All the rush and noise, all the wishing for dread terror not
to be part of MY life. Can’t it be merely something that YOU suffer from,
perhaps as a patient of some benevolent medic/therapist. I must act fast,
movement is balance, speed along before I too slide into that patient place
(again!). I imagine an impatient patient – can’t you do something for me,
doctor? What if I dig deep into my pockets and go private, would that help?
Lull me to sleep; those words of Auden touch and frame, offer an image – Muse,
Clio – a sort of silent embrace or setting up the possibility of embracing
silence and yes, doctor, lulling me to sleep with a lullaby. Hang out the Do
Not Disturb sign. We call it falling asleep. Letting go of our fiendish desire
to control. Falling, a moment of terror and . . . perhaps not even that, a seamless transition between conscious and
unconscious . . . and later I’ll read you a story.
A couple of evenings ago I went up (it’s out of town and up
the hill) to the local cinema to see Inception, the newish film from
Christopher Nolan. A very watchable, even enthralling movie, though it shuffles
about on the edges of incoherence. Come to think of it, shuffling about on the
edges of incoherence sounds oddly familiar, like I might be catching a glimpse
of myself in the mirror, inadvertently, so to speak. A story about planting an
idea in another’s mind – a theme that is banality itself given that we are
always engaged in conversations that attempt to do just that. But to make it interesting
you have to bring in power and control. How do you get an idea into some
powerful person’s mind to your own advantage? So it’s business as usual:
powerful wealthy people making use of clever skilful people who need a bit of
cash or some other favour, but here digging into the mysterious nature of the mind and its ability
to tell us all sorts of stories whilst we are asleep. Stories that are so real
when we are in them but after waking, begin to fragment, drift into the air
like smoke, leaving us with fractured images that may mean something or
nothing.
Anyway the movie is very noisy and they all have lots of fun
jumping into each others’ dreams, killing endless numbers of anonymous 'baddies', fascinating special effects, and at the same time exploring the dynamics of
loss and mourning.