Authors: D. F. Lewis
#The Sunne acted like the sun but was not the sun. This does not represent a fantastical or imaginary approach to cosmology, merely a shorthand for something that will eventually become quite reconcilable given the circumstances of intertextual reality. For the moment, please treat Sunne and Sun as blood brothers (i.e. crude synonyms), if you currently lack confidence to revel in their essence and truth as spiritual brothers (mutual metanyms, if not alter-nemos).
Stub of pencil: Sunne = Sunnemo?
##‘Firedrill’ was a difficult concept to grasp in this context. This made me think that The Death would have indeed been preferable after all, rather than now (alive) having to explain what is meant by this or that word or concept. I hope they will clarify themselves naturally in the course of events, with the description needed for such events hopefully allowing collateral construction of clue-semantics
vis a vis
many words or concepts otherwise ungraspable.
*
Stub of pencil: However close you get to someone, you are never more than just a couple of entities separated by the skulls of the head.
*
Greg suffered from an unbearable tinnitus of the Inner Ear. The only way—in his desperation—to cure himself of this incessant cricketing was to deafen himself. Whilst it would be relatively easy—given the will—to blind the eyes, ie with spikes, it is far more difficult to bring such instruments to bear on the hearing, short of bringing the deafness of death itself to one’s aid. Slicing off the ears themselves would surely be counter-productive as this very act itself harbours the possibility of even more tinnitus that is allowed greater access—via the creatures of noise—permanently to attack an Inner Ear thus denuded of the mysteriously effective protection of the Exterior Ear. Doctors and Ear Specialists would probably disagree with this prognosis, but Greg wondered how they could know for certain. Only doing things to oneself and feeling the effect in oneself directly gives the ultimate certainty of one’s own senses, i.e. the evidence of the self’s senses at whatever level of felt reality one is working through. So, Death seems the only exit from the noise. Sleep does not dull it as dreams often increase the efficiency of the noise or change its very nature into a series of new home-grown noises, a gestalt of noises being dreamed as louder and more relentless. Klaxon City was one such dream. The Inner Earth. The Inner Ear.
*
As they scaled the pylon from their earthcraft, Greg and Beth began to stretch their legs in yawning downward strides. They had been cooped up in a serial cabin-fever for several months of travel in individual body-hugging room spaces. The dream of a Corporate Lounge on board the earthcraft—where an urbane Captain dished out cocktails and scintillating sights of Inner Earth—proved to be a dream even deeper than a dream being dreamed by merely one other single dream. Indeed, a single such cause-and-effect dream in the concertina of dreams proved to be even less reliable: whereby two dowager ladies known as Edith and Clare were not such ladies at all but chivvying dream-stewards ensuring that dreams were correctly threaded in the correct order on any particular ribbon of reality or strobe-strand... presumably also to ensure that believability was not unduly affected by crossing any threshold of disbelief. These two stewards—when failing to maintain their ‘lady’ disguises—often became, by involuntary default, large bird-headed individuals who employed the otherwise human nature of their own residual-‘lady’ bodies in the seeming behaviour of insect-articulated ratchet-limbs that became (in their minds at least) spiny or spiky appendages that the large beaks of their heads actively tried (but failed) to snap up self-cannibalistically as tasty buggish morsels.
Greg, as he neared the pylon’s base, turned to take a closer look at the misshapen tree on the hill overlooking Klaxon City—knowing instinctively that it was the perpetrator of the inner sky’s wall-to-wall wailing: a series of echoes that bounced around the bowl of the city’s cavity. Several separate ribbons of spatial reality—mixed with tangible strobes of time—fluttered in the air-movement of noise: a wind of striated history... a vertical cross-section of which Greg traversed. The earthcraft tethered to the top of the pylon seemed, for him, to become a religious vision that curdled gradually into a huge plume of black smoke from a global-warming turning inward on itself with a heat so over-bearing several incremental levels of dream were needed to intervene as a combined firewall to guard against its ferocity. Dream-fighting on a superhuman scale. And, indeed, as each dream kicked in one by one, Greg was able to ignore the noise and the heat as he ruminatively considered the panoply of Klaxon’s geography... while he continued to scale himself down. The vista of its configuration was like a huge human ear—a canyon, a ridge, a lobe, all constituents of the city’s mingled God-given nature and subsequent fabrication.
*
Greg grabbed Beth by the hand as they left the environs of their earthcraft’s pylon—without bothering to think that the meter needed inserting with an unknown currency of coinage.
“That’s for others,” said Greg, eventually, to himself, vaguely recalling the duty of parking fees on or within the scarce resources of a finite earth but also that he and Beth were simply crew members, not owners of the earthcraft.
The streets radiated as streets (i.e. as gaps between) from the area sparsely planted with pylons to other areas where more cavernous buildings clustered around thicker clumps of variously-sized pylons—some pylons with craft tethered, others empty, and a few currently being roosted by kite-shaped birds with large black plumages. In the distance, the ambiance of a city built as a patchwork of overlapping quaint village-scenarios was disrupted as the rims of giant
Angevin
tanks were spotted in an apparently camouflaged industrial estate unglinting in the bright directionlessness of Sunnemo Cathedral’s broken shafts through stained glass.
Greg and Beth, however, were window-shopping on a much lower level, as they passed through a precinct where some earth-stripped caves were neatly thin-roofed and glass-fronted. These contained the hardly static wares of a thriving chamber of commerce even if the gaps between these ‘shops’ were deserted... window-shown to any chance passers-by breaking this empty pattern. One labelled
Sudra’s Shoes
brought a wry smile to their lips as they inspected the various jingle-toed items of footwear.
They dodged into something labelled Cavé for some refreshment, hoping that any necessary payment by unknown coinage would be subsumed by serendipity.
Inside were two non-descript locals of short standing whose conversation Greg and Beth began to overhear—during which they decided to intervene with convenient questions, convenient to real visitors such as Greg and Beth themselves and to any possible vicarious visitors coiled on their backs like old-men-of-the-sea. Convenient if the conversation made any sense beyond its semi-conscious ability to refine sense into nonsense, or vice versa.
Beth was described in an unreported part of this exchange as middle-aged, buxom, pretty face scarred with frown-lines, still perky enough to lift her head above the narrative parapet. Greg remained naïve despite a mature aura of be-whiskered pink chops. He still tried to maintain his own identity in face of all attack to divert it elsewhere, but all descriptive resources remained counter-productive in this direction, whatever or whoever took up responsibility for them.
Crazy Lope:
Where’s the air from, then?
Go’spank:
Sea air—it’s sort of caught by the melting tectonics, you know, internal tsunamis carried within caches of air-movement made from noise.
Crazy Lope:
Don’t understand. Words don’t do much for me. Any words. But specially those words. Where do words come from?
Go’spank:
The words are like moving air, too, or fingered sound. Words are what drift through it. Tricking the above, the below and the across… (Laughs.)
Greg:
Been here long?
(Crazy Lope seems perturbed at the interruption.)
Crazy Lope:
We’ve been here longer than you two. We’ve been taking the washing in.
Greg:
Taking the washing in? Is that a sort of password?
Crazy Lope:
If you don’t know it’s a password, then it’s not a password.
Go’spank:
Or if you think it’s a password what’s it a password for? The whole background of black noise is just one never-ending password, perhaps. (Laughs.)
Beth:
(Frowning) How
do
they put up with all that here?
Crazy Lope:
I block it out. Or rather the blocks block it out.
Go’spank:
Dream blocks, yes.
Greg:
Ah, but I was brought up to believe dreams were a sickness. They are perhaps defence systems, I see. Rather necessary evils. Yet so much depends on the gaps or streets between the dreams. Are we in a dream now or a gap?
Go’spank:
Wish we knew. And if we did know how would you know we knew?
Crazy Lope:
Wish You Were Here. Shine on Crazy Diamond.
Beth:
It seems you can’t talk properly without, you know…
Go’spank:
I know… It’s difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication. And to say all those words “
I know… It’s difficult. Conversations are obstacle courses rather than proper communication”
has taken a lot of effort and concentration. I’ve never been able to say anything sensible for this length of time before, or perhaps this exact length is my personal best so far.
(The noise of a distant explosion is carried further than it would otherwise have been by sound atmospherics of the moment, as the other Cavé customers do runners.)
Greg:
What’s that?
Crazy Lope:
What Go’spank just said.
Go’spank:
Yes, an air cushion, even an air tsunami perhaps.
Beth:
(Flicking a speck of dried mud from her eyelid) There’s no noise now.
Crazy Lope:
Probably the next few minutes’ of noise has turned into silence because it was crowded into those earlier few seconds when the jolt came.
Greg:
Sounded like a bomb.
Go’spank:
No, I think it was condensed background noise of the sirens in time-shift from a period to a moment. Lope was sort of right, for once!
(Beth sniffed at the drink she had been brought by an attractive waitress who turned all heads.)
Greg:
What
are
you two characters up to here?
Crazy Lope:
Bringing the washing in. Told you. (Laughs.)
Greg:
Yes, but…
Go’spank:
(Squeaking like a grey mouse and pointing at Beth in the waitress’s wake) I like your wife, Mister. She’s nice.
(Beth frowns deeply but her eyes receive the information of such admiration with a glinting smile.)
Go’spank:
Can we show you round?
Greg:
(suspiciously) If you like. We shouldn’t leave our pylon too far behind in case it, you know, can’t be found again.
They left into the relative outside using strung hawl-pulley hooks as direction-finders (the cost of the Cavé bill blandly settled during a gap between two intersecting dream-streets) and they all looked up at the newly blackened sky-cavity, with Sunnemo Cathedral’s fantasy light-source as a fairy castle nesting in a violet cloudscape now just a dull beige disc not unlike the coin just exchanged in the Cavé for a packed lunch.
Greg and Beth wondered why their two benighted companions now kept calling each other Edith or Clare in some new game of nemonymous passwords.
*
Stub of pencil:
My head’s led from the diseased wood of the Canterbury Oak that wraps me. And there is much for me to think about. Can a planet from which I am able to be thus created, i.e. one called Earth, be more than just the head of the person who first imagined it? An Earth from the Ear to the Ground
Who first imagined this Earth? Meanwhile, who imagined the head that imagined another head like the Earth? The thought extends both ex-ends of the dynastic ribbon of reality from first cause to last effect and realises (with both ends now missing or sharpened away) that imagination is not the best tool for imagining reality because reality is unimaginable being already there in an unimagined state. To imagine an unimagined reality would be to corrupt it or create it as a new imaginary thread through a headless head. Then this single thread, by an uncontrollable volition, would stiffen its sinews to masquerade as an imaginary weave of many threads bearing the tread of a head-leased, heavily head-led reality... the only sort of reality that causes the bodies of its inhabitants to grow cancerous.
I find that, without the Earth on which to be born with a head and to fill that head with learning and to experience or express life via its means, the same head creating the Earth needed another head to create it. Or have I already said that?
Klaxon City being a dynasty rather than a single city on a plain, Greg and Beth—our Essex couple, our salt of the earth—now are indeed (through the imagination of imagination that in turn can summon a new strength to dream novel-ly without the use of fiction) invested with the background noise of spirit needed to reconfigure their existence as new visitors to the Megazanthine Core whilst having already visited it once before—a fact which, effectively, was imaginable because they had ceased to exist as real people having once entered it as a by-product of producing the creamy Angevin or Angel Wine and thus became their own seed without having created the seed in the first place. It takes two to retro-tango.
*
As Greg and Beth left the environs of the Cavé, they decided they were being escorted by two child-sized stick-figures who used Sunnemo’s closure as a light source (with silent drapes) to feed their own emptiness from anything but manipulative bone... to feed it with charcoal drawings from another pencil stub that had a point of incipient darkness for any shading. Like a lost cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci combined with one by Walt Disney who now lived (from death) in such cross-hatches foreign to the smooth technicolor he once so relished. Yet these creatures maintained the dulcet tones of Edith and Clare—which gave a sense of comfort, especially as in their prior Lope and Go’spank modes their voices had been far too shrill.