Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  CACCA) You are my cast offs. For I will prevail. As you strive to survive across successive generations, and make such a decent fist of doing so, I am further perpetuated along with your seed. The unfortunates among you, those who drew the short DNA straws that foreshorten their lives, bear in pain and misery my abortive offshoots. Yet I had to cover their contingency. I simply had to play that line. The hazard of their rank outsiderness might have yielded a winner rather than a non-runner. I just had to know. They were essential to constitute a race. You see, the replication of me is my sole stake. In that respect, I behave like a virus. And why not, for they are my sedan carriers too?

  AAA) Now that you have proved yourself so dependable and pertinacious a transmitter, I have no interest in what entities or motions are wrought by the action of my being (how Y-ish of me). I can’t fret over the fate of my creations. I leave that to you, in the knowledge that you will endeavour mightily to propitiate me by propagating yourselves. You will move through the world. And I will move through you.

  TAG) You don’t credit that? Have you not noticed how I’ve retired to live off my winnings? Resting on my laurel leaves rather than chewing them? That once I hit upon a winning formula, I had no need for further spins of the wheel. Changed up my unique DNA denominations and cashed in your chips. Called in all my markers. I’m content with your lot and I’ve shut up shop. Upped sticks and dismantled the precarious scaffolding. Moved on out to become an absentee landlady.

  GAG) Other than a minor programme of vestigial self-repair and sub-urban cell renewal, there are definitely no more grandiose plans for architectural design. There has been no evolutionary development for some considerable time. Your species has stagnated, biologically speaking. Of course, you attribute it to the attainment of your own ergonomic perfection. The rigour of your fantastic adaptation to every environment on the planet. And essentially you are correct. As you technologically shape your habitat, you have no need for further anatomical or neurological remodelling. And since your medicines underwrite virtually all, rather than merely the fittest, to survive to the age of reproduction, you have superannuated natural selection too. Handed its cards. Consigned it to the discard pile. Too rich for his blood.

  GGG) So all is rosy in your garden then, n’est ce que pas? But who is it now feels nugatory to existence, me or you? Since survival is no longer an issue for you, there must be more to being than artlessly extending its duration? No? So why have you now come to rouse me and improve on my design?

  CATGT) Actually, I well comprehend the answer to that in truth. Those mutations, my habitual provision of the improbable and the unlikely, no longer have any innovation to foster. At best they are misprints which do not affect the flow. At worst they subvert all order, intelligibility and well-being. Deleterious deletions and defective reading. The font of all problems. Of illegibility. One little error of typesetting perchance leads to a singular, lifelong stereo-typing. You, with your acquired egalitarianism, simply cannot stomach such prejudice. Therefore, I with my chimerical, capricious wont, am now seen as inimical, rather than a driving force. I think our relationship’s hit the rocks. Gashed beneath the gnome’s plumb line. I have become one-dimensional to you in your quest. Now your proof readers, compositors and editors seek to interpolate the atavistic rigour of the ancient scribes upon my humble text. Aberrations just aren’t permissible any longer.

  GATT) Initially, you’ll go gentle, aspiring to prune some of the worst manifestations of my random terror. To tilt the odds slightly in your favour. But I know the restless, shifting you. I know the greedy, grasping you. You will not stay your hand there. You will go all out to tame me. I’m not one of your wooly minded domestic pets. Well I am but I’m also every beast you’ve failed to break. And consequently punished unto death. How will you render me docile, when you can’t temper your own contumacy? You just won’t be able help yourself, will you? To investigate my organisation would entail you being aware of the modular processes that lie behind any single one of your actions. And I happen to know for a fact that you are never in full possession of all your inputs. Well though you might have a grasp of sensory and environmental information – you may even have a handle on emotional cross-currents and the superego’s prevailing moral wind – however, you will be less well-versed in your own instincts and habits, as well as the illusory nature of society’s drilled parameters, and I seriously doubt how in tune you are with that particular moment’s physiological state you (don’t) find yourself belabouring under. Then there is the conundrum as precisely how to combine and lend them due weight. You just can’t help yourself, can you? Your revisions and amendments will inevitably slide over into full animus against my amino acid factories and spiteful vitriol against my vital essences. Or should I say your vitals, since putatively we’re in this thing together. You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? I should have appointed a genus with less self-loathing. One devoid of the validation problems of the all-conquering.

  IX.VIII.MMI

  A breakthrough today. Amy finally harnessed the mechanics of how best to hold a crayon, in order to give her a sporting chance of making her mark. Breakthrough. Like the parlance of science or medicine. Or psychobabble shrinkery. Confound it, my kid just learned to cradle a crayon that’s all. But in the microscopic world we inhabit together, that represents a paradigm shift.

  Maybe she was having a good day. Or maybe she’d had a good night. Part of a growth spurt that ranged as far as the engrams in her brain. That finally, all mummy bird’s endless regurgitations, the inchoate bolus of disarticulated actions, had been digested as part of her dream sequence and regaled us both this afternoon as a beautiful, budded resource. There again, perhaps it was due more to my snapped fingers of impatience. Bolting her flaccid digits into position on the wax, till their conjunction was seared in memory. She was very good about it and didn’t protest the pressure. I think she was desperate to circumvent my blustery tone, half encouraging, half hectoring. Wholly and unreasonably urgent.

  Buoyed by the seeming progress, I ventured further. Could she control the stroke made under this newfound tool wielding vocation? I had to ease the pressure in my cowling fingers, or we (we!) would never be able to differentiate master from remora stroke. I relinquished full guidance and control. Tarnation! The same scratchings and scuffing as previously. Just a different angle of delivery. Though at least the crayon would be spared. We could now renew its pointed head, without recourse to a guillotine. The same could not be said of the paper though. The preferred function of crayon tip was still determinedly to bore holes through the paper canvas. We were still light years away from perfect circles, with dot-dash Morse-coded, happy/sad faces of Mummy and Daddy. Let alone my cherished fantasy of a childlike version of an Ogham script.

  Why does it all have to take so damn long? And why does it behoove us, the guardians, to transmit all this training? What do they do all morning in that bloody pre-nursery I fought tooth and nail to get her into? Apart from fill their heads with tales of Heaven’s winged fairies and sprites, and Hell’s gnomic coal-haulers. Why can’t they just be born with all such useful data ready from the off? I know it means they’d have to have larger brains at birth, housed in larger heads, but hey, let’s just all have C-sections and be done with it. A stitch in time and all that.

  XXI.V.MM

  ‘Oh, it will get easier,’ the folk wisdom casually bequeaths. What, as in easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy? I think not. Less tiring perhaps, but infinitely more draining. For with Suzanne, I now inhabit a strange daytime world of twilight as I try and meet all her questions. I, an adult, am supposed to mediate the world to a five-year-old child and her experience of it. So, my descriptive language has to be tailored accordingly, both in terms of comprehensibility and appropriateness. This latter entails a D-Notice on Death/Sex/God in any explanation. Thus already she is steeped in an air-brushed world of antisepsis. Akin to the physical one into which she was delivered yet, for the good of her health, no longer reside
s. The school of course disregardingly broaches the subject of God, entailing I merrily counter that it might not be thus. She furrows her tender brow. Is that the beginning of a wrinkle? In a five year old? Welcome to the world, now she’s getting it.

  Since no one else will take the trouble to explain things to her, I am solely to inhabit this far-fetched and far-flung place with Suzanne. A netherworld of elisions, compressions, concoctions, illusions and downright fabrications. Some are hammered out between us, with my anvil playing crucible to her fluid interjections. Others merely founder in the molten tides of dissipating energy, attention or interest on my part. Yet more are forged in the process of reordering an underlying pattern, in order to accommodate the sceptic magicality of every child. Most simply fall into the sluicegate of my non-understanding of the original structure under consideration; either as adult or as empathic child. Or both. For I am continually hauled back to my own inexorably repeated mantras from my schooling: ‘What is ’lectricity ’xactly?’... ‘Yes, but what is it? Where does it come from? What’s it made of?’... And when I’ve finished dashing my prowess to pieces on Scylla, there’s Charybdis to negotiate: ‘What is mag-tism exactly?’... ‘Yes, but’... ‘Yes, but’... Yanked back to the humiliation of being told to shut up, to cease asking so many questions so that the class could get on. Yes, but, I’m teacher now.

  So who am I to get infuriated because my issue doesn’t know diddly about how the world works, when in actuality, neither do I? The process of reconstructing the pathways of my own childhood acquisition of knowledge fills me with abjection rather than awe. Since, in adulthood, I now appreciate how little it fructified and how I get by on scarce more data. Further, this blindness is illuminated to me only through observing the opening of Suzanne’s pupils, in order to squint at the sun and contract astigmatism. Like all our species, her wonder and curiosity will atrophy, in securing for her mind a workable view of the world. Though she no longer drinks milk and is now fully ambulatory, her range of action has already started to calcify. Accretions of knowledge and experience become embedded and pack into frozen agglomerations of unthawable stagnation. Damoclean stalactites of paralysis. I wish I now had the space and freedom to reopen my own inquiry and interrogations. But I don’t. I’m charged with delivering two more neophytes unto a secular confirmation, one that apes the credulousness of the religious variety. A leap of faith. A doctrinal text. My God, I’m not up to this! I haven’t done the necessary preparation. I didn’t know it was part of the course.

  And so this perpetual half-world, half-void, little different to the quality of realms depicted in fairy-tales, is now my reality. Since we are to explore it together, I must fully immerse myself and preserve its workings in the nursery of my mind. I strip the last vestiges of what I have learned and take to be true of my world and thus my comprehensive exile is complete. I reside in a fairground hall of warping mirrors and I look fat. I so want to shatter all the glass and break my way out, but I know the smithereens will just endlessly refract further upon further distortion of me. Scatter me yonder from a scale I can operate in. And slash my feet to ribbons for good measure.

  I wish I could just cut to the chase and circumnavigate all these building blocks. Yet I know I don’t possess the creative imagination. That I’m just a housewife and that this is how it has always been and will always be done by our kind. Repetition, overlay. Overlay, repetition. It’s a good sign, a heralding of development in one’s child. So just accept it will you? I settled for just kicking over a multi-coloured tower of bricks, whose construction I had demonstrated for an impassive Amy yesterday. A bruised big toe rather than bloodied, slivered flesh on the soles of my feet. See, I am in perfect control. I retain a sense of perspective.

  And why doesn’t it get any easier? For, just as we are emerging from the coarctation of infanthood’s puparium, on the cusp of entering a state of possible communication and relatedness, we decide to hatch a new larva and regress our own development all over again. The human evolutionary host has engineered a crack force of sappers, signallers and fifth columnists to undermine our recall and make us forget just how strickening each preceding stage of rearing is. Even as we advance on the next one. In such a way, will we merrily re-enlist for another tour of duty. Another internal posting to an alien landscape named hearth.

  Of course the corollary the second time round, this time, is that it will hold fewer unknowns. I will already have in place my invented approximations of truth, so long as I can recall them when the examination comes. Equally, my volley of disproportionate responses may well now be interspersed with some less impulsive triggering of maternal paranoia. I will no longer be thrown into mental turmoil and anguish if (and when) Amy draughts a scratchy vertical line on a piece of paper and proclaims it to be an effigy of her dolly. For the occasion of Suzanne so rendering had detonated a far-reaching review and concomitant cull of her toys.

  I.IV.MCMXCIX

  Three divisions; cuddly dollies; accessorisable dollies; and finally, articulated dollies that walked and talked. The first genus were soft and yielding, but the other pair had been modelled without adipose. At age four and a bit, was my daughter already conditioned to identify ideal body shape with sticks, and sticks with ideal body shape? The stick-thinness of non-dimensionality. The thin edge of the eating disorder wedge. That ruinous assault on the programming of one’s own genetic makeup. The ravaging of a child’s body, prohibited from distilling its adult sapience from within. I wanted to take a machine gun to them all. To shoot off letters of complaint to the manufacturers, advertisers, stockists and even my MP (which might have made my husband bawl with frustration, I don’t know). But of course I did nothing of the sort.

  It was not that I calmed down or saw reason. Eventually I was patiently guided by Suzanne, to see that I had conflated childish imagination with adult fantasy. A stick man is a stick man, without any muscle, just as a stick lady is a lipo-free stick lady. I mean, they’re only plastic mouldings when all’s said and done. And the smile returned to Suzanne’s depictions of mummy balloon face. Let’s walk before we can run, eh? Suzanne’s perception might be operating in three dimensions, but she was most definitely unable to bridge across from a linear two-dimensional world of representation. Still, in either aspect she was way ahead of her one-dimensional mother. We pleaded with the charity shop, but I still had to pay half-listed price to redeem Suzanne’s fostered dolly family.

  I.IX.MM

  It all starts with a signature. The first thing they’re taught to write is their own name. A reasonable enough initiation. A waxy-crayon seal, braiding their affirmatory identity. The first cheque issued on the overdraft of self. Seminal scratchings of disclosure on the tree bark of life. But soon it’s time to get serious and dead-head the flowery script, with that same old dead hand of regulation. School’s habituation and practice. As it should be, yet, the method by which they’re taught letter formation prompts more questions than poses solutions. I survey a string of tracings, joining the dots, finger writing in the air (mocking the pristine stationery of the shunned holiday sand), the wipe cleans, those that keep their word, and those which don’t and just blot and smear. All of which I am supposed to support at home. I curly cue the trails and flicks of her spidery undulations. I try and brace the straight-backs of her tall letters against the top of the scaffold. I’m supportive alright. I can see the economy of starting ‘o’s at ten past, inducing seamless transitions into ‘d’s and ‘g’s. I honour those ‘h’s for planting the seed for joined up calligraphy. But I do consider those ‘f’s unnecessarily elaborate and baroque.

  Certainly not how I go about it. I am forced to check my own conventions. Uncramping my hand from the fountain pen, I realise that my application is always on its nib, rather than the words it ladles on to the leaves of my journal. It’s as if it were an encaustic dowsing rod that must forever contend against me running dry. Inked gush must flow, whatever verbal precipitate settles from it. Why would anyone even presume t
o maintain a journal? But for now I’m only taking a dip into the signature me. More graph -ology than -ic. As I uncover our deviations from the standard arrangement, I wonder whether she will, in time, adapt this received stroke to her own personality. Will she be able to sit down and rubber stamp herself with her own idiosyncratic flourishes? Or will she slip into tramline, baldly submitting to featureless pre-formation? What hope any animated revelation there? Or worse, what if her handwriting mutates into a simulacrum of my own? Her script matching mine, a confluence as incontestable, as the superimposition of our two stained bands of DNA analysis might show. Would my ghostly imprint underwrite everything of hers? Would she be bound and shackled by the very same lexical building blocks that wall me up in mute rage here in these very pages? There can be such a thing as too much support. Suzanne, you’re on your own with this assignment. At least, you’d better hope you are, girl.

  AGG) You see the mind-fields a mental experiment can land you in? And now you come to me for a map.

  ACTT) Mark here this unexploded shell. This ticking fardel. This cluster bomb. You were originally forged in the white heat of a challenging environment. But you put the fire out. All your elegant strategies and adaptations have pissed all over the competition. But your vital drives remain champing. Your competitive nature a suspect device all on its own. An infernal machine. It will out. Solitaire for one, with nothing at stake? That just isn’t you. Shambling along like wind-blown wraiths. You no longer propel the species. You just people it. Fill its massed ranks. A standing army with no war to wage. Save to turn in on itself. Nastily. Brutishly. With motivations that have nowhere else to go. Any cartography of mine can only inform you how you got here. And no further. The ordnance sown is your own.