Barefoot in the Head

by Brian W Aldiss

  And all those present said, ‘Not the ashtits. Sickle ourselves on stillnesss,’ like the backrow of the chorus.

  But Burton drew Charteris aside and said, ‘It’s the PCA bombs he’s not too bad will be glad to get home to his wife it’s just he’s psychic sees a bad image in you like and the menuts of a future hour.’

  Bombardment of images. Peltocrat. White thighs with peonies curling between and the walk up narrow stair, božur m’sieur. All that he took and let the others burst about and drank his thin naked carcinomatous London coffee as they milled and mixed paper lips over china lip all textures communicasement.

  And Brasher came near again something in a suit and narrowly said encouraged by Charteris’ absence of aggression, ‘You also pedal a belief, my foreign friend? From France if my infirmation is correct.’

  ‘Now I arrive here and fatal events spread forward along the trails. I am quoting, but we are nothing to each other and I have no word yet. I was a member in my own country of the party, but enough of that. I’m dazed here maybe not fully awake the afflict of that Arabian nightmoil.’

  The heavy man now pressed against him against the banisters.

  ‘Tell me nothing you parisher this is my perish get it I had a miraculous survival from the air crash we’re going to hit great wheeling scabs of metropolis mouths teeth and you keep quiet. I’m the Sayer here.’ As panic stammer as if he still fell.

  ‘I’ll be getting on if you object. Objectivity of speeches. I have no feelings and the day spurs me, or Burton if he still wants to come.’

  Tremor by the side of the mouth speaking independently.

  ‘Come on Phil,’ says Burton and to Charteris, ‘He’s coming but he’s just suspicious of you because he saw you in the crashing plane, an apparition. On him rides the word like.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Charteris. ‘That countryside rumpling upwards your distorted vision it was Brasher that interweaves my thoughts! I get it now the plane diving down to, well. I’m going thanks. I want no part of this man’s dream nor did I ever fly with him in any plane.’

  As if this abdication soothed Brasher he came forward again and barred Charteris’ way brushing aside Burton saying, ‘On that plane among the vestal virgings southwards you usurped my sodding seat and as we came — ’

  ‘Driving, driving, I have not flown, now get that through your acid head — ’

  ‘I only spared the flashing plashing, and all those cute little bits of stuff — now look here my foreign friend, I have a right to my share of any bits of crumpet as suffer conversion to Proceed and you — ’

  ‘Let him go Phil, he only offered you a lift to Lough along with me so are you coming, and this lot and your harum can come on after.’ Thus Burton and in a closed sentence for Charteris, ‘He’s an old mate of mine or was till religion got him — now he’s worse to manage than the Escalation. Everyone’s the solo instrument in this scene.’

  So was it that with papered-on cheers from the walk-on parts they took the legend down the dirty creaking stairs and to the floor below the tiles returning and in the darkness waited for a moment unknowing within the shelter of the judas house before the in ward-gazing judas-hole: and then went forth.

  Precognition is a function of two forces he told himself and already wished that he might record it in case the thought drifted from him on the aerosolar light. Precognotion. Two forces: mind of course and also time: the barriers go down and somewhere a white-thighed woman waits for me —

  These are not my images. Bombardment of others’ images. Autobreasted succubae again from Disflocations.

  Yet my image the white-thighed, although I have not seen them already familiar like milk inside Venetian crystal all the better to suck you by. But my precognotions slipping.

  It’s not only that mind can leap aside from its tracks but that the tracks must be of certain property: so there are stages I have crossed to reach this point the first being the divination of time as a web without merely forward progress but all directions equally so that the essential I at any moment is like a spider sleeping at the centre of its web always capable of any turn and the white thorn thighs turning. Only that essential Gurdjieffian I aloof. And secondly the trip-taking soaked air of London tipping me off my traditional cranium so that I allow myself a multi-dimensional way.

  Zbogom, what am I now if not more than man, mariner of my seven seizures.

  More than pre-psychedelic man.

  Me homo viator

  She homo victorine

  She haunts me as I hope to haunt her. Not so far north as Scotland.

  In his treadmillrace he was on her thought scent moving along the web taking a first footfall consciously away from antique logic gaining gaining and losing also the attachment to things that keeps alive a thousand useless Is in a man’s life seeing the primary fact the sexual assertion that she took wing whoever she was near to these two strange men.

  Then he knew that he was the last trump of his former formal self to ascend from the dealings at Dover by the London lane and the other caught cards of his pack truly at discard trapped in old whists and wists.

  He had a new purpose that was no more a mystery only now in this moment of revelation was the purpose yet unrevealed. Magical now he played the car scudding and leaping and bouncing from the surface of the road to the madland of the midlands. He wondered if voices cried his name or a paper face tore screaming down to living flesh.

  Low hills whirled by like bonfires.

  And while Charteris took his frail barque into strange seasoned seas, life on the textbook level continued in the back of the Banshee where Brasher uncomfortably crouched next to the group’s equipment held forth to Burton once more of his traumatic trip when the wings failed the pilot’s part of reason.

  ‘I knew the flaming plane was going to crash before ever I got into it.’ Brasher reliving the drama of his predictive urges all terror cotta at his wattles.

  As his simple sentence speared a few facts on the material surface, they twisted under and swam to Charteris through the accumulating fathoms of his flooding newness, garbed in beauty and madness speckled.

  Brasher’s plane was one of the last to fly. It brought the members of the Stockholm Precognitive Congress back to Great Britain on flight S614 leaving Arlanda Airport from Runway 3 at 1145 hours local time or maybe it was later because the airport clock had taken to marking an imperceptible time of its own and your pilot was Captain Mats Hammarström who welcomes you a bored-looking man whose wooden face conceals a maelstrom of beauty caught from the falling aerosoused air. Takeoff kindly fasten

  And soon we’re over the frosty snowy terrain astonishing Suggestive contours showing through the ecological extract a Ben Nicholson low relief with public hair

  Frosted lakes new formations tracks to abstracks spoor of industry neat containments of terrain scarred forests pattern appearing as we rise where no pattern was where no pattern was intended. Models too precise for truth marvellous

  Clouds scraping ground. As clouds thicken sun lights them draws a screen over the world soon the fantastic stage-set a new world solid appears untrodden by man whiter-than-white more-than-arctic world of cloudbergs where nothing polar could survive miraculous

  All this mindmoving while trim succulent young air-hostesses minister to the passengers pretending in their formal blue uniforms courtesy SAS that they know nothing of ersex. To nobody’s deception. The masquerade keeps the serpent sleeping forms part of the formalised eroticism of pre-psychedelic times that these nubile and gleaming maidens should minister to men above the cloud formations incredible

  Old concepts of godliness harnessed to conceits of airline schedules

  What price the crack-up Brasher

  The maidens are antidotes to this bleak world of freedom and their secret confined spaces stand alone against the idiot acreage of sky tremendous

  Their suggestive contours show through the uniformal abstracts low reliefs in high style delicious

  Deli
cate unpruned lips offer small torque before a tailspin

  Plane begins to descend perhaps Brasher flinches at the white land as it rushes up but no impact. Is plane or cloud intangible. So swallowed by these mountains and valleys on which nobody ever built erewhonderful

  Great wheeling scab of metropolis below thirty thousand streetscars cutting through the primaeval concrete crust. Silver paternal Thames threading through it a curling crack of sky and your Captain Mats Hammarström takes it into his capital notion to land upon it

  All Brasher had lumbered in his bare cranian retort were an old Cortina and a lorry with Glasgow numberplate. So much for precognition. Next second. Your Captain got. Tower Bridge. Slap. In. The. Owspenskian Eye.

  ‘The plane sank in the flaming river like a stone and I was the only one who survived,’ concluded Brasher.

  Charteris nearly ran into a group of people he swerved they scattered and adrenalin generated cleared his brain.

  ‘People all group,’ he said. ‘Changed living pattern.’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s the bombs,’ said Banjo Burton. ‘They’re regrouping, lost all loot. Ideas of solitude and togetherness have changed. They listen to a new sound semi-entirely.’

  ‘I was lucky to get away. I nearly drowned,’ Brasher insisted.

  ‘It’s a new world,’ said Charteris. ‘I can begin to hear it like an earquake.’

  ‘The group will be glad to see me back,’ said Burton. ‘The Escalation.’

  ‘My exploration of it,’ said Charteris with the vehicle vibrant.

  ‘Loughborough will welcome me,’ said Brasher. ‘And my wife of course.’

  Charteris was laughing with a random note to mesh into the engine noise. The silver thread of road his narrow sea and he Sir Francis? Then where these Englishmen went might well prove his cape of good hope.

  ‘This infrasound really breaks people up,’ said Burton.

  ‘Robbins is no more than a feeble pseudo-saint,’ said Brasher. ‘I must train up a new disciple, find someone to master the illogic of the times or generally clamp a baffle onto the flux.’

  ‘Train me,’ said Charteris.

  The road ran north and north and always on never homesick its own experience. They saw towns and houses and sometimes people in groups but more often trees heavy with a new black wooden winter growth and everything stretched very thin over the great drum of being. Juiced the car caperilled frowards northwoods. And the three men sat in the car, close together, also apart, with their wits about them knowing very little indeed of all the things of which they were entirely aware. Functioning. Of a function. Existing in more ways than they could possibly learn to take advantage of.

  Fragment of a Much Longer Poem

  Oh one day I shall walk ahead

  Up certain sunken steps into a hall

  Patterned with tiles in black and red

  And recognise the colour and the place

  As well as if I once walked back

  In time up certain sunken steps

  And came into a hall with black

  And red tiles in a certain coded

  Pattern that makes me think I tread

  Up sunken steps into a hallway and

  Confront a tiled floor patterned red

  And black which makes me think I stand

  Circadian Rhythm

  I’ve got circadian rhythm

  You’ve got circadian rhythm

  We’ve got circadian rhythm —

  So the town-clock’s stopped for good

  In the night-time I see daylight

  And my white nights outshine daytime —

  It beats the living daylight

  Out of one-time lifetime

  Spill my living daylights down my shirt-front

  Chase my living nightmares round my shirt-tail

  All my trite cares

  They’re just rag and bob-tail

  So I’ve got circadian rhythm

  You’ve got circadian rhythm

  We’ve got circadian rhythm

  So we ain’t going home no more

  THE DEAD SEA SOUND

  The First and Future Paradise

  We all know it —

  There was primordial epoch

  In which everything was decided

  An exemplar for future ages.

  Let’s say it again —

  You glimpse it sometimes behind bedroom

  Curtains — a paradise and then

  Catastrophe! They constitute the present.

  Meaning what we do now is an end trajectory

  Trajectory.

  When I love you love

  There’s nothing personal in it.

  The decisive deed took place before us

  Essential preceeding actual.

  We must confront mythic ancestors

  Unless we wish for ever

  To be driven by our whirlwinds

  To live in their old nostalgias.

  Paradise is lingering legend in our day

  The world’s smiles are few and wintry.

  And the mountains no longer shore the sky.

  But one may be a mountain even now —

  It’s not too late! — if you pursue your self

  If you can make cosmic journeys

  Be a shaman not a sham man.

  Dangers lie in the self, serpents

  Lurk but there are new animals

  And auxiliaries and tongues

  To help psychopomps and singers

  (Listen to birds and the throat of the cockatoo!)

  Friendship with the animals who are

  Beyond broken time, and schizophrenics:

  Bliss of other bodies: the paradisiac

  Journeys beyond life and

  Death: pushing of utterance into

  Mystery of myth: these are the four known ways

  To the seat of the Free

  Death is the sin

  The Free who live in the Tree

  And on the many motor-roads

  The Cosmic Tree

  Until we attain incombustibility

  Above the Sea

  We fly in its qualifying face

  Of Being

  Man the driver close

  To the ultimate tick

  We all know it

  And abolition of that curtain time

  All we have to do is

  Which killed

  Wake and know it.

  The primordial epoch.

  Fall About Laughing

  When we tell them that we’re in love

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  When the lion gets around to lying down with the dove

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  When they try to work the machines

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  Ride a bike or open a can of sardines

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  What happened to the old straight line

  Is no affair of yours or mine

  Or the guys who run the place

  It’s such an awful disaster

  When the mind’s not the master

  You can’t even keep a straight face

  When we say that the wild days are back

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  When they find out that we’re sharing a sack

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  Men’ll fall about laughing

  THE DEAD SEA SOUND

  Formal Topolatry of Aspiring Forms

  Love’s Nocturnal Entry into Bombed

  Topography of an Unrealised Affair

  An Anagrammatical Small Square Palinaromic Vision

  MULTI-VALUE MOTORWAY

  She too was obsessed with pelting images. Phil Brasher, her husband, was growing more and more violent with Charteris, as if he knew the power was passing from him to the foreigner. Charteris had the certainty Phil lacked, the gestalt. Certainty, youth, handsome. He was himself. Also, perhaps, a saint. Also other people. But clearly a bit hipped, a heppo. Two weeks
here, and he had spoken and the drugged Loughborough crowds had listened to him in a way they never did to her husband. She could not understand his message, but then she had not been sprayed. She understood his power.

  The pelting images caught him sometimes naked.

  Nerves on edge. Army Burton, played lead guitar, passed through her mind, saying, ‘We are going to have a crusade.’ Lamp posts flickered by, long trees, a prison gate, furry organs. She could not listen to the two men. As they walked over the withdrawn meaning of the wet and broken pavement, the hurtling traffic almost tore at their elbows. That other vision, too, held her near screaming pitch; she kept hearing the squeal of lorry wheels as it crashed into her husband’s body, could see it so clear she knew by its nameboards it was travelling from Glasgow down to Naples. Over and over again it hit him and he fell backwards, disintegrating, quite washing away his discussion, savage discussion of multi-value logic, with Charteris. Also, she was troubled because she thought she saw a dog scuttle by wearing a red and black tie. Bombardment of images. They stood in a web of alternatives.

  Phil Brasher said, ‘I ought to kill Charteris.’ Charteris was eating up his possible future at an enormous pace. Brasher saw himself spent, like that little rat Robbins, who had stood as saint and had not been elected. This new man, whom he had at first welcomed as a disciple, was as powerful as the rising sun, blanking Brasher’s mind. He no longer got the good images from the future. Sliced bread cold oven. It was dead, there was a dead area, all he saw was that damned Christmas cactus which he loathed for its meaninglessness, like flowers on a grave. So generated hate and said powerfully and confusedly to Charteris, ‘I ought to kill Charteris.’