These days what’s the most we can realistically hope for but some form of ideal dystopia.
Perhaps an isolated bunker in a distant land deep beneath the surface fitted with all the conveniences that seem so essential, naturally.
We could sleep safe and soundly there and dream plastic dreams of our synthetic future as we transform into angelic androids, with our skins like vinyl that hisses and crackles when we touch, superficially smooth yet as we press harder we discover contours and grooves that activate sensations far forgotten within the soul.
We long for a fine and private place but there is none to speak of so we sneak into what passes for a sacred grove, dedicated to some degenerate local deity with one glass eye and undoubtedly an unappeasable taste for tidy hookers and neat gin.
In this dimly lit ersatz arbour made of rusting metal and fake bamboo hemmed in by tarnished mirrors we talk:
of replicants;
of organisms that ceaselessly duplicate;
of the next eagerly anticipated catastrophe;
of death and destruction as the ultimate spectator sport;
of the serenity to be found in surrendering to the spooked spiralling logic of paranoia;
of nightclubbing and nightcrawling;
of nocturnal emissions;
of the vicious inanity of Incubi and Succubi;
of the Latter Days of the Fourth Decadency;
of a corrosive inertia;
of ennui and entrophy;
of containment and contagion;
of chance encounters and happy accidents that lead to inevitable happy endings;
of the cellar door in The Very Heaven Heavenly Hotel;
of protean cult leaders;
of clairvoyant photographers;
of a vanishing star of stage and screen;
of wandering infra dig soldiers lost in the twilighting border zone;
of standing on the threshold of a room;
of skipping a vital slowed down sleazy beat;
of nonsensical impulses and randomly compelling whims;
of waylaid emotion and contaminated intimacy;
of perverse attractions;
of dream homes and heartache;
of love and sleep.
The Melancholy Lieutenant woke up immediately when he registered the sound of a key being fitted into the lock and the scrape of the door as it grated against the cement floor. If they thought that the delay was going to make him sweat they were mistaken. He felt refreshed after his sleep and prepared for whatever fate they deigned to grant him.
Two men entered, both in plain clothes. Their superiors had probably decided to pair them up as a study in archetypal contrasts, which they had then made into their schtick, their routine. Naturally there was a squat, older harassed tough guy with the obligatory rumpled brown suit that he wore like a baggy second skin. The Melancholy Lieutenant felt he had read the script that this bad cop with the good heart beneath the gruff exterior was going to act out many times before. Of course the sleek, soft spoken and ambitious young detective, impeccably turned out in bold blue stripes would be all concern until he had found an angle into which best to turn the knife. Well let them play their little games, he thought, they will get nothing out of me because I’m keeping schtum, silent as the grave, his accent alone would give him away as a foreigner. Besides even to himself his story of parallel dimensions and vast inter-stellar conspiracies sounded like the incoherent ramblings of a deranged mind. But here he was, in this room where he shouldn’t be. But he doubted he could convince a pair of over-worked and cynical policemen the truth of the matter.
Seating himself in the chair the tough cop addressed the sleek guy who had decided to perch on the wooden table, all the better to lean over and presumably intimidate the Melancholy Lieutenant.
‘So who and what did we have here Boss?’
‘Dunno Boss, no papers, no ID card, no number, nada nowt and he’d decided to clam up whats more. We know nothing about nothing about him. Which is a little perturbing, both of us…and for himself there. I mean without any solid information we have to naturally assume the worse, don’t we Boss?’
‘Another fucking ghost then.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Got a cigarette Boss?’
‘Sure Boss,’ said the good cop. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled a gold case which he presented to the older cop all in one smooth fluid motion. He took two cigarettes out, handed one over, and then rifled through his trouser and jacket pockets before finally finding a lighter. He lit his colleague’s cigarette first before lighting his own. Both of the policemen took deep drags before directing heavy clouds of smoke into his face. The Melancholy Lieutenant remained impassive.
‘So what are we gonna do with this guy? Obviously we need to process the fucker, but as what? As an agitator, subversive or just some poor bastard down on his luck? Or did he just lose his mind out west.’
‘Well he looks and holds himself like a soldier, and an officer at that. Maybe he was exposed to the Black Acid at the front. Maybe, maybe. I wouldn’t peg him as one of Red’s, and definitely not as a Wrather, but unless we find out more we can’t ever really be sure, can we Boss? What is your famous gut telling you?’
The bad cop studied the cigarette for a while before answering. ‘My gut is telling me that it’s hungry while my brain is telling me that I am tired. Are you not going to say anything there Sonny Jim? Huuh? What you say and do in this room could decide your entire future. So what’s it going to be, boy?’
The Melancholy Lieutenant didn’t move a muscle and kept staring into the middle distance, though he was worried that the gathering heavy silence would galvanise them into action. Although he was trained and held the necessary detachment to resist speaking out under torture, it was something he obviously wanted to avoid if at all possible.
‘So be it then, ‘the smooth operator said and stood up from the table, squaring himself up. ‘I think we need to show him who’s the boss, don’t we Boss?’
‘Ah hold on there Boss. Let’s not be too hasty. I got a feeling inside that we have to be careful, a wrong decision may come back to haunt us; bite us in the ass big time. We still have hundreds to process yet and of all the people we have seen so far this bastard looks most likely to have connections. He isn’t your run of the mill agitator anyway. Besides I think he realises who’s the boss.’
‘O.K Boss,’ he said relaxing and standing down.
‘So where are we going to process him then Boss?’
‘Chosher Fastness I suppose, the catatonic ward seems about right for this bleeding phantom.’
‘Yeah, a better class of loony up there.’
‘Officer class mental cases.’
‘Good monitoring as well.’
‘We can see how he responses to the presence of certain problematic inmates.’
‘Decided then boss.’
‘Yes no doubt. Call up the McNally boyos and get him loaded up into the van.’
‘Can’t wait to be shot of this one, let him become somebody else’s problem instead of ours.’
‘I’m with you on that Boss.’
‘Ah well, on to the next one.’
‘Never fucking stops does it?’
‘No and it never will either Boss.’
Salvador Dali-a Miserable Flat (From the Marquis De Sade Suite-1969
Forever the sensualist, pursuing the pleasures
Of the flesh and the transitory moment,
Every passing chance and fleeting lust
With your oh-so debonair, cavalier
Devil-may-care-can-take-me tomorrow attitude,
Never paying heed, feckless and reckless
Following every bizarre whim and contrary impulse.
You never know why you are the way you are,
Though upon any given day you may blame
The father for passing on his rogue genes
Designed to self-destruct whenever
You gain an instant of clarity and collected calm,
Or the mother for expelling you from the Eden
Of the womb into this world of sorrow and woe.
But why stop there, surely the impersonal God
In the vast unreachable fortress of the Heavens
Deserves a share for even thinking and therefore
Emanating all the demiurges and demons
To fashion this perfectly flawed creation
With its built-in obsolescent as the unique selling point
Yes the guilt and the shame has to be theirs
For the urges that you always have to act on
Regardless of consequences and the possibility
Of a whole universe of hurt and pain
But can anyone take the weight of such responsibility?
At times like this, better to drink deeply
And gamble on the possibility of redemption,
Within her encircling arms lies salvation
The pressure of her hand on your thigh
Hints at an all-encompassing bliss
An unsurpassed re-capturing of the holy moment
If only she holds on tight and doesn’t hold back
You could die right now looking into her eyes
But one moment escapes into the next
And this night, like all nights, has to end:
The sun breaks the magic circle
Ending the eclipsing spell
Returning you to the sleazy here and now,
The dishevelled bed in this pallid light
In this foetid atmosphere heavy with sex
With the bitter taste of a fulfilled desire
Turning heavy and cold in your mouth.
The time is now, I think,
Tomorrow has come
Your party is over
That race has been run
You sinned in such haste
Time now to repent
At, of course, your leisure
For Hell is forever.
The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)-Rene Magritte 1928-1929
A supremely thought provoking and troubling philosophical painting by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte. We are presented with a meretriciously drawn image of a pipe while beneath the neat legend paradoxically informs us that Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). It seems that before us is less a painting than another one of Magritte’s monstrously banal, and ultimately terrifying, pictorial mysteries.
The pipe drawn with such painstaking exactitude is of course just a representation of a pipe. You cannot hold in your hands, stuff it with tobacco and smoke it, which is surely what is required of a pipe for it to be a pipe. Yet we feel perplexed and somehow obscurely cheated. If it the case that ‘perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves’, then all we can know are images of the world, and images are by their very nature treacherous. All we have is the map, and as everyone knows, the map is not the territory.
Robert Desnos was in many ways the archetypal surrealist spirit. Involved in Paris Dada he was in the literary vanguard of Surrealism and possessed an extra-ordinary talent for automatic writing during the Trance Period, rivalled only by Rene Crevel. Desnos, like many others, fell out with Andre Breton and joined the group centred around Georges Bataille and his magazine Documents and he was one of the signers of the anti-Breton polemic Un Cadavre.
During WWII Desnos was an active member of the French Resistance and he was captured by the Gestapo in 1944. He was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and finally Theresienstadt where he would die a few weeks after the camp’s liberation from typhoid.
I Have So Often Dreamed Of You
I have so often dreamed of you that you become unreal.
Is it still time enough to reach that living body and to kiss
on that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?
I have so often dreamed of you that my arms used as they are
to meet on my breast in embracing your shadow would
perhaps not fit the contour of your body.
And, before the real appearance of what has haunted and ruled
me for days and years, I might become only a shadow.
Oh the weighing of sentiment,
I have so often dreamed of you that there is probably no time
now to waken. I sleep standing, my body exposed to all the
appearances of life and love and you, who alone still
matter to me, I could less easily touch your forehead and
your lips than the first lips and the first forehead I
might meet by chance.
I have so often dreamed of you, walked, spoken, slept with your
phantom that perhaps I can be nothing any longer than a
phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow which walks and will walk joyously over
the sundial of your life.
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Lee Miller-Man Ray 1929