John Madden, again. He told me recently of an old dream, in which his long-gone father appeared, and talked in some detail about his regiment in WW2. The next day John wandered into a bric-a-brac shop and his eye was caught by a book about said regiment.
Coincidence or synchronicity?
And I still can’t get over the pterodactyl turning up again last weekend, symbolically, only six or so miles from Bowers Gifford. Mirroring the fears that have run deep-veined through my years, upstream and downstream.
On our mini-voyage up and down the Stour, a fortnight ago, we visited Wiston church, a beautifully preserved Norman building. This mural was on the wall, a thousand-year old manifestation of deepest Christian fears.
During a Buddhist weekend course back in 2013, a fellow attendee reckoned that she could see a brownish monk hovering behind me protectively. There were no brown monks on the course, nor any psychedelic drugs distributed. That I know of. In the picture with my underpants outside the trousers, in Blog 17, who should be looking over my shoulder?
A guy called Grant Morrison began writing animated sci-fi fantasies back in the 90s. In his first major work, the main character gets beaten up and has limbs broken. In real life, the same happened to Morrison. In his second major work, the hero meets and has a passionate relationship with a beautiful redhead. Guess what happened to the author shortly afterwards?
Could life itself be a lucid dream? Where we have varying, and unpredictable levels of control over events, depending on the level of will mobilised? In the disco, was Si Gaze unknowingly predicting a future where humans have the ability to de-materialise? “I could go right through that”.
Did Roy Keane and Alex Ferguson mastermind 9/11?
By the bed at present are books by Philip K Dick and Carl Jung. The masters of synchronicity. My dream last night involved an apprenticeship to a gay, very tall, very old artist, who looked quite like Gandalf. He had painted for decades, and encouraged me to use oils. Eventually I came up with an effulgently glowing green tree, framed by a sky of dried white paints, obviously applied in layers. Creative layers.
I’m not even looking for these things. But remembered, as I sat with the first morning coffee, that Gandalf was played in Lord of the Rings by the gay Ian McKellen, who owns the Grapes pub by the Thames in Limehouse. In ‘Out of Essex’, this is where the world’s greatest master of time and magic, Jesus, stops to comfort a homeless man.
I had no idea at the time that McKellen owned the pub. And was only able to write that scene because I had walked past the pub in 2014 with Al Campbell, the observer of layers.
Future and past. Upstream and downstream. Where is the causality?
Or am I just some cunt blogging?
The Biscuit Factory 