my dream

I was restless and frustrated.
For some reason I was trying to convince some people about something. but my frustration stemmed from the fact that whenever the time came for me to prove that I needed, I couldn't. I didstinctly remember being in a room with two guys dressed in black. someone else was in between us and his back sat facing me. I recognised him - I think he was my brother - i approached him, but he fell backwards and lay with a thud on the floor, unmoving.

I screamed.

I'm not sure he was dead but more than the actual event, it was my emotion that frightened me. It was such an intense frustration, reaching the end but never reaching it. Near and yet so far. Like the ending of a chapter which, when you finally get to, abruptly ends and you're left unsatisfied, frustrated, and fuming that you've got to start another chapter. Sometimes you turn the page and it's there, but there is still no answer. Imagine that happening again and again, going through each chapter thinking there's an end to it, but just when you think you're getting there - you get transported away. by words. by actions. by no means any fault of yours. and you're totally helpless.

I scream again. I scream so hard all the air in my lungs are exhausted, and my throat is dry and hurts, but I still cannot stop. I scream with all the frustration and anger and sadness there could ever be in the universe. It is a scream so filled with horror and sadness that you recoil from it but are gripped by it. I double over in my tears, crying so hard, in a height of hysterics I never knew any human could achieve.


I am taken to a door and I open it. I get shoved inside and suddenly I'm in a train cabin,
with serene-looking passengers looking out at a serene passage.
I turn around instantly and grab the door I came from, but it isn't a door anymore. It's just a window. I keep getting pushed through doors, which, when I return to, isn't a door anymore. The portals transport me in a maze I can't even see, nor determine its boundaries, nor understand its complexities.

I realise I'm on a train to Turin. The scenery is unbelievably beautiful, the big blue clear sky reflects itself in the calm lakes, trees and greenery surround me, engulf me. I don't even know when I got off, but suddenly I'm wandering around on cobbled streets, strangely dated, yet so present, I suddenly feel so alone.

I see someone coming out of a door in a wall under an archway. It's a hotel, I discover. I go in and as if time was lurching and jumping forwards, there was no way to determine which direction it was going. It felt like I had stepped forward in time, and I was in a flat, high above ground level, looking at the prettiest view you could ever see. The moutains were in the distant and you could see its snowy-caps, promising some sort of fantasy, then the river flowing down through it and growing bigger till it was a body of calm right under your feet. The room, however, is entirely made of glass. My walls are crystal clear, transparent. All at the same time , I feel naked. I had an idea a hitman was perched somewhere high above and looking through my glass walls, ready to aim a laser beam at me to exterminate my existence.

I am also acutely aware I am on a quest. To Venice. To meet Him.
Something weighs down so heavily on my heart I almost have to lie down to relieve it. I know I must get to him, but I don't know how.

I wander down the cobbled streets and walk past a row of continental-style cafes. Elegantly-dressed ladies glance at me from behind their veneer of human friendliness. I get the feeling that I'm getting nowhere, and I reach the banks of the lake. I don't know where to go.

I need so much to be with him, but I don't know how to get there. All I could do was cry, and hope he will find me eventually. But I had a feeling, that like my previous frustration of never getting to the end of any chapter, without any result, our search for each other would never have an end.

And then I realized what I was screaming about - all that sadness in the world, rushing in a frenzy to collide at this one moment, was the horror of my realization that something that meant the most in the world to me, had been taken away from me.

I'm almost blinded by my own tears.
My body jolts and suddenly it's like I had gone through another portal.

I woke up lying in my own bed, and with a sense of urgency I reached out for my phone on my bedside - the hard, physical, reality of the object came within my reach, and I recovered for a moment from my disorientation.

He called, it said on my phone. The comfort of the familiarity almost flooded me senseless.

I didn't realise I was holding my breath, but I finally exhaled. If I hadn't known the immensity of grief before, I think I finally do now.

I saw it in my mum's eyes while she sat on the floor rocking us, her two babies when my father left her world. I don't blame her for wanting, then, to kill herself. But she didn't. I could only pray in my heart - I would almost throw away love, in exchange for immunity from grief - that it'd never come to that.

Did I really know what I thought I knew?

I've just had a thought and it's been festing in the inner recesses of my brain for sometime now and I've finally managed to articulate it.

Whatever I thought I knew about writing, I now realize I don't. Well, at least not to a certain kind of writing that I have somewhat been training myself to do well.

I always thought if you knew how to write, and could write well, it will speak for itself on the page. Whatever style you chose to wrote in would be good and suitable, only because it was you that was writing it.

But I've learnt that it's all about the audience.

And the sad truth is, words, are now ubiquitous.

Worthless.

Abundant.

Accessible.

Excessive.

What sets you apart, then, is your ability to write for your audience. Different audiences. Many, many, audiences.

I used to look for the expressions, like the true sesquipedalianist. Wanting to outdo myself, all the time. But it's dawned on me now that the very things I used to despise or hold in contempt is done so for a reason. It's been done this way for a certain reason throughout history. And I guess it only takes you to mature, to realize it.

I'm reaching a turning point now where it's like my eyes have suddenly opened and my pen has frozen on my page, metamorphosising from inside out. The words come at me from all around like diffusion at speed. I no longer belong to my own insular, intellectualising world.

I hate those who don't get it. I got hurled abuse at today because I used the word 'intertextuality' at the lunch table. It was obvious he was stupid, in some way. But I would be stupider to think that's it. Only when you stradle both stratas and understand both will you be able to consider yourself superior. Only then will you transcend the ordinary.

I need to let in the elements that I used to hate, and force myself to embrace them. Only when I do so, will I be able to surpass my own levels of expectations. It will all come down to one word, the choice of that word, its exact location, the smell or touch or emotion or image or sensation that is conjured by its precise position and manipulation.

And when I've attained that nirvana, I can write about anything I want, in any way I want. And it wouldn't matter if you didn't get it. It would have to take one to recognise the other. And ultimately, I want to keep it that way.

So did I really know what I thought I knew?

If you know what I'm talking about, I'll really like you.

The Da Pinchi Code

It is the sign of our times that we have reached a saturation point in our social history that everything that could be said, has already been said, and we are now fighting over how we’ve said what we said.

Postmodern theorists will happily tell you that humanity’s innovation and creativity is no longer possible in this postmodern age, and all that’s left is imitation. They are recently, I hear, excitedly planning to throw a party to discuss the latest developments surrounding the drama unfolding at the London High Court as a prime example.

If you haven’t already given in to the pressure, you might as well submit to the temptation and get your copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code since you won’t escape it anyway. 40 million copies and counting have already been sold, a film starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Sir Ian McKellen is set to be released in May, and surprise, surprise, it’s splashed across all the newspapers too.

Brown has been charged of stealing his plot from the authors Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, of an earlier book titled The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. For those who haven’t succumbed, the now infamous plot is that Jesus did not die, but married Mary Magdelene, the prostitute he saved, and had a child with her, whose line is protected by the Knights Templar and whose secret is desperately hushed up by the Roman Catholic Church. If you think that’s a lot to copy, well, apparently Leigh and Baigent think so too and now want a slice of the 45-million-pounds-in-sales-a-year pie.

Worthy of a blockbuster plot of its own, Leigh and Baigent are suing their own publisher, Random House and have decoded anagrams of their surnames as evidence of direct reference in Brown’s book to them. The villain in Da Vinci Code is a character named Leigh (from Richard Leigh) Teabing (from re-arranging Baigent). It does strike me peculiar, however, that if Brown was consciously plagiarizing their book, HBHG, (which by the way sounds more like a different strain of the avian flu virus than a serious acronym in a high court case), it would seem pure stupidity that he should make that reference. It could be tongue-in-cheek, and it seems more the latter as Brown also mentions HBHG in his novel. The character Teabing owns the book and quotes it as being on “sound” premises. (Teabing on Teabing could be the next title)

As the future of literary plagiarism is being battled out in the courts, it seems to me the verdict is already pretty clear. Intertextuality has become a prevalent characteristic of our modern times. Stories in the public domain have been passed down, used, recycled and reinvented over and over again that to begin drawing finite boundaries around ideas would be a futile exercise. Copyright, as counsel for the defendant Mr Baldwin said in court, does not protect ideas. It only protects the expression and treatment of ideas. That, itself, is hard to determine.

Leigh and Baigent are fighting a losing battle. Authors throughout history have used biblical or historical references extensively, or even borrowed from other writers. For example, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were experimental writers who often drew references from other literary works. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Bunyan and even Disney drew on many public domain stories to create their works. If one has to draw the line around an idea now, where will that lead to? Where will it stop?

Frederic Jameson will tell you the only merit for living artists today is to acknowledge that they’ve used something that existed before in their works, because that will turn your art from pastiche to parody. And perhaps that was what Brown was doing. Not lifting, but intertextualising, acknowledging, and reinventing old material as his own.

I do wonder when Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were writing the four gospels, whether any one of them said to other ‘Oi! You can’t say it in this way, because I’ve already said it.’ But that is beside the point. Together, they drew for us a bigger picture. And that is what authors, ultimately, do for us readers – painting a bigger picture of the imagination.

At the end of the day, if Leigh and Baigent lose their case, they will still stand to gain by increasing sales of HBHG on the back of Brown’s DVC success. If I’m completely wrong, and Leigh and Baigent win their case, it will certainly cause repercussions in the literary world. But really, a few million pounds in damages is hardly going to make a dent in Dan ranked-12th-richest-celebrity-by-Forbes Brown’s fortune. In fact, all this high court drama is set to only make The Da Vinci Code the most widely read book on the planet. Probably even over-taking the Bible.
Now, that’s a cracking good story.