Memorycemetery

Dreams are absurd. They grant us desired escape from mundane.That’s why we like to dream. Shakespeare said: “nothing is new under the Moon”. (I wonder why did he put “under the Moon”, not “under the Sun”? Did he refer to night time and our dreams actually?). Can absurd be repetative? I’ve heard about repetative dreams, seeing the same one over and over, but never had myself one. There is no such thing as an absurd memory, on the contrary. There are some memories of absurd situations or events, but they always have a context.

For instance, today I’ve experienced an absurd situation.

My wife, me and our 2 years old boy took a taxi. We live in Bangkok, and it’s city planing can rival our brain: very complex and illogical. Sometimes to complete a simple task to go a bit up the road you have to take left first, make a circle, come to a main road, navigate through few traffic jams, take right, go up for a while, turn on the left, take second left and turn on the left again to end up 1 hour and 400 metres away from the place you started. It reminds me a test labirynth for rats I saw once. The process of navigating through narrow Bangkok sois can make an absurd  memory itself. The task this time is simple: you just need to go left until the end, turn left again and go all the way up. 10 minutes journey. The driver has a different idea: he wants to take us for a joy ride through the maze, and doesn’t want to follow direct instructions. So I’m saying to him: this way isn’t good. We shouldn’t go this way. He replies: get out of my car then, and stops. And we get off his car, as we don’t have an hour to spare. It’s easier to take another taxi, save time and avoid arguments and cheating. I hold my son in hands, and turn to go a bit back to the intersection, from there we can continue our journey. Suddenly I hear yelling. I turn around and see the driver. He abandoned the car and charging after us wildly wielding  a piece of metal pipe over his head. His intention is clear: crash it over my head. He shouts something I can’t comprehend; he doesn’t seem bothered I hold child in my hands.  As I turn around and look at him he stops. He doesn’t attack, but he doesn’t retreat either. We are a couple of metres apart. It looks like he is considering his options: should he hit or not, and if yes, where and how? Meanwhile he shouts abuses. The scene goes for few minutes. I’m starting losing control too. I dislike people trying to hit me or freak me out, especially without a worthy reason to do so. So I cry back: “Fuck you and your taxi! Go on, hit me!”. He lost the moment: instead of an empty street in the beginning of our little confrontation behind me is an improvised traffic jam: though it’s possible to go around his car, everyone is curious about the scene, but nobody does anything to stop it. There’s no way he can attack me now. My wife shouts: somebody, call police! And then he retreats. I still wonder, what was this about? This memory is not absurd, but situation obviously is.

Coming back from this discourse to absurd dreams. One of Memorycemetery contributors and a publisher of  highly recommended  blog with the same name, Ieclectic, have sent me today a link to an article about a dreams’ researcher, Allan Hobson, referring, I guess, to my last post. I’ll quote it:
…In the early ’70s, while planting microelectrodes on the brain stems of cats, Hobson formed his widely cited Activation-Synthesis theory and broadened its implications, perhaps unduly, to disprove Freud’s claim that dreams are caused by unconscious, often sinister desires. He and his Harvard colleague Robert McCarley proposed that dreams are strange and fragmented not because secret urges are being censored, as Freud claimed, but because the brain is in a naturally chaotic state. During REM sleep, the phase most ripe for dreaming, the brain stem sends random signals up to parts of the forebrain that control emotions, movement, vision, and hearing, and these higher brain centers patch together a story out of the electrical input. Hobson accused psychoanalysts of reading dreams as pieces of literature and creating narratives when there weren’t any. (“I’m more interested in their grammar,” he says.) …
/excerpt from Rachel Aviv’s article, “Hobson’s choice. Can Freud’s theory of dreams hold up against modern neuroscience?”./
So here’s yet one more proof of my theory that memories go in loops: something that you could call a postmodernist approach, as I’d like to quote yet another excerpt from  my novel ”A girl from Taliban, CocaCola and the last days of my creation” again.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a quote for a quote.
Here is an absurd dream I had, as a narrative, quickly scribbed on a back of an envelope. Probably I wouldn’t write it down at all, if I wouldn’t have an idea to put it in the film I was making at that time. It didn’t fit the film in the end, but perfectly fit the narrative of the novel.
Anyway, it goes like this:

…Tonight I had seen a dream. If dreams would have names, this one could be called “Pandora’s head” (could be a nice name for a pub) and all the action was on the roof. There were:

1.Creator with a spherical head.
2.Creator with a cubic head.
3.Creator with no head.

-1. - I am pleased of being here.
-2. - And I am glad indeed.
-3. - I’ll switch myself in silent mode if you’ll not stop talking nonsense.
-1. - I live therefore I doubt.
-2. - I doubt therefore I live.
-3. - (Making a spooky sound. Flash).
-2. - (pointing at 3.) – Only an idiot can behave like this.
-3. - I am proud to be an idiot. This is an achievement worth spending many lives.
-2. – So many lives, so many years wasted… Look, you hardly have a head.
-1. – I have a head of perfect and noble shape. I store inside my doubts.
-3. – What do you doubt exactly?
-1. – I doubt what fit my head. And I don’t doubt what fit not.
-2. – Such a convenient approach…
-3. – Forgive me not if I understand anything you are talking about.
-1. – Just fix your head and follow my wise teachings.
-2. – Accept your doubt and share it with us.
-3. – I have no room to doubt.
1 and 2 together: - Such a pity!
-1. – If you have no doubt, what are you doing here?
-3. – I wonder.
-2. – You wonder what?
-1. – And how?
Somebody plays trumpet nearby (Konrad, of course)
-3. – Manifestation of pure existence I am. I wonder now and then. And here and there I do not require any reason apart myself.
-1. – I doubt it.
-3. – You doubt yourself.
-2. – This is the nature of any living being…
-1. – So far so good.
-2. – But never good enough.
-3. – Enough for what? And where is never? Does it have any certain limit?
-2. – “Never” is not where. Never is when: it’s never ending now.
-3. – About time.
-1. – Do you have anything to say?
-3. – Stop asking your endless questions.
-1. – Why?
And then I woke up.
3 monkeys: see nothing, hear nothing, and tell nothing.
The perfect wisdom.
See illustration:

THE PERFECT WISDOM, aka ONE MONKEY

What is absurd, anyway? Absurd is just a sense of a higher order, I guess. You can take this statement as it is: reductio ad absurdum (a claim for the sake of argument, based on a statement which cannot be both true and false); as for myself: this post was way too long, I’ll better depart to the realm of absurd, as it’s 1.20 AM already.

Boris Kislitsin

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