Hallucinating (31 page)
But then the velocity of his descent is reduced, and for a moment he stops moving, before he begins ascending again. He is bouncing across the land like a big ball of ape wool,
boing, boing, boing,
until at length his motion stops and he stands up, naked and hairless as the day he was born, except that he is wearing clothes. Clothes made of wool, ie. sheep hair.
He is standing beside the rocks of Hound Tor. He's all right. There are narrow ruts in the calluses at the ends of the fingers of his right hand.
He was not hallucinating.
It was
real.
...but this one's more mysterious...
Suddenly Kappa is falling. But she is not falling into cold air that rushes past as she descends, she is falling into a Y-shaped tunnel—and the junction is approaching. She understands that one direction is safe, whereas if she chooses the other she will splat upon Dartmoor and be killed. How to choose, though? The left tunnel is characterised by red dreads and hippy clothes, by the smell of happy valley and by her interest in watching the skies: the right tunnel is characterised by leather seats, tax documents and Glasto rent agreements. The left is alternative, the right is conservative.
The junction is coming up!
Kappa can't decide. She is facing downwards, so she reaches out with her left and right arms, so that she also is shaped as a Y.
Whumph.
The concussion stuns her. Her teeth are aching. She is stuck into solid earth, her left and right arms buried in soil up to the shoulders, her face pressed against the grass. Her neck is really hurting from the crash-landing. Then somebody has taken her ankles and is using her teeth to cut a hole in the ground, a hole that is eight feet long, three feet wide and six feet under.
Now the hole is complete. She is exhausted, and her mouth is full of grit from the digging process. She turns around, standing at the bottom of the grave, to see a lone test-tube leaning over the edge and glowering at her.
Kappa gasps. "You're saying I've got no natural parents?" she asks.
"Everybody has parents," the test-tube replies. "No, Miss 2 of 3, I'm saying something entirely different."
Kappa is scared. She clambers out of her grave, but when she looks around she sees Dartmoor, an oblong hole, and nothing else.
The wind is cold and the air is damp.
She was not hallucinating.
It was
real.
...goodbye...
So was it all a gigantic hallucination, like last time?
Nulight is uncertain, like last time. It is not a black and white situation.
And then everything happens.
First, the sky goes green. In the garden of their secret house on Dartmoor, Nulight and Kappa look up into the heavens, and it is like peering into an inverted bowl of pea soup. The stars are black, like grains of pepper, but they are insignificant compared to the hundreds of rainbow coloured parentship trails filling the sky. These trails are finer than they were before—done with a pen, not a brush—and they have a granular quality that suggests they are breaking up under the influence of unseen particles.
As the pair stare upwards, the trails begin to oscillate. Kappa suggests that they lie down upon the damp ground, for they do not want to miss this. Now the trails are a myriad of sine waves, as if they are watching the superimposed images of uncountable oscilloscopes. In years of tripping, Nulight has never seen anything so freaky. The sky is a moving, living pattern—
Nothing.
The trails vanish instantaneously.
The green fades a matter of seconds afterwards, and the stars are revealed as twinkling white flecks in black heaven.
"The aliens have gone," Kappa says.
"I think you're right, sweets."
"No, they really have gone," Kappa asserts. "The sky is clean again. Can't you feel it?"
"Yeah, I think I can."
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
...the concluding thoughts of Master Sengel...
*
to you all
*
from *********
*Re: our experience with the aliens.
*For me, the events of recent years have illustrated the distinction between private property and personal property. It is a mistake to assume that all property, regardless of type, is somehow bad. Private property is dead property that exists in what Erich Fromm called the 'having mode' of living, ie. obsessed with goods at the expense of a fruitfully lived life. Personal property, on the other hand—and this can include anything from, say, the pack of tea-bags that I use, to my Apple Mac Phase9 UltraTower—is property related to a person and to their actively lived life.
*I look back now and realise that my main error was to think that I and my colleagues could repel the aliens by an act of force. I utilised both my equipment and the people who at that time surrounded me as if they were a great dead hand, an item of, I admit it now, private property. In fact, once we had failed to repel the aliens with djembe power I realised that the only way of successfully exploiting my position was to utilise my equipment and inspire my colleagues in an alternative mode. This mode, as Nulight correctly realised, was a display of our humanity—but, more importantly, I used my equipment etc. as personal property, that is, as adjuncts to my actively lived life. And we were successful.
*I hope you will agree that private property is the opium of the people.
*See you soon. Continue the good work.
...the concluding thoughts of Jo...
Before all this happened—the alien invasion and everything—I wasn't sure if there was a spirit or a soul inside me. Now I know. There isn't. But it wasn't just the nights we spent with the coven at Ruyton-XI-Towns that convinced me, it was a whole host of other thoughts and conversations.
It seems to me that throughout humanity's history so far (excepting the most recent centuries) it has been assumed that after death the soul or spirit of a person lived on in some ethereal realm. This was an inevitable idea. The first people to bury their dead, the Neandertals, were fully conscious, and they must have had a concept of life—of self-awareness, aliveness, of the importance of other people—to have had a concept of death. They were aware of themselves as unique individuals with unique identities. This posed one of the deepest of humanity's problems; how to understand what happened when life stopped.
Given two observations made by every human being, there was only one answer for early humanity, an answer that became entrenched in thought for thousands upon thousands of years. These two observations were that people were conscious and unique, and that they died. Understanding that human beings were conscious, and that they died, decayed, and disappeared after a few decades of life, early humanity had no option but to assume that this uniqueness was not in fact annihilated; that some non-physical part, some symbol of the uniqueness of every human being, of their personalities, did survive death. It was an unavoidable conclusion for these early peoples with their scant understanding of the world.
And it was surely the only explanation. It was impossible for early peoples to imagine death, non-existence. I think it was inevitable that they presume the existence of an ethereal spirit that seemed to reside within the body. This explanation did away with what at the time was the inconceivable dilemma of not existing. Physical death could be transcended by continued mental life.
Other feelings would have led them to this conclusion. Those early conscious peoples would have felt emotions, would have experienced love, and their relationships would have been important; individuals mattered to one another (the basis of all morals). It was inevitable that, upon the death of some person, they wondered what had happened to the unique and irreplaceable character; possibly they had imagined their own physical demise and been afraid of it. In such an atmosphere, the notion of an immortal non-corporeal component was inevitable.
Burial rituals were the social answers to these problems. They expressed the fact that people mattered to one another, that everyone wondered what happened after death, and that some generally held explanation was required. From this basic idea came many others: the idea of an after-life, a spirit realm, which was of course required for the dead spirits to live in; the idea that ethereal spirits resided inside earthly bodies as a separable entity; the idea that spirits had knowledge not attainable by people, and that they could influence earthly life. It seems to me that all these ideas grew, over time, into religious concepts.
It wasn't possible for early humanity to know the truth of consciousness and existence. It was impossible for early humanity to conceive the idea of life ceasing after death—they could not let their selves go. But as for me, living in the twenty first century and knowing what I now know, I realise that in forty, fifty years or so, I'll cease to exist. Of course, I can't imagine that—it's a logical impossibility—but I can imagine the concept of ceasing to exist. (It's not scary. What's scary is the unknowable process of dying.)
But, anyway. Thank you aliens for giving me three years of terror and interest. I would rather that you had not destroyed so much, but life, I have discovered, is as good as random, and we, as a species, had better get used to it.
...Sperm's concluding thoughts...
Nice one, yeah. Where's my guitar?
...Kappa's concluding thoughts...
What I want now is to return to Glastonbury and take up again my position as Dean of the Faculty of Avalon. I need stability.
In my teenage years and early twenties I was well into UFOs and sightings, but now, having been through what we've been through, I feel I want to distance myself from that whole scene. At the same time I want to embrace the green, permacultured, alternative/holistic scene, as typified by the people we met in Llangollen. Glastonbury Tor is already well into that scene, but I'd like to bring it to the rest of the town. I think we need to bridge the gap between the Tor People and the rest of the local residents.
...final daydreams of Nulight...
hallucinate, hallucinari, alucinari, aluein
To wander, to be distraught. Yeah, that does kinda sum up alot of my experiences these past few years. Real or not? Difficult to tell. When you've done what I've done... well, the real world acquires a phantasmagorical sheen.
My feeling is that the world the YBs in Lyme Regis are trying to create is the fake world, the one divorced from reality and so a 'hallucination' of sorts. Wouldn't it be better if our social forms mirrored the actual needs of human beings? Like, doesn't it miss the point of life if you're trying to force nature to change shape? Nature can't change just to suit immature people, science has proved that.
We
should change so that we complement nature; and, you know, it's perfectly possible, there's no need to give up technology and 'live in mud huts', as blinkered reactionaries usually put it.
I'm no pragmatist, though for the sake of love I've tried to be. The way I see it, other people can be pragmatists if they want to, I've got no problem with them—but there has to be a direction in which to journey. Pragmatists should build the path, but idealists (like me) have to point out the direction.
Hey! I kinda like that.
AFTERWORD
I had enormous fun writing
Hallucinating.
The novel began as a free festival inspired short story that I wrote in the mid 1990s, taking all my musical loves —Shpongle, Ozric Tentacles, Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind and so many more—and weaving them into an idiosyncratic tale... a
very
idiosyncratic tale of musical invasion and psychedelic mystery.
The story was "published" only on my website. After a while I began to wonder what happened next, following the alien invasion and the remixing of the western world's economy. I was living in the Westcountry at the time, and, inspired by the beautiful local scenery and by artists such as Nigel Shaw and Carolyn Hillyer who lived on Dartmoor, I wrote the next part of the tale, that in the novel became Part 2, Return Of A Tune. By this time, the turn of the millennium, Sean Wallace of Cosmos Books and Prime Books had asked me when I was going to complete the tale, which he loved and was interested in publishing. My initial response was that I wouldn't complete it—I felt the tale was too idiosyncratic. It was not aimed at my SF readers, rather at all my underground and free festival friends. But eventually the lure of the story got to me, I planned and prepared the rest of the tale and soon began writing it.
Hallucinating
plays with ideas of reality and illusion. One of the ways I wanted to do this was to include cameo appearances by real underground musicians, and so I contacted as many as I could, asking them if they would allow me to use them in the novel. All but one answered: all positive replies. I was delighted. And so Ed Wynne, Simon Posford, Steven Wilson and all the rest appeared in the book. Some of these musicians took it really seriously! Phil Thornton for instance told me what synths he'd be using for his imaginary gig, while Simon Posford insisted on having purple hair.
The ultimate game was to have myself appear, and so I did, though that decision was condemned by one reviewer, who thought it too self-indulgent. But for a novel that was written about the musical world that I love and am part of, and which deliberately mixed fantasy and reality, I felt my appearance was appropriate.
I was particularly pleased that so many of the in-jokes were appreciated by my readers. As one reviewer pointed out,
Hallucinating
is the novel in which my rather silly, surreal sense of humour is most obvious. Other reviewers found the tale baffling.
I did have plans to write a sequel, bringing in the American hippy scene, but never found the motivation to begin it.
Hallucinating
stands on its own I think, with its suitably ambiguous ending...
Stephen Palmer, Shrewsbury, 2011