Scribble > Books: psychology (41) ×

“. . .For here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming . . .”

“ . . . the world would perish because the accumulating traumas of human history were poisoning the human soul, just as morphine saturates the lungs and lunar caustic collects in deposits of metallic silver beneath the skin . . . nothing is stranger than reality; the reality of a life spent dreaming . . . Once [the] gardens were allegories . . . Water, both real and metaphorical, is in evidence, everywhere . . . an aquatic maze . . . is still talked about in the village because it fostered promiscuity . . . Nicolas is the survivor of a triality and witness to his family’s tragedy. His answer is coma . . . the Ego forsaking itself . . . “We forget,” she said, “that other mental states exist . . . thought is a process which has evolved over the ages from anterior states . . . Trauma infects our dreams . . .”

“The New Hebrewdees or some such. A mere girl I was, no bigger than the Pope’s nose, I learned all I know from the cook, one Madame Pittance, a cut-the-gills-and-don’t-slouch sort of person, proud of her culminary talents – as well as she had a right to be – who instructed me in the arts of cookery and related matters: herbaldry, marketing, pickles, and what have you. A stout woman, this was, not to say obese, and when at fifty she succumbed to auricular ataxia – and it was I who found her headfast in the vinegar barrel and never have I, Heaven help us, seen such various veins (how she must have suffered yet gave no wind of it), I was dramatically propulsed from scullery to kitchery. I hired a miniature Parisienne, old as my shoes but nevertheless up to snuff, to scull in my stead.”

The Cod: “ . . . a foul tempered hyperbolic . . . used to sitting on horns.”;

The Cod’s Wife: “. . . [kept] in tune . . .” by a gang of three: The Marquis, and twins Gilles and Gillebis (Goat and Twice Goat, or Goat and Brown Goat – and goats are associated with satyrs, who belong to Pan, for their unflagging obeisance at the altar of lust);

Charlie Dee: the chimpanzee, the beloved child substitute of the Cod’s wife, although his “ . . . relations with the Cod’s wife are rumoured “seditious” by Rose” according to after-sermon small talk, and whose manner and name suggest kinship in the tradition of Darwin’s theory;

Aristide Marquis: the mimic, the modern day Marcel Marceau, whose “. . . ancestors were traders in gold and ivory and wax . . . [and] have become scavengers . . .without dreams, tending fires of thorn, fires of dung . . . [taken into] Slavery.”; his name translates from the Ancient Greek as ‘the best type’; and

Toujours-Là: or, he who is always there, with his mesmerising, sinister, tales and his baleful commentary and his readiness to pierce Nini with the double-edged sword of knowledge, dark and corrupting: “Now you know what women are, Nini . . . Blue Beard’s closet is fathomless.” Toujours-Là “. . . is powerful, too, magical, a man of keys . . . to the mystery of parents departed . . . his knowledge . . . is the tantalizing prize he holds up . . . always just beyond my reach.”.