Burglary 2

Burglary. incl. a condition whereby sexual excitement accompanies housebreaking. or just visceral lawbreaking excitement.

Grandma's house. she is a widow. Memories of: gran n papa. In the kitchen or ante-chamber, merchandising tie-ins... Idea: take yr beloved character n stick him on a number of disreputable products.

Andy Capp is a lazy bastart. put him on a range of microwave chips n instant cup a soups. Reclining on his couch. "fat n lazy special".

Lifestyle marketing. target the overworked single person. Oldschool Andy Capp. back when he was a gambler and wifebeater. He really belongs to the twenties just like the Broons. Flo ought to be in a cloche hat, niggardly and complaining, wringing hats. (hands).

stumbling in the dark I bang into a door, flimsy wood. a shanty town shack on clifftop. the mother imprisons me. she's thin proletarian with a tribe of kids. she's sick of travellers banging into her door in the dark.

In her house, a Daily Mail or somesuch newspaper. I attempt to steal but the thing is too big. On cover: self-aggrandizing soapstar. soapstar as sex kitten.

quote from a tabloid: "Multi-tasking is the key to superstardom nowadays; as celebs balance acting/singing/modelling/whatever like so many spinning plates".

The post-modern celebrity, or the vaguely famous. In chameleon-like guises.

Empty house. Recurring dream: Empty houses.

Ransack it, be the intruder. Steal. Eat. Suck back soup.

Some sort of complex about locked/unlocked doors. Quite commonplace. Themes: openness, concealment, privacy or lack thereof. Leave doors open n all lights on. Passerby can see through hollow of trapdoor past concrete floor to cosy basement kitchen.

like, nakedness, public exposure, neglect of person or property, anxiety thereof. Very common.

burglary (dream)

In a flat on my own. Some sort of student accommodation. unlocked door leads out to tenement passage. must be 3rd floor. unused, abandoned, even dangerous. ending in a large opening overlooking empty space and vista of grey houses. I take the old staircase upwards leading to another landing. several doors, must be the rooms of people, occupied. I enter one room. A bedroom, belonging to a student. very seedy.

2 hrs. Image: Hollow closemouth. A gap to see through to the depths. illicit. where excitement. burglary. magazines & newspapers, the theft thereof. recurring.

The following: music magazines, Q's, a pile thereof. face down. Cyndi Lauper looking like Pink. Advert on back: Black. BRMC. old. Old fanzine-style. "Post-Holocaust". Publication featuring photos of Nazi atrocities. many Victorian-style engravings. of eyes and mouths. features a poem scrawled on wall of death chamber: (i scan it)

o traveller, turn not aside

the brain is down here somewhere

...... (goes on for several more lines)

...... Death. Shakespeare.

Obviously the work of a madman. A bag of what I think is dirty washing. The cheapest British porn, say Escort, full of readers wives.

themes: dilapidated, neglected student accommodation. the neglected city. shared accom. communal apartments. urban neglect. the urban dispossessed. haunted bathrooms. the sound of a toothbrush in yr hollow mouth, changing pitch as you widen or narrow your jaw. the tenement, squatting. the squalid student: as recluse, pop-culture overloaded, isolated bohemian. youngsters clinging to the old gods: hence, rock n roll. post-post-post-post-everything popculture. the sex industry. horror as entertainment. squalid student bedroom. one-room apartment. burglaries.

poems in dreams are impossible to reconstruct:

"O dear traveller, turn not aside

The brain is down here somewhere...

(goes on for several more lines)

........ fear. shame. death. Shakespeare."

(found scrawled on the wall of a concentration camp)

Cezanne

I was looking at a book of Cezanne reproductions and was struck by a certain painting.

A portrait of a priest, done in muddy shadowish colours, an earthy palette. A gloomy-looking, darkish man, but looking also determined, in fact more like a crusader. The thing that stuck in my mind was his pure white cercingle and on his breast an absolutely blood red cross, painted a very fresh and solid red. I also liked his mephistophelian pictures, a meurtre here, a viol there, all under dark and rolling clouds.

Now Cezanne was a determined man if nothing else, a man who valued sincerity in painting but who also had a healthy dose of old classical aesthetic sensibilities. He lived in the country and was apparently of independent means, had a wife, cared not much about Paris and the fashionable world, was basically a bourgeois. Toiled away in obscurity.

How many hours did he stand before that Mont St. Victoire, squinting, making adjustments, straining, determined to push through, to render the rocks and the trees solidly and harmonically.

Off he trundles home with his easel on his back, no doubt in a peasanty smock. Full bountiful beard, thinning hair, tendency to impatience or irascibility. Didn't suffer fools gladly. Off to paint his fleurs et fruits.

When a kid he swam in rivers on vacation from the lycee, his head fulla Greek. And he said his favourite smell was "the smell of the fields".

The morning ablutions

At a girl's boarding school in the country, a greying house on its own within dull implacable grounds.

Now I see a young lady, slim, rotund face with a tendency to sulkiness or irritability, but also rather proud and leonine, hair a scruffy blondeish colour, eyes blue. Aged about 18 at the most.

The constraints and properness of a disciplined boarding school. Having to wake up in cold mornings and scrape hair back, and into a plain and functional uniform, on with the sensible shoes.

This particular girl seems to shine among her schoolmates, and in the dank surroundings of the school grounds. Lips a subtle mauveish colour, mascara'd eyes bringing out the grace and strength of her face. Eyes flicker holding a certain fiery naïvety.

The morning ablutions start: The girls are marched in detachments of about half a dozen to a marked-off section of lawn near the gravelled driveway.

Here the girls line up before a solid plinth of marble, on the wall of which is set four or five medium-sized sinks. In the background, the old Victorian school building. Grey early morning clouds.

At a given signal, a few girls detach themselves from the queue where they have waited rigidly hands clasped together. In this particular group marches our blonde girl. She takes the second sink.

Each girl begins immediately to fill her sink with water which after a few minutes runs from cold to tepid to decently warm. The blonde girl depresses a nozzle set by the sink and lets fall into her hand a quantity of smooth lotion. It is fragrant, viscous stuff which soon works up into a good lather.

The girls thoroughly and methodically wash their hands, as if performing a long-practised task, the blonde girl with a careful, fastidious sulkiness.

Morning ablutions are all part of the drill.

Mad King version

a monarch should have a kingdom

a gold crown, ermine furs and plush red robe

at twilight. A wide estate of green swards

A hall in which shadows gather.

(and the king should be allowed to do as he pleases).

I had just finished watching a weekday movie:

Up the marble stairs, by the balustrade,

through dust-swathed twilights, of old salons, wallpaper,

memories of a stately home. Past gilt picture-frame

Velvet rope, a faceless marble bust

Rooms of state- a terracotta army of footmen

Featureless and quiet

Stradivarius in alabaster, is to give a concert at four

And I cut a swathe through the dusty air.

And the princess stands in the state room...

Mad King 2

The Mad King at court, in full view of the dandies and pallid butlers, has insulted the Venetian ambassador. "I suggest, sir" he informs him, "that you have come to me in the guise of a grinning monkey. I shall send at once to the Treasury for a thousand florins stamped with the emblem of my arse. You may go."

The countess has put on facepaint. Her face aghast.

The King's stream-of-consciousness monologue continues interminably. Shadows lengthen from the high windows.

Dust collects in corners.

The King's son the Prince Regent was, as history has recorded, an extremely corpulent and vulgar man. Showed no signs of madness, but did demonstrate unbridled wastefulness, idleness, and stupidity.

His reaction to his father's insanity? A certain slow disgusted outjutting of jaw. Otherwise greedy for the old fella's throne.

Typical of the blighted sons of the house of Hanover. You can see it in the faces of Victoria and her successor. Heavy jowled and lidded, dull, obtuse, as if bludgeoned into pituitary insensibility by a lifetime of pampering and being grovelled at. Apparently the line is affected with some genetic malady probably caused by selective breeding.

As for the present Windsors, there's hardly a noble or majestic physigniomy among them. They're alternately heavy and ox-like or weedy and awkward specimens.

It seems the royal line has run right to seed.

The Mad King

The madness of kings- Did ye ever see that movie the Madness of King George? The King in his nightshirt scarpering over the lawns, at dawn, his anxious footmen following.

Twittering on voluptuously, hallucinatin, his perriwig n hose. Or at the palace of Versailles to hear a symphony he makes lewd suggestions to the ladies-in-waiting.

At first, no-one tells him what to do. It's all "Yes, your Majesty, of course, your Majesty". The deranged monarch in this position of unquestioned power lost all decorum. Could've pissed on the floor if he chose.

He goes on a wild goose chase, in pursuit of nothing, this crazed king. Runs through high palatial rooms, past tall elegant windows. Raging cursewords for the pallid courtiers. His wife, the countess, very anxious to project aristocratic dignity as a head of state, is mortified.

... The king has fled down a wide sweeping staircase, pausing only to upset a marble bust, smash a stradivarius. Lunacy don't go down too well at court.

He bursts through double doors into the groundfloor ballroom where a dance is to take place. The ladies of the court are idly fanning themselves, the gentlemen stand graciously by. He run past rows of liveried footmen, solemn-faced, unseeing.

At one end of the hall stands the King's consort and their little daughter, the princess.

"Fetch me peace-juice and gin! It's good for the constitution... keeps the skin pliable... don't keep me starving!" he addresses a nearby footman.

The King sweaty-faced interrupts his ravings when he catches sight of his little daughter. A taciturn and gloomy child, she merely watches, uncomprehending and a little frightened.

The King, wretched, exhausted from his flight around the house, lets out an "Ah, my dear, my little cherub, my delight!..." He approaches her pityingly, displaying something like a parody of fatherly concern, the trapped agony of hysteria still in his eye...

He gently caresses her cheek with his knuckles, cooing at her sorrowfully. "I hear you're mad, my dear" says the King. "Are you? Are you mad, dear one?"... a particular loneliness in his voice.

The princess merely gazes sorrowfully into his eyes. "No, sir" she meekly replies.

(It seems that children understand madness).