fas — fate, divine law
instar — likeness
mane — morning
nefas — sin, abomination
nihil / nil — nothing, none
secus — sex, coitus

[Wikipedia: Latin Declension]

If offered any of these, you must not decline.

Some years ago, I worked on a long-term project which was funded by the then Public Record Office. When that institution was rebranded as the National Archives, complete with shiny new website, they decided that our hitherto independently-styled and -managed website must be rebranded to mimic theirs in look and feel.

This was far from easy, partly because their design had a horrendously messy implementation, and partly because (of course) it had been designed without any reference to us or how our data delivery might fit into it. It was imposed on us as a fait accompli, and we had to – somehow – squeeze our square peg into their round hole.

We spent a full year smashing our clean, lightweight design into pieces and gluing it back together in order to fit their restrictive, bloated one. I didn’t much enjoy doing it (can you tell?), but I like to think we did a good job.

Possibly too good. What we found when it went live is that users got confused: our site, now a subdomain of theirs, looked and felt so similar to the main site that users expected it to work in exactly the same way, but this was ultimately impossible as ours had a fundamentally different set of functions than theirs. Those areas where we overlapped had been made to work identically, but this just led to confusion where the functionality diverged.

One size does not fit all. And the more distance there is between those responsible for the design and management of a site, and those producing the content for it, the more likely it is that some of that content will be presented poorly, or not at all.

I don’t think people really want all government websites to look the same, or to be in the same domain¹. I think what they want is for information to be easy to find and easy to access. The best way to ensure that is to keep the designers and managers of the website as close as possible to the people producing the information. By all means have standards to ensure best practice, but keep them as minimal as possible, with a mechanism for those bound by them to suggest changes if they find them too restrictive.

And let different things look different, because that helps people to realise that they are different.

But just as I began to consider which topical subjects of the day I might want to cover in my lyrical discourse, Afrika Bambataa started rapping over it in my head instead. “What’s this phoney ceremony, hanging around…”, lyrics that are familiar to me solely due to their use by Bassheads in their classic upfront progressive house tune “Is there anybody out there?”. It fitted perfectly.

Now my role in the piece seems to have been relegated to waiting until he sings “Just get up and dance, you got to get up and dance, y’all just get up and dance” and then shouting “LIKE A MUPPET!”.

I think perhaps it’s best if I just try to forget that any of this happened.

A bizarre bit of code in the e-commerce software¹ I’m currently fixing up does exactly that; it uses the Soundex algorithm to look for an approximate match to where the customer lives, according to the similarity of how the countries’ names are pronounced, rather than the more conventional considerations like geography.

There are 27 countries in the database that share a Soundex value with at least one other (mostly just pairs, but the largest matching group is 4: Ghana, Guam, Guinea and Guyana). In each group, all the countries would be rewritten to whichever was first alphabetically. Addresses in Greece would appear to be in Georgia; Norway became Nauru.

This sort of thing is nice and easy to fix (finding it is the hard part), but leaves a strange aftertaste… the insoluble mystery of just what was going on in the mind of whoever decided to write that code that made them think it would be a good idea…

But only a little, because this soon turns into a celebration of my speed and ingenuity – on a bicycle. I am on a… no, I am dreaming… the dreamer is on a bicycle. He is able to stay mostly well ahead and out of range of his pursuers. They catch up periodically but I suspect it’s only as a reminder that a pursuit is on, that peril is present, when the dreamer has strayed a little too far into the sheer thrill of the ride, the air, and the novel landscapes, rural and (pleasant, well-planned, futuristic) semi-urban. In the latter, multi-lane freeways lie empty, save for occasional groups of people ambling across the road on foot; these provide the only real frustration to be found in this tale, as the dreamer must sometimes wait for the pedestrians to move out of his way in a very pedestrian way, his horn having failed to motivate them to any additional sense of urgency, before continuing his journey, his ongoing escape from this motiveless chase.

Then, on one such 12-lane superhighway, again completely devoid of any wheeled traffic except him and a few prams and buggies being pushed by the slowest-moving parents ever, one of which and its attendant family he is about to accelerate away from, he notices something which makes him pause.

It’s a sound. Very faint, just on the edge of audibility, disappearing with each gust of wind, coalescing again as the air stills, so that it takes a moment to consciously know what it is; but by that time his unconscious has already recognised that he is being called, summoned, by the insistent repetition of the most ancient and secret of his names.

Doof. Doof. Doof. Doof.

- * – * -

The sound is coming from a neo-neo-classical pavilion towards the centre of the well-tended park that runs for miles alongside this deserted highway. The building, whose architecture is almost entirely ancient in style but whose bright albedo and suspicious glinting in the sunlight suggests ultra-modern construction and materials, sits like a gatehouse (but too far from the gate) astride the park’s central boulevard – a wide, smooth-surfaced path, which begins a little to the left of the dreamer’s current position and enters and exits the pavilion by means of high archways on its way to the shore of a crystalline lake or sea just visible in the distance. The dreamer repurposes his bike toward the boulevard and begins to ride, but as he cycles onto the boulevard, somehow he feels that is not right, not the done thing. There are no signs, no laws to say he must, but he knows that the approach is to be made on foot.

I am walking beneath one of those arches now. The building, the architecture, the unnatural brightness with which it glows in the sunlight, are of no interest to me. As I neared the building, and the music declared itself more evidently, I found it by turns interesting, then exciting, then compelling, but now, as if the archway were an invisible gateway to another dimension, as I cross the threshold into the building, it immediately becomes something more: overwhelmingly, transcendentally beautiful. What before was an aural, intellectually-stimulating phenomenon, opens out into a multi-sensory, sensual and spiritual experience wrapped around my whole body and soul.

When I recover my senses a little, I realise it’s not just about the choice of music, although that matters, of course it does. It’s the speakers. There’s something very special about these ones. I go in for a closer look at them, because from a distance – and, it turns out, from close up as well – there is nothing distinctive about them visually. They couldn’t look much more bog-standard: each carpet-covered rectangular housing of maybe 8 x 5 x 3 ft has two bass drivers of 14″ or so, covered with black metal grilles, and a horn tweeter. I can see only four of these units arranged around me, but the clarity of sound from these things is an epiphany.

They have no identifying features, no maker’s name or logo, nothing memorable about their visual design. So I have to enquire of the DJ, who tells me they are ED-25s.

I am awake.

I need those speakers.

This is my second attempt to write up a dream in short-story format (after this one). In this dream there were noticeable (in retrospect) shifts between a semi-lucid state, where I understood that I was dreaming but played along, and the more common state of being so enmeshed in the story that I’m unaware that I’m dreaming. These shifts seemed significant enough that I wanted to convey them somehow, so I chose to do so by flipping between first- and third-person narrative, although within the dream I was entirely acting, as I usually do in dreams, from a first-person point-of-view. I found it challenging to implement these flips in the narrative in such a way as to make it obvious that they are intentional rather than accidental, but without excessively calling attention to themselves… I’ve not attempted anything like that before, at least not deliberately…

Firstly, they hold a mirror to show you what needs healing in yourself. That ugly behaviour you see in them probably has its origins or counterpart in you; the uglier it is to you, the less you want to face it, the more you need to.

Secondly, time is running in. Our children are that much closer to the omega point. On the deepest level, they know, better than we do, which way things are heading. They can feel more keenly the pull of that strange attractor; are more aligned with it. While we have become magnetized, polarized by the dead weight of the past, they are aligned to a future of infinite potential, and are trying to guide us there. We need to listen to them.

They want to give us an inheritance. Instead of passing on to our children all our ossified and stratified millennia of pain from the past, let our children pass on to us their flexibility, adaptability and ready forgiveness.

Thankyou, my children, for being such wonderful teachers. I humbly promise to try to be a better student.

Now eat your vegetables.

Bill Griffiths is playing
Something by Bartok
A plodding piece
Simple, 2-note chords.
I fantasise
About taking the stage
By force.
Like the Chechen Rebels
in the Moscow Theatre
But no guns
Just Liberation
An audience
Captive
Ready to be Captivated
by the introduction
to Acclimatize.

Bill Griffiths is reading
A poem of his. He reads
Halt
ingly
Pauses inser
ted where they don't
belong, where they
Don't flow
Alternatelyrushedand
Not
Rushed.
And saying Nothing
that makes any sense.
Am I being cheated?
"You would do better,"
He says.
I agree, wholeheartedly.

Bill Griffiths is playing again
Something else by Bartok
A better piece this time.
One that actually requires
some skill, that actually has
some tune. He plays
Haltingly.
And then it's over.
And all I can think is,
I need to network
with people like Iain Sinclair
Have my audience delivered
on a plate.
And fuckin' use the opportunity.

There are three films being projected: a slow-mo rear-view mirror scene in the rain in the centre; on the left a real-time forward-looking “this is you driving” boring one; but on the right, zoomed in, a view looking right. We see one-frame blipvert flashes of wheels zipping past on the other side of the central reservation, the rhythm of this occasionally broken by an overtaking car sailing serenely past on this side. We’re cruising the middle lane, but with a view normally denied to the driver, that of the sheer pace of humanity, the raw velocity with which we drive ourselves toward extinction. We are a pair of alloy wheels for one frame only, and then we’re gone.

There’s few a better opportunity for the peoplewatcher, the loner, to catch sight of other loners, other peoplewatchers, aliens, standing, sitting alone, watching, than at any event associated with The KLF. They stand, unashamed, at the edges but also in the middle of the foyer, watching, observing like I, but not making notes like I, just watching. Who are these people? Who am I? Was I?

Watching the films I realise that the point of motorways is to take you through, past; never to touch, feel or experience the countryside, the people, just a journey to get from A to B and not even realise how shit it was, our lives reduced to the need to arrive, never deviate from the course ordained for us by our wise Government Minister. Ours is not to question, just to fucking drive, got to get There, never mind all the cones, never mind having an HGV up your arse, never mind the grey, the black, the spray, the Nothingness, the shit food and shit service stations, never mind the White Van Man cutting you up for the umpteenth time that day, never mind the rain, the sales exec in his Mondeo, never mind the concrete just play spot the Eddie Stobart, it beats actually THINKING.

Encased in our
own personal
Bubble
We feel nothing
see nothing except
what hits our windscreen.
No wonder people are
so divorced from reality
when the reality they face
day in day out
is the M25.

You might like to check out a more complimentary review.

They probably told us it was a supernova or a comet or something, but everyone knew it wasn’t, and nobody knew what it was; and though some of us suspected, none of us would have dared to speak our suspicions aloud, even if we could have found a way to describe them, in case the act of fixing our suspicions into words made them come true.

But they came true anyway.

At first, it was just a small, bright, jagged line, about a moon’s width across. I don’t remember exactly when it appeared or how we all noticed. I don’t anymore remember it not being there. It definitely appeared — suddenly — but it so soon became such an established part of our lives, that the idea of the daytime sky without it would have been as preposterous as the night sky without stars.

It was only visible by day — and the skies were clear blue and cloudless, back then, so we had an uninterrupted view of it for a large part of the daylight hours. Yet we all felt a curious desire to ignore it. The TV reports told us we probably ought not to look at it for too long, as it was bright enough to damage the eyes, but there was no danger of that. No-one wanted to look at it. We would catch glances, of course; see that it was still there, and yes, that it was getting worse, larger, brighter, throwing off sparks now… but then we would look away, and try, pointlessly, to continue with our lives.

For days, the whole planet pretended.

Somehow, I saw it change. I don’t know if I happened to glance that way, or if I was compelled to watch. It’s no longer possible to tell the difference.

The initial bright scar across the sky had lengthened and straightened so that it was now less like a jagged crack or tear in appearance, more like a thin letterbox or slot. I grimly wondered what was about to be delivered to us.

The sparks or meteor streaks or lightning bolts which had been arcing out of it with increasing frequency over the past two days, were now continuous, and all arced in the same direction, anti-clockwise. A mist began to swirl around with them, which soon became thick, dark clouds, all spinning the same way, and too fast, obviously, unnaturally, too damn fast. Then obviously, unnaturally, too damn red. It was big now, spreading out to take up half the sky. We couldn’t try to ignore it anymore.

The crack or scar or split or slot at the centre had been growing dimmer for a while, but now suddenly turned black; yet it seemed all the more piercing against the swirling red vortex around. Worse, at the moment this happened I felt the sudden knowledge, the instant recognition, that I was looking into the eye of a conscious being. Not truly a God, just another lifeform like us, and yet so much more advanced than us that it might as well be a God to us. There was no question of its harmful intent; no hope of resisting. Only death or slavery awaited us now.

The last thing I remember is thinking, though I have no idea why, exactly these words:

“I for one welcome our new evil eye-in-the-sky overlord.”

The eye winked. There was a searing flash, and nothing more.

I didn’t set out to write this as a literary work. This was my dream from last night; in the process of writing it down it started to sound like a short story, so I rolled with it, without spending too much time on it. I really did wake up with that phrase in my head, along with a set of vivid but rapidly-fading images of the sky.