MONDAY
20th SEPTEMBER
Whenever I experience a
nightmare these days, like earlier this morning, I am in the habit of turning
violent. I refuse to be
intimidated. Usually, a sudden uprush of retaliatory anger has the effect of obliterating
the nightmare, and I lie awake feeling slightly
annoyed that I was obliged to resort to something which had the effect of
waking me up prematurely. If I can't
force myself back to sleep as quickly as possible, I lie there fantasizing or,
alternatively, thinking over the chain of events which led up to the crisis.
Now from what I can remember about this particular chain of
events, a man in a raincoat and trilby, whom I had never seen before, stepped
through my french windows and tried to strangle me
whilst I lay in bed. When I realized
what he was up to, I struggled free and yelled, at what seemed like the top of
my voice: 'Piss off, you stupid sod!' and began to lash out at him with my
fists. Then I suddenly woke up with a
start and discovered that I was in an empty room. The mysterious stranger had evidently beat a hasty retreat!
So far as I can now recall, most of my nightmares over the past
few years have assumed a similar pattern; retaliatory abuse of the most
expletive kind serves to dispel the impending calamity, and the assailant, whether
human or otherwise, suddenly finds himself confronted by more opposition than
he had evidently bargained for. However,
as a child my nightmares were very different, both in substance and outcome,
and often took the form of a chase. I
would almost invariably encounter a hairy monster, a sort of large ape-like
beast who frequented derelict houses at night and who may well have been a sort
of perverted father-figure come to steal me away from my mother. How or why I got to these houses I shall
never know, but I was usually alone and, like most young children, highly
inquisitive. Now at sight of the
monster, which either appeared on the scene from around a corner or out of a
dark hole in the ground, I would beat a hasty retreat. But, as it was night, everywhere was dark and
forbidding, which caused me to experience considerable difficulty in finding my
way home. At the same time I somehow
sensed that the monster was hot-on-my-heels, though I could never force myself
to look back in order to acquire concrete verification. The initial glimpse of him had evidently been
enough!
What really troubled me, however, was that I couldn't escape
quickly enough; for my efforts to evade his pursuit were gradually becoming
harder and harder, and I felt my legs overcome by an incredibly overpowering
heaviness, as though I were wearing deep-sea diver's boots or the ground
possessed a powerful magnetic quality which inhibited movement. Now while this was going on, and I was desperately
struggling to quicken my pace, it occurred to me that the monster was steadily
gaining ground, that he need only stretch out a large hairy claw and I would be
done for, torn limb-from-limb or eaten alive.
Terror-stricken, I turned to face my pursuer, who by this time had borne
down on me, in order to experience the worst.
But my last-moment panic invariably woke me up, and I would lie drenched
in sweat with my head ducked under the blankets and my heart pounding away like
it was about to explode. Fortunately for
me the explosion had already taken place, since the nightmare was blown to
pieces! All that remained to do then was
to prevent my imagination from going back over the sordid details of the chase
and digging up fresh evidence against me, fresh horrors from the dungeon of my
petrified soul. Had I been able to get
quickly back to sleep, this problem would never have arisen. But my imagination usually had ideas of its
own, and the more I struggled against it, to avoid a recapitulation of the
dream sequence, the more dedicated it became to frustrating my struggles until,
an hour or so later, my soul was a hideous prison of mortal fears!
As it happens, I don't experience such ghastly nightmares these
days, probably because I'm old enough to look after myself and am more
psychically evolved, in any case. But I
still hide most of my head under the bedding, as though to shield it from the
proximity of invisible powers who only come out, as it
were, at night. That is undoubtedly a
legacy from childhood, as is an occasional tendency of mine to discern the
outlines of faces, masks, profiles, disguises, etc., in a variety of small
patterns and/or nondescript shapes, doubtless because I still have an active
imagination. At the age of five or six I
was often frightened by the many projections cast by shadows, by the 'bogeymen'
who inhabited the curtains, appeared behind lampshades, paraffin heaters,
clothes hangers, and other domestic objects, hugging the walls with their
ominous silhouettes. I almost expected
to see one of these silent projections move and slowly turn towards me, in
order to petrify me with a pair of piercing eyes which, until then, had
remained firmly closed, and thus hidden from view. It must have been similar to the suspense I
subsequently felt at the cinema during the introduction to those old Edgar
Wallace thrillers (I think!), when a metallic man slowly swivelled around in
his chair and you waited breathlessly for a full view of his authoritative
face, that apparently omniscient gaze which encompassed everyone and everything,
and from which you knew there was no escape.
Long before I was regularly taken to the cinema I must have attributed
similar powers to the shadows which haunted my room, because I could never
force myself to sleep unless the light was left on, so that things remained exactly as and where
they were. Then I knew what I was up
against, that the shadows had fixed limits.
Once the light was turned off, however, there would be no limit to what
they could get up to; they might feel protected against detection and multiply
in the dark, like frenzied ghosts.
Well, whatever they did, I no longer worry about them at
all. Yet I can still detect the outlines
of strange faces, masks, etc., if I choose to stare at my flowery wastepaper
bin or crazy-patterned lino some evenings.
There is nothing particularly frightening about this propensity, which
would hardly be worth calling hallucinatory.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that I can occasionally construct an
imaginary face or two if I really focus my attention on doing so, if I allow my
adult imagination to wander a little in the direction of Salvador Dali's
'paranoiac critical' methodology.
However, when I awoke from this morning's nightmare I didn't in
the least imagine that 'bogeymen' were lurking in the shadows. But, all the same, I couldn't get back to
sleep as quickly as I'd have liked to either, nor did
I fancy the idea of allowing the night air to caress my ears. So I must have been dozing for quite some
time before I entered the next dream (of which I now retain only the vaguest of
recollections), though a dream or two later I was dancing with an attractive
dark-haired girl who also permitted me to fondle her breasts. Naturally, I would have preferred this episode
of my dream life to continue much longer than it did; for when I squeezed her
tits, she thanked me warmly and cried: "Oh, do it again!" over and
over, as though she hadn't been toyed with in ages and my service was
consequently of especial significance to her.
So I made every effort to be of further assistance and when,
all-too-soon and for some unaccountable reason, I woke up ... I felt bitterly
disappointed that the dream in question hadn't permitted me a few additional
and, as it were, deeper intimacies besides.
But there you are! I
experienced both heaven and hell in one night.
My dream life had once again become more important to me than my waking
one. Indeed, so much so that, when I
eventually crawled out of bed this morning, it was with the ominous feeling
that my next round of dreams would have to be paid for at the high cost of a
day's intensive labour. My new literary
venture was awaiting me, in consequence of which I would be compelled to mould
something from the various notes made during the past two weeks.
Of course, if things became too onerous I could always read for
a couple of hours, visit a museum or art gallery, take a lengthy stroll, or
even go to the cinema. Yes, why
not? My last visit to the cinema had
been several months ago and, as far as I could now recall, it had amounted to
an extremely memorable experience. I had
seen an adaptation of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, with
Max Von Sydow in the title role, and it had made such
a profound impression on me that, for an entire week, I could think of nothing
else. In fact I re-read the novel (for
about the fifth time), and then went and saw the same film at a different
cinema the following week! For films
like Steppenwolf and, for that matter, Siddhartha (another Hesse adaptation) are comparatively rare, in fact so rare
that, when you see them, you're aware of experiencing an important film event,
the sort of event that probably won't occur too many times in your life,
particularly when you reflect on the crassly violent nature of the countless
commercial films which continuously swamp the market with their mass-produced
inanities and vulgarities.
However, in returning to the present, I'm not really
anticipating any such important event, filmic or otherwise, today. It will probably be one of those lukewarm
days that drag along in a rather monotonous fashion - the sort of day with
which the ailing Harry Haller was apparently well acquainted!
MONDAY
EVENING
When I eventually
settled down to doing some writing this morning, it had gone
However, at the moment I am in the process of recording some
fresh thoughts, particularly about the money in my pocket. Admittedly, there is
nothing remarkably strange or unusual about it.
But what does strike me as a little
odd is the fact that it only fully dawned on me today, whilst I was handing
some silver across the counter at The Cornerstop
Café (a different place, incidentally, from the one I invariably have
breakfast in), that it wasn't really mine, since it had undoubtedly passed
through many thousands of hands before me and had probably collected as much
unspeakable filth, in the process, as one either cared or dared to
imagine. I was fiddling with the coins
in my pocket, feeling their edges, weighing them on my fingers, caressing their
obverses and reverses absentmindedly, when suddenly, as though from a stunning
flash of insight, I realized that this money was essentially communist, that it
belonged to everybody ... from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the
poor. I almost threw the silver I was
holding into the greasy, outstretched hand of the plump waitress, in order to
be rid of it as quickly as possible and thus 'decontaminate' myself. It would have been far too demoralizing for
me to have thrown up my lunch there and then on account of a handful of dirty
coins!
Yesterday, the day before yesterday, and any number of days
prior to that, I wouldn't have given the matter as much as a single
thought. My chief concerns were (a) to
have enough money to get by on; (b) to make sure I didn't lose any; and (c) to
ensure that I kept a constant check on my spending. Today, however, I acquired an additional
concern: I wanted to wash the rest of my coins under the tap in order to
sterilize them! I somehow feared that my
hands, and possibly even my mouth, had already become 'contaminated', in which
case it was too late for me to rectify anything; my skin would be swarming with
thousands upon thousands of ugly germs which had been transferred from the
dull, greasy, piss-smeared coins in my pocket.
Indeed, my mouth was at that very moment probably seething with
countless microbes which had no business being there. It would be justice to smoke them out with
the aid of the worst imaginable cigarettes, to rid myself of these pestiferous
little monsters that thrive on dirty coins!
What really amazes me, however, is that I hadn't thought about
this problem before, but had treated my money somewhat matter-of-factly (as
people usually do when they've never been accustomed to real bellyaching
poverty), without in the least suspecting that it could have had a most
unhygienic history; that, for example, somebody could have dropped a 10p coin
on the dirty pavement or not washed his hands after going to the lavatory; that
a disease-ridden prostitute could have reached into somebody's sweaty pocket to
extract a few crumpled bank notes and a little loose change, or pushed a 50p
coin across an ash-stained, beer-stained, sweat-stained, spew-stained counter
in some dingy neighbourhood pub.
Everybody and anybody, from a king to a beggar, could have nonchalantly,
unwittingly, playfully fingered these coins in exactly the same way as me,
without in the least suspecting the true extent of their filth. Even the local health inspector wouldn't have
known exactly what he was dealing with.
For this really is a case of 'Where ignorance is bliss ...'
Anyway, I'm not going to let all this bother me too much, since
I don't value my life that highly, even though I find it difficult to be
flippant about it. In fact, the most
seemly thing to do now would be to make a point of only touching money - notes
as well as coins - when I have to, in order to minimize the risk of infection.
These wretched flies! I
am sure they have a mind of their own.
No sooner have I begun to eat a peanut-butter sandwich and to shoo the
filthy insects away than they turn spiteful and converge on me from all
directions, like kamikaze pilots. I
ought to do the job properly and swat them all to death, knock the stale air
out of their filthy lungs, but I don't possess a fly-swat, nor
even a newspaper today. You would think,
though, that the little wretches would leave you alone when you've given-up
struggling with them, that they would take the hint and become reasonable. No such luck!
One of the little buggers seems particularly bent on revenge. He is even going so far as to wander around the
rim of my mug until he arrives at the place against which I normally put my
mouth and, doubtless encouraged by the obnoxious residue of stale tea, has now
begun to rub his front legs together as though to gleefully deposit something
unspeakably despicable upon it, the dirty little shit! Absolutely no sense of decency! Right now the only thing that concerns him is
how best to irritate me.
Yes, but if by ill-luck he gets out of here alive he will settle
on the first piece of tempting filth his big wild eyes lead him to, quite as
though I had never existed. Indeed, he
will probably become part of a colony of fellow shit-mongers. And if he then encounters a member of the
opposite sex with whom he fancies some kind of coital arrangement is feasible,
he will leap upon her and do everything in his power to breed more flies. The only thing that really matters to him is
to revel in as much sex, filth, spitefulness, and flying as his comparatively
short and highly precarious existence will permit, to die after a full,
adventurous, and productive life. That
is doubtless why he refuses to waste any more time over a slightly humiliated
human being like me, but continues to do exactly as he pleases, despite my
obstinate protestations. He absolutely
refuses to acknowledge my moral superiority over him, the egotistical little
pig!
Still, I shouldn't allow myself to become so upset over this
relatively trivial intrusion. I haven't
fallen so low. If I were a scientist,
however, I could quite understand it.
Flies, rats, spiders, skunks, frogs, lizards, worms, lice, and snakes
are often the very justification of a scientist's existence, his raison
d'être. He can rattle off a hundred-page
thesis on genetic anomalies in rats without batting an eyelid. He has compiled immense volumes of highly
erudite material concerning the lower animals, and sometimes concerning things
far below them - for example, microbes.
From these and similar investigations he has instigated remarkable breakthroughs
in the world of organic knowledge. His
distinguished colleagues clap vehemently and spontaneously in unanimous
appreciation of his important findings, and from laboratory to laboratory,
lecture hall to lecture hall, country to country, his knowledge of rats,
spiders, flies, and other such lowly creatures has steadily increased his
authority and overwhelming prestige. The
age of rats is on the wane; they will soon be virtually extinct. When Professor Ratcatcher
has completed his studies and is satisfied with his findings, there will be
little reason for their continued existence.
After all, it's mainly through such studies that, thanks in large
measure to the professor's perseverance and unshakeable optimism, man will be
able to aspire towards his noblest achievements to-date, that he'll embrace the
future with fresh hope and, above all, as strong a desire to eliminate flies
and spiders as he previously showed with regard to the more accessible
vermin. So be it! I leave Professor Ratcatcher
to his worthy task, and just hope that he doesn't treat the coins in his pocket
with the same insouciance as most of us now treat flies!
Now it is time for a short nocturnal stroll. If I don't get a change of air soon, there'll
be a strong possibility of my suffocating to death and being metamorphosed into
a fly or something equally disagreeable, like one of Kafka's enigmatic
characters.
