we inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors who had to rehearse for the real live situation. You can train yourself to lucid dream and then in dreams visit the local McDonalds and thus have a dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment already went to Heaven where we all took particles of dirt that worked like wonder drugs, and chanted the mantra “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect.”

You can also smuggle language out of the unconscious. Michael Hofmann says language smuggled out of the unconscious is a leather boxing glove protruding from the telly on a mechanical, metal arm. It could be that there is a book in the undersea of dreams below. Once I had to fly to the Isle of Man using any contraption I could dream up, to pick up a collection of poetry the shape of a remote control and made of chocolate from a white garden table. Another time an actual text down there in which I was dreaming and which seemed in the dream at least to have meaning was signed three times by Einstein’s value for light, c. Another time I held an actual book in my hands in the dream, and it was written by my friend; and it was amazing, inspiring great envy with its oneiric-textured and liminal phrasing.

My father said dreams are merely bureaucratic work; Freud took them more srsly, saying “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” I reckon if there is a book down there we can drag it out, like a shipwreck. I would therefore need to get down there again, into the unconscious so smoked another bifter and waited for ambush. I wasn’t sure it was going to arrive, because I was willing it to happen so it wasn’t like “ambush by the unruly unconscious,” as you hear of on English Literature courses, but nevertheless...

Down

down

down

down

down

I plummeted

down a coral staircase in C sharp minor,

to the Dream Film Store again.

V

“We’ve got some amazing things down here,” she said. She meant dreams stored on disk. It was only now that I asked her her name and she said “what is your best guess?” For some reason even though the odds were against it, because of its unusually high rate and frequency, I thought Mary, and she said that was correct! She said she had some cracking dreams. The Periodic Table arrived in a dream. She said if I wanted I could be anyone, on an experiential level while the dream lasted. She was trying to entice me down there to help her with the smooth running of dreams.

I told her I wished for my dreams to contain something be it science or magic. I was reading a book about a character who had a glittering and even insane CV. At seven he helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at his house to give it a chance to grow all the way round it was him. He was then the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, twice making obscene observations. He was then marked by his own experiment into the maths of the new colour but it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. He also attained the face of stars, predicted a massive economic crash to the day, and spoke against it, and just as you thought “scientist!” went and wrote the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. He’d also been in bands and was in short a polymath. That was all before leaving school. I had nothing like that in my boring existence, me, Franco of the Franco-Prussian war, and maybe I was glad to not be in the limelight, but I yearned for something to have, something to my own name too… maybe if Mary could organise the Real Dream as she said I could become a scientist through meaningful transmogrification, or if not a scientist, then at least someone.

It might be getting a bit ahead of its time, into science fiction, but in the book I was reading, the main character also recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying he would plug his senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, had his name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered a sheet of paper where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew. It sounded fantastical to me, like the author was trying to build a genius, a time-soldier, a meta-Finch, but that was what I was reading and I wondered if that was why I had the dream of science and maths, when we plummeted, or if I am getting confused and in fact the character is not someone I am reading of but that that was the content of my scientific dream… I also wondered if, knowing what I was exploring intellectually, Mary chose a dream of similar things to entice me. Now all the lights were on in The Dream Film Store.

“Franco,” she said “you are a Deus of Chaos and I want to suck your cock. May I please?”

I said by all means, starting to think, and got it out for her. She wrapped her lips around my bell end and cradled my balls and made sumptuous sounds, the sounds of sumptuous consummation. With something like that in your mouth, be it a gun or a penis, you can only make vowel sounds. One thing led to another and before I came, Mary and I undressed and made love. In the Dream Film Store. At the bottom of the sea. Where dreams are stored on disk. With all the lights on as I say.

VI

I woke in my flat after sex. Things were intriguing but confused. I didn’t think they would ever be sorted out. I had penetrated a surrealistic fantasy world. I guess sometimes you need a green parrot sent to space through the conch and at others a patch of taut blue denim for realism, thus to calibrate a scale between fantasy and realism… as a private school boy I excelled at matters of creative writing… they were my victories. What was bugging me now was the character I read of or maybe dreamed of or maybe dreamed I read of and all the wonderful things he does. I looked about the flat. It would have to be a book. That’s why I didn’t buy them, all those wonderful things he does.

At seven he helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at his house to give it a chance to grow all the way round it was him. He was then the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, twice making obscene observations. He was then marked by his own experiment into the maths of the new colour but it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. He also attained the face of stars, predicted a massive economic crash to the day, and spoke against it, and just as you thought “scientist!” went and wrote the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. He’d also been in bands and was in short a polymath. That was all before leaving school. I had nothing like that in my boring existence, me, Franco of the Franco-Prussian war, and maybe I was glad to not be in the limelight, but I yearned for something to have, something to my own name too… maybe if Mary could organise the Real Dream as she said I could become a scientist through meaningful transmogrification, or if not a scientist, then at least someone.

It might be getting a bit ahead of its time, into science fiction, but in the book I was reading, the main character also recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying he would plug his senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, had his name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered a sheet of paper where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew.

I

All of a sudden I woke up, no seaweed in my hair, eyes stinging, in the cemetery in the witness’s city as before. I had had a dream of the future, of maths and science, of a book in the undersea of dreams below. It was still the same old grey day as before though. Grey streams pervaded the sky. It felt like a day of intermittent rain. I stood up and brushed the crumbs of skunk and baccy off my top. I made my way to the gate of the cemetery. I didn’t even have 10p with which to call Gabriel from an old red phonebox. I had definitely woken in the morning, left the flat, gone to Gabriel’s, passed out, left Gabriel’s… but what else? I had come to the cemetery. The gravestone of Mary Calliope was next to me, grey as grey matter. It suddenly struck me that to complete a scene I had to understand that Mary Calliope was the name of the woman in the Dream Film Store. I had a look to see if I had any weed still and I had. When next I saw the woman, in the undersea, I would ask if I knew her name correctly. But now I was in the cemetery. Things were unstable.

I went back to the flat, which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, and skinned a bifter and put on The Pixies. My CD was a bit stop start, had the odd slight scratch but apart from that it was smooth. I thought about the cannabis I had been smoking, how it was a magical sacrament. I avoided the mirror. It was into the afternoon already. My shoe box of papers complicated my thinking to no beneficial end so I ignored that for now. But the cannabis, it propitiated great realms within realms. I guess I smoked it to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, touch the texture not name side of life, renounce fidelity to surface gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance. There was a font change to italics, a switch thrown on the tenses. To light it and write it, burn and unlearn was my motto. I had a taste for waste, for deep fried Mars bars. But all the old props were falling away, if culture is a set of props, I mean… they were falling away. There was nothing underneath, like in the Radiohead song at the same time, which meant an inescapable postmodern nightmare where there was nothing but props. As you know I never finished my English course but I did come round to thinking postmodernism is not a massive, extended metaphor for the effects of cannabis on the brain. I suddenly felt sick with what I was doing and went back to bed and drifted in and out of consciousness. That was when I sank down to the Dream Film Store again as if for the last time…

“Franco,” she said, and I, “are you the woman from the grave stone?”

She said yes, and that we were lovers in a past life.

I believed her.

She also said “you were in Lower Sixth when you took an acid trip too strong for anyone and never came back. You came back home, even though you had never come back from the trip, and started a grimy, dirge-like novel called The Dream Film Store inspired by The Beach by Alex Garland, also Hunger by Knut Hamsun. It was the year 2000, by the time you actually sat down to write it, and you wrote it well, all in a single, black, leather-bound notebook, which you kept in your green tuck box from boarding school, from which you had been expelled for substances. Your main character was based on Rimbaud.”

“Hang on,” I said, “am I not the main character myself?”

“Yes you are,” she said.

“Are you telling me I am but a character in my own fiction?”

“I am telling you you are dreaming as we speak, and that when you dream there are no rules, there is no logic. It’s like when you write about drugs – it’s a poor thing to write of because anything can happen.”

“What happens for the rest of the novel?” I asked.

She said “you only wrote about 20 pages then had to abandon it and now it is 26 years later and you’ve rediscovered it and are trying to extend it.”

“How am I getting on?”

“You’ll end up in mental hospital if you keep going like you are. You’ll hear the dawn chorus at midnight.”

“I don’t want to have these dreams anymore,” I said, and she “I will let you slip back to the surface then… but don’t come blaming me when you smoke too much weed another time.”

II

Where was I? Not the cemetery but my flat. I skinned a bifter for the journey, and then head out for the park. Things were confused and confusing still, but I could put it down to dreams. They were a license for ill-planning and impoverishment of the imagination. It was afternoon and I made it to the park where there was a band stand, a bench to sit on, a paddling pool for little children, a playground, a tennis court and acres of room for strangers to play football against each other – for all who said there was no community in the city?

There was an ice-cream van. Back in the days of Open Poem Opium we had a song called ‘Ice Cream Van’ about an ice cream van that also had drugs and guns on the reverse side of his menu. We tried to get the musical jingle of the ice cream van in the sound and made it heavy, dissonant, distorted. We believed distortion = clarity. We were into cleansing by chaos.

I went and got myself an ice-cream and sat down on the bench. I watched the parade of people, joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, families, football playing youths, young lovers strolling and felt bemused by it all. Then guess what happened next? I saw Mary Calliope! In the queue for the ice-cream van. I wasn’t sure whether or not to go up to her and say hi. So I pretended I hadn’t seen her but it was definitely her. I finished my ice cream and sat there watching. She moved further off with her ice cream, I believe pistachio flavour by the looks of it. Mine, b/t/w/ was salted caramel. It was good. It gave you brain—freeze but was good. I skinned a rollie and flicked ash on the ground, witnessed a red kite, with a fifty-butterflied tail, flitting in the high wind of karma, saw a kid lose his ice cream to gravity and the family dog lick it up, had a rush of nicotine clarity to the head, felt like I was passing through a colour while being colour-blind, maybe it was blue, maybe green, forgot for a while what colour white is, what is a while, if this is where the truth flies or the truth fairy, forgetting also how to spell “is” then suddenly, all of a sudden, awoke again in the cemetery, on the bench, same day as before!

Hello, my name is John F B Tucker and I was the witness when I was wee. I decided to get some sleep and wade out to get my books, but the sea came crashing to the shore instead.