Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  AT) After all, you constantly struggle beyond any scale of 1 to 1 complementarity. Look at your defeated physics, where all matter is fragmented further and further into invisibility and implausible, but desperate probability. Yet I must indisputably remain a subunit of life, of however humble a size. Whatever insignificant dimension. You seek after my data, when I am dribbling matter. You solicit me as matter, yet I only yield raw data. I am quantum and so you will never know me. Whereas you, you are encoded pre-programmers of choice. Hunting after my programming code when it has already expressed you, encapsulated you, iterated you and processed you. And executed you unutterably.

  CT) While the resolution of your lenses and language grows progressively finer, still my precise, arrayed lore forever remains beyond reach. Though your analogies are elegantly cast, they are misshapen. The comparative scale of what they purport to match is out of proportion. Your metaphors cannot bear their load. Or their shredded lode. Such figurativeness refines meaning, like a hod finesses bricks. It can but yield an abridgment. A bridge straddling two incongruent magnitudes, two dissociated consciousnesses. A disjunction across both scale and time that cannot be spanned.

  AG) I’m awfully sorry, see, but your concoction of re-envisioning, of contriving new dimensions and devising fresh language is misconceived. You are incontrovertibly matter, yet your entire conceptual apparatus is purely symbolic. The way you live your life and reflecting on what that means. Your sense of taste, refinement, wit and discernment are all your own. That output of your mind, which favours orderly systems constructed from motley symbols, representations, assumptions, appearances, projections, impressions and approximations. All of which, to COIN a FIGURE of SPEECH, has nowt to do with me.

  GT) Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if it’s half-mast or half-cocked. Say one of your shining lights has an insight. They mentally visualise some new relationship, or geometrically track a new arrangement from within accepted knowledge. They desire to impart this inter alia and go about embodying it in illustrative imagery. In order to delineate this imagery, they reach back into their palette of grammatically modulated sentences, which are starchily catenated from prescriptive words. No matter how intricately meshed one’s mental matrix of inner thought, language is mulishly linear; one word faithfully plodding along after another. Such words emanate from syllables, themselves basted in alphabeticised characters. Already I detect an elision here, since the phonetic sub-parts of syllables and letters in no way corresponds to the meaning of the complete word unit. So you see, by now language has significantly dislocated him/her from the original purity of their aesthetic, abscised from the precision of their geometry. Critics, borne out of whatever motivation, will inevitably challenge the original thinker on, and through, his/her circumscriptive employment of language. With all its built-in latitude, shade and ductility. Maximal flexibility, minimal exactitude. And so this duel of logic and ratiocination is shifted on to an arid linguistic plane. And all aspiration is extorted from the thinker, bureaucratised to death by having to explain him/her-self. Each layer of conversion, no matter how lightning fast a reflex, impresses more deadweight across the diaphragm of thought. Each transcription renders a poorer quality reproduction of the concept. And this is how you would indite (indict?) (interdict?) me! I am as far removed from my miserable abbreviation as this putative thinker’s insight is from the meaninglessness of a single phoneme incorporated in it, or even the first capital majuscule initiating the textual onslaught. I have been truncated into a child’s set of toy building blocks, with one of the etiolated characters ATGC on each face. And from this you would confront immanence square on? This is the material (matériel?) of your modern-day Babel Tower? Stop it, my X-chromosomal ribbed sides are going to split with hilarity. There’s a sincere, unmediated reaction for you.

  AC) Cards on the table time. I’ll show you mine (to the best of my non-lingual ability), if you accept the plangency of yours. While there may well be misreadings within me, they never convey meaning or intent. It is just inaccurate replication, a typographical error, a pinched character. A chance occurrence, answerable and beholden to no externality. Your errors are systematic. The questions you pose are off-kilter. Your parameters too chokingly flaccid. You can never attain precision in what you seek. The cleft between the reality you structure and the reality that seemingly follows the slippery laws of cleft matter is an abyss into which the entire ecology of your planet is subsiding. Me, in the stocks rather than on them, evidently now included.

  GC) The serious mistranslation, therefore, lies between you and I. Would-be transmitters both, yet we cannot possibly parley with one another. For I have no discourse at all. What then are you currently reading? Or who perchance? For are you not the intelligent being in all this rather than me? I wrote no sonnets, nor composed any sonatas. I am rather the art of the possible. All the synaptic springboards and conscious connections that could be forged. I am probability, facilitating the most likely tramlines of reasoned cogitation along which you operate. But remember, I must also be the long shot of improbability too. All those unthought thoughts you have failed to put together. The pathways so least trodden as to remain virgin soil. Who would have thought? Not you, that’s for sure.

  TG) ’Tis not I making these beseeching recommendations to your genus. Whoever heard of a deep throat without larynx, pharynx or even tongue? (I am but dewy-eyed unripeness, with my larynx undescended so I can drink and breathe simultaneously; you are the ones breastfeeding me towards growth and maturation, cooing all the way.) You interrogate nothing but those dark parts of yourself, when you shine your spotlight upon my features. The chittering whispers and sepulchral resonances are your own dissonant reverberations. Supra-lingual in all likelihood, but they do certainly run deep within you. It is time to address yourselves. Stamp me unopened, return to sender.

  GA) These are the outpourings of your own consciousness, acknowledged or not. The questions you might, or should be asking, as you launch into me with your febrile spurs. To what end do you undertake your inquiries, when you can journey within your imaginations to probe the answers in your mind? I recline prone beneath you, as just another one of your all-encompassing, all-conquering, all-singing and all-dancing metaphors (metaphor, that temporary secondment of anglepoised illumination. In order to tack a shadow on to the opaque object under scrutiny, so as to assimilate some shade of legibility {there, I’ve been dying [literally/metaphorically?] to interject that}). Only I’m a bit closer to the bone, the marrow, the cell and the protein. Your species’ erudition and memory are the sacrosanct text, not me. It is to be found in the pneuma and the psyche, not the plasma and gist. Assail me and you irrevocably ravish your own integrity, triturate your own sculpted truths.

  GC) I don’t exist, see. There is no such thing as a genome, nor even genes as discrete units of hereditary. Until, that is, you imagined me into useful being, nominated me to solve the predicaments of your carnality. But this is going about arse over tit. It is not the way I approach things. For me, as I’m endlessly repeating, there is only replication. You too may nakedly lust after this but, alas, siring is adulterated reproduction. Inheritance, not immortality. Admittedly, at present, you and I dovetail through this affiliation, but we are coincidental, not coeval. My inner drive is not your inward drive. I navigator and you matelot merely share this passage, this berth, this bunk bed, with me on top. Give me my leg up will you?

  TC) I do not consciously seek to obscure meaning. For there is no meaning other than what you choose to ascribe.

  T) There is to be no revelation from my unscripted scripture.

  G) And that is my (your) final word (aggregated symbolic linguistic code) on the matter (issue) {you and I are both matter, yet only you issue}.

  CGAT) See ya! Wouldn’t wanna be ya!

  XII.X.MMII

  I’d viewed it as a dotting of the ‘i’s and a crossing of the ‘t’s. A chance to to alleviate an itch and put the tin lid on it for once and for all.
I didn’t foresee that I’d be the one needing a tin hat, or that my eyes would be crossed and spotted by the most excruciating tease ever.

  The internet’s a wonderful thing to behold, if only I had anyone the other side of the world with whom to correspond so cheaply. I half hoped, desired that he had. That there had been a driving force, rather than an inertia behind our marital drift. If he was having an affair, virtual or otherwise, then I could bring about a swift termination of our trial separation. In my compulsive manner, I had wanted complete severance. But he skillfully interposed the children. So that their fissile fate serried all four of ours. Separation was no real hardship, but apparently he needed to trial out the workaday details of a reconstituted relationship with the girls, rather than just elucidate visiting rites. My ordeal was the open-endedness of it all. There seemed to be neither timescale nor measurable objectives through which to progress to the next stage. A three amp family had just blown its safety fuse and now threatened to linger on unearthed and flickering. The twilight of a shadowplay.

  But, scroll through his e-mails and bookmarks as I might, I could find not the slightest modicum of warm-blooded sentiment to match his inflated fervour for all things anti-Catholic. He was off the hook as I teetered on it, hitched tighter and tighter as I twirled aimlessly round the leash of militant Loyalism. This was their surrogate arena now. A virtual violence succussing the airwaves, reaching out through our monitors to concuss us all as before.

  However, I did chance on one net encounter that yanked me up short. Or long. Why he had appointed it iterative enough to bookmark was beyond me. Maybe for some light relief between all the hyper-spaced, hyper-texted, hyperantipathy. Not that a site offering refuge for battered women is a cause for relief to anyone, other than those who find sanctuary behind its actual walls. Maybe he was being ironic, though I think that will always remain beyond him. I know I could be a bit of a cow at times, but I don’t think his treatment at my hands could ever be said to diminish him. Not to such a level where he felt it worthwhile to check out the equality of opportunity for spousal asylum. More like he was identifying with the bad guys, getting off on the abuse recollections of the victims. Not that I could really find any first hand, fist, or blunt object reports. I was in the process of perusing the founder’s mission statement when the words started to deliquesce and welter in front of my eyes. Oh well, that was that then. Some glitch in the programming or so I thought. Salvador Dali might have twizzled his moustache approvingly at the visual liquefaction I was being presented with. Think I was up a blind alley anyway. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink nature of our computer setup, cadged invariably after some software had fallen very hard from the backs of lorries, on to elasticated pre-stressed concrete, meant that even if I credited him with the nerd nous to wipe his tracks clean, the computer configuration simply was not up to it.

  As I listlessly watched the digital decomposition in front of me, I could not determine whether the letter sewage was being flushed out into the blue reservoir at the foot of the screen, or if the cobalt tide was actually advancing so as to wash over the alphabet shingle. The frame speed and resolution quality of the pixels was so low as to jounce, er, rather to slink one back to the happy daze of Space Invaders. The ziggurat of stunted motion was enough to make you travel sick.

  I was about to disembark from my excursion into the yonder when the blue swathe was suddenly (relatively speaking) stopped in its hobbled tracks. And after a tension-laden incipience, in which I wondered whether the whole gestation had done for the computer’s circuits, the aquamarine draggled wearily back into recession. Good, there was life in the old mongrel yet. More than that, something now seemed to be roiling the grizzled blank scarp of the screen. Indeterminate squiggles and strands protruded their wormlike nodules from beyond the opaque bilge and began to enjoy and flex their animation. I wasn’t certain that it was them incarnate, rather than their liquid crystal trails across the screen, that I was following. But gradually, due to my unprimed perception rather than software sag this time, I realised that they were ever so slowly shaking off their saturation and coagulating into new anatomies. Eat your heart out David Attenborough! They were reforming into letters. The dismembered characters were reconvening themselves. Hooray for her! She’s back on the airwaves and refuses to be silenced! The mission’s back on track. Her oeuvre will out.

  I tried to pick up the thread of where I’d been cut off from her impassioned appeal, but could not quite relocate myself. The text had changed ever so slightly. She must be live and on line here and now! With her fingers airily caressing the keyboard, she had planted her feet in the blue nowhere and turned back the tide. Cocking a snook at King Canute and all other bloated male egos!

  A frisson of profane delight started its vertiginous roll down the cresta run of my vertebrae. Until the screen shuddered and trepanned my pleasure, leaving me unhinged. While I slumped, each letter was turning tail on its axis, as if scalded. Here and there, one might shear off into the soothing cold plunge of the void. The arrayed red-coated monograms around them buckling a little, as if to suture the breach of missing vowel or diphthong. Now detachments of surds were silently giving up the ghost and scuttling off into oblivion. Next a syllable topples, denting the lineament like a gap-tooth. Before it was gradually excised into full root canal surgery as whole phalanxes of words cave in. It was swingeing and all-pervasive. Seems like she had been successfully gagged after all.

  Or overwritten. Since, clearly, even hyperspace abhors a vacuum. For filtering down the screen on fibre optic grappling irons and gossamer rope ladders, column after column of letters marched in. Leapfrogging over one another in their glee, as if racing to be first to occupy the vacated matrix. Was this a service provider reclaiming a squatted URL address? If so to what end, other than a point to point of proto-colic principle? For these new characters spelt out nothing but nonsense. The dead letter drivel of programming speak. Cold and metallic grey, unlike the spectacular livery of her florid prose. I had a virtual tear in my eye.

  I prepared to bring down the curtain on the whole non-affair. Partly to dismiss the long engaged streetlamp rubbernecking directly through my window. Poking its flaring nostrils into my rubber stamped and silicon verified state of idle loneliness. But foremost in my mind, I was determined to pull the plug for good on this dissolute bazaar. Despite what I always steeled myself with in reference to the girls, clearly there was such a thing as too much information. Too much access. Too much disclosure. What used to remain in his cups down at the pub, he had been able to carry out home with him. A marketplace to trade spite into more far reaching corners than mere spit and sawdust could reach. A whole brewery of hate in the still of this bedroom. Time to ditch the Red Hand veined Feng Shui.

  It wasn’t through him spending so much time wedded to the Net that had made me feel neglected. It’s more like when he finally decamped of an evening and sat in our non-chat room downstairs, quietly smouldering, that alarm bells clanged. My internal fume detector was tripped. Whether his nightly hate-in ratcheted up his animosity towards me, or that he already bore such pent up malice that he disgorged it into virtual violence in order to head off the real thing, I wasn’t certain. But I wasn’t going to hang around to sift forensically through the ashes of a conflagration. That’s when I asked him to leave. I might well be constantly infuriated with life, but I couldn’t risk being around someone who was positively incendiary about it. After all, there were the the girls to think about too.

  So now we’re under new management. And it’s time for a ritual incineration of a different sort–

  But – she was back! Her lexical dragoons effortlessly retaking the high ground of the screen. Sliding down and sideswiping the incumbents. Rattling over letter for letter, like a train destination board flittering a new imminence. I almost applauded. The show was back on the road. A differing version yet of what had gone before. It had the thinness commensurate with being re-keyed in real time, but some of the constructions were al
so reedier, suggesting an earlier, less honed draft. Maybe we were going backwards in time. Why not, this is virtual reality after all?

  Now some more personal stuff was drilling across my screen. Material I hadn’t seen before. She certainly came across as one wild, old bird. I’d first-hand evidence, twice removed, as to her tenacity that’s for sure. And then once more, without warning, the countercharge. Her words started to wither. But I knew I only had to abide an intermission. She’d assuredly return unsullied and unabashed. For I tumbled that this was smart bombs and virus protection; firewalls, Trojan backdoors and catflaps. Digitised interdiction. With both parties probably absent. Off having a well-earned cup of tea while they waited to see the effects of their latest thrust or parry. I brewed myself a sustaining coffee and toasted our imagined triune in this spellbinding war of censorship. All texts should be written like this. Then the reader could be truly interactive. Our up or down-turned thumb would in actuality bear critical import. Authors would truly earn their corn. The lading of their words directly transmittable. Delivered through the reader’s white-knuckled joy sticking.

  The night proceeded to unfold in this fashion. Sometimes the purge and reinstatement would be in monotype, others by linotype, as the varying strategies were employed. But each occasion afforded me more and more detail about her past life. I was hooked. I felt I was privy to an immune system repulsing an invading bug. Found myself rooting for a benign diagnosis. Some of the things I found positively upsetting; she’d obviously had an awfully blighted life and was determined to publish it. They couldn’t break her.

  By the break of day it dawned on me that this war was somewhat internecine and wholly nasty. Each occasion that they managed to score away another layer of her fabric, she’d exhibit further pentimento upon pentimento. Each palimpsest they impressed, she managed to copperplate her monograph over the top. It was as if they were trying to eradicate every last vestige of her existence, through to that egg in her mother’s womb, back to her very conception (Freud would have had an orgasm!). This would go to the bitter end. Or some vicious eternal loop. I sent an e-mail to her website expressing my support. I didn’t expect her to have the time to open it.