Basement Twice

I’ve had this recurring nightmare this year. It’s very short and very simple. I receive a phone call, and on the other end there is a woman’s voice that whimpers the word “basement” twice before the line cuts out. Then I usually wake up more than a little concerned, ready to shake off my dream sweat like a post-lake dog.

But I bring this up because when I think of this nightmare on its face, it doesn’t seem scary at all. There’s little reason for me to feel so terrified. I can examine the logic behind the reaction, and to an extent I can explain myself. To me, there is an intimacy to the phone call and the brief clipped message. It implies a great deal about the circumstances of the person calling. In the dream, “basement” means something to me. Is it merely a location? Perhaps it is also a circumstance. This person knows that this single word will explain her situation to me in its entirety (otherwise they might have added a second word instead of repeating it again). And what am I, the dreamer, to do with this information? Probably I am meant to seek out and investigate this basement, in the meantime wondering about what horrific scene or experience awaits me there. My fear is the child of her fear, and her present is a preview of my future. Perhaps I can explain it this way. I can explain it this way or any number of ways. And my brain will cobble together something that will make enough sense of it.

I wonder if I could have had this same dream and had a positive reaction from it. Could it cause me to wake up inspired and hopeful, with a newfound fondness for basements? I doubt that, and I’m sure the reader does too.

I think that’s because the nightmare has an obvious stamp of horror movie influence. The briefness of the phone call is disorienting and intrusive. The dialogue is simple, which allows the cerebral to subside and the instinctual to take over. Basement suggests something dark and unknown, hidden to daily life but still close by. The danger does not stem from something foreign or otherworldly, but something familiar, something purposefully kept out of sight. A woman’s voice suggests (to me) a mesh of vulnerability and responsibility, a connection that denies me the safety of neutrality. It is an urgency which pushes me toward rather than away from the unknown. Phone calls are often put to good use by horror films. The phone is a very tenuous connection to another human being. There is immense psychological safety in something that can be seen, something immediately in front of us. Sound is the messenger of danger, something to be turned towards, something supplemental by day but essential and critical in the dark. Sound cuts deeper, and runs a more direct line to our animal hearts. A horror movie without sound barely holds together, and hinges entirely on how engaging you find close ups of wide-eyed faces. This is why deaf people actually can’t feel fear, a scientific fact, and why I like to invite them to my laboratory.

I haven’t even seen that many horror movies, but growing up in the 90s and 00s I saw a lot of horror movie trailers. No doubt that staccato history is to thank for this recurring experience that my brain has cooked up for me. It is a strange phenomenon, to have this experience generated from such dregs. It is a dream not based on firsthand experiences or secondhand oral tales, but something processed in an experience-factory. It isn’t even hand made, you know? These artificial memories flow through my system, piped up from the corporate aquifer.

In my actual life I have had genuine moments of terror and faced danger where my life and well-being were threatened. It’s an entirely different feeling. The fear generated by movies is an unnaturally pure concoction. Fear in real life is always well cut with other concerns, and you never have time to experience it undiluted. There is never time for the marquee scream in which you print the image of your lungs onto the Dolby 5.1 surround sound system. Your mind is instead lined with practical considerations like how you get out of danger, what the best follow-up course of action would be, how you suddenly feel very thirsty, which object in the room is the most immediately dangerous, that kind of thing. Or else you’re just entirely frozen and your spider senses are turned up to eleven, and every muscle in your body feels strong and sharp like a bear trap. In my opinion, actually belting out an expressive scream or ear-shattering shout is akin to the drowning child who cries Help, I’m drowning and flails their arms while gurgling and gasping, while an anonymous woman wails My baby! Someone save my baby! As life guards are trained to tell you, that isn’t how it happens.

Yet language is built brick upon brick, and so these tropes persist. Their simple purity lends them a durability which can be relied on and worked with. It does bother me that my inner experience is so tainted by these inauthentic products of creative minds at work in the service of filling theater seats. Over time, like the poor young men enslaved to pornography, the mind becomes calibrated in ways that make no sense for one’s real life. It’s a strung hare we violin against. I don’t think it is difficult to resist the influence of such engineering. I think it’s flat impossible. I admire the power of creativity, for finding the perfect evocation of a desire. If a real artist means to make me afraid I have no doubt they can find a way to do it.

I admire it and want to be free of it, but my won freedom would collapse the foundation for my admiration. The urge to be free is there, and I know it’s an insatiable thirst, yet I still want to want it. I want to want it because in my mind that yearning for impossible freedom forms much the basis of what it means to be human. And I do want to be human. I just feel trapped. I feel trapped by my humanness, my humanity, and by my inhumanity entwined within that. I am the dreamer answering the phone. I am the woman whispering basement twice. And also the unknown presence provoking both. The dream never reaches a conclusion, the dark presence is never unveiled and so it can never be dispelled. I can only whinge a little and then eventually return to that familiar uncertain moment in a world where I am stripped of all cerebral powers, removed from my self-conscious knowledge of history and context, disoriented, alone with my corporately mandated instincts. It is a worthy reflection.

Autumn ’20 Reorientation

The world is thick with opinions. It’s too much, all of it. And also there are the facts. Too many of those as well. Between opinions and facts there’s already so much of the world that you have no room to breathe. Yet you must breathe. You must breathe eventually. Then so these particulates enter and assault your system, replacing and regrowing your fibers, tendons, neurons, and spirit until they are no longer in you but instead they are you. Examining the wrinkles in your palm, touching the fuzz above your lips, you discover nothing but what the world has breathed into you.

It’s exhausting. When you read a news article, be vigilant for all the traps. If the headline is in the form of a question then the answer is no, and it is no BECAUSE the headline wants you to assume it is yes. The headline itself has a strategy in mind. It has come alive like a moth fluttering into your field of view. It is a simple creature and you could easily crush it, but at this moment you must eat, tend to your loved ones, prepare for tomorrow, decompress from today, repress all the moments that happened betwixt yesterday and your birth (except for those few bright moments you remember that the starving kids in Africa would wish had happened to them). So you don’t crush it. You let it flit about like the harmless pixie that it is, allow it to work its petty magic. You let the headline win. And then you read the rest of the article, and in each carefully considered word you try to ignore the influence of a writer who is a political agent, of an editor who sweats under the watchful eye of seven advertising firms, of a public readership who lurk in phalanx position, more ready to pounce on each other than “the enemy”. Every moment is a battle for your allegiance and for your attention.

The world never tires and is always regenerating itself. In fact, it feeds on your suffering. With every small defeat the world gains a bit of local history. You are the local colour that it can use to embellish itself for the other people that come to visit. These tourists are also prisoners, like yourself, and some are even aware of it. Some even have a plan to escape, like yourself, and if you could only band together you might have a chance of refurnishing your prison cell with the perfect rug, a nice table setting, and enough hopes and dreams to drown out the roar of eternity. At the very least, you could drum up some prison gin and dull each other’s senses with bawdy jokes and good company. Like children crawling underneath a table, you feel safer when you cannot see how high the ceiling is, when there is less of that space you cannot dance in because you are short and cannot fly.

You grew up. You can speak, you learned speech! You can form words and make ideas fly into other people’s ears. It’s incredible. There’s no reason to be alone when you can run up to someone and whisper the truth into their ear. PSSPT FWHSP SHWFF. Now you’re on the same page. And yet, somehow, they often seem to miss most of what you said. Or they’re trying to whisper in your ear at the same time and you end up grabbing at each other’s heads forever like The Two Stooges. Some people try to get ahead of it and go completely silent. They know that conversations are monstrous like hydras and what you really need instead of effort is simply luck. To get on the same page you just need to already have been on the same page. You simply need to be fellow stick figures, drawn by the same hand into the flipbook of life.

There are other strategies too. There are lots of strategies. There are strategies and strategies. Strategies that anticipate other strategies, strategies that facilitate subsets of strategies, strategies that respect and infiltrate and emulate and counter. You can learn them all! Then if you want to win you just pick a point somewhere on a map or in the landscape and then go there. Once you’ve arrived, you’ve won. You’ve done it. Sometimes other people like the spot you’ve picked though. Then you’ve got a fight on your hands. Blood out, hams up, tongue worked to an even lather!

You’re in for a thrilling time. I wholeheartedly support your side of things and want you to win. Ah, to be part of life, to want things. There is nothing more freeing than desire because apathy is a cage exactly the size and shape of one’s own skin.

Well, and I am not the bystander I present myself to be. If I were, I wouldn’t so consistently strain to hear something in all this noise. What am I listening for? I don’t know. I think I would just like to know something for sure. I would like to be able to lift away all the layers of confusion, bias, tradition, ulterior motive, random chance, spite, and even the will to survive, lift it all away and see something clearly for once. And for that clarity to persist for long enough that I could convince myself it was genuine, one long held note I could hum to myself. Then I could die with immense satisfaction, like a pig with a four-leaf clover in its belly.