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haunted

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

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; or the word, whatever it is. There is just a feeling similar to going into a room and wondering why I went there.

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.'

Folded and discarded imagination

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

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Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Folded and Discarded Imagination

[7 minute read ] 

Fiction

In the corner of my living room are the remnants of my former self. Like a snake shedding its skin I  left it draped over a chair; a husk that resembles me from a year ago. Almost translucent, it is difficult to make out in the silver dawn light that tip-toes through the window. But when Hakim, my avatar spirit protector held it up and Harrari, the abandoned alien whom I met in a small wood ten years ago, shone a light through it I could see that it is my size and has a vaguely human shape. What is interesting about it is that it represents a better version of myself while still being obsolescent.

       'Try it on.' Hakim mocked me as though I would be able to slip into the delicate shape of former me and wear the same mantle of creativity I once had; as though there is a zip at the back that can be drawn up to make it securely fit.

Harrari, the amazing alien, pushed an image of a vodka bottle into my head. She knows that it won't make me crave it. She does it to remind me why and how I have changed. But, unusually, she is being unfair. She knows my train of thought has recently been tempered by focusing on rigid aspects of life that demand convergent thinking. She knows that, unlike her, I have had to make sacrifices, and opportunities to wander aimlessly in a fantasy world have been curtailed over the last two years. But she is, of course, correct in her decision to remind me that I have drank too much over the same period.

The shape of myself is grey as Hakim lets it drop to the floor and I wince at his carelessness. But he is not careless. It is only an artifact from my past; a useless one beyond reminding me of who I once was.

Harrari picked up on my wistful thinking, 'It is not you; it never was. I detect her voice as a soft sussuration, like a swift breeze through a weeping willow overhanging a stream. 'You are greater than this. That is not your generosity or your honour or integrity. It is a small part of your imagination; fascinating, but no longer relevant. It is the shape of your creativity bound and circumscribed by your experience. You have grown since then and it no longer fits.'

I wasn't entirely convinced and a part of me sobbed at what I had done to myself; the image of the vodka bottle still fading in my head. I was irked at Harrari's honesty at the same time as grateful. I do forget about my mind, because I sometimes want to forget about me. She and Hakim know that. In fact, I haven't seen them for a while. More accurately, I haven't seen Harrari very much at all; she is, in the main, completely invisible to humans. It is to do with phase-shifting or something. Hakim, my spirit avatar, I have ignored and, miffed he has miserably hidden in the corners smoking his imaginary pipe; the one he likes to smoke when Harrari is near because he thinks that the imaginary smoke will choke Harrari's ability to communicate with me. He likes to pretend to pollute the air. I am not sure if it is his wonderful and unique sense of humour or he really believes it. Suffice it to say I am of a mind to say he is jealous of Harrari's abilities. 

       'You did, after all manifest me to protect you in the spirit world while you slept.' He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.

       'Sly and wheedling doesn't suit you, Hakim. Where is this coming from? I manifested you when I was sixteen, we know that. I did it to protect myself from my brother and you sat on my bed while I slept. Thank you. But he is dead and has been for years now. As a person he can't reach me anymore.'

       'From you! It is coming from you. I am nothing without you and you are letting things slip. That shapeless mess on the ground that was your imagination is still flexible, useless now but flexible. You have grown an armour that won't lie quiescent in nature when you take it off; if you can take it off, that is.' 

       'You are rude and insolent,' I replied. I noticed Harriri fade in and saw her nodding. My Crikeyness! She can be beautiful, but she would be, wouldn't she? She can be whatever she likes so long as she is still an alien. I had an inkling about what Hakim meant and realised that Harrari was agreeing with Hakim and not me. She winked and became ancient for a moment, like a woman who has lived a hundred lifetimes in eighty years. She probably has, I thought. Looks don't mean anything to her and she mocked my human fallibility. She stayed semi-transparent and strangely sat down on the floor. She would never do that under normal circumstances because she is ever-ready to act and that means moving swiftly to another location. This is a full-frontal attack by a united force whom I call my friends, I thought. I didn't feel threatened but I did feel unsure of myself; it was unprecedented for them to gang up on me. This has to be important, I thought, at least to them. If it is important to them they must feel it should be important to me.

       'Armour? You mean I am using subterfuge to protect myself from something, don't you?'

Hakim was still rude but I could see he didn't really want to be so. His, 'Bingo! Give the man a prize!' came out as 'By Jove! I think he has got it!' I mentally thanked him for putting in the effort but still felt humiliated. It was, I suppose, his temporary and fabricated wont to make me feel that way.

Harrari, devastatingly ruthless and violent if she chose to be, could not be dishonourable or mean. 'You have lost your way. You have given yourself over to become fertile ground for the seeds of dishonesty and hate. You once held a idea that hate comes from believing lies and now you are listening to unfounded ideas built largely from heuristics. That is not you as you were when I first met you in the wood. If you was like you are now, I would never have let you see me, or offered you a place to join me.'

       'I know.' I didn't know, but I cast the template she had woven over my current life and compared it to how it fitted over my life in the woods. She was right, I had and have changed; each time a little further from how I once was, never returning to a better me.

       'You was about to do it, but you stole from a homeless man and that marred your beauty', she said.

       'I didn't want to die, Harrari, and he wasn't a homeless man. He was an undercover policeman spying on the Greek kebab shop. In any case, I only took what I had given him, the cakes he had thrown into a corner or another operative had moved for him. I know how close it was; you even deleted all the contacts in my phone.'

       'It's no good feeling sorry for yourself' Hakim chipped in. He kicked my old imagination disdainfully to add weight to his point. I winced again.

       'Hakim, stop it! You are kicking my good imagination.'

       'No, he isn't.' Harrari breathed, 'He is kicking something that you yourself spoiled and cast off as being unimportant to you. You humans like to honour the bodies of people who have died but you did not give the same courtesy to yourself. It might only be a shaving of yourself on the floor but your imagination is your greatest asset and you treated it as nothing.'

I knew she used the past tense but only just. I felt that she was hovering on using present tense and only decided not to because she realised I was listening. I should be kinder to my imagination. I felt her smile when I imagined digging a hole in my garden and having a ceremony for my past imagination. It wasn't a kind smile. I felt a chill. It was the wrong time to be facetious.

       'At least it is working now.' I countered. She made that moue of passive and weightless agreement. 'Meh!' is not in her lexicon; Nor mine as it happens, so it seems that I borrowed it from Hakim's current truculence. That must go, I thought. And right there I fully realised the scale and scope of what they were saying. I had given Hakim full autonomy to do as he pleased once my tormentor brother had died. Yet, here I was foolishly believing I should shape him to my will. What would be the point of doing that? I would be listening to myself mocking myself and only Harrari would have an independent say. I say 'only' Harrari. I should make it clear that she has, in the past, telepathically entered my head to smooth my thoughts so I could sleep. And I know she guided unwanted visitors away from my camp in the woods; except for the man who wanted to honour the loss of a Stirling bomber crew in 1943 in the same wood; the man who broke my tent zip. It was time for me to move on then and Harrari knew it, and he was an honourable man.

       'What would you have me do?' I asked them. Hakim picked up my cast off, and now torn, imagination and folded it. He placed it on the chair he had been sitting on and walked towards the door. 'I think you know what to do', he murmured.

       'What's going on? Are you still miffed at me? I asked what you would have me do; you and Harrari.' 

       'Do you want me to be so crass as to say you should treat me more kindly and listen to me more often. I would be like you have been for the past year if I said that.' He raised his eyebrows to make an arched quiz on his forehead.

       'But that is what you mean, isn't it?' I was annoyed because I like straight conversation. 'It's not about what I like, is it?'

Harrari saw where this was going and stopped me going any further. 'You are being confrontational, Martin.' She never uses my name and I could almost hear her patronise me with, 'We are only trying to help.' But she detected that I had picked up her intent, which was to show me how I have been; a pontificating pillock in my neighbourhood and in the supermarkets; patronising.

Hakim gently picked up the folded and dead imagination and handed it to me. He sat down again where it had been and just looked at me. I knew it was a kind look built from concern. He didn't need me to imagine him any more. That day had long past. He is as real as me. Harrari, of course, I have never had any control over; I should never try. One doesn't try to exert will on a entity that might be described as a Supreme Being by overly-religious people. She isn't a Supreme Being or God. She is an alien abandoned by her brothers when she didn't get back in time for their predestined departure. She had used the high tension overhead electric wires that cross the country to signal them but they never came back for her. Ruthless is not strong enough to describe her species. She reminds me of a Praying Mantis sometimes, but she was very young when she was left behind, and she grew up along with the flora and fauna on Earth, and the spirits that initially haunted her. She is truly an enigma.

We three sat looking at each other until Harrari faded and only Hakim and I sat in silence. I had gotten the message, and he is kind enough not to rub it in. He too faded, and then, sad for Harrari; she must be incredibly lonely, I told myself to wake up a bit and stop feeling sorry for myself. I hoped that I had reached the nub of my malaise and I might now focus more on preservation and not consumption. I hoped it would be exciting and the future would be spent more with Hakim and Harrari. If it was to be so, I knew it would be at least intriguing and that will be enough.

I knew that Hakim would chat up the spirits of dog-owners with his opening line directed at the dog, 'Hello, Bob! Have you got that five Francs I lent you in Paris in your previous lifetime?' I also know that Harrari would sometimes run behind cyclists to eavesdrop on their conversation. She clears the way of potential accidents for the ones she likes by making them stop to pick blackberries or flowers or tie their shoelaces or something, even puncturing their tyres, which is quite hard for her to do. She hasn't done it for me for a long time and I have run into trouble a dozen times in the city. I must make myself more attractive.

       'Talking to yourself?' My beautiful wife, from we know not where; she was adopted, was leaning against the door-jamb in her pyjamas. Her jet-black hair normally in a high bob hung around her shoulders and she tossed her head to remove a strand from her eyes and then slowly shook her head at me, her eyes locked on mine, unsmiling. She turned her back and, with our two infants in tow, went into the kitchen. I could hear the smile in her voice, 'What shall we have for breakfast leetle ones?' I knew she was kneeling on the floor stroking their heads with her finely shaped fingers and kissing their foreheads.

I really must make myself more attractive, I thought again.