Words are inflammable, words about dreams as well as words in dreams; the dreams themselves are also inflammable, and there would prevail a sense of conflagration after waking, if one is allowed to wake. One dream was of complex machinery with pent-up pistons and closed-off conduits and filters holding the inflammable fluid; it was not steam hissing from its moving parts, but this highly inflammable fluid’s tiny escape routes from the mechanical process. Difficult to encapsulate in words the configuring of the contraption in one single viewing, but exploring it bit by bit, you can arrive at the concluding shape and purpose, but of course, all of this will likely to be forgotten upon waking. You felt the urgent need, before waking, to tell someone about it as it seemed important in a way that would never be grasped. Waking was dependent on one of your own bodily conduits not bursting its confines, so you needed to find someone within the dream as quickly as possible. And the arrival within the dream of a human shape seemed at first to be the answer to your dreams, if that was what this shape was, and it gave an undeserved feeling of relief. This eventual dream saboteur took from some pocket what appeared to be an old fashioned cigarette lighter for old fashioned cigarettes. And clicked its tiny capstan. The rest is not history.
***
“…his fingers caught on her elbow. How small it was, but it wriggled, and seized with a sudden despair he loosed it.” —Henry Green (‘Blindness’ a novel)
Since my observations in the last few years, it is now an accepted fact that ELizabeth BOWen triggered the ‘elbow’ as a literary device. I also later discovered that Dennis Potter in the ‘The Singing Detective’ explicitly spelt ‘elbow’ out and called it the most beautiful word in the English language. And Bowen herself ‘folded her arms, consoling the elbows’ in her final novel as a sort of farewell, whilst even I, in the 1990s, naively started my novella ‘Ladies’ with a very painful elbow chapter without realising what I was doing. And later much else through my gestalt reviews (please Google ‘elbow’ and ‘nullimmortalis’ together, and click to show the omitted results) — so to find this reference yesterday in the powerful opening novel of Henry Green was very satisfying. But I have sought, unsucessfully, to find a work that mentions ‘elbow’ and ‘mansion’ together in some quotable quote, unsuccessful, that is, until I wrote this new mansion miniature with an elbow mentioned within it. A mansion without tennis courts but with several ghosts.
““The writing-table overlooking the sea, where she rested her elbows…” – Elizabeth Bowen
***
“Sky’s too black to show up any stars,” said the white knight to nobody. He was alone in the distance; I could barely hear him. When I described him speaking to nobody, it was because he did not know that anyone could hear him. He could not see further than a lance throw. “Sky’s so black that not even the moon shows through it.” He was determined to speak, to speak aloud into the blackness. It was his way of dispersing his loneliness, as if he were the person listening. Casting words into the distance towards himself from the ghost that he imagines to be there. A ghost was second best in the realms of providing company, though. He little imagined that I could read his thoughts. I approached him nearer than a mere lance throw. But even if the moon came out, we were beyond a mere glance of each other. Meanwhile, he reached up with his own lance as if to pierce the blackness above him. I knew that he knew that sky was all show, sky pretending to be sky. And I now stood beside him almost within reach of touching him. But if someone painted us, all that painter would need would be black paint. Black paint needed so as to paint black paint. Unlike grey, there are no shades, only black itself. Abruptly, his lance rent what he thought to be sky and let the whiteness pour down in swathes of a new day. It was then he saw me. Not that I myself could see him, as I was blind. Did I not tell you that? So I reached out at least to feel his presence. But can metal feel metal? Can pain feel another’s pain? What does pain and paint have in common other than the artificial soul within them.
***
Who ever defined the gestalt I have sought over the years within the pages of imaginative and speculative literature, the fiction that ever teeters on the edge of horror and fantasy and frail human nature? Before I could answer my own rhetorical question, I heard a knock on my study door by what turned out to be a ghostly visitor from Porlock.
The man had a word for this gestalt I sought - a Malebolge, he said, and his shadow swelled in the firelight as he spoke about it…
“All human minds, as they move about over the face of the earth, are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race’s psychic garbage. Just as all the thrilling and vibrating thoughts that have animated human organisms survive the deaths of those organisms, so all the heavy, cloddish, murderous, desolate thoughts, in which free will and faith and happiness perish like asphyxiated gnats, roll themselves in a foul torrent into a great invisible planetary Malebolge. This Malebolge is always present and near, a little way below the surface, for all our human minds; and it only needs certain occurrences, or certain arrangements of matter, to cause an odious and devastating effluvia from its surface-scum to invade the arteries of our consciousness.”
I nodded with some stunned silence, and asked: “Who are you?”
“I am John Cowper Powys.”
I nodded with a sense of calm as I opened a drink for him, showing that he was welcome and then offering him my seat behind my desk. And a shadowy third escaped up the chimney, as if its tail were chased by hot red sparks. I then knew Powys and I would be uninterrupted as we discussed the future of human nature, till dawn at least arrived.
TO BE CONTINUED
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