12-20-2017, 05:40 AM
Notes On A Series Of Hallucinations [edited]
Imagine a human body stripped of everything but its capillary veins, standing upright and moving just as it would if it were fleshed out. I saw such bodies—ten or twenty—but instead of veins, these were green daisy chains, intricately woven, tracing out the burst bodies of human beings.
I looked again and the green plexus had become red. Flesh grew rapidly from the white petals and covered the network of vessels; and then, what had once been an explosion of red fibers, was a hundred naked women, running towards me.
I covered my head, closed my eyes tight, and braced myself. They never reached me. I looked about. I was on a school field. The sun was bright but going down.
§
I had escaped the toilet cubical with my life and found myself in a quaint country church yard. I wasn’t exactly lost, not in a geographical sense, at any rate; but I had that lost feeling, that strange homesick feeling that hangs around your insides like the ghost of a panic attack.
Everything around me seemed a little too thick and clumsy, half solid and half liquid, the kind of consistency Sunday afternoons are made of.
Beyond Cartesian troubles, now, I looked closely at the church wall's nodes of chert—half of them broken into sharp, shiny, black surfaces of flint. I saw three prophets: a fat one, a thin one and an average sized one, all wearing appropriately shaped hats.
At first, I saw the prophets in three stones, then two, then apparent in every one; then in the cloud formations, in the trees—everywhere.
§
We milled around a dead end road between two rows of rusty garages, in the corner of a suburban council estate. The dead end was two parallel concrete walls, about three feet high and five feet apart. The gap between the walls was filled with soil out of which grew a tall, unkempt, laurel hedgerow that ran the entire length of the partition, separating the council estate and the local college.
It was only really a ‘dead end’ for cars, as there was a small opening between the foliage, big enough to sneak through.
In the mud, at the foot of the hedgerow, lay a small crucifix. The shrunken Jesus was in bad shape, covered in blood and open wounds—but the blood was not liquid and Jesus not flesh, at least not on the surface. It appeared as if he’d been laminated with a hard transparent plastic. In any case, I felt sick at the sight of it.
A second Jesus stood next to me, a tall bag o’ bones, staring mournfully at his own glazed meat. He wore a long white robe and pale skin-coloured marigold gloves. He slowly, gently, touched my left shoulder with his finger—touch that crept through my body like sweat over a junky clucking.
§
Seems peculiar now, but we were always, more or less, half way between the wilderness and civilization. It was no different in that tunnel, if only a little more explicit: one end opening out onto an abandoned field, populated by wild flowers, bordered by hedges and trees; the other end, a claustrophobic town, run by drunks, gangsters and housewives.
We hadn’t said a word to each other since we entered the tunnel, disorientated by the strange purgatory we had found ourselves in; and, as with any purgatory, there was a gate keeper: a psychotic witch with a chainsaw. She cut the throats out of my two fellow pilgrims.
Billy stood against the tunnel wall holding his neck, trying to stem the blood. I knew I was next.
I had to make a run for it. But, which way?
The old witch, whose face looked as if it had been cut off and stitched back on with rusty chicken wire, blocked the town side exit, but that was the way my legs were already going.
It’s an odd sort of cowardice, to run headlong into danger in order to save one’s own skin. A justification, of sorts, for the modern world, I suppose.
Imagine a human body stripped of everything but its capillary veins, standing upright and moving just as it would if it were fleshed out. I saw such bodies—ten or twenty—but instead of veins, these were green daisy chains, intricately woven, tracing out the burst bodies of human beings.
I looked again and the green plexus had become red. Flesh grew rapidly from the white petals and covered the network of vessels; and then, what had once been an explosion of red fibers, was a hundred naked women, running towards me.
I covered my head, closed my eyes tight, and braced myself. They never reached me. I looked about. I was on a school field. The sun was bright but going down.
§
I had escaped the toilet cubical with my life and found myself in a quaint country church yard. I wasn’t exactly lost, not in a geographical sense, at any rate; but I had that lost feeling, that strange homesick feeling that hangs around your insides like the ghost of a panic attack.
Everything around me seemed a little too thick and clumsy, half solid and half liquid, the kind of consistency Sunday afternoons are made of.
Beyond Cartesian troubles, now, I looked closely at the church wall's nodes of chert—half of them broken into sharp, shiny, black surfaces of flint. I saw three prophets: a fat one, a thin one and an average sized one, all wearing appropriately shaped hats.
At first, I saw the prophets in three stones, then two, then apparent in every one; then in the cloud formations, in the trees—everywhere.
§
We milled around a dead end road between two rows of rusty garages, in the corner of a suburban council estate. The dead end was two parallel concrete walls, about three feet high and five feet apart. The gap between the walls was filled with soil out of which grew a tall, unkempt, laurel hedgerow that ran the entire length of the partition, separating the council estate and the local college.
It was only really a ‘dead end’ for cars, as there was a small opening between the foliage, big enough to sneak through.
In the mud, at the foot of the hedgerow, lay a small crucifix. The shrunken Jesus was in bad shape, covered in blood and open wounds—but the blood was not liquid and Jesus not flesh, at least not on the surface. It appeared as if he’d been laminated with a hard transparent plastic. In any case, I felt sick at the sight of it.
A second Jesus stood next to me, a tall bag o’ bones, staring mournfully at his own glazed meat. He wore a long white robe and pale skin-coloured marigold gloves. He slowly, gently, touched my left shoulder with his finger—touch that crept through my body like sweat over a junky clucking.
§
Seems peculiar now, but we were always, more or less, half way between the wilderness and civilization. It was no different in that tunnel, if only a little more explicit: one end opening out onto an abandoned field, populated by wild flowers, bordered by hedges and trees; the other end, a claustrophobic town, run by drunks, gangsters and housewives.
We hadn’t said a word to each other since we entered the tunnel, disorientated by the strange purgatory we had found ourselves in; and, as with any purgatory, there was a gate keeper: a psychotic witch with a chainsaw. She cut the throats out of my two fellow pilgrims.
Billy stood against the tunnel wall holding his neck, trying to stem the blood. I knew I was next.
I had to make a run for it. But, which way?
The old witch, whose face looked as if it had been cut off and stitched back on with rusty chicken wire, blocked the town side exit, but that was the way my legs were already going.
It’s an odd sort of cowardice, to run headlong into danger in order to save one’s own skin. A justification, of sorts, for the modern world, I suppose.
