and so it has been my task to summarise
the lively letters of the dead.


and this tired task continueth.

updated from old post:

Dreams, dreams, so many.

One: I was walking with Kit and friend in the bush. There were multicoloured cockatoos guarding one gateway of leaves, and every so often on the right, a restaurant or something, set back. I went through one of the doors on the right and I became a Muslim boy called Abdullah. I really was him. Having been moderate, my father had turned fundamentalist. He had grown a beard and so on. My mother and two sisters and I were standing by while he searched the place for anything infidelic. He was looking for jewellery and so on. Writing. Meanwhile, my younger sister, Dana or something, was desperate that I help her find these purple earrings of hers. They were deeply sentimental for some reason: something either to do with our grandmother or some boyfriend, a date. I hunted in wooden boxes and things, pretending to help my father. What’s that in your hand, he said, when I found them. I was helping my younger sister get away to meet someone, driving her quick in my open topped car. But back at the house, he was asking, What’s that in your hand? And yet, like a film, in the end, he forgave us. We foresaw the possibility of living together, in mutually accepting tolerance. But for the moment, though there was love, it was uneasy. My mother, I barely recall her saying a word. I had no consciousness that I was in any way me.
The dream looped back, so I repeated the walk in the bush, and the scene had changed slightly and I was explaining to my companions the subtle ways in which it had changed since the time before. my voice annoyed me.

I’ve had so many. I should have written them all down. One, I was DJing for James brown and my intellectual property teacher was having us right our exam on closeted women in Victorian novels instead, and then I announced I’d already done the exam and she sent me off, and up above, in these little garret nun’s cell rooms, she was helping keep the women in hiding.

The one in the jungle. Skinny dipping. Some sort of animal, I’ve now forgotten what kind, maybe an orangutan or something more unusual, that I was caring for. Felt it was in danger. My aunt and uncle were about.

The one where the whole world was paved and there were glass scientia buildings everywhere, evacuant, and people walking like open-day tourists between them and how, from the pavements, the Picasso fountains would spring up, like some architect with a minimalist glass vision had taken over the world with his verticals and his horizontals and his space and it wasn't so bad but it could have been better, it could have felt more alive. We passed between them and came to a place with stairs where you could see more of the distance and a vast sunken public square but it was vacant, we had space to ourselves for once but you didn't know someone wasn't watching and you didn't know a fountain wasn't about to spring up at your feet. Aesthetics had conquered.

The one far too complex to explain with the German or Austrian or Scandinavian bushwalk that seemed forever and the beach and the swimming the overhang with cave paintings and how were went out swimming, my father and i but it seemed within seconds it was already dangerous, time to come back, it was going to be dark and I was so afraid I hurried on ahead of them over the tussocks and hillocks the boardwalks racing on ascending and it all had the slightly fake look of a diorama and there were the wooden fruitboxes next to the signs i didn't have time to read with the cauliflowers and other soup vegetables stacked in them, proud of their produce those aryans, but i hurried on and it seemed so soon i was already back at the entry hut, the information centre. And maybe that was the dream where I was stuck in the onefloor yellow asian airport place with the little open mall-store grocers trying to buy a singlet looking through coathangers, and trying to find a snack before Kit came back.

I can’t remember any of the really lengthy amazing ones. Sadly: because I remembered them all perfectly on waking from them. Maybe I will on reflection.

Weeks and weeks ago now, months ago, the one with the posh megamall with the red cushioned wallpaper walls with the gilt counters and welldressed women milling about buying crystal jugs and so on, all so red velvet wallpapered and oppressive. yes, all the women were shopping, while upstairs up those last escalators there was the floor where the world leader with his dark eyes and his slicing charming smile had his boardroom and the model Lego forest set out with the little LEDs in it that lit up when he and his board of decisionmakers, all male, made their decisions about how to release hate into the world. That was it, the map made of lego, the model map, mapping the spread of different forms of hate with these little red lights, like the forest was the world.

Updated...


**

ONE

We’re going around the corner and there’s a storm like a mushroom cloud in the distance. There’s a feeling in the air lie the world has only recently discovered the corruption of its idols and apostles, and like many have died or may yet. Things are insecure, new, fractured, bleak, and yet a little optimistic like this might be a new beginning—and we’re a little optimistic because we’ve been lucky compared to some. Still, the powers that be have something just beyond the horizon and you can see it, and smell it, in the smogspread air.
Maybe that’s why the black cockatoos have gathered round the substation on this main road with dust and no traffic. We pull over to watch them, we open the car doors to watch.
The cockatoos are playing a game. They perch on the wires against a backdrop of stale brown bricks, with the static air, and each bird leans forward slowly on its perch, slowly, leaning further forward until they reach tipping point and tip forward, swing down around upside down then up again through 360 degrees back to their original position.
Anyway if we want to beat that acid rain and whatever else might be behind us we’ll have to get going. Back in the car, drive on, slow. There’s only one direction: forwards. Everything brownish—wait, there’s one of the government buildings. “I need to go to the toilet,” I say. They roll their eyes at me, affectionate. Although we’re all apprehensive we’re ahead of time so we pull up and I get out. Inside, it’s dim. A university feel, cramped. The loos to the left—I head in. There are cobwebs. A yellow dim hint to the light. A stolid stocky thirty-something female lawyer with a short wave of blonde hair emerges from the nearest cubicle and doesn’t look at me and I go in after her. I sit down on the loo, and the woman lawyer has left her thoughts behind her in the cubicle for others to find and they become mine, I have her thoughts as I wee. I reflect on the meeting and the conduct of one of my associates in the firm. I’m amused to be having her thoughts. She didn’t seem friendly, and I suspect it would annoy her. Still—and I flush—she’s the one who left them hanging round behind her. I wonder how that’s possible. If she knows she’s doing it. I exit.

TWO

China. The lands are owned by the political philosopher John Rawls. Late daytime. Dark cliffs, rough-cut, a quarry, almost a chasm, dropping down. The family and I, or some of us, are at this stage walking the edge of it. Waiting for someone to catch up. The ocean is not far off. We sit down to lace shoes or chat or drink or something on a rock. A sense of excitement, fear, something wrong perhaps. The grey, periculous view.

Then it's the grey gameshow arena. Conrete. Desks tiered, ranged round in a semi-circle. Perhaps there are hidden cameras. Very Mao, but modern. Dark grey. It's a gameshow. Here's how the game works: when it's your turn and you're ready you press your buzzer from your audience desk and the two opera singers, Chinese and painted in ancient Oriental style, run out warbling out into the centre of the space warbling the high-pitched opera and you have to translate as they go. NB: the militia come in if you're not up to scratch, with machine guns, to arrest you.

Then you're in the holiday shack. A shack up on stilts, or raised in some way, perhaps. There's a verandah. The place could use a sweep, I think. You're camped out there with your uni friends. You weren't expecting the house to look so domestic. But there's no furniture. It's cold. Your thinking feels very internal. It's funny how the ocean comes almost right up to the front steps, the verandah, the door. That's Julie's handbag getting washed away down there! She left it on the sand, who'd have known the tide would come in like that? Was that a little dog just now in a blur?

Something's wrong. There were war crimes in the quarry, or something. And what's with Rawls being a big landholder here? That seems dark.

But then, you're a singer yourself. The engagement is not til this evening. You're in the mall, you're walking with Rhonda. You're wearing a ball gown - I think it's royal blue. You head towards the dingy supermarket. You pass the busking singers. There are two soloists, and then behind them, three girls who provide the chorus. Because there are only thee of them they turn around and sing down the empty lift shaft so the reverb will fill out the sound of their voices and multiply them, making them sound more like a real choir. George Torbay is conducting. You reel, you don’t want him to see you but feel that he has - you jump the metal bar fence that fronts the supermarket then you're inside, in the eighties kmart glow. You head for what I suppose is the foriegn foods section. There they are - the mushrooms. Cut in quarters. Each quarter has the span of a vinyl record. They must have been seriously huge mushrooms when they were fresh and before they were quartered. They're dried, of course. In their compartment.

Up on the nearby shelf: the canned weetbix with milk.

Yes, it does seem as if, with this dream, you are mocking yourself. If only you'd get it!

THREE

Maybe the building was drowning. A hotel I think, the four of us, the family, staying in one room and we saw a dad and daughter from a neighbouring room going out now and then on the balcony looking over the sea. I don't know, anyway we had to keep going down the grey brick chute and the black meerkat cartoons were hitting each other over the head with their paddles with cartoon whacks, flattening the flat tops of each others cartoon heads. We went up the dark chut the other side, came out, went down again, Kit and I. At the bottom, the next time, there was the cartoon warthog. It chased us like a minotaur, reddish, bullying, and we were terrified and somehow we got up the chute slammed a cubicle door on it, I don't know, I felt heartbeat terrified, and then, up top, guilty sad - maybe we drowned it.

There was something also to do with a hospital bed and a very high ceiling in a huge gallery-white room with some hint of green, and all of us girls in our nighties.