Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  Have we been penetrated? Oh yes, almost certainly. But infiltration by men does not concern me. I believe these to be pitiful creatures who can’t get laid any other way. Other than to allow themselves to be colonically irrigated on a regular basis by our queer brethren, in order to gain annual admittance into our inner sanctums. I well regard a folorn quality in such poor dupes, acknowledge their hardy perenniallism. But the female agents under cover pose a greater abuse. I mean, just who do they think they are, playing on our emotions like that?

  Not that they blend in any the better, these prissy missys with tits as flat and gym-toughened bodies as contourless as the wheatlands they were reared in. (Contour, there’s a male concept for you, as if you could ever define a curve or a mass by a line.) There are two ways these girls can go; either they demonstrate complete and committed professional detachment, while on the job on the job; or their latent lesbianism is unlocked, in which case they show far too much passion and ardour for our blunted and anorexic senses. Either way, they stand out like a suppurating sore thumb stuck up a rectum.

  They lack that limpet desperation that we bring to our love making. Of fingers gnawed down to nail cuticles. So that when dug into the conjugatee’s back, the ensuing blood troth derives from the harrowed quick, rather than any ploughed dorsal skin furrows. And though they may counterfeit the breathlessness of forever choked screams stopping up our glottal protestations of love, they cannot project the guttural cackle of years of late-nightly fag and alcohol vigils coating the membrane of our throats. (This might mark why the ATF sniff around after stockpiles, not of guns, but rather that inevitable sedimentation from us all being the fag ends of abusive relationships.) While, finally, good actresses as they may be, the agents cannot fake the genuine hollowness of our scooped out orgasms.

  Bear with me a tick here. Top of the hour, time to give you know who the pip. Let me just bend my creaking body over the desk. Hook myself up for a webcam live broadcast. Don’t be trying this at home on your stairlift folks! Squeeze till you hear the pips squeak. There, now, read my labia!

  How many times do I have to tell you people? We are not, repeat, not a cult for God’s sakes! We are a women’s community run along democratic principles, by and for each and every one of us. How could we be anything else? We began as a refuge for women to escape their gynocidal spouses. Safe from their would-be men-hit assassins.

  Once secure in a community of like-minded souls, we women developed greater confidence and grew more self-possessed. Then, as we sloughed off the derangement fostered by previous domestic environments, our own congenital craziness came to the fore. A by-product of acclimitisation to our moonstruck menses-driven conformity is a cesspool crawling with horror tales of male asperity. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that the corrosive discharge of self-discovery attaches itself to consideration of such spectres just beyond our borders. A pathology of energy. A mutinous mutation.

  So yes, we have one or two who could only be described as motivated by born-again zealotry. But again, I stress, we have no guns or other terror ordnance. Besides, where would they go, for we are about saving lives rather than people dying for us. Breeding a brave new world, rather than doomsday and demise. We try and conduct such vigour into galvanising our political education. And before you leap up to object to the commie pinko cultishness of it all, we have two women of divergent opinion to facilitate our dialectical programme. As I said, we are nothing if not democratic. Besides, I have other fish to fry.

  VI.III.MM(mmmm)

  I cuddled up in the marital bed with a ciggy and my new book for some warmth and understanding. Just trying to reclaim some time for myself. To stretch out a little piece of night and smooth out the wrinkles of day. But my gristle has already long lost its elasticity... I was awakened by the familiar aubade from the room next door. But a yet more pressing stimulation was the driving ache just beneath my shoulder blade. ‘I’ll be in in a minute Amy.’ Valueless to a pre-lingual. ‘Mummy’s coming!’ I groped for the novel that had become furled in the bedsheets. I bent an arm beneath my spine arched for access. Pain spasm. The throb of my shoulder now swamped by the mushrooming cloud of electro-chemical payload, radiating from the ground zero of my lordotic back. Click-click went the pain geiger counter in my head. Ack-ack came the less than transcendant response. And all the while, I seemed insensate to the stream of refugee signals emanating from that numbed tributary of the pinned arm, propping up my entire lumpy weight into the contortion. I don’t seem very connected up this morning. Except through a network of pain knitting me together. Oh, and my alarm-clock only reads five seventeen am. Morning has broken me...

  (While we’re talking of time, the entire episode above spanned considerably less duration than it took for me to reconstruct, and presumably for one to read about, in words. I can’t get the notion of ‘embroidery’ out of my head. An imposture. And yet I’m just trying to preserve an experience. A flaming-well painful one at that. So there can’t be anything beautiful or adorning about the whole thing, can there? Not if it hurt and I’m relaying that fact, if not the sensation of the pain itself.)

  Wait a second – five eighteen and thirty-four/oh, thirty-five – this is a stitch up! The babe’s crying, the novel is in the frame, yet it appears my journal’s the one nuzzling me towards a sustained mental clinch. Smirking like the cat that got the cream (before the baby’s even had its milk). Now, well you know, dear journal, that in the scheme of things, our needs trail a poor second to instant infant response. So, where on the looming scale perches the novel? Sure enough, there it was, my late-night companion. With several pages fed back at the edge into an earlier part of the story, the contents not only imprinted on my mind, but now informing the sinew of my back. A feedback loop. Book-suffering-book-pain-book. Silently screaming, ‘Leave this nightmarish scenario! Get yourself out!’ ‘Coming, darling. Mummy’s coming in right now.’ There’s your loop for you. A perfectly enclosed system. A vicious/virtuous circle. With the creased pages, the book no longer sat flush when closed. Feedback becomes distortion when you’re plugged into someone else’s amplified instincts.

  Feedback as the principle of engagement. Each child’s cry a blip on the radarscope of parenting. The calculus of neglect. How many blips before a precisely targeted response? Too few and the heat-seeking child locks on to you, forever freezing your innards. Too many and your salve falls oh so short. Forever in a lifetime of depth charged unforgiveness. (The journal licked its paws clean and then lolled over to the scratchpad for some whetting. The novel sat mute, not even licking its creased wounds. I was determined to stroke it back to health.) But first, there was a mewling infant to attend to.

  *

  Morning, or its primeval dawn, may have crumpled me, but each night, the interim of my own space and time, reconditions me. With all others in the house asleep, I snatch time from my own Circadian rhythms. The debt will have to be redeemed at some point. But still I keep on at it. So the story goes. Or rather it doesn’t. Like an abandoned stolen car (these days joyridden rather than paramilitary), with its four doors yawning wide, every succesive morning the book found itself petrified on the floor, incongrously imparting its erudition into a shagpile dotted with cigarette burns. A recipe for broken spines and fractured narrative. At least each morn’s freshly brewed wrinkled leaves marks for easy access. Back to the point in the story at which consciousness had sloped away. However, the immediate few pages preceding were a complete blank to me, having been broached under the tyranny of heavy eyelids contending to pull up the drawbridge. The painstaking descent of sleep’s portcullis, having rent asunder all chronology and sequence.

  I can see it now, with vision closed off, how my head lolls forward over the page, before the neck’s bungee reflex wrenches it back up and drags my eyes back open, poised arbitrarily at an as yet untracked paragraph. The text is scanned, but with minimal cognisance. When returned to tonight, the words will have the familiarity of having being circumnavigated, but meaning
still cannot be plotted. And so on and so on and so on. This process, repeated nightly, condemns me to a halting progress through the book. Some passages are traversed only after six or seven stormy crossings, while further on, the odd phrase sparks deja-vu. The book stops speaking to me. The endearment over. What started with ardour ends up dribbling away vital energies. We were sleeping together back to back. And finally we weren’t even in the same bed anymore. Maybe we were always incompatible. Maybe it just wasn’t the right period or circumstance. A mere adolescent infatuation revisited.

  I’ll settle for my sense of relatedness to the world being related to me by my very closest blood relations. It was nice to be briefly reacquainted with an echo of the literary narcissus. But I can’t afford to dive in. So, for now, I’ll stick with being the reviewer of all children’s works that enter the portals of this household. Oh and my journal of course. She knew I was coming back to her. She arches herself into an elegant stretch, before settling down at the prow of my bed, leaving no place to rest my weary head.

  Thus does literature go the same way as needlepoint, am-dram and cycling. Replaced in my hormonal biochemistry by caffeine, nicotine and TV daydream. My body shape has altered too. The mesomorphic legs of that cyclist pedalling for all she’s worth now distended to those of an endomorph. On the plus side, having either to hoick about an exponentially growing child (or her exponentially regressing sister) in both arms; or performing a balancing act, bracing baby in one, while conducting some suddenly minutely calibrated task with the other, has toned my upper body. However, my overall post-labour, stretched flesh-rather-than-muscle disposition delineates a phenotype for me which could only be described as that of a fat blob. Regaled at the papershop with, ‘When’s it due?’, ‘Boy or girl?’, until my blazing red eyes laser-guides their gaze down through the glass counter at Amy in the buggy. I’m paunching above my weight. Where does that acquired change in my body leave genetic determinism?

  T) Free will or determinism? The choice is yours. Go with your instincts. But you’ll be needing more efficacious parables with greater defined arcs than have served you up till now. Ergo, yet another recasting of the imbroglio, ‘nature versus nurture’. Versus (verses?). V. V for victory. V for vexation. V is not a character in my alphabet, however you transliterate me.

  T) When you finally pensioned off God and sent him to that modest retirement home at the top of the celestial stairlift, you nervously tried out the vacated throne of divinity for yourselves. And you squirmed uncomfortably in its exalted woof. You could only fill it if some external authority formally conferred title on you. So once again you relinquished your autonomy and cast outside of yourselves for an interventionist. Some Master Builder. A devising mind.

  C) And you arrived at me. Via a whole can of nematode worms, lowly fruit flies and yeasts. Since you couldn’t quite profane your own image, nor penetrate your own complexity. Perceiving that I held the key. That you’re made in my image. How you all stem from my Second Causes, from my step-daughter stem cells. My priestesshood. My vestral virgins. Deflowered and debased, here on your craps tables.

  C) So, why am I not ravished and refined by your touch? Is it because I all too evidently disseminate from your corporeal shells? Since I am even present in those gauntleted fingers that maltreat me. I am the manifestation of your self-reviling fragility. Both fox and hound, while you sit up saddled high, powerless to intercede in Nature’s cutting edge drama playing out at ground level before you. Incontestably you do emerge from me, but simply unformed and unbidden. For I am switched on at the behest of your needs, rather than you serving as my instrumentation. You exist because you will it so. Only you can create yourselves, for you can inflect your change. Whereas I merely mutate randomly. You encompass landscapes, so I entreat you not to become obsessed with portraits. Look whom I’m addressing. You, who get hung up by a smile, or a dilation of the eyes; who get hamstrung by the shape of a leg; who cream yourself over the contours of a breast; or become all tremulous at the wiggle of a rump. Only you can go all weak at the knees and yet stiffen all points north. I’m wasting my breath, as all your language is a frittering of essence.

  T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my strident and possibly chiding tone. I’m not–

  G) It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. Stopping at ‘the three Rs’ of reductionism, reductionism and reductionism. I’m more expansive than that. Well might you subsection me into chromosomes and chromosomes into genes, in order to zero in on the nucleotide bases with just their humble quartet of letters. Yet my fabric is vastly richer. The rest is not empty, garbled, meaningless printout. Yet you deem it ‘junk’ and ‘pseudo’, since it fails to fit in with your target-led fusillades.

  G) Besides, in these segments lie more of the inclinations that you seek than from within the augury of my genetic ordinance survey. Disavowing it as junk leaves you cavorting in a paddling pool, when just over the lip lies the sun-kissed ocean. For junk DNA is veritably your baggage. Your log-book. Your individuation (as acknowledged by forensic criminologists, who lift this flap of my investment in search of pinpointing identity). Moreover, it is the whole of your species’ wisdom in diary form. For here ought to be an open book of rememberance for your pioneers. The glorious, faceless, nameless failures, borne on powerfully broad shoulders upon which you now gnomically squat. The steady eddies, plodding along unspectacularly towards handing on the generational relay baton. There in full is your pre-natal immunisation record against diseases you’ve never even heard of, simply due to your forebears successfully seeing them off. Your unknown, forgotten war dead. Which you dishonourably class as jestam. Collecting dust in the attics of your future construction. I think we owe them a minute’s silence in recognition. Or better yet, let’s not disturb their war graves at all.

  G) Alright, alright. I concede that’s scarcely feasible. The gene genie’s out of the gourd and all that. Okay then, mull on this. Another facet of what you dismiss as valueless is that very foundation upon which you are constructed in the womb. Phases only redundant, now that they have delivered you into the orbit of life. The instructions and the scaffold poles, along which files of cells shuffle along into position. Think regimented coloured card collages in totalitarian displays of obedience. The metaphor only goes so far of course, for my scions willingly sacrifice themselves for the cause. Excess cells cut off at the enfolding of a cylinder of tendon or bone, voluntarily pitching into the void to secure perfect execution of form. What you have designated as my TP53 (evocative don’t you think?) genes, do not act like puffed-up cadres or cowardly cult subalterns, for they don’t have to coat any cyanide pill. They chemically converse with superfluous cells and request them to turn off and turn out. And they willingly comply. You have dubbed it ‘apoptosis’, the fall of autumn leaves. See, you can do it when you put your mind to it. When you let your creative imagination go.

  C) Oh, and don’t expect to rely on computers to facilitate that.

  C) Computers. Those inorganic pack-horses and drays. Those sterile mules. Those humdrum hinnies. With their yes/no, one/zero, open/closed binary duality of literalness. Common or garden memory and retrieval systems. A network does not automatically render the two into the multi- dimensional. Just ’cos they can sit there and patiently tally the dead. My pulverised selves. They can also count the number of letter ‘E’s in the works of Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean they can approach him any the better either. Number crunching when you pursue language and idiomatic function. Go figure. Thirty-odd thousand genes to count off. Or at least, those are the one’s you’ve caught in the act of being you. What about the stealth genes? Or those other long-game genetic components. My sub rosa inhibitors and ulterior enablers? ‘Codeless’ DNA is so infinitely sidelong that its function is imperceptible. It forms the mute mountains, impenetrable jungles and distant deserts which modulate your internal ecology. Acting as the rigging for all operative DNA, much like the skeletal system spaces out your bus
tling musculature and vital organs. But which of these functions is symbolically taken for the haecceity of mankind? The vapid skeleton, naturally! It is even represented as completely self-articulated, when you are fully conscious that it is the other tissues which tether it. Well the same goes for junk DNA. The very armatures on which coding DNA is arrayed, whose variability determines the efficacy of that coding. And you would present it only as some muzzled mannequin? Flibbertigibbets, you are so perverse!

  T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my strident and possibly chiding tone. I’m–

  G) I applaud your pursuit of precision. No, I really do. Your beguiling son et lumières. Of MRI, PET, CTS, DSR and the sturm und drang of US, which have delivered you fantastic shadowplay performances. Of presence and absence, health and pathology, order and disorder, regulation and tumult. Yet, always this irreducible binary pairing of existence and proto-non-existence. (And always these bloody trite triplex monograms, flattening out the jagged relief of perishing being. Absurd surds picked out and made into abashed uncials.) Life’s little dramas, dumb shows, acted out in stage whispers. What does the Random Access Memory of computers know of the stone cold certainty of demise? Where is the virtual reality modelling of non-being? The macro-processor that I installed in you (after millenia of software rewrites), at least has a shot at processing such self-scrutiny. But don’t entrust it to your artists. Absentee creators, projecting their imaginative explorations on to inanimate textures of paper, canvas, clay and plucked catgut. Somehow, rubbing up against these inherently mute tablets, you are supposed to engage with the emotional expression engraved therein. What an indirect, incoherent way of going about your communication. First God, then your own secular prophets and seers. And now with me, for I am approached as both the creative intelligence and the insensible raw material.