Entanglement
The word has a meaning in quantum theory, referring (I believe) to the fact that physically distant particles may have correlated probability functions due to previous proximity. Its use is more mundane here, though. This place isn't highbrow enough for theoretical physics, even if I was capable of disputations on the subject.
Feeling the unfriendly squeeze of my commitments lately, which of course means I'm procrastinating more than ever. Problems will be solved. Problems that can't be solved will be ignored. An axiomatisation of my existence. I'm getting that feeling - the one where increasing pressure points to a likely leap out of some potential well or other.
This web-log entry doesn't look like it will have much emphasis on reportage of historical events. Lucky, wouldn't want you all to be bored stiff. Note: I am not angsting here.
You soothe yourself with the shapes you know,
You tune out, out, out the hypnotic drone,
The perfect hexagon of the honeycomb,
You soothe yourself with the sounds you know.
Should I come outside and run your cars?
Should I run your rockets to the stars?
Could you invent a world for me?
I need to hear a symphony ...
Sleater-Kinney, 'One Beat'
Unpleasant Dream
I had a hideous, unnervingly vivid nightmare recently, which I shall now describe for your reading pleasure.
I found myself at a massive wedding reception. The venue for the reception was a country villa, all decked out in stark white with large, glass windows and many spiral staircases. Outside was a banquet area with a clinically pure swimming pool and a neat Mediterranean garden. The guests were very wealthy, and came uniformly from a number of very wealthy families. The heads of these families were the guests of honour at the reception. Everyone was wearing an awful lot of white, and seemed to glow in the rays of the sun, which was beating down quite hard as I sat at table.
My own position in the hierarchy of those present wasn't completely clear; but I was a minor player at best, seated with the obnoxious elder children of the various families. I have a particular objection to rich, cozened idiots. The wedding feast proceeded more or less as (I imagine) these things do for the de facto aristocracy. Although I note that there was a distinct feeling that nagged at me throughout this part of the dream, which was that the people present were all somehow part of some criminal or evil organisation, for example the Mafia. In fact, the whole sequence was not unlike the wedding scene in The Godfather except with all the guests wearing rather garish white suits.
At some point it became apparent to me that something was very wrong with the family head sitting nearest me. This woman was now wearing a blue, sequined dress with a short jacket over the top of it - a tacky ensemble. She had cheeks that bulged strangely, and a wicked smile. As I gazed at her visage in morbid fascination, I suddenly witnessed part of her face peel away to reveal livid, scaly skin underneath, and the fact that about a quarter of her upper skull was missing, leaving exposed the blood, brains and eyeball underneath. She smiled at me and this horrible sight disappeared, replaced again by her puffed cheeks. I now perceived her head as a shiny blue sphere which was straining fit to explode. Her ordinary exterior appeared stretched over this alien substructure, which had a fixed, rictus grin. I watched as she stretched over to her left and possessively placed a hand on the knee of the young girl sitting next to her.
I had become very conscious of the following facts: the woman was some kind of demon. She was aware that I knew this, and didn't care. No human present other than myself had any idea she was a monster. As I looked around, I saw that most of the other prominent guests, both male and female, were also demons, with their own facial substructures fitting poorly behind human masks - one had a red skull with distended temples and jawbone, another was bright sickly green and rotating slowly in its expressionless housing. All had patches of skin missing in different places, revealing decaying and bleeding bodies beneath.
Shortly the banquet ended and the guests began to disperse into smaller groups in and around the villa. I went into a sunken room with a young man and woman I had been dining with. I should note now that all the younger guests at the reception were extremely physically attractive, in a manifestly conventional way. After a small amount of incidental conversation about university courses and the progress of a tennis tournament, the young man began a matter-of-fact rape of the young woman, forcing her onto a purple double bed which was in the corner of the room. I leapt on him to try and prevent this, and he backhanded me in the face, knocking me down. It was obvious to me, in the dream, that I had no hope of outmatching him physically, so I fled. As I ran out of the door of the room I saw the demon-woman from the banquet surveying the scene behind me approvingly, half her skull missing as before.
It was now dark outside, and the party had become a depraved hell. People were being killed and beaten all over the place under the amused tutelage of the demons. Where previously the guests had been seemingly unaware of the demons amongst them, they were now allied with them.
At this point the dream took on a format which is fairly typical for me. I often have dreams about being chased interminably by people who want to kill or injure me. The difference here was that I normally find these dreams quite exhilarating and pleasant, and triumph continually over my pursuers, but in this nightmare I was genuinely afraid of being caught and killed brutally or sexually assaulted. The demons and the rest of the guests hunted me through the labyrinthine interior layout of the villa, which had now merged into a kind of office building (it looked somewhat like the Alexander Library, or possibly the office building which the protagonist in L'Emploi du Temps gets ejected from) with stainless steel elevators and stairwells. There was an awful lot of blood, my perception of which was possibly influenced by having seen Dog Soldiers a few days earlier. A lot of blood and intestines flowing off flat surfaces onto the floor.
The chase went on forever, and every time I burst into a new room or fled down a corridor I was accosted by one of the smiling demons (in distinguishing between them, I had become reliant upon the colour and shape of their skulls/masks - it was mostly the red-skulled one chasing me by now). In the final part of the dream I was followed relentlessly down flight after flight of stairs while being showered with blood and guts from above, which slipped continually down the steps onto me. Although my pursuer (who was always behind me at this point) was able to use the stairs, I had been reduced to sliding painfully in between the slats of the steps to get down from one flight to another. My repeated escapes in this fashion were made possible by the lubricating effect of the omnipresent waves of blood, although my back was still being viciously lacerated by the metal edges of the steps. I was uncomfortably aware that the stairwell had a finite depth and that once we reached the bottom I would be caught. The only visuals I had of whatever was hunting me was a rotting, clawed arm that swept down over my head constantly, missing me by smaller and smaller margins.
At this point, I woke up.
It was one of the few dreams I've had in my life that has really terrified me. I couldn't get back to sleep for hours afterward. I also found it extremely strange, particularly the vast amount of blood that was involved in the later stages, and the disturbing sexual element. Not only that, but it focussed to some extent on one thing which I've always found very scary - people in positions of authority or trust turning out to be irreducibly evil and malevolent.
There is no Spoon!
'Dog Soldiers'
So much funnier in that film than it was in The Matrix. You'll have to see it to understand why.
The word has a meaning in quantum theory, referring (I believe) to the fact that physically distant particles may have correlated probability functions due to previous proximity. Its use is more mundane here, though. This place isn't highbrow enough for theoretical physics, even if I was capable of disputations on the subject.
Feeling the unfriendly squeeze of my commitments lately, which of course means I'm procrastinating more than ever. Problems will be solved. Problems that can't be solved will be ignored. An axiomatisation of my existence. I'm getting that feeling - the one where increasing pressure points to a likely leap out of some potential well or other.
This web-log entry doesn't look like it will have much emphasis on reportage of historical events. Lucky, wouldn't want you all to be bored stiff. Note: I am not angsting here.
You soothe yourself with the shapes you know,
You tune out, out, out the hypnotic drone,
The perfect hexagon of the honeycomb,
You soothe yourself with the sounds you know.
Should I come outside and run your cars?
Should I run your rockets to the stars?
Could you invent a world for me?
I need to hear a symphony ...
Sleater-Kinney, 'One Beat'
Unpleasant Dream
I had a hideous, unnervingly vivid nightmare recently, which I shall now describe for your reading pleasure.
I found myself at a massive wedding reception. The venue for the reception was a country villa, all decked out in stark white with large, glass windows and many spiral staircases. Outside was a banquet area with a clinically pure swimming pool and a neat Mediterranean garden. The guests were very wealthy, and came uniformly from a number of very wealthy families. The heads of these families were the guests of honour at the reception. Everyone was wearing an awful lot of white, and seemed to glow in the rays of the sun, which was beating down quite hard as I sat at table.
My own position in the hierarchy of those present wasn't completely clear; but I was a minor player at best, seated with the obnoxious elder children of the various families. I have a particular objection to rich, cozened idiots. The wedding feast proceeded more or less as (I imagine) these things do for the de facto aristocracy. Although I note that there was a distinct feeling that nagged at me throughout this part of the dream, which was that the people present were all somehow part of some criminal or evil organisation, for example the Mafia. In fact, the whole sequence was not unlike the wedding scene in The Godfather except with all the guests wearing rather garish white suits.
At some point it became apparent to me that something was very wrong with the family head sitting nearest me. This woman was now wearing a blue, sequined dress with a short jacket over the top of it - a tacky ensemble. She had cheeks that bulged strangely, and a wicked smile. As I gazed at her visage in morbid fascination, I suddenly witnessed part of her face peel away to reveal livid, scaly skin underneath, and the fact that about a quarter of her upper skull was missing, leaving exposed the blood, brains and eyeball underneath. She smiled at me and this horrible sight disappeared, replaced again by her puffed cheeks. I now perceived her head as a shiny blue sphere which was straining fit to explode. Her ordinary exterior appeared stretched over this alien substructure, which had a fixed, rictus grin. I watched as she stretched over to her left and possessively placed a hand on the knee of the young girl sitting next to her.
I had become very conscious of the following facts: the woman was some kind of demon. She was aware that I knew this, and didn't care. No human present other than myself had any idea she was a monster. As I looked around, I saw that most of the other prominent guests, both male and female, were also demons, with their own facial substructures fitting poorly behind human masks - one had a red skull with distended temples and jawbone, another was bright sickly green and rotating slowly in its expressionless housing. All had patches of skin missing in different places, revealing decaying and bleeding bodies beneath.
Shortly the banquet ended and the guests began to disperse into smaller groups in and around the villa. I went into a sunken room with a young man and woman I had been dining with. I should note now that all the younger guests at the reception were extremely physically attractive, in a manifestly conventional way. After a small amount of incidental conversation about university courses and the progress of a tennis tournament, the young man began a matter-of-fact rape of the young woman, forcing her onto a purple double bed which was in the corner of the room. I leapt on him to try and prevent this, and he backhanded me in the face, knocking me down. It was obvious to me, in the dream, that I had no hope of outmatching him physically, so I fled. As I ran out of the door of the room I saw the demon-woman from the banquet surveying the scene behind me approvingly, half her skull missing as before.
It was now dark outside, and the party had become a depraved hell. People were being killed and beaten all over the place under the amused tutelage of the demons. Where previously the guests had been seemingly unaware of the demons amongst them, they were now allied with them.
At this point the dream took on a format which is fairly typical for me. I often have dreams about being chased interminably by people who want to kill or injure me. The difference here was that I normally find these dreams quite exhilarating and pleasant, and triumph continually over my pursuers, but in this nightmare I was genuinely afraid of being caught and killed brutally or sexually assaulted. The demons and the rest of the guests hunted me through the labyrinthine interior layout of the villa, which had now merged into a kind of office building (it looked somewhat like the Alexander Library, or possibly the office building which the protagonist in L'Emploi du Temps gets ejected from) with stainless steel elevators and stairwells. There was an awful lot of blood, my perception of which was possibly influenced by having seen Dog Soldiers a few days earlier. A lot of blood and intestines flowing off flat surfaces onto the floor.
The chase went on forever, and every time I burst into a new room or fled down a corridor I was accosted by one of the smiling demons (in distinguishing between them, I had become reliant upon the colour and shape of their skulls/masks - it was mostly the red-skulled one chasing me by now). In the final part of the dream I was followed relentlessly down flight after flight of stairs while being showered with blood and guts from above, which slipped continually down the steps onto me. Although my pursuer (who was always behind me at this point) was able to use the stairs, I had been reduced to sliding painfully in between the slats of the steps to get down from one flight to another. My repeated escapes in this fashion were made possible by the lubricating effect of the omnipresent waves of blood, although my back was still being viciously lacerated by the metal edges of the steps. I was uncomfortably aware that the stairwell had a finite depth and that once we reached the bottom I would be caught. The only visuals I had of whatever was hunting me was a rotting, clawed arm that swept down over my head constantly, missing me by smaller and smaller margins.
At this point, I woke up.
It was one of the few dreams I've had in my life that has really terrified me. I couldn't get back to sleep for hours afterward. I also found it extremely strange, particularly the vast amount of blood that was involved in the later stages, and the disturbing sexual element. Not only that, but it focussed to some extent on one thing which I've always found very scary - people in positions of authority or trust turning out to be irreducibly evil and malevolent.
There is no Spoon!
'Dog Soldiers'
So much funnier in that film than it was in The Matrix. You'll have to see it to understand why.
