Alexion

Little dreams, savour the taste. Are these inventions? Do you invent your dreams? Do you create mystical systems? Films from a dream factory, video games, interactive.

Are you dreams compositions? Does mind submerged below talk to mind above in weird collision course empathy? Look at the beast, consider Hermetic thought. As above so below.

Is it redundant, as you will probably find, to dream when all around is strange, new redolent and vivid with sight and sound? Of course dreams are evocative. But are they also the by-products of boredom?

We could suspect that vivid dreaming is one way of perhaps gaining some answers. Producing the unexpected from the consciously mundane. This would imply external force. Is this necessarily the case? Do the Gods have dreams?

There was a window in the morning.

An old, flaky paint window with dingy lace. Through the window, mountains. The original blue remembered hills.

There was tasteless wallpaper, Gainsborough women in straw hats on swings in leafy bowers.

Pull in and across a disgusting junk filled dressing table, coloured, dappled, lozenged with early morning sunlight.

A mirror, dark, dreary in its interior. Shafting, straight-line sunlight, moving and drifting like open water, never staying the same. Dust motes in the air, of course.

There must be a smell to describe this cliché even if we cannot appreciate it at the moment. Damp and mildew from a room long unused, closed for a winter. Open only for a short summer holiday season.

An old, old wardrobe, fake walnut panelling. The door catch is broken. One door hangs open.

Then there is the bed. This must be large and double with brass ends and knobs. The middle of the bed is a confused white landscape. I painted beds with landscapes once upon a time, but you needn’t know that, it’s not important.

The bed is important to this dream. It is certainly a very large bed and it appears two people at present inhabit it. One is curled around herself in a vaguely foetal position, occupying most of the white landscape. The other a man, is awake although his eyes are not open. he owns a thin strip to the left of the bed

There is a sigh, a long expellation of air, a worrisome trembling. the man opens his eyes and remembers his dreams.

He looks first of all towards the woman, a strange expression on his face.

He is incidentally wearing a long white night-shirt. Why I don’t know. I presume something significant about the colour.

As there is something obviously significant about the mounted antlers and cobwebbed festooned patch of deer skull above the bedroom door. This is the first thing to catch his still focusing eyes as he swings out from the bed away from the woman.

We can now, again incidentally, look out from his eyes. He stands on a bedside carpet, a threadbare rug. It has to be doesn’t it? A wood panel floor. There could almost be a blue jug and washing bowl with floral pattern if you wish. But I digress.

Antlers above the door, an obvious symbol. Something deeply personal or perhaps an aside into the collective unconscious. Celtic imagery, Cerunnos, the horned one, Herne in later days, Satan even later. The leader of the wild hunt across the night sky, searching for souls.

Harping back to his dreams, no pun intended. Strange it should be the first thing that he should notice, very male. The female would have been Shelia-na-gig, a fertility symbol... Now I preach, I am sorry.

A test, could it be? Will anything happen as he moves through the door? Will he feel a tickle on the back of his neck? Will he shudder?... Of course, he must... Yes, told you so... spirits of the past in this place.

The stairs are steep, there is no carpet, or is it threadbare and paisley patterned again with brass stair rods? Splinters are an obvious danger and of course his feet are bare.

Now why am I concerned about that? I doubt he is. I doubt he cares, he is too angry. Insomnia makes him angry.

How, he asks himself, can others fall away into happy oblivion when he finds the shortest sleep impossible?

Now this is an irony, a dream about insomnia. Must be a first.

Look carefully down the stairs, steep as we say. Turning a short corner at the bottom. A door normally split across the middle but fully closed at present.

I know that there are two more steps at the far side of this door where a child once sat and listened and warmed to the heat of the kitchen and the large fire and black leaded grange that filled one wall. Oh, I know this place, I know it very well.

We will, then, we three, you, I and the dreamer, go down to that same kitchen and sit in one of the favourite armchairs that we find there and we shall see what kind of day it might be.

He is now wearing a dressing down, although I cannot remember him putting it on, can you?

This is allowed, of course, in a dream. No need to question it. Not much has happened so far that we need to question. This is not yet a lucid dream. I have not seen the sign that I gave myself, the sight of which would enable me to take control. I am not even sure, yet, that this man is me.

Has he made morning coffee?... If you like. Has he sat in the chair facing the kitchen window as you intended? Perhaps he has, but does it matter? I don’t suppose it does.

We have to beware of reading too much into this. Of looking for symbolism everywhere. What chair, what multicoloured dressing gown, whatever?

What is the symbol that will make this a lucid dream? I see you understand the concept. That, my friend, is at the moment a secret. As giving the true name conveys power, I will keep it just that for the moment.

It strikes me that he is waiting for something, what I don’t know. There is another armchair, however.

It may be worth describing these armchairs briefly, while we are waiting. You will probably know them as well as I do. High backed and comfortable for the most part although a spring or two may be missing. Each has a profusion of flowery cushions and each has seen better days.

Both chairs are identical and both now have figures seated in them. Both are male at the moment although one may change at any time. It depends on how the conversation turns.

Where did the other figure come from? You ask as if you felt I knew.

In any case, I mean, if we left that rather vexed question for another time, or for at least the moment. You wouldn’t... Oh good, I am so glad.

It is a wet and windy day. I can see a tree blowing in the wind through the kitchen window. I can imagine shapes in the branches. This is what I used to do in Miss Linton’s singing class at Primary School.

All gathered around the piano in the large hall. We could see a large bare tree tapping time on the window above us. Rather frightening and disturbing.

In this particular tree I can see a man playing a cello, the leaves and branches as the bow across the strings. I can see, of course, a galleon in full sail, I can see a quinqereme of Ninevah. Through a break in the branches I can see clouds across the sun. There has just got to be a rainbow, can you see one?

We are on an island, or at least that is where this dream started. There is nothing between here and America or perhaps more accurately, Newfoundland, but the Atlantic Ocean.

Here it obviously rains a lot. Here more often than not it is windy.

Near this place with its Gaelic name is a waterfall. You know what I feel about waterfalls. This one falls directly from the top of the cliff to the sea. Findargad.

Nearby again is Columba’s island, the Holy Island, the murderer saint. Islands were particularly holy places for the Celt. This is the place of illuminated manuscript. The birthplace of the book of Kells and the Lindisfarne gospels. The burial place of Macbeth, so legend would have it.

The cottage and the window through which we look are across a sea loch and over a mountain from this holy isle.

Perhaps here are the antlers explained. Here I saw whales. Here there are Sea Eagles. These are the isles of the Blessed, Hy Brassil.

Wet and I am laughing.

Within darkness, books, into small rooms and fantastic shadows…

The two are talking. Because this is a dream, no words are exchanged, but we will know anyway. This is the nature of dreaming.

What would I talk about to another man, a man who is at the moment a stranger?

Assuming, of course that this is, in fact me. Sex, in one form or another. Beautiful women, dirty jokes, politics, all typical.

What do I want to talk about to another man? Not much really. I would rather talk to a woman. Far more interesting.

Do you want to go first? Do you wish to guess? What are they talking about? Perhaps we can extemporise. I know we will work it out together. We will talk about…

Changes, climate, the summer we never had, currency, current changes. Our love lives, go on name names, be a devil. The news, politics, overweight, bio clocks, bio rhythms, bio degradable, green, re cycling, children, talking at cross purposes, poetry, illness, other countries, other places, a Summer place, long ago and far away.

Jazz, soul, rock, opera, music, what you like and what I. Ugly, beauty, none such, making love, not making anything. Talking too much, too little.

Being pretentious. The weather, no, not the weather. Films, beautiful women, beautiful men. Letters, necks and ankles and breasts and legs and bottoms. Eroticism and what is not and all the myriad names for it and are you happy or are you not. Who you are, who likes you, you know that I do too. Work and holidays. Did you see? Once when we, a few years ago and so on and so on. Never come again.

What is it you want to know?

Are you happy? Are you?

I don’t know but I asked first.

I don’t know either, a practised sigh, hands are placed behind necks in spectacular body language.

I dream, I change with the wind. Sometimes I can be too emotional, sometimes I can’t. Too much has taken over. Too much upsets or depresses me. I’m wound up like a tape recorder. It keeps me awake and so I can’t dream.

Can I say something, I hope it won’t upset you? No… I shouldn’t, its not my place.

We wish to be young again and know what we know now. Why did it take so long to learn all these things? Was it wise to let go? I wish it was all changed. We will change all that. When I first knew, when first I thought. When first I was sure, when I couldn’t say. I had to say, but most of all.

The lucid dream symbol is a cat. A green cat with white spots. The symbol as I am sure you can appreciate needs to be totally incongruous. I have not seen one yet, have you?

He whistles sweetly, now why does he do that?

Of course there is a partly nostalgic reason for all these glimpses. They are only in part memory. In that sense they are all true. None of the abstract. Of course if you believe me. There is no reason not to. Believe the fantasy if you like.

Don’t you find music evocative?

This man, by the way, is married, of course he is. Upstairs is his nemesis. Perhaps that is a little strong. Would she mind that title? I don’t think so. In fact I rather think it would please her. He thinks all the while of someone else, several someone’s, a history.

This may or not be a lucid dream. It is certainly a teaching dream.

We may all learn something I suppose, or nothing.

The man, or indeed, woman opposite, who cares? Have stopped talking. All have stopped listening.

Music is very evocative. Certain songs take me right back. Almost bring with them the same feeling, or certainly create new ones, linked with the originals in some way. Can you hear music? I can.

Sometimes I compose whole symphonies in my sleep, only to forget them the instant I awake. I once dreamt of my most beautiful painting, now I cannot remember.

You know my interests sufficiently now to almost guess what is coming next. You know how interested I am in the unexplainable. Once as a kind of therapy I listed all the things, incidents, that had happened to me that I could not explain away rationally. The list was quite long. I think it was longer than the lists of most people.

You know how I like the old ways. How I prefer them to the sticky dogma of the new. New souls have short lists. Never have a relationship with a new soul; it will inevitably destroy you both. We meet through the years, we know each other. We know this room. We, whilst we are here, know this dream.

Now this dream, don’t you find it more than a bit out of the ordinary? Why should we three be sharing it for instance? Is, in fact, that possible? One would have thought not. Let me know if you dream of me, ever?

Dreaming has generally to do with sex. At least at some point. I know my companions in dreams are more often than not female. This dream at the moment, is the exception rather than the rule.

Following Alexion, who was the first, in many ways.

The myriad names for It, I said. Now there is a study. The modern names, the old and of course the Anglo Saxon. The fresh and the mildewed. The beautiful and the extreme.

Have you got what you always wanted? Your greatest ever wish? Don’t you find we all tend to live in the past these days. Could the present be that awful to bear?

He read that somewhere as a line. He also said it on several occasions. He never knew it to work. Of course it could be just him. Perversely trying to impress the ladies. God help him.

Back to what we were talking about, sex in dreams. Happens a lot.

Must happen every night, I mean, if the average man thinks of sex once every fifteen minutes? Come on he must dream of it fairly frequently as well. I know I do. Not yet in this one however. Nous avons change tout cela.

I cannot remember ever having what is classically termed a wet dream. Alexion was not as far as I was aware a dream at all. I never awoke sticking to the stains on the sheets. It was training if you like.

Who was Alexion? The truth is I don’t actually know. I have no idea.

Was she real? The person in the chair can shrug at this point. Where did she come from? From my fevered imagination. It’s a good a place as any. A pubescent spirit? My imagination run riot? If I said she seemed real, would you really believe me?

History teaches nothing. But then again what are we supposed to learn? We should know by now all the dangers. We should see the signs long before it becomes a problem.

Alexion was a teacher. But I learned only in the short term. In fact that is not true. I learned nothing at all.

This dream is a teaching dream. There is a message behind all these images, these evocations of the spirit. Holbein, the Spanish ambassadors, detail upon detail.

The message is, don’t confuse what others want for what you want. They are never the same.

I convince myself that I will never fall again. But, inevitable empty words, empty promises to myself. Which must be the ultimate, original sin.

I began by asking if dreams could be wish fulfilment. Seems more likely than ever now. What do you wish for? Do you wish this dream would end, so you could forget and no longer worry?

The person in the chair opposite is now most definitely female. Many different females. Some young, some older, all around my age. We no longer talk. Occasionally even the one upstairs puts in an appearance. I suppose once…But not now.

But then no one talks now. What is the point? There is no point. No point to beauty, no point to love. It all just hurts too much. Even here on this island. Across the water were Alexion cannot come. Answer me this, who looks at your eye’s, who can see what is in them?

Do you suppose that in starting all this Alexion denied me the possibility of believing in myself? To love you must believe in yourself. I do not, so it follows I cannot believe in love. It does follow, you must see that.

All the women in the chair are getting quite caught up in the argument, quite agitated in fact.

I have tended to destroy all that I have considered that I have loved. I have destroyed all that I thought was love. In most cases I was mistaken. It was a hollow, pathetic, cripple of a thing. A disease tainted and twisted. Therefore it deserved to be destroyed. There is a warped rationale for you, my dear heart.

We shall come yet to the earlier vexed question once again. But first we shall arrive, by whatever convoluted route is necessary, at your identity. Just who might you be? Someone close and female again, of course. I have already stated that I do not like talking to men. So of the opposite gender you must be.

Are you sitting opposite? Is this part of your dream? Is this our sharing?

Memories of both, a joining of our memories. The collective unconscious. A sharing between two. Something is created because of this. A vibration in the ether. Like making love, a ghost. A note is played. The echoes bounce from the walls and linger. Ripples that rebound, leaving never ending with the one.

How long have you been here now, sitting in that chair opposite? How many more dreams like this one?

These islands were the waterfalls down to the sea. No one else can appreciate this dream. No one else would believe in Alexion. Except for you and I; and you will forget when you wake. How do I know? You will have to in simple self-defence. As your day progresses. As your life, consciously, takes shape. For my own part, I believe, otherwise, why?

So again, why you as a partner? Why do we share this? Do we share anything? I mean, if you are going to forget and I don’t want to remember.

Memories fade as new follows old.

Concerns that were once apocalyptic, or so we thought. Ideas, ventures of a new kind to lead us on beyond the meagre benefits of our existence, blighted by what has been lost through foolhardy passions. Coming too soon or too late. What does it matter if chances are not taken when feelings consume beyond our understanding.

We are fools, that at least is evident. Talk not of our foolishness and remember.

I hate all this.

Once more to the machine I come and I genuflect. Once more to the ghost I speak. Tell me machina, do you take notice of my petty horrors?

What use this? What to go back to? Was it ever thus?

Asking for more of the dreams. More of the horrors. Waking in panic and not knowing why. Something dread happens and I spring upwards, cold and in mortal fear. The night terror haunting whatever further meagre rest may eventually come my way.

Always, regularly since the illness. Years now, twenty-five, thirty now. Good god, a lifetime. Since I was so ill I didn’t know you had gone.

Still, at least now the voices have gone, apparently not to return… the only way to loose that ancient horror was to talk aloud for hours, to myself. Counting, spinning vile doggerel, nonsense, quoting swearing, into my heart an air that kills.

The whispers that were always on the edge of hearing, yet never quite there. Whispering conspiratorially, so obviously getting faster, but never quite.

I understand now that one in every ten people have hallucinations, of some kind. Pity I did not know that then. It would have helped, perhaps.

God my back hurts. I need a rest, I need a holiday, I need a friend.

I hate all this, are you listening machine? This is disgusting. Are you listening too Alexion? Are you there? Speak!

I need a holiday. Not that I am going to get one. I need to finish this. I need to paint some more. There are many things I need to do. Many things I need to get sorted in my mind. I need to go back to the island.

I feel starved, missing so many things once enjoyed. But then it would be weak to say it was anything else but my own fault.

Starved of affection, starved of grace. Missing many things, things of note, items, emotions, ideas, I had them once. These are the voices of nostalgia. Gone but nearly not forgotten.

I understand what drove men to become hermits. How many solitary saints on cliff tops, in caves, on top of poles, were failures at what they wanted to do?

You ask many things. How to answer? Too many to answer all at once. What has happened since you left? Many things I thought at the time were good, now, not so. If only we could go back.

A marriage that has failed. Children that are the only reason that I stay shackled to such frigidity. A job that is hard and not the career I once thought.

That is true of a number of a number of things, it is not what it once was. No more enjoying like reading a book or watching a film. No more escapism. No more easy dreams.

I am tired; I am at odds with the world. I have not had a sexual experience in an awfully long time.

Of course things need to change. Things need to change fairly urgently. What I am doing, what my life is like cannot be healthy? New experience to fuel the creativity. I need extra stimulus. That seems self-evident.

More travel, new places, that is one way. New relationships, or old one’s rediscovered, that is another. And another way to extra problems, of course, as if I didn’t already have enough.

Of course, that is why you are here. Alexion are you searching, trying to find something to change the mundane? No longer things of gentle compromise. Something drastic, oh yes!

I walk into this room for some minor privacy. Not much chance of that these days. I switch on the machine. I enter the word processor and I stare at the screen.

I sometimes get the impression that I must watch what I write. That this machine is listening or watching, making note of what I say. There is perhaps a little sub programme deep in the bowels of memory that alerts it to any mention of itself.

It most certainly is watching now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it adds something to this when I have saved it and finished. A word, a change in punctuation, emphasis.

Maybe when I run the finished document through the spell checker. This is usually just before I decide what to title it.

A change that would with extreme subtlety alter the whole meaning of the piece.

And of course you remember that favourite axiom of mine. "Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you".

On this machine is a little pocket of memory called a user dictionary. It is a list of all the words I have saved into the main dictionary, as they were not recognised. Reading through this list of personal words is interesting. Giving, perhaps an insight into me, as I write.

Abbas

Avalon

Barabbas

Caliburn

Crankwood

Findargad

All the words that the ghost does not know. These are mine only. The ghost cannot find or use these. They are personal key codes for me only. The bit that cannot be altered, cannot be entered, cannot be polluted. They are memory.

Gralloch

Hy Brassil

Quinqereme

Rothko

Sangraal

Uffington

Meaningless in themselves to a literal minded machine. Only all parts of me and what I know. Other places in a myriad universe. Long ago and far away.

I can lock any amount of information under these passwords. Keep what I know under the spirit nose. Why should I wish to do this?

Because I can that is why and it just might irritate. Of course it asks, the machine. What is this word? A mystery is highlighted. Save the answer, remember this, even if you don’t know what it means, it will come again. This is what I say.

Austringer

Outremer

Yeats

Cully

Creance.

The world was a shinier place then. Smells of evocative times. Perfect place to hide a body. No one to know.

As a heron, a red heron she walked past the cenotaph, refusing politely. It is strange how things in one’s past associate with a premonition of the immediate future.

Nice white hands, long fingers denote tenderness.

"One minute in the life of the world is going by, paint it as it is", said Cezanne.

Three boys sitting on a dry stone wall on an island off the coast of western Ireland in the summer of 1968.

A dry stone paddock on a cliff edge. The Atlantic side of the island. Green sea below and large breakers on large rocks. The smell and the sound of it. Hot in the sunshine.

One boy is crying, one is throwing rocks towards the cliff edge but not quite reaching. The final boy is picking small stones from amongst the seagull droppings on the wall.

Two large men without shirts and red flesh, walk up the hill behind the ruined crofter’s cottage near the paddock. One man carries a dirty, soiled pink saddle strap.

The paddock wall has been damaged in several places. There is a large hole in the wall on the cliffward face. Several of the larger stones have been displaced along the top of the wall.

A number of seagulls float, parallel with the top of the cliff.

The broken body of a skewbald horse lies at the bottom of the cliff, its head moving slowly, delicately in the white and green water. The waves slowly turning pink.

Oudon

Quinish

Anna

Gurdijieff

Kells

A line of thought, a single note in the nightime air. A wish, dreaming again. Meeting, buoyant, beyond the green cat. Remember the symbol, this time perhaps in a painting, maybe the sound in a piece of music.

Going back again into the past, back and back again. Oh, how we wish.

You can follow. You can see what I see, do what I do. Be where I am. Should you wish to? I can’t see any reason why not, you cannot remember when you wake anyway.

We have decided that the dreamer is me, is that Ok? Or perhaps elements of both of us inside. An amalgam, or more a composite. Something else, but my memories.

We can be back on the island with all its mysteries. Back in the old house in the valley, by the waterfall. This is why these dreams become more like reveries. We can choose our locations so easily.

Heat, muggy, dirty heat. Heat for lost in strange liquid reveries when the dark is like treacle.

Tonight the ground is lighter than the sky even if the sky is full of stars.

There is a soft mist over all the water in the valley, down towards the waterfall; somehow it only makes it hotter.

The memories of incidents fight and compete in the nightime air.

The mass of night, encumbering, remembering, always unfolding. Changes happen at night. The world is never the same. It is quality and effect. The whispers of incidents.

Combining what we know with what we feel. We do care; we try to be gentle. We hope, we dream, we try, we cannot see, we can only follow. We feel, we chance things never before attempted, we engage.

Chirascuro

Boggarts

Othneil

Sherkin

It is strange, yet again, how some we thought as close friends, near for life, are no longer with us. Some, faded into memory, gone without a struggle, never a ripple. A movement perhaps almost missed on the edge of sight.

Some gone as enemies, or no, antagonists perhaps. The why we do not know, we cannot fathom. It would be good to know. Perhaps something can be done. It does hurt, with some even now. Ah, Alexion, what did you do?

England, my England, sitting in an ancient oakwood watching butterflies.

The only movement is a bird, my Cully in the branches over my head and there is the bleached skeleton of a small mammal on the ground at my feet.

I should go looking at the waterfall today. Go and find another painting.

A painting, these paintings, should always control the reception they receive.

There should be as many questions as answers in any piece of artwork. This was how I always worked. Pluralism, let the underpainting show through. A multiplicity.

Always a tall stool several feet away from the canvas. I would sit and look and light a cigarette. Almost always I would stand the cigarette on its end on my worktable to burn away unnoticed as another thought struck me.

A colour sang, a line moved, a shape became something else, a gestalt. A new line of enquiry, a possible exploration into other unknown territory. The past is another country.

Paintings were giants in those days. Large works stalking the land. There was space enough. Viewed from a distance. Full of heavy colour. Expressive brushstrokes gestures.

Now they more gentle, compromising. I wished to continue but I had nothing. Grand statements belong to the young.

Later I wished for a smaller subject. Something tighter and more complete in itself. Smaller images but more information. Gentle compromise, still layered, continuing with the plural energy. Allowing the underpainting still to show through. Say what you said then and say what you want to say now in the same sentence using different words. Paint moving water; paint waterfalls, meaning a lot.

So for now, this is what I paint, small things. I usually give them as gifts. A tutor at college produced a hundred sunsets from Monument valley in Utah, the location for all those wonderful John Ford westerns.

I was impressed with the idea and decided upon a hundred waterfalls from various parts of the country. Large and small, well known and unknown. Whatever pleased me. I might even add a little prose and attempt a book from it in a light, half-hearted sort of way. Until the first burned them all.

Combine the two, or maybe even more sides to my productions. I hesitate to use any term more grandiose. The painting and the writing, has always for me, been difficult. As you can see I am finding it virtually impossible now.

There is a plurality. There are connections, a multitude of them in fact. But to say something new and wonderful, that is the problem.

Not only these two, the painting and the writing but also the visual and the temporal, ultimately Alexion.

A system is required. A way of saying, showing, seeing what I want to say. That was one reason for the ghost in the machine. Hallelujah for plural energies.

What to do? Alexion has been gone, except for in these dreams, twenty some thirty years and more and only now do I remember her well.

What to say? Do you say these were the good times? Do you say she was only a passing pubescent fancy? What would you do?

I forget which is which. I forget, is the female incubi or succubi. Perhaps I flatter myself. As if Old Nick would be interested.

Alexion began in dreams like this one. Or perhaps not. She did begin a life long fascination with the unconscious.

I have never had a recurring dream. Strange thing to say I know, considering you are here again. But then you don’t remember you part in all this. All the dreams are different, the difference may only be slight, an odd item perhaps, but enough to give the change.

The Alexion dreams had a peculiar feel from the beginning. Adolescence began with them. Not wet dreams. Not particularly sexual to begin with in any way.

An influence has been exerted that continues even now. She was beyond her time in more ways than one. The unexplained had happened before but not is such a focussed way. To say that she taught would be a touch too obvious. She still does, on occasion, when I remember her like an old lover.

The official line is even more obvious. Perhaps too much to be stated. I have said how I was beaten by a father in drunken temper.

This then was my escape. My therapy. A personal fantasy, a retreat into a safe sweet harbour

If this is what makes daylight sense then so be it. I could care less. If you by sharing get a vicarious pleasure from the story but require a foundation explanation then again, who cares?

Some of us feel the essential grimness of our situation very early. This is not necessarily the truth of our lives, the way we are. It is a thought we sometimes have. We know ourselves, on occasion anyway. Attempt an escape into quietness. If you can then good luck. This is why I paint and why Alexion.

All my smallness’. The way I remember. My books on the shelves of my small bedroom. The drawings and the poems on the walls. The notebooks that were later burned in glorious heathen temper on the highest hill I could find after my father had read them and beaten me for what I had written about him.

Oh, my heart, this was why. A terrible thing, a wanton beauty.

I’ve never known a peaceful relationship, have you?

A relationship where one is sure of the other. Is this too much to ask?

Competition always. Scoring points, this still happens, even now.

From Alexion onwards. She happened at the wrong time. She came to me too soon. I was definitely not ready for anything like that

Is it any wonder, I was ill the first time it happened seriously.

Breakdown is quite accurate, given the circumstances. That is exactly what happened to me. I broke apart, shattered into little mirror pieces.

I found I could no longer cope with any degree of success. And of course, I didn’t want to just cope; I wanted to succeed, in the worst possible way.

Say you are an atheist. You do not, cannot, even when presented with all the evidence believe. It is impossible. Faith is not what you can do. You are incapable.

This is not nice, you are not nice. It is your God given right not to be nice. Despite what may be said. In despite is what you are. In despite with the world. You do not like all the manly things. They bore you and the others hurt too much. You are not virile. You wish it to remain that way. Romantic crap is what this is. Invented by some over glandular, perverse troubadour, how many centuries ago?

That, incidentally, is the one sure way of destroying anything. Research it. Find out in all its glory, the true story. Love, religion, psychoanalysis. All the great what ifs.

Find out all you can about them if you really want to stop believing. Read your books, become one of the worlds greatest cynics.

Slowly it becomes more important to stop the regular pain than to experience any momentary happiness. Tell yourself always this brief catharsis, this small healing is not important, not enough. It is at best fleeting, gone in a moment. It is all glandular anyway. Invented and marketed as the greatest what If in the history of mankind. Used to brighten a grey solitary fantasy in later years. Fantasies what balls. Why can’t we be honest and say what we really mean in good old solid Anglo-Saxon terms of endearment, Fuck!

Into my heart.

Imagine the bells. For bells there are. Small, sweet sounds on the edge of hearing.

Softness, the bed sinks beneath and behind him. He feels the weight gradually, slowly filling the other side of the bed. No sudden movements, only a gradual awareness of something there.

She turns towards him, a weight, pushing back the sheets with her legs. These she draws upwards as she cups him from the back with her body. Her small arms across his chest. It is very warm and she is naked. For the first time, in all her visits, she wears nothing. Very aware of both their nakedness.

He can hear her breathing. Faster than normal and erratic. He can feel the small soft mounds of her breasts in the small of her back. She moves slowly down, brushing nipples across his back and buttocks.

There is a smell, an evocative sense of something, somewhere else. He chases the memory as far back as he can. Nothing stands out. Nothing he can immediately remember.

A warmness moves slowly down his back centring on his middle. Gathering around him, pulling him in towards himself. His prick has risen to a point. The centre of his spiral. This is far more pleasure than he has had alone. In his solitary fantasies.

She brings her arms around and gently strokes his erect member. Starting at the head and moving slowly down before slowly pulling the skin slowly upwards again.

It is slightly painful and there is a tightness that he finds a little unpleasant. He does not mention it.

It is obvious that she knows how to do this. Breathing directly into his ear. She is experienced and this vaguely suprises him. She learned somewhere obviously. Does it matter, he thinks? He does not, cannot allow himself to worry. So what if she knows more. All to the good. He pushes back into her and slowly begins to relax. Let her take it. Allow it to go.

He feels wet. Bucking forward, without control, he pushes out from his centre, tight but flowing.

He cannot hold on. He cannot help it. He comes. Warmly he spurts and cries out as she, delighted laughs. He arches away from her still pushing out from his centre. He is ashamed of the suddenness of it all. Any interest is gone, suddenly with no hope of return. For the present anyway.

He knew then that the visits had started again. It was the why of the matter that was giving him trouble. How, what, where, why? The camera can watch these type themselves out across the blue screen in close up. We can watch the flashes on his face as he plays with his toy. His techno freak machine.

He reviewed as he had taught himself, all his information. All information at present to hand. Get to know this was the thing, hold you’re post mortem, and play to the habit.

There was obviously a need to know more. To assemble all the available information and to analyse what was happening.

Construct and assemble, observe before the inevitable destruction comes again.

His art training had taught him first how to do this. How to perform this trick. How to work something through in this manner, be it an idea, a concept, a drawing. Take it first to its limits and then bring it back again. Eventually of course it was necessary to destroy it. To take it eventually beyond the limits previously defined and on into unknown territory.

Destroy then this drawing; work on it hard until the beginning, the subject, is no longer in sight, no longer an item of concern.

Now significantly he tested most close things by this yardstick. Not always an appropriate or desirable method, he knew, but then what was?

Was he mad? No, on serious consideration he did not think so, but then could anybody be sure asking such a rhetorical question? He liked to think romantically that intelligence was some kind of amulet against insanity. It may indeed have been the case.

But was something happening that was not of his doing. Something that was not at his original instigation. In the ambit of his experience. Whatever it was, he did not begin it. Exactly what it was he wasn’t quite sure. Finding answers to such things was very difficult.

Was this new phenomenon therefore of external origin? Did she, Alexion, come again from somewhere else? Answering yes to this original query meant that the whole idea must then be taken on board. It was everything or nothing. A main stumbling block. Supernatural debate was his entire difficulty. Not possible says the sceptic.

Could he believe what was apparently happening? It was out of the ordinary certainly, but supernatural? This was the only other conclusion left to him. Several things did point to the experience as being of external origin.

Evidence.

Sex had stopped, entirely now, as it had before, or rather before it had not entirely started. Now was different, now he was completely celibate and not at all through choice.
His life, his marriage, his mind was not all that it should be, all that he would have it. In fact it was in a terrible state. (This he considered for some time before entering the information into his hidden files. He felt he was letting the ghost in the machine have something deeply personal about his problem. Ah well, he thought, Mea Culpa.)
He was stressed, under stress, stressed out. ( He wrote all these into the file, he could not find the right term, stressing, and all my stresses.)
His dreams had come again, vivid and complex and in glorious colour. (Do you dream in colour?)
This was so obviously she. She was around, she was here. It was this last fact/thought he could not doubt.
The time had come to discuss the problem with someone. In fact the time was long overdue. The principles of enjoyment had long since ceased to be a valid rationalisation. It had, of course, as a series of incidents moved way beyond him. The answers he now needed were not, for the first time, there for the taking.

Another facet of the problem that convinced him of its essential external nature.

But with whom could he talk? Who do you tell that a succuba visits every night? A friend, did he have one close enough not to believe him simply mad? Protesting that the insanity conclusion had been a possibility all the time would not protect him from friends who would inevitably take the easy answer first.

Perhaps a confession in its truest sense was required. Perhaps to see a priest?

No, this was dismissed almost as soon as it was considered. Too simplistic. The old question, what would a celibate priest understand?

A professional then of some sort. To analyse, a medical confession, to write down and give the correct, proper scientific opinion. To explain why this series of events was not that much out of the ordinary, to completely rationalise. In hallowed psychological terms. No, that was not what he wanted either.

He was, in fact, already talking to the computer about it. Of course, why not let the electronic psychiatrist sort it out? Somewhere he felt, instinctively that a connection lay beneath the surface of this morass, one that needed to be made clear. A common interface if you like. Alexion and the ghost. These two together on common ground. A symbiosis.

Hell, why not these three bound together. That was it. She shares the machine with the ghost.

The ghost estimating his needs had brought her back to here. Hell, he thought, again, what a conception. Telling the machine all that he knew everything. That certainly would be something. Creating all three anew in the machine. Devising the whole of the story in the world of the machine.

It did actually clear up a lot. Perhaps and if, of course he was not mad, it did explain much of what was going on. Succuba and symbiote synthesised. The artificial intelligence of the machine. How much of that did he believe?

He had placed most of his information on file. He had already told the machine a vast amount. He had filled several secret files and hidden each under a secret password.

Now, he thought, ask the machine to do its job, ask the ghost to analyse, account, debit and credit, audit. Her database if you like.

Build and develop. Hack, that was the word, into the mainframe brain. Talk to the ghost in the machine.

This machine had a lot of him buried in its memory. Certainly all that he knew or could rationalise. All he could personally put down in words. It had much of him before he wrote his letters around the world. It had certainly much of the information that would go into these letters. Before he talked to friends, not that he mentioned his problems much. You are mad it would perhaps say. The machine would synthesise and then diagnose. Why then did he complain, then it was what he asked for was it not?

This Alexion file had all of the pertinent him then in all its necessary bytes. It had his headaches, it had his thoughts. The revelations, the primal process. The number of his machine.

All his smallness, the completions, not too many. The diverse souls of his machine.

All this came, as a whole, as he was writing or rather as he was wondering what to write. He told the ghost and in telling the ghost he felt he told the girl/spirit, he told Alexia. Afterwards he renamed his machine, obviously.

Hello Alexion.

Hello…

Deux et Machina.

I have ceased to believe in love.

I know.

Is that why you have come back?

Partly.

Partly. He pauses.

Partly, she confirms.

Did I bring you back?

Not really.

Where are you now?

All these questions. You are not happy that is all. I can be something you can look forward to. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?

Something for your ten year plan.

Have you been following me?

Yes

Why have you returned?

Because now I can.

I need something.

Something to look forward to.

Yes.

Something pleasant.

Well I’m that.

He continues writing down his questions. The girl spirit answers, through the machine. It could be simply the machine answering, using the arcane knowledge he himself had placed within its printed circuit memory. Machines cannot, of course have opinions. Machines can only regurgitate what man feeds into them, of course.

Whatever, it did not scare him. Rather he seemed to think of it as therapy.

In his spare time he considered the beautiful complexity of what had been revealed. Enjoying its complexity. A secret about a secret wrapped in a secret.

The dreams were like this.

He asked how it was achieved. He thinks hard on the secrecy of it all.

What, why, where, how?

What has happened?

Where is she? What place does she inhabit when she is not with me?

Why does all this happen now?

How do I explain it?

He places these questions also into the machine. The ghost becomes both judge and advocate.

This is still the problem; he still needs his explanations, his post mortems.

There is a sense of relief, he feels. Now that I know, I can change, perhaps. At least I can do what I set out to do, which was to analyse.

But then again, what does this new knowledge change? Does it, in fact change anything?

It does give some shape to his thoughts. Instead of an amorphous nothing. Yes, this is concept he can enjoy. A line, a fence around his dreams. A fluffy thought bubble above his head, another above the machine, inhabiting whatever dream landscape it finds natural. It gives a pleasant romantic tinge to all his less than attractive thoughts, a simple bloom of lust.

True he no longer believes in love. He does however, believe in romance and of course lust. A technical wet dream. Something to look forward to.

So what if it could become addiction. He thinks it may become one, if not already. Then he remembers the island and the fact that vampires cannot pass over water especially salt water. He will eventually go there. The ferry journey will, he knows act as a simple exorcism for the girl/spirit.

What does the ghost think of that? An escape is always possible. He will deny any loss of control. He will always deny that. If his illness of so long ago taught him anything it taught him that. It is, after all these post mortems that give him always ultimate control, even in his dreams.

Especially in his dreams.