Literary LionsIssue 10 February 2013

Dreams & Nightmares

CONTENTSOpening Windows 4

Beat / Gonzo 7

The Therapist 9

Dream Sequences 12

Dante’s Divine Dreams 14

The Riots Debate 16

Dreaming I & II 18

Edvard Munch 20

Mulholland Drive 22

The Terror 24

Boredom 27

Literary LionsIssue 10 February 2013

Dreams & Nightmares

4

OPENING

WINDOWS

by Cillian Dunn

are closed to you forever. But it’s even worse here, because, even though you are surrounded by people, you can’t hear them. It’s a big crowd, hundreds of people, maybe thousands, maybe millions, a forest of bodies. You remember watching The Lord of the Rings when you were younger, in which the trees, which are actually these totally weird things called ents, come to life. It’s like that, you’re in a forest, but the trees aren’t ents, they’re people. And they’re walking, and talking, and laughing, and you should be one of them, except you can’t hear them. There is noise, like the buzz of the crowd you get at a concert, in a queue, at a football match. But individual voices are lost, jumbledtogether and senseless, so even though you’re surrounded by people, you may as well be alone, because you can’t open any windows.

You’re frightened, so you attempt to explain to someone. (I know this sounds, like, seriously weird, but I suddenly can’t hear anything?). They ignore you. You try again, and again, andagainandagainandagain. You’re ignored every time, by different faces, that become, very quickly, all the same. A face smiles, and you think it’s meant for you, but it’s not, and that’s when you realise. You thought you were part of the crowd, but you’re not. They cannot see you, and they cannot hear you. You are alone.

It’s like when you’re on the bus, and you’re surrounded by strangers, who see only the people who inhabit their world, not you, the boy in the back seat. They’re talking, and every word is a window into their life, and even though you know you’re not part of that place, you can let yourself in, if you listen carefully. But the windows are very small, and they don’t stay open for very long, so you only ever get to glimpse through them before they slam shut. In front of you, the pint-sized little blond kid (you definitely weren’t that small when you were twelve) got the new iPhone yesterday, and his equally miniature mate is jealous, because he only has the old version, and that came out, like, a whole year ago. The obese man to your left, chins wobbling as he talks, thinks the public transport is actually getting worse, and “George” agrees, and so, privately, do you, because you had to wait half an hour for the bus today, which is a complete joke. And then there’s the gorgeous brunette sitting opposite you, who you know is way out of your league, but still can’t help staring at, because there’s no law against that, is there? It’s hard for you to catch even the briefest glimpse of the far-away place that is her life, because she’s on her mobile, telling someone, somewhere, she loves them. (Damn!)

It’s hard to open windows on the bus and, when people get off, you know their windows

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their arms their hands to force them to look at you and then your worst fear comes true because your arm just passes right through them like youre a ghost a shade a nothing. your friends your family your teachers the people from the bus you see them all but they dont see you and all you can hear is that buzz buzz buzz like a screen a barrier blocking you from their lives

But then something changes.

You can’t escape the buzz, it’s a part of the forest, just like the trees-that-are-people, but then, for the first time, you hear a voice. And you’re excited, because even though the barrier is still there, you know that if you can understand this person, you can tunnel through the barrier, and open some windows into that person’s life. The voice is too quiet to hear over the buzz, but it’s getting louder, and the louder it becomes, the more your tunnel grows, until it’s a big tunnel, big enough to see through, to realise that the person is your mother, and she is telling you to wake up, because it’s tomorrow, a place where you can open windows for yourself.

You walk on through the forest, (because after all, these people may as well be trees), trying to find a way out (because no forest goes on forever). You’re moving quickly, but somehow managing to avoid colliding with anyone. At first, you think this is instinctive, but then you realise you’re doing it consciously, because if no-one can see you and no-one can hear you, then you’re nothing, and if you’re nothing, what’s to stop you hitting someone and going right on through them? You keep on walking, but every step seems more pointless (because this isn’t like a normal forest, so why should it have an end?), but then you see them - the people from your world.

its like when youre on the bus and youre surrounded by strangers but this time someone from your world gets on but they don’t see you and they go upstairs leaving you alone again in the back seat

its even worse though because at least on the bus you can follow them upstairs and force them to see you but in the forest you cant because the trees wont talk to you. you shout you cry you scream you grab their shoulders

Allen Ginsberg

JackKerouac

missed shot in his introduction to his book Queer that “the death of Joan brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”

The teenagers’ who do like On the Road tend to be attracted to the stereotype of teenage rebellion that the book seems to champion. It’s romantic, hedonistic, seems hopeful and enables people who read it to rebel by proxy in their free time. Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ also describes drugs, drink, travel and an outcast, rebellious youth. (By the way, all these writers I’ve mentioned so far were friends with each other and all these rebellious experiences were had together.) However, all their works seem haunted by some void, something that their wild experiences perhaps sought to heal, though these struggles generally ended up being one great “lifelong struggle.”

Somebody else in the Upper Sixth tried to read On the Road by Jack Kerouac and couldn’t finish it because nothing seemed to happen – they found it boring. It’s a surprising criticism for a novel that’s all about young people moving fast over America drinking, getting high and having sex. Kerouac supposedly wrote it in six weeks non-stop, high on Benzedrine, on one long scroll of paper so that he didn’t need

to waste time by changing sheets in his typewriter. The creation of the book, the Beats, Kerouac himself – a lot of apocrypha has risen in their wake. Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, amongst others, became counter-culture gods, of

sorts, and still are, though to a lesser extent than back then. One of their fellow Beat writers – William S. Burroughs – shot his wife – Joan Vollmer - in Mexico while performing a William Tell stunt, in which he tried to shoot a glass of water off her head. He wrote of that

7

by Max Smith

Hunter S. Thompson

‘Howl’ opens with “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”. This sets the scene and tone well for a tragic poem that tells of self-destruction, madness and tragedy.

Burroughs wrote to exorcise “the Ugly Spirit” that invaded him when he shot his wife; Ginsberg wrote of a generation “destroyed by madness”; what happened to Kerouac? He threw a large amount of blood up into his toilet bowl after too much drink, again, and he called for his wife as he did so, crying out “Stella, I’m bleeding.” He died the next morning of an internal haemorrhage, caused by cirrhosis. Dali said that Kerouac was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen; Kerouac had received a scholarship to university because of his skill as a football player; he had sold millions of copies of books that have gone on to be extremely influential; he inspired Allen Ginsberg to write and was a crucial figure of the Beat Generation, which acted as the foundation for the Sixties counter-culture movement; he died of alcoholism at 47 while living with his mother and wife. In 2005, Hunter S. Thompson shot himself.

Hunter S. Thompson inhabited the same realm of craziness as Burroughs. His most famous book is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which he describes, usually while high on several varieties of drugs, his travels around Las Vegas with his attorney Raoul Duke. He invented ‘Gonzo Journalism’, which was based on William Faulkner’s statement that: “the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.” Thompson later wrote of the book: “I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism.” Like the Beats, Thompson’s literary method and way of life revolved around excess. He took huge amounts of drugs, drank and ate tons, often while driving fast all over America and writing about the twisted, hellish land he saw, feared and loathed.

Why did these writers’ lives end so tragically? It’s often said that creative types are disturbed in some way. It seems, however, that there is something more to their decline than simply ‘it was in their nature’. In interviews, Thompson spoke of his irritation at the media’s expectation that he would act as the characters did in his books. Similarly, Kerouac was often visited by admirers wanting to drink with him; he writes of this in the opening sections of Big Sur, a book that chronicles his failed attempts to get off drink, alone, in a hut in the hills of Big Sur. In some ways, they all focused on the problems of the American Dream; as they approached the life that the Dream preaches, the problems they chronicled rose up and, arguably, destroyed them, despite their insight into its, arguably, dominant state of cancerous delusion.

8

“What was it?”“I don’t remember.”“Come on. Just think.”“I don’t know. I’ve tried.”She sighed. “I can’t help you if you don’t remember.”“Then why are you even trying?”“Why are you?”This time it was me that sighed. “Because I want to know.”She looked at me with eyes wide open, wrinkled, with bags pulling them down. She wasn’t old, but the stress must have got to her. The stereotype suited her, in a horrific way.“It’s just a dream. You can do it another way.”“That’s new.”“It’s been two months. If there were to be a breakthrough, it should have happened by now. We shouldn’t be averse to new things.”“That’s what Harriet used to say.” There was a long pause. Her eyes were watching me intently, willing me to make eye contact. I suppose that’s what you’re supposed to do. I looked up at the ceiling.“George?”“Mm-hm?”“Harriet?”“Yes, Harriet.”“You’ve never mentioned a Harriet before.”“Harriet was my superior officer.”She looked down at her file, checking her notes. She came across something, raised an eyebrow, and then covered the thing quickly with her arm.“Tell me about her.”

“She was taller than most women. She had auburn hair. Her eyes were grey. Her complexion was fair, though she wore a little too much make-up. She had a skin condition she was covering up, made worse by the make-up.”“That seems a pretty clear image of her.”“I dreamt it.”“When?”“Every night for the past week.”“Why haven’t you told me?”“Wasn’t relevant.”“Why not, George?”“She’s dead.”“That’s why we’re here, George. It’s important.”“It’s not important. She died, and it was my fault.”“It wasn’t your fault.”“Yes, it was. I saw the petrol slick. I didn’t say anything. I should have evacuated the crime scene as soon as I saw danger.”There was a long pause. She looked down at her notes, and rippled through them with her finger. She got a papercut, but she ignored it. Or didn’t feel it. She fiddled with her pen between her index and middle fingers and leant forward.“Tell me about the dreams you’ve had, George.”

* * *

I am on a train. The carriage is 16.25 metres in length, 2.87 metres in height and 2.62 metres in width. If one were to draw a cross section of the carriage it would resemble a rectangle with

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The Therapistby Ben Farrand

10

a curved top, because it needs to fit into a circular tunnel running deep underground, giving rise to the name “tube”. When one occupies a profession like mine, details such as this could become useful at any point.

At first it seems I am alone on the train. I am sitting down, in the middle of the carriage, watching my reflection in the darkness of the tunnel. I stand up, though I know not why. It winds its way up and down in the dark for what seems like an eternity, and I have to hold on tight. The train accelerates ahead, and suddenly there is blinding light all around, and the train is slowing down, the familiar two-by-two thump of the wheels turning slower and slower.

Eventually the train stops, the jolt backwards sets me a little off balance. The doors slide open, and the art deco brickwork glows in the bright sunlight. The train is stopped now. The doors are open. No-one gets on, and no-one gets off. It is deathly silent. That’s when I hear the sound of creaking hinges. A gate swinging in the wind, I think.

The repetitive high-pitched beeping begins to sound, it takes longer than usual. Then I hear the sound of footsteps, hurried, coming down

the stairs, and then from around the corner hurries a woman. Her hair is auburn and her eyes are grey. I recognise her, though I know not where from. But as she reaches the train, the doors have closed and the train is moving out of the station.

As I look back at her, she stares into my eyes, as if she knows me, and I know her.

Then the train accelerates until the whole world becomes a blur. I am forced to sit, but as soon as I am stable again, the train slows down, and comes to a halt. The station appears not dissimilar from the last one, but more familiar. The station is empty again, and there is a thick liquid running down the walls. I hear the swing of the ticket barrier, and hurried feet down the steps. “Please stand clear of the doors.” The beeping starts and she has turned the corner, and is running towards me, and suddenly I remember a name. She calls mine, but I can no longer hear her. The doors have closed.

But then, suddenly, they open again. She doesn’t get on, but stands there, staring at me, less than a metre away. Whiteness, a rush of noise, beeping, then the four-beat rhythm, and then nothing.

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10 F ILMS WITH GREAT DREA MSEQ UENCES

Stalker

Vertigo Blade Runner

The Seventh Seal

La Jetée

12

by Max Smith 1979

Andrei Tarkovsky

1982Alfred Hitchcock

1982Ridley Scott

1952Ingmar Bergman

1962Chris Marker

2001: A SpaceOdyssey

The Big Lebowski

AmericanBeauty

Mulholland Drive

The Tree of Life

13

1968Stanley Kubrick

2011Terrence Malick

2001David Lynch

1998The Coen Brothers

1999Sam Mendes

14

It is said that we dream in order to make sense of what has happened in our lives.This is why dreams have such uniquely per-sonal relevance. Every face in our dreams is based on one we’ve seen before, every event an amalgamation of our experiences.

Dante’s Divine Comedy can be read as a dreamlike narrative, a retelling of an epic journey through the afterlife. Although su-perficially the text encapsulates nightmarish and fantastic imagery there are more complex interpretations.

Dante’s motivation in writing his poem is a matter of huge debate. Suggested reasons in-clude politics, revenge, the church, a desire for recognition, religion, and love. I believe that the poem is an attempt by Dante to set out his life’s beliefs, from the humorously trivial character profiles of his petty enemies to the profound questions of existence. The scope of his work portrays him as somewhat predat-ing Renaissance man in his opinions on love, redemption, art, religion, astrology and litera-ture. Dante wants to have the leading opinion on everything.

The Divine Comedy is a text that is difficult to classify. Although it covers epic, autobiogra-phy and romance there is no clear dominant genre. Some describe the work as encyclo-paedic, as it covers all the disciplines of liberal arts. The matters are covered with the lucidity and freedom of an unrestricted dream, tran-scending our modern consciousness.

Although the Comedy can be thought of as being like a dream or a vision, Dante was keen to stress the reality of his journey through the afterlife, insisting throughout the poem that his journey was a genuine experience. He even lists the moments when he was commissioned by various spirits to chronicle his voyage. These guiding spirits include his love, Beatrice, who urges him to “Take note: and as my words are carried from me/ Make sure that they are delivered to the living/ Whose life is nothing but a race to death” (Purgatorio XXXIII 52) and one of his ancestors Cacciaguida, whom he places in heaven, who is compelled to ask for Dante to “Make clear to everyone the whole vision” (Paradiso XVII 128). Dante wanted to portray the power of his personal vision through the allegory of the poem, even by speaking directly to his audi-ence: “O you whose intellects are sane and well,/ Look at the teaching which is here concealed/ Under the unfamiliar veil of verses” (Inferno IX 61). The most honour-able of all Dante’s characters is St Peter, who, with great virtue and compassion, speaks to Dante saying “And you, my son, who, heavy with mortality,/ Must go below again, open your mouth/ And do not hide what I have not hidden”(Paradiso XXVII).

Keen for his vision to influence his audience, he presents the afterlife as having the ideal, dreamlike, qualities he wanted to be echoed in the society in which he lived. In many

Dante’s Divine Dreams by Edward

Wheatley

15

abstract yet forced into pertinence by the discipline of the the poem’s three line rhyme scheme, terza rima.

The opening lines of the poem set the tone for this dreamlike style of writing, creating a visualisation of the metaphysical world through the use of earthly references:

“Half way along the road we have to go, /I found myself obscured in a great forest,/Be-wildered, and I knew I had lost the way.”

Dante was well aware of his refreshingly modern and accessible style of writing, even making reference to it by having a damned spirit relin-

quish a secret to him because of it;

“He said to me: ‘I say it unwillingly/ But I am forced to do so by your clear speech, /Which makes me recollect my former world.”

Whilst his style is memorable in expressing the dreamlike qualities of Hell, the descrip-tion of the nightmarish Inferno, portraying his strong, personal conviction of the atroci-ties of Hell is created through the use of ref-erences to historical battles and bloodshed as well as powerful epic storytelling. The visualisation of beasts like the “filthy harpies”, the “scowling and terrible” Minos, the “two tentacles, hairy to the arm-pits” of Geryon, and most strikingly “The emperor of the kingdom of pain”, Satan, who is portrayed as “a grotesque mechanical monster” (Higgins) rather than a more sinister and subtle devil, is in keeping with the ferocity of Dante’s Hell.

The Divine Comedy can be seen as a dream or a nightmare, capturing Dante’s fears and hopes for an uncertain future in a time of great turmoil.

ways, Dante’s poem was an escape from what he felt was the corruption of his native Flor-ence and the Church. Dante lamented the passing of order in Florence, something that he could restore in his images of Heaven, juxtaposed with the visceral representation of Hell, perhaps inspired by the bloodshed in Italy. Notwithstanding this obsession with Florence, Dante is also happy to pass judge-ment on the rest of society as he does in In-ferno XXIX, asking “Now was there ever/ A people so frivolous s the Sienese?/ Certainly not the French, by a long way!” (line 121). With the backing of his prophetic conviction, he is not afraid to of-fend people from any region, having Venedico Caccianemico say: “[He is] not the only one from Bologna/ Who is weeping here; the place is so full of them” (Inferno XVIII 58). This confidence to place the population of a major city in a certain re-gion of Hell reflects the vengeful qualities of Dante’s dreamlike poem. The courageousness of Dante’s writing is seen in his condemna-tion of Pope Boniface VIII, predicting his destiny in Hell through having a damned soul mistake the poet for the pope:

“And he cried: ‘Are you standing there al-ready?Boniface, are you already standing there?”

Perhaps the most convincing aspect of The Divine Comedy which can be seen as dream-like in style is simply his writing style. The very weight of the Epic poem provides a sense of scale as well as beauty and poetry that characterises many ineffable dreams. Added to this is Dante’s own style, called the Dolces-tilnovisti which, as commentator David. H. Higgins states, provides a “high-mindedness and clear sense of moral priorities”. Dante was concerned with the immediacy of his writing, creating a very personal narrative,

‘the most apt thing to liken the work to

is a dream.’

NO

The 2011 riots began with a peaceful protest against the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police which degenerated into violence, opportunistic looting, and thuggery. These despicable acts secured the attention of the whole nation. Many who felt threatened and angered by these events demanded the immediate use of whatever means necessary to ensure suppression of the riots and the rapid and robust punishment of the offenders. The police were issued with plastic bullets but, thankfully, none were fired. Why then do so many people feel that they should have been given the right to deal with the rioters even more severely?

Before exploring the wider ramifications of a more severe response, the safety of the method requires examination. Used in Northern Ireland under similar circumstances, plastic bullets resulted in the deaths of fourteen people, including nine children. If the police are given these methods of suppression how do they distinguish between those whom many felt deserved the punishment, and those who meant no harm at all? In the Ohio Kent State massacre of 1970, passersby and observers were shot dead by the authorities putting down the revolt. Such events would have increased the destructiveness of the riots of 2011 to an unprecedented level as well as leaving a dark stain on the history of the nation.

Consider also the effects on already tense relations between different communities had the outcomes of a heightened response been grave. Race relations deteriorated in Birmingham when three Asian men were killed by a black car drive during the riots. The situation was only saved by the intervention of the father of one of the men. Imagine the disastrous response had the police been responsible for the death.

We must remember that it was a police shooting which began the violence in an area with poor relations between the police and the community. How would it have been logical to suggest more shooting to solve the situation? Irreparable harm would have been done to relationships between communities.

It has been suggested that the riots had no political or morale message but it cannot be denied that they raised awareness of the feelings of a disaffected segment of society and even brought people together (as with the ‘heroine of Hackney’). This is no justification for the riots, and although not expressed in these terms, they occurred during an extended period of almost Victorian levels of inequality, with the effects of a ruined economy felt most keenly by those rioting. To have used brutal methods of suppression on such disillusioned and alienated people would have turned an unacceptable riot into an irredeemable infamy.

Should the London Riots have been dealt with more severely?

Ed Wheatley

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YES

Collective indecisiveness is as defining a feature of this country as scones, Stephen Fry and kebabs. As the 2011 riots escalated we witnessed this hesitant bewilderment in the feeble attempts of our police ‘force’ to contain the rioters. Our screens filled with scenes of upstart thugs, united only by their general disregard for the law and the safety of others, a ragtag mass of ne’er-do-wells mocking the apparently powerless “feds”.

Some have suggested that the police’s failure to keep order can be attributed to the sheer volume of rioters - both in London, and throughout England. It might have been a logistical crisis of nightmarish proportions, but it is important to remember exactly what kind of rioters the police were dealing with. These were not determined Syrian freedom fighters or the crazed fanatics of the 2005 Alexandria riots; neither were they the hardened criminals of the LA riots; these were merely young malcontents.

The suggestion that these rioters were actually fighting for some sort of greater cause is also preposterous. In interviews, many appeared to be unaware of which party was in government. Wanting a new pair of Nike’s is simply not a moral high ground. Theresa May, the Home Secretary commented: “there is no excuse for thuggery”. The real motivation behind the looting and violence was opportunistic criminality. So why the descent into chaos?

Whether through inattentive obstinacy, a misplaced antipathy to the use of greater force or a naive belief in the adequacy of the response, May rejected calls to authorise the use of the rubber bullets and water cannon. Footage of the disorder demonstrates that there is little that small numbers of police can do to disperse large crowds armed with little more than glorified sticks. Without fear of physical prevention or arrest, looters did not even bother to conceal their faces as they made off with all manner of electronics and overpriced footwear, before burning the shops in their wake.

Interestingly, vigilantes appeared to be far more successful in deterring looters. Rioters appeared to respond well to threats of violence, be it federal or vigilante. It is only when Prime Minister Cameron returned from holiday, and authorised the use of more robust crowd control tactics that the rioting ceased. How little persuasion was needed - the threat of use alone was enough to deter the rioters.

If more robust measures had been introduced earlier the riots would not have escalated to the extent that they did. Criminals should not be mildly persuaded to do good, they should actively fear our police force. The law should be a deterrent, not just a punishment.

Tom Tyler

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Should the London Riots have been dealt with more severely?

Lightless beacons flutter behind the porous cornersOf my mind – I clutch and clasp at the flitting embers.Heavy shelves of water burst; the full blast of a new thought, an image Like a surfacing wave, sinking again, drowning another,

The thought is strangled beneath the earthy blankness, Compounding the heart-ache of lost avenues,Of contemplation, closing the gates, forgetting the way,No recognition rewards the crumbling mind,

To imagine it scientifically is least destroying, But what could it be? To pin it down and see, The library of ideas, lonely and unused, Derelict, as the ink merges between the pages,

Unfinished, unformed, wasted and lost,Through the incalculable spewings of whimsy,Does it change me? A glint in the eye perhaps,From years of forgetting and feeling the cost.

Dreaming Iby Ed Wheatley

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Scenes emerge, people made, Tall thin houses of cerebral mortar rise

Reason is created; conviction, a motive,Things are done and lives are lived – and crash.

Shifting lines make the eye see what the mind Cannot understand. Looping thoughts and rushing

Pictures merging from one another Into a loose frame – they die.

Have they gone? They have not,But they are not here.

The dreams don’t concentrate, They are in a world of their own.

It is the warm ringing of familiarity,The memory returns, the dream is here,

In another world, not theirs.Ours.

And minutes have passed, stolen By the lingering pictures, snatched from a safe place.

It is confusing. No promises can be kept.There is no security in dreams.

Dreaming IIby Ed Wheatley

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EDVARD MUNCHEdvard Munch is best known for his iconic painting ‘The Scream’, sold in May 2012 for a world record $120 million. It is no wonder that this particular work retains a special place in the public’s perception. Munch captured the intense significance of the image in a poem developed from a personal diary entry:

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

He painted this poem onto the frame of the version that went under the hammer in May, a testament to its power to unmask its meaning.

Munch became a primary influence on Ex-pressionism, as he developed his themes from the haunted life he lived. The influence of his early life is clear. He was instructed in literature by his father, Christian Munch, who

would often entertain the children with the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe contributing to those experiences that would lead to him becoming ‘master of the morbid’.

His childhood was riddled with death and sickness; tuberculosis took his mother in 1868 and his favourite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. Munch’s father used these events to impose a ‘dark pietism’ upon the family, tell-ing the children that their mother in heaven was watching and grieving over their misbe-haviour. The burden of the distress caused by these experiences and ‘the seeds of madness’ they helped induce is expressed in throughout his work. His paintings bear witness to the ex-tent of his trauma.

His painting ‘Self-Portrait in Hell’ features Munch, unclothed in a burning hellish scene. A wall becomes dancing fire, his shadow a demon. The figure, with its searching eyes and dark glow from within, expresses Munch’s anxiety and fear. It does not thrash, flail or cry out - what is recorded here is simply the sudden realisation of a personal hell. Munch offers an explanation of how he reached this state:

From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimi-dated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

In ‘Workers on Their Way Home’, painted at some time in 1913-14, hordes of figures push through the street, hostile and lifeless. The canvas itself is huge, leading the viewer to

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by Simon Hamlyn

Self-Portrait in Hell

feel they have themselves become a worker, trapped in the hustle and bustle of the poverty stricken scene. The central figure is particular-ly confrontational, a hollow eyed man lunging into the viewer’s personal space.

Stepping out onto these alien roads, Munch feared the common man and was estranged by the great power and pain he saw in this crowd of workers. The violent brushstrokes in the bottom left hand corner invoke the sense of panic as chaos takes over. The development of this ability to express his feelings in his paint-ings owed much to Munch’s acceptance of his state.

“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my-self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”

Munch’s changing state of mind is expressed in his self portraits. The fresher earlier pieces present a shadow of his character.

In ‘The Night Wanderer’, how-ever, Munch has transformed into one of the very figures he fears, finally resembling the labourer in the work above, his hollow eyes and ragged appearance symptomatic of his despair, his stare that of a stranger. The painting is a conversation with himself, an act of pure loneliness. Edvard Munch’s life was riddled with anxiety but his art seems to have helped him express and submit to his misery.

A final threat to his life’s work emerged when Adolf Hitler invaded Norway. The Nazis declared Munch’s Art ‘degen-erate’ and confiscated of all

his known works, though many found their way back to Norway, having been hidden in Munch’s house. As a final twist, his funeral was orchestrated by the Nazis, suggesting that Munch sympathised with Hitler. Munch’s nightmare was endless as, fortunately, is his legacy. His genius remains, as master of the darkness of the human condition.

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Workers on Their Way Home

The Night Wanderer

oscillation between the constituents of countless dualities that creates an atmosphere in which the viewer must constantly take leaps of faith in order to gain some sense of certainty. These levels of oscillation range from the relatively mundane – hair colours of the characters – to broader oscillations: two-thirds of the film seem to be reality until it is suggested that that was Diane’s personal exploration of her deepest desires as a dream (though this is again (perhaps) altered by the final 90-second montage of mind-blowing density), and not a representation of Betty and Rita’s relationship in reality.

In his preface to an interview with Lynch about the film, Chris Rodley describes it as such: “Either section of the movie could, in fact, be read as a version of the other’s reality. They constantly speak to each other as equal partners, while simultaneously threatening to expose each other for what they are.” Here, Rodley is referring to the contradictory nature of the sections of the film: the first part, which seems to be a dream, is presented as a clear, relatively coherent narrative (well, as coherent as anything gets in this film), whereas the final section of the film, which is apparently based in reality, is far more fractured and conventionally dream-like than

Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s 2001 film, returns to many of his most prevalent themes and succeeds in aligning his style and ambitions as successfully as the likes of Blue Velvet and Eraserhead.

It begins with a car crash on the road that winds above Los Angeles – Mulholland Drive. A dazed woman flees the scene. We find out that she is suffering from amnesia when, while hiding in a house in Hollywood, she chooses Rita as her name, having seen a poster for a Rita Hayworth film. She then meets Betty, an aspiring actress, and they work together to establish Rita’s real identity. The apparently conventional nature of this mystery is undermined by the clichéd, unrealistic behaviour of the characters. When Betty arrives in Hollywood, she is naively optimistic, smiling, happy and hopeful. This unusual optimism is also undermined, in this case by Rita’s desperate situation. By using this method of constantly undermining presented realities with others, Lynch creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and, therefore, of fear.

Lynch also does not distinguish between these realities, or choose one over the other as preferable or dominant. It is this constant

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by Max Smith

the part of the film that is more obviously a representation of a dream. Essentially, the method used by Lynch to create such a confusing atmosphere, that seems to mimic the way in which we dream, entails creating several possible truths and realities that are always competing for dominance. This could be deemed an inadequate justification for a narrative that simply does not work, or the film may well provide answers and firm realities. This seems unlikely. Lynch doesn’t want to break the film down and reveal whatever answers it may hold, as he explains in the interview with Rodley when questioned on the obscurity of the film: “I think people know what Mulholland Drive is to them but they don’t trust it. They want to have someone else tell them. I love people analysing it but they don’t need me to help them out. ... Telling them robs them of the joy of thinking it through and feeling it through and coming to a conclusion. ... The experience in the room changes depending on the audience. That’s another reason why people shouldn’t be told too much, because ‘knowing’ putrefies that experience.”

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This acknowledgement of the obscurity of the film and Lynch’s desire for it to be interpreted individually by each viewer hints at what is perhaps the fundamental truth of the film: its obscurity mimics the difficulty of living and the countless hurdles we all encounter in the pursuit of the fulfilment of our dreams and the ways in which we can retreat from those difficulties. Mulholland Drive offers no definite answers, and it seems foolish to claim that there are any. As is the case with all of the greatest art, it is complete enough to withstand attempts at simple breakdown and explanation. However, this justification for the ambiguity of the film should not be taken as Lynch stepping back and creating a banal work lacking in substance and meaning and beauty. The film is incredibly beautiful, incredibly complex and incredibly original. It is a true work of art that does not hide behind a facade of shallow, clichéd justification and pretension. The most effective comparison seems to be to a mirror: it reflects you, your conscious and subconscious, your dreams and nightmares, and, in doing so, alters as you do, and is therefore rendered timeless - at least until every copy is destroyed.

by Adam Beckwith

They were coming. She sensed it, but she didn’t know why. The sky turned purple, tinting the sparse scrubland below an ethereal haze. Nymeria turned and started wearily off into the endless expanse of monotonous vista. This was the third day she had found herself in this wasteland, but inexplicably she wasn’t the least bit troubled. The fluorescent green orb dipped below the horizon, glowering at her with its unnatural glare. She pulled her tattered jacket more tightly around her, a chill wind howling relentlessly across the barren plain.

Eventually, she could stumble no further and collapsed, exhausted, to the cracked dirt. The wind screamed unsettlingly meaningless sounds, whipping through her hair, trying to rip her jacket away from her. She could not lose that jacket, whatever happened. That was when the ground disappeared. She fell, down and down, faster and faster, until she could no longer discern in which direction she was falling. All was black around her. Blacker than anything she thought possible, so that the darkness seemed to leech off what little glimmer of light there was until it no longer existed. Perhaps more disconcerting was the complete absence of sound. Nymeria snapped her fingers, but they made no sound. Nothing.

When she woke, she was still in darkness. At first she thought she couldn’t see or hear, but, as her mind became less disorientated from sleep, she remembered her predicament. Once

she was alert, she began to hope that her life was back to normal. Then the cackling began. It emanated from all around, piercing the darkness like a stiletto blade through clothes. It seemed to worm its way into her skull, writhing and wriggling as it induced a mental scream of anguish from her. She desperately clamped her hands over her ears in the futile hope that it would at least disperse the otherworldly cry. She might have screamed, but the only sound was the all-encompassing cackle. She was aware that she was sobbing, her body convulsing, the tears running down her contorted face in an attempt to flee the terrible sound.

Light. Nymeria could not tell whether it was above, below, or next to her, nor did she care. Light meant escape from this torture. She blocked out the noise as best she could, and struggled towards the light, but the darkness seeming to physically pull her back, wispy tendrils wrapping around her legs and arms. She did not give in. She could not. The cackling stopped as abruptly as it had started and changed to a haunting melody, the words barely discernible. Images of happiness, peace and tranquillity rose unbidden in her tormented mind, and she knew that if she stopped struggling against this sentient darkness, it would be hers. Inexplicably, her will to reach the light waned, until it was as small as the pinprick of salvation itself. Then something jogged in her memory. The faint memory of pure terror, not a strong feeling,

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THE TERROR

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but enough to make her shudder both inside and out. Then it came back. She could not stay here. They were coming.

She tore away from the tendrils and made towards the light, the sentient darkness making a far more concerted effort than before to keep her there. However, for all the honeyed words and images of paradise, Nymeria could not be swayed, still making for the rapidly glowing window of light with increased urgency. They were close. As she drew ever closer, she faltered; the warm and radiant light of her salvation had transformed into a malevolent dark orange light. She could not turn back, They would get her. She pelted headlong towards the light, until an impossibly strong force knocked her through it with more power than she thought possible. She experienced an acute burning sensation, as if white-hot needles were simultaneously piercing her entire body, along with an unbearable white light that was somehow even more frightening than the darkness.

She came to with a jolt. Looking around, she saw nothing but white walls. And a door. She fervently hoped that her ordeal was finally at an end, and moved to wipe her eyes from the tears of relief rolling down her cheeks. But she could not move – straitjackets are not designed for ease of movement. Then the door opened and They came in, one by one, deathly silent. Nymeria looked up to the unbroken white ceiling: would this nightmare never end?

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Boredom.“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.”

- Line 1, Dream Song 14, John Berryman

Why shouldn’t we say so? We all know of boredom and we experience it often. There are the weekly cycles of timetables and designated classrooms, a calendar that maps out further obligations for the rest of the term. Before we see the calendar to follow our current edition, we’ll be granted a holiday that, though precious, can feel as though it is still controlled by less overt schedules and fallout-obligations from the temporal nuke that’s term-time. Our experiences every month, week, day and minute, tend to be of things that we’ve endured before. Eventually, this apparently endless repetition at all levels of life feels as though it changes us. Something, finally, feels flattened, but not removed. It can be felt, but isn’t that feeling just of what’s not there?

That may be quite a pessimistic view, but it feels accurate. Feeling, however, is hardly an accurate method of measurement. What, then, can we resort to? Despite our regular experience of boredom, it is difficult to speak of it in clearer terms than ambiguities like ‘feeling’. So, let’s attempt to break down boredom.

One of the major difficulties that arises from this is that boredom seems to be a state of mind (though it sometimes feels as though it is a state of your whole being) that is predicated on a lack. What, then, can we latch onto as a foundation for any attempt to understand it? The dictionary may offer some assistance here.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ‘boredom’ as:

“weary and impatient because one is unoccupied or lacks interest in something.”

Now we need to define some of the terms used in that definition. ‘Weary’ relates to ‘tired’ and ‘tired’ is defined as “in need of sleep or rest.” Sleep and rest are basically a lack of movement. ‘Impatient’ is based on ‘patience’ and ‘patience’ is defined as:

“the capacity to tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without becoming angry or upset.”

Finally, ‘interest’ is defined as (these are only the relevant definitions):

“n. 1. - the feeling of wanting to know about something or someone – a quality exciting curiosity or holding the attention – a subject which one enjoys doing or studying. 4. a share or involvement in an undertaking5. a group having a common concern, especially in politics or businessv. 1. – excite the curiosity or attention of – persuade someone to undertake or acquire”

Now we can slot those definitions back into the original definition, resulting in this confusing thing:

“boredom – a state in which we become angry or upset over delay, trouble or suffering and/or need to stop doing whatever is taking up our time because we’re either not doing anything or we’re not doing something that we enjoy or want to know more about or have an involvement or concern in.”

by Max Smith

John Berryman

Essentially, what we are doing feels to us that it amounts to nothing. That feeling makes us “angry or upset” because of this action that can produce “delay, trouble or suffering”.

This is echoed in Dream Song 14, a poem by John Berryman. The narrator, Henry, explores his boredom: “I conclude now I have no / inner resources, because I am heavy bored.” He then lists what bores him: “Peoples bore me, / literature bores me, especially great literature...” In the end, even “tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag” and, finally, the poem retreats into a nihilistic emptiness in which Henry has become nothing but the legacy of a wag of a dog’s tail:

“and somehow a dog / has taken itself & its tail considerably away / into mountains or sea or sky, leaving / behind: me, wag.”

It is presumably his boredom that has caused Henry to descend into this state. The lack of anything substantive and meaningful in his existence has produced in him a boredom and, therefore, an anger or upset so great that he’s been swallowed up by it and thinks of himself as so insignificant that he is no longer anything more than the memory of a movement of a banal part of an animal that has disappeared. The poem does not offer anything approaching hope or a chance of brief respite.

David Foster Wallace, however, delved into boredom in his posthumous novel The Pale King, released last year, and found something else. The book explores the prevalence of boredom in today’s world and in life overall. In doing so, it tackles the pain of boredom, like Berryman, though he finds something more positive.

In Section 44, narrated by an unnamed character, we find some statements that are crucial to the book:

“I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance

of which causes great suffering. ...The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. ...It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

This character offers us hope. We could retreat into a “wag”, but that is painful and inadequate. Instead, his character suggests that embracing that boredom, however painful at first, does, in the end, offer us something better. Crucially, it’s something that helps us to tolerate the boredom that we often cannot escape.

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David Foster Wallace

Wallace expands on this in a note included at the back of the book:

“Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious things you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”

This echoes certain Buddhist beliefs: the transcendent state, without suffering or desire, of perfect happiness that is nirvana, and the concept of rebirth in which all of us are streams of consciousness that are reborn every moment into a state that is determined by our actions in the previous moment. These, amongst others, emphasise the transience and consequent importance of the present and a happiness that can be derived, partly, from an awareness of the present.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker also involves this struggle with the unattainable and the purity of the present. In the film, there is an area called the ‘Zone’. It began to demonstrate certain supernatural powers after an unexplained event, powers that centred themselves on a house lying at the heart of the Zone. When you enter a specific room of that house, your deepest desire will be fulfilled. However, everyone who has had that desire fulfilled has killed themselves after a week. Is it worth it?

In order to get there, you must be taken by a Stalker who understands the power of the Zone – inexplicable forces will contrive to prevent you from walking straight to the house. The longest route is the safest, and the traps of the Zone are always changing.

One of the characters wanting to visit the house – the Writer – talks at the start of the film about boredom:

“My dear, our world is hopelessly boring. Therefore, there can be no telepathy, or apparitions, or flying saucers, nothing like that.

The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it’s insufferably boring. Alas, those laws are never violated. They don’t know how to be violated. So we don’t ever hope for a UFO, that would have been too interesting.”

However, by the end of the film, he has lost some of this sardonic attitude to the boredom that he perceives as being inherent in the world. The Writer would probably agree with “Life, friends, is boring.”

The Stalker’s daughter is a ‘child of the Zone’

who was born without the ability to walk. We know almost nothing about her until the end of the film, when the Stalker, the Writer and the second person seeking the power of the Zone, the Professor, have all returned from the Zone. Now in the real, normal, “insufferably boring” world that is governed by the “cast-iron laws” the Writer spoke of, we find out more of the Stalker’s daughter during two scenes. Both of them are in colour, yet colour is only ever used when the characters

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Andrei Tarkovsky

are in the Zone; the normal world is always in sepia. Despite, or perhaps because of, the child’s disability and rejection from society due to her abnormal nature as a child of the Zone (though the Stalker and his wife are also social outcasts), the child’s presence brings colour to a world that’s otherwise dull and almost monochrome. The first of these scenes shows the daughter being carried on the Stalker’s shoulders as they return home. The second shows her sitting at a table, reading a book. After a while, she rests her head on the table and looks almost directly at the camera. Dandelion seeds drift over the scene and we hear birdsong. After more time in which she does nothing but sit still in silence, staring, one of the glasses on the table begins to move towards the edge of the table and the viewer. All of the glasses move over the table, without being touched. Throughout this, the girl has been staring at them, dull-eyed. Finally, the second glass moves further, faster, and falls off the table. We hear it roll away, intact. After a while, the sound of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy accompanies the sound of a military train passing just outside the house; both of these

sounds are extremely loud. As the train passes by, the scene becomes quiet again, but still shakes. The camera zooms in on the girl’s face. The film ends.

This slow, long scene is not boring. This disabled, outcast young girl demonstrates, quietly and slowly, her supernatural powers. Despite her bleak situation that would not maintain our interest for too long, the girl manages to vindicate all the pain of the characters who sought respite in the tremendous and fatal power of the Zone. The scene seems to parallel the process Wallace talks of. As the girl topples the glass and demonstrates an innate greatness that overrides all the pain and the slow pace of the rest of the film, the addition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy helps to elevate the moment to something wholly redemptive and hopeful. She shows us and enables us to feel, despite or because of her situation, “a constant bliss in every atom,” an innate greatness that is beyond pain and boredom. She shows us hope.

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The Team

ContributorsCillian Dunn

Ed WheatleyBen Farrand

Tom TylerMax SmithSimon HamlynAdam Beckwith

Fiction EditorBen Farrand

Non-Fiction EditorEd Wheatley

Art Editor and IllustratorSimon Hamlyn

Editor and DesignerMax Smith

Thank you

Thank you for reading Issue 10 of Literary Lions. I hope you have enjoyed this collection of articles, fiction, poetry and artwork on the theme of dreams and nightmares. Keep an eye out for the launch of the Literary Lions website, where you will be able to view everything from this issue and much more. Many thanks to all who have contributed for their great work and for their commitment over the past year. I would also like to thank Mrs O’Hanlon for her tireless support and patience.

Note from the Editor

Special Thanks toMrs O’Hanlon