haunted

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Haunted

[4 minute read ] 

Imaginative Opinion (hyperbole)

Apparently, according to one of my neighbours across the road there were a whole bunch of our planets lined up yesterday. He was looking at the image of the solar eclipse passing through his reversed binoculars onto a piece of white paper. For two weeks I had thought I had been relaxed because the troll who lives under a bridge, who is my nearest neighbour, had been away for a while. 

       'My planet is Saturn,' I mused. He wasn't interested. He speaks ancient Greek in his sleep I imagine. 'It goes around the sun every twenty-nine years,' I continued. 'So nothing changes much in my life very quickly.' He still wasn't drawn into commenting.

I have to face it, my mind is a bit loose sometimes. I was, respectfully, casting a handful of dots in the air for him to join up. But he wouldn't enter the game. Horoscopes are plainly not in the breadth of his interests. I wondered if I live a life of perceptual duality; a consciousness that other people do not share. Surely, I am not the only one who throws templates of my fancies over real events. Of course not. I am merely a fool who voices them inappropriately.

       'I should like to be able to describe this light,' I said in the silence between us. The light was the light from the partially occluded sun. 'I am used to it now but if I just stepped out of my door without seeing it beforehand would I say to myself 'What's going on? Things look different.'

       'You would,' he replied trying to refocus the sun's image on his piece of paper.

We tried to describe the light. He made reference to practices of yore that sent smoke into the air over fields. 'Look, the sky is grey and the light also grey as though it has passed through smoke.'

Later, at half past eight, when the momentous event of the rare partial solar eclipse had passed, I looked out into the evening and saw the same light. The houses opposite were no longer bathed in the golden glow of the sun and the sky was grey. The light, just as my neighbour had earlier suggested, seemed to have passed through smoke, yet it was a normal evening light. I suggest that it is the rapidity of the earlier change in light that caused my neighbour to add in a contributing factor to explain the phenomenon. His past experience of stubble-burning; a now outlawed practice of burning the remains of harvesting wheat while still in the field - the roots and the lower stalks; had played in his mind. Anyone who has noticed the shadow of smoke from a bonfire has experienced the same. 

I was eager to record the effect of the partial solar eclipse in my mind. Keen on writing, I wanted to be able to obliquely reference the effects of a sun that is partially obscured. When I consider that a cloud does the same thing as a moon I realised that I was following a path to nowhere. Except, it was not an entire waste of time. I was after all, perceiving an event or set of circumstances in an elevated perceptive state. That can't be bad, right?

       'He lived his life like a solar eclipse; grey with diminishing energy.' I randomly said, mostly to the air but in the presence of my neighbour. It wasn't something I would ever write with any expectation of leaving it as it is, but it fixed the moment in my head.

Over the road, on the pavement, the strange family from up the road were about to pass my home. The tiny girl, probably only two years old, had, a few weeks earlier, approached me and said, 'You're my friend!' I had bent to talk to her a couple of times over the past year and chatted with her four-year-old brother a few times. She seemed to have remembered me on that occasion of stated friendship. It was indicative of an approach to calm her at playgroup. 'Look, the children you know are your friends.'

       'There's my little friend.' I mused aloud. Really it was to attract the family's attention to our little group. The little girl ran on with only a swift glance. Even her brother made no comment. Usually, he would shout an excited greeting at me. I considered that their mum had issued them a quiet command. She is the weird one in the family. It won't be long before I shall be able to detect a strangeness in the kids, I thought. Perhaps, though, she won't have too much of a negative effect on them, even if I can detect a growing reticence in her husband to talk outside of their group to the neighbours.

I noticed another neighbour from across the road, who had been living there for over three years without us ever meeting. She was watching me and beamed every time I glanced at her. 'There's a Starman waitin' in the sky; he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds'. - (Starman - David Bowie, 1972). I suspect she thought I was talking to myself since she could not see the neighbour with the binoculars and paper behind an overgrown shrub. 

       'Come and look at this,' I called. 'He has an image of the eclipse on a piece of paper.'

       'I can't stay long.' she replied and approached us. I suppose she was placing a verbal wedge down, to keep her exit clear and easily attainable. I had no intention of detaining her. I just wanted to make sure she realised that I was talking to a real person. However, I did recognise an opportunity to greet someone I had not had the chance to do so before. You know, what do you do for work and stuff. Before we got anywhere the strange woman came back without her kids and husband and snaffled the neighbour I was engaged with. For a few seconds we formed a triangle on the pavement but before long I realised that the conversation was going to be all about how the poor woman was ill and had just finished working nights. I talk about myself a lot and I know how boring it is to others but somehow this woman could cast spells on others and compel them to listen and sympathise even empathise with her. 'I know, I know! Poor you!' She reminds me of an idea of how someone might look like if they are haunted; gaunt and grey and with an air of despondency, yet still in possession of a tiny ember of hope. I am going to have to look at her with different eyes, I think; see if I can 'see' something.

Her husband wandered over but left again when no-one greeted him. I was going to but I was a little lost in contemplation of how my conversation had been high-jacked and my conversation-partner's attention diverted. The grey woman works for a party that is sent to curtail my progress, I thought. 

I am convinced I have been hypnotised as a child to help me forget childhood trauma. I think my mother was given a secret word that would cause me to forget the previous few minutes of my life.

       'Five, four, three, two, one. You are now in a deep state of relaxation and free from pain. When you hear this word, 's$%*m#' you will immediately feel relaxed and free from pain and have no memory of the previous ten minutes before you heard the word. You are waking now and when I click my fingers you will be wide awake and never be able to recall this session, but the magic word when your mum says it will relax you and erase your memory.' Click!

I think there has been some erosion in the containment of the process and if I hear the 'magic' word these days I have no recollection of a short period preceding the utterance of the word. 

Suddenly, all my neighbours were gone except for the one with the binoculars and the piece of paper. I noticed that the orange-grey sunlight on his face was significantly darker than I remembered, as though an hour hand had just jumped from one numeral to another on a clock-face; that notion comes from 'Lady Audley's Secret' by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, but it fits how I felt. 

There is a chance that I am psychotic and I imagined the participants in a fantastised scenario but the countless instances of no memory of an immediate past are more indicative of either 'perceptual catatonia' or hypnosis gone wrong. I have no idea if 'perceptual catatonia' is a thing. I know I have slammed two words together in a hope they, when combined, suggest an emotional state in which my mind is wholly quiescent and non-receptive to external stimuli. I have always described the period following my nervous breakdown as a child, as 'emotional catatonia'. I am trying to move on from that expression; probably because I like words and like a toddler, also like building blocks.

       'It has pretty well passed now,' my neighbour said. I was a little confused, stunned I suppose, so I thanked him for sharing his image-making time and went home.

       'Not at all,' he politely replied. 'Not at all.'