Doctor Faustus made a pact with the devil, one he came unsurprisingly deeply to regret though remorse was no escape. I made no such pact, would not even if I could. But I did, when this wretched sarcoma came, avow that as best I could I would live long enough to see E grow up.
Being somewhat the pedant I would have seen her turning eighteen as that moment of formal adulthood. But I think she has beaten me to it at a mere seventeen. Left school, with a more or less live-in boyfriend [see earlier] the dear infant - ah but no longer that - even started her first job on Tuesday this.
A veterinary practice in the village has taken her on as a trainee, but the first of many steps to qualifying in some profession to care for animals. A man - a father more - could not be more proud. At lunchtime on her first day, I texted her to enquire how she was doing. 'So far so good' came the reply. Dear child - that too no longer - I could not bring myself to add 'Just another forty years to go then!'
And so she has grown up and my avowal is fulfilled, thank the Lord. I do not believe Lucifer has come to claim his reward, for it was not with him I made my concordat. But maybe, just perhaps, higher claims are being put upon me. We shall see. It may not be, but if so then I shall rest in peace.
Not until the very late autumn is my next scan - the proverbial now annual date with destiny - and I do trust I shall manage some undisturbed nights while I wait. I get the message, believe me, if message there is to be one.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
La Mort Encore....
What is it with me and death at present I ask? Last night, once more, death came by in a singularly aggressive and unmannerly manner. A dream again, yet perchance a portent? (Might even be minded to check my life insurance policy, but then that wouldn't take long as I have none.)
The circs. were slightly different, though the grabbing, thrusting act was the same. A totally invisible force this time; no hand or arm just a sharp presence.
Forewarned being forearmed, when death struck last night I struck back. It grabbed me, so I grabbed it with equal, opposing force. That though not to its liking one bit - nor actually to any useful avail - for it merely hurled me the length of the dream room leaving me startled, winded and more or less running up the white flag of surrender.
That the moment to wake up of course, in something of a muck sweat and wonderfully rationally aware that the fell fiend was there before me still, an inch from my face daring me to open my eyes to confront its invisible self.
So I did. Eyes ablaze, but it was not there. It had fled my conscious counterblast. For this time at least death has not undone me. I do believe though it is getting bolder by the hour.
The circs. were slightly different, though the grabbing, thrusting act was the same. A totally invisible force this time; no hand or arm just a sharp presence.
Forewarned being forearmed, when death struck last night I struck back. It grabbed me, so I grabbed it with equal, opposing force. That though not to its liking one bit - nor actually to any useful avail - for it merely hurled me the length of the dream room leaving me startled, winded and more or less running up the white flag of surrender.
That the moment to wake up of course, in something of a muck sweat and wonderfully rationally aware that the fell fiend was there before me still, an inch from my face daring me to open my eyes to confront its invisible self.
So I did. Eyes ablaze, but it was not there. It had fled my conscious counterblast. For this time at least death has not undone me. I do believe though it is getting bolder by the hour.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Death's Dream...
...every once in a while I dream of my death. Don't we all? Can't spend all our sleeping time in complete oblivion, or else in some incestual turmoil despite Herr Freud's prognostications.
This then my latest death's dream:
I am in our house of life. It is a long, low bungalow. One storey - but many stories, each for one of who we are. My room off a corridor that opens out to H's room and to E's.
Both are absent this day, not something that troubles me. We are on a high plain, the land is glossy and bright. Old, magical clowns play on the sand. They could be irksome, with wild clothing and hats, but I am not anything more than intrigued that they are there.
The wind picks up and I lie down to show that this defensive posture is best for protecting against a coming storm. Only mild swirls of perhaps danger approaching, so I am not sure why I am so determined to be down on the ground.
But then someone says "Look, see the tornado, we are in its path." And we are. A force five massive funnel comes over the hill straight towards the house of my life.
Can I run away, avoid its path? Why should one man not avoid nature, a natural thing I allow, but looking so much a cartoon merely a moving sketch? But strangely I cannot. My humanity is not able, I am cross to discover, to nip to one side and avoid this terrible thing. The tornado, no longer just a drawing in charcoal, must hit right across me and the house of my life.
So again I duck down into the ground. I fear above all that I will be sucked up by the force of the thing, flung high into the air to my doom.
At a mercy, however, as the full force of the tornado passes over me, it does not lift me up but pushes me down into the friable earth. The wind is a terrible weight. I am driven deeper and deeper underground. I am almost buried in the earth and I clutch a small root hoping neither to be plucked up into the sky nor to be suffocated into the ground.
There must come a climax, the epicentre of the tornado and then the passing. And so it happens. The crushing, downward force lifts from me and I must scrabble towards the light to be free from the earth that threatens to drown me. There is the light from a window above me and I push upwards towards that light. The root to which I have clung breaks, but I had expected no more and no less of it. Not quite a symbol, nor yet a strong refuge, it had been what it could be.
I am alive and I am safe. Alone, but not yet entirely sure that E or H have been hurt or unharmed. I must check the other rooms in the house of my life to be sure they have escaped. In the first room there are mementos of how we were when E was little. Small cameos, inscribed on plaster, show our lives as they were. I cannot be certain that each episode is our actual past, but if not then close enough to something we once were.
But I must at least call out to make sure that they are not here, that E and H have been somewhere entirely away from the tornado.
No response from either and though the silence is somehow sad, it still remains that better that I here alone without them than that they too should have been scared by the wind.
So I must check their rooms to see if they are all right. I know where to look for them, but by accident I open the door to a room that is not one of ours. There is a thickish grey curtain blocking the view and behind it lies someone or thing that must not be disturbed. I retreat to the corridor off which lie all our rooms and I find one room that is ours, though it is empty.
Emptiness is not a problem: E and H were not here when the storm came, but I have to be sure.
One more room to check for their presence. It is a simple matter of setting aside the room not to enter. But I cannot count out this other room and once again I open the door to the not-our room with the curtain behind which lies my doom.
To have done this the once was forgivable, but not a second time. The doom is unleashed. A hand - an arm but no body - whips out like a snake's tongue. The hand grips me by that part of my side where the surgeon cut out the sarcoma.
The hand clasps that place. It knows what it seeks. The pain is horrid and unendurable. I know that the hand grips me for a purpose. It compels my death. It knows that this grip is all that it does and that in doing it I am slain.
As that moment comes I awake with a terrible gripping pain in my side, in that very place where death-to-be once lived.
Did I but sleep badly for lying on that one sore spot, or has death come to tell me it will not wait for me forever?
I am inclined to believe the latter.
This then my latest death's dream:
I am in our house of life. It is a long, low bungalow. One storey - but many stories, each for one of who we are. My room off a corridor that opens out to H's room and to E's.
Both are absent this day, not something that troubles me. We are on a high plain, the land is glossy and bright. Old, magical clowns play on the sand. They could be irksome, with wild clothing and hats, but I am not anything more than intrigued that they are there.
The wind picks up and I lie down to show that this defensive posture is best for protecting against a coming storm. Only mild swirls of perhaps danger approaching, so I am not sure why I am so determined to be down on the ground.
But then someone says "Look, see the tornado, we are in its path." And we are. A force five massive funnel comes over the hill straight towards the house of my life.
Can I run away, avoid its path? Why should one man not avoid nature, a natural thing I allow, but looking so much a cartoon merely a moving sketch? But strangely I cannot. My humanity is not able, I am cross to discover, to nip to one side and avoid this terrible thing. The tornado, no longer just a drawing in charcoal, must hit right across me and the house of my life.
So again I duck down into the ground. I fear above all that I will be sucked up by the force of the thing, flung high into the air to my doom.
At a mercy, however, as the full force of the tornado passes over me, it does not lift me up but pushes me down into the friable earth. The wind is a terrible weight. I am driven deeper and deeper underground. I am almost buried in the earth and I clutch a small root hoping neither to be plucked up into the sky nor to be suffocated into the ground.
There must come a climax, the epicentre of the tornado and then the passing. And so it happens. The crushing, downward force lifts from me and I must scrabble towards the light to be free from the earth that threatens to drown me. There is the light from a window above me and I push upwards towards that light. The root to which I have clung breaks, but I had expected no more and no less of it. Not quite a symbol, nor yet a strong refuge, it had been what it could be.
I am alive and I am safe. Alone, but not yet entirely sure that E or H have been hurt or unharmed. I must check the other rooms in the house of my life to be sure they have escaped. In the first room there are mementos of how we were when E was little. Small cameos, inscribed on plaster, show our lives as they were. I cannot be certain that each episode is our actual past, but if not then close enough to something we once were.
But I must at least call out to make sure that they are not here, that E and H have been somewhere entirely away from the tornado.
No response from either and though the silence is somehow sad, it still remains that better that I here alone without them than that they too should have been scared by the wind.
So I must check their rooms to see if they are all right. I know where to look for them, but by accident I open the door to a room that is not one of ours. There is a thickish grey curtain blocking the view and behind it lies someone or thing that must not be disturbed. I retreat to the corridor off which lie all our rooms and I find one room that is ours, though it is empty.
Emptiness is not a problem: E and H were not here when the storm came, but I have to be sure.
One more room to check for their presence. It is a simple matter of setting aside the room not to enter. But I cannot count out this other room and once again I open the door to the not-our room with the curtain behind which lies my doom.
To have done this the once was forgivable, but not a second time. The doom is unleashed. A hand - an arm but no body - whips out like a snake's tongue. The hand grips me by that part of my side where the surgeon cut out the sarcoma.
The hand clasps that place. It knows what it seeks. The pain is horrid and unendurable. I know that the hand grips me for a purpose. It compels my death. It knows that this grip is all that it does and that in doing it I am slain.
As that moment comes I awake with a terrible gripping pain in my side, in that very place where death-to-be once lived.
Did I but sleep badly for lying on that one sore spot, or has death come to tell me it will not wait for me forever?
I am inclined to believe the latter.
Friday, July 11, 2008
The Character of Brown...
...So our Gordo compares himself to Emily Bronte's Heathcliff does he, much to the amusement of all?
Wrong character, wrong novel.
Gordon Brown is the spitting image of Widmerpool.
See Anthony Powell's duodenary masterpiece 'Dance' passim.
Wrong character, wrong novel.
Gordon Brown is the spitting image of Widmerpool.
See Anthony Powell's duodenary masterpiece 'Dance' passim.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
One Hundred Things To Do When You're Dead Drunk...
...you can sense already where this is heading, and you'd not be wrong. Those lost moments when alcohol commands the stage; brain, conscience, fiscal probity, etc., all banished mute to the wings.
The act itself - written, directed and performed a bottle soliloquy - need not be awful, merely unhinged, unexpected and utterly untoward. Very personal too. One is not talking of some ghastly public display of moral turpitude, tale of which is round the village 'ere one is half-way to perdition; but rather some matter or moment of inner silliness distressing none and hurting none more.
So behold 'One Hundred Things To Do When You Are Dead Drunk" #1:
Traffic, now there's a band. Couldn't abide them first time around between you and me. A veritable mish-mash of styles, all with layers of embarrassing English whimsy. One minute quite groovy rockers-lite, next some half-decent, mystical coves in fey Albion mode (a little of that going quite a long way thank you), but then falling over themselves dissolving into fits of schoolboy giggles at some silly impish nonsense.
The occasional gem of course - 'No Face...etc.', 'Low Spark...et al.' and, above all dear 'Dear Mr. Fantasy', anthemic in quite the right manner for the time. A band for the pick 'n' mix Ipod generation if ever there were one. Pick the few treasures and deep six the rest! ('Hole in My Foot' eh? My arse rather!)
That last though presumes one is, and one absolutely isn't - Ipod-man I mean. 'Twas hard enough letting go of vinyl for CDs, but that was it as far as this dude was and is concerned. At least there was some residual tangible thing qua thing with a CD - an object to have and to hold - even if no one ever rolled a decent joint on their tiny, plastic covers.
Did I ever give the typology of the very different highs to be had from a joint rolled on a mid-period Grateful Dead album sleeve as opposed to, say, an early Bob Dylan? No? Probably best just left to the quietude of history, lest Tom the Bish should ever glance at these idle pages! (But do try - if you are that way minded, and not if not - doing a five-skin spliff on the inner cover of the Allman Brothers Band double-album 'Each A Peach'. That extended hippy-happy world graphic will give you something to fall into until the morn' I can tell 'ee.)
But here we were, late one night, not stoned of course but seriously tipsy. And what should happen? A sudden, inexplicable, irresistible urge to hear Traffic once more. Do not ask from whence it came this compulsion, for I knew it not then and could not tell it now.
But came and rested it did. Traffic must be summonsed from the grave of youth to haunt the hearth of the ancient. Now had one been an ancient versed in this music 'downloading' malarkey no doubt the appetite would have been satisfied - satiated rather - in but a few twirls of apposite computer knobs and dials. Google this, click that and hey presto out she comes.
And if one had, would one have even recalled the doing of it the next day, let alone remembered either the pleasure or the pain? (We are talking some serious level of inebriation after all.) Well no, one wouldn't have. Possibly a faint returning wisp of memory a few days later: "Did one? One did! Lord above, fancy that!" etc.
Not me though. Luddite to the core, mastery of the fell desire was the ordering of the requisite CDs that have duly arrived today a week or so after the squiffy night in question. All right, that did involve a certain online activity complete with site search (Germany seemed to have it all for some reason), placing of orders and confirmations of dispatch, etc. The upshot though is that - now, later, and largely sober - I have three fine Traffic CDs to be consumed at my leisure.
The moot point remains: does one dare listen stone cold sober to music of one's long abandoned youth, risk rending the veil of forgetting unaided, unjuiced?
Things To Do When Dead Drunk #2 - listen to early Traffic?
Time shall shortly tell.
The act itself - written, directed and performed a bottle soliloquy - need not be awful, merely unhinged, unexpected and utterly untoward. Very personal too. One is not talking of some ghastly public display of moral turpitude, tale of which is round the village 'ere one is half-way to perdition; but rather some matter or moment of inner silliness distressing none and hurting none more.
So behold 'One Hundred Things To Do When You Are Dead Drunk" #1:
Traffic, now there's a band. Couldn't abide them first time around between you and me. A veritable mish-mash of styles, all with layers of embarrassing English whimsy. One minute quite groovy rockers-lite, next some half-decent, mystical coves in fey Albion mode (a little of that going quite a long way thank you), but then falling over themselves dissolving into fits of schoolboy giggles at some silly impish nonsense.
The occasional gem of course - 'No Face...etc.', 'Low Spark...et al.' and, above all dear 'Dear Mr. Fantasy', anthemic in quite the right manner for the time. A band for the pick 'n' mix Ipod generation if ever there were one. Pick the few treasures and deep six the rest! ('Hole in My Foot' eh? My arse rather!)
That last though presumes one is, and one absolutely isn't - Ipod-man I mean. 'Twas hard enough letting go of vinyl for CDs, but that was it as far as this dude was and is concerned. At least there was some residual tangible thing qua thing with a CD - an object to have and to hold - even if no one ever rolled a decent joint on their tiny, plastic covers.
Did I ever give the typology of the very different highs to be had from a joint rolled on a mid-period Grateful Dead album sleeve as opposed to, say, an early Bob Dylan? No? Probably best just left to the quietude of history, lest Tom the Bish should ever glance at these idle pages! (But do try - if you are that way minded, and not if not - doing a five-skin spliff on the inner cover of the Allman Brothers Band double-album 'Each A Peach'. That extended hippy-happy world graphic will give you something to fall into until the morn' I can tell 'ee.)
But here we were, late one night, not stoned of course but seriously tipsy. And what should happen? A sudden, inexplicable, irresistible urge to hear Traffic once more. Do not ask from whence it came this compulsion, for I knew it not then and could not tell it now.
But came and rested it did. Traffic must be summonsed from the grave of youth to haunt the hearth of the ancient. Now had one been an ancient versed in this music 'downloading' malarkey no doubt the appetite would have been satisfied - satiated rather - in but a few twirls of apposite computer knobs and dials. Google this, click that and hey presto out she comes.
And if one had, would one have even recalled the doing of it the next day, let alone remembered either the pleasure or the pain? (We are talking some serious level of inebriation after all.) Well no, one wouldn't have. Possibly a faint returning wisp of memory a few days later: "Did one? One did! Lord above, fancy that!" etc.
Not me though. Luddite to the core, mastery of the fell desire was the ordering of the requisite CDs that have duly arrived today a week or so after the squiffy night in question. All right, that did involve a certain online activity complete with site search (Germany seemed to have it all for some reason), placing of orders and confirmations of dispatch, etc. The upshot though is that - now, later, and largely sober - I have three fine Traffic CDs to be consumed at my leisure.
The moot point remains: does one dare listen stone cold sober to music of one's long abandoned youth, risk rending the veil of forgetting unaided, unjuiced?
Things To Do When Dead Drunk #2 - listen to early Traffic?
Time shall shortly tell.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
