Night and day the cleaners scour the city. There are water cleansing machines and gully suckers. At random intervals sirens wail or a screeching ambulance passes with lights flashing. Perhaps with a dying victim of heart attack, stabbing or road crash. A pall of orange smoke sometimes diffuses itself over a working class district. Heavy chemicals lace the air. Scavengers try to beat the cleaners to the garbage tied up in polythene waste bags. Tons of such bags are distributed everywhere. In the old days we had reusable tubs or filled up used cardboard boxes. We could roam the streets looking in at the rooms of the wealthy frequently exposed and open to observation, illuminated by the yellow glow of middle class lamp shading. But these days the curtains are firmly drawn. No-one wants to be seen as the crime wave soars. old people never go out, except for essential daylight shopping and by this method have reduced the crime statistics surrounding them. There are underpasses where human derelicts measure out their lives in beer cans bought with money cadged from passers-by. The policy here is to let them be. No use increasing the rioters numbers by preventing them from blunting the harsh reality of life under those awful orange street lamps in the damp and cold, or the sweaty heat of summer afternoons, with a few cans of beer.
 These days they are holding more and more festivals. Every section of the city has a stall day with very loud music, civicly assertive and down right brash. They include military personnel on occasions and the big festival has a parade which draws on military equipment after a war.
 It was into this environment that rebels introduced a dream machine . . .
 The inventor's name is lost in the mists of time (actually Brion Gysin) . Using a series of flickering coloured lights in suitably modified cardboard it was discovered that hallucinations could be obtained without significant effort. No need to risk imprisonment or fine through the use of some proscribed narcotic, no need to fast, go on fruit diets for several days or to do chanting, deep breathing or visualisation practices. A minor expense from the revolving motor of an obsolete record player coloured tissue papers covering slits in cardboard and internally lit, by the light from even a suspended candle could provide the hallucinatory patterns. Make sure comrade reader that thou leavest adequate ventilation for thy candle. We most strongly advise against setting afire one's precious abode. Harder and harder to find these days. Some had devised a hand turned wheel.
 The 'Quicker Saver' shops sell irradiated foods and frozen fruit. The fruit turns pithy or blackens.
 No doubt about it, if one's a puritan would be world conqueror several days on fruit is of course more elevating than the dream machine. The taste of fruit is presumably more like the nectar of heaven. Living without starch - bread, oats, potatoes, rice - can be very disheartening; but there are times when the craving ceases. Moments when one feels one could abandon all - food, sex, possessions. At such times the training seems worthwhile and who knows perhaps it is a key that enables one to circumvent the lower astral, the area where desires are reflected in grotesque forms. Work and abstinence, responsibility and rectification, the terms of the true mason. Like alchemy however the process may be a long one.
 A grey fog swirled around the black spires and factory chimneys. poor sweeps and cleaners passed shadow-like between rows of dimly lit overcrowded dwellings, and out on the brink, on the scorched lands of Drew men felt their famine drained bodies and minds flickering like mirages of the burning sands.
 A dull ache in the region of the right kidney. Could be congestion, deposits, the aftermath of alcohol or protein dysfunction.
 I turned to where you stood twenty-five years ago and your arm, in memory, hardly raised in recognition. A stiffened arm rejecting affection. I could be you, you could be me, a different time, a different place.
 The Quicker Saver store doesn't sell any fine assam tea or better Chardonnay and someone tells me Quicker Saver are poised to take over even the cleansing department.
 Government bonds compete in the market place and more taxes will after all be raised from the general population. The crisis will affect strata so far untroubled by the slump - new rows of terraced lower middle houses will come under scrutiny. For sale notices flap in the wind. Today they are made of a new flexy material.
 When, my son, you have understood the complexities you will begin to sympathise. Taken as a whole society is more complex than a novel by Aldous Huxley or even James Joyce.
 "I like Dedalus myself. He brings an air of sanctimonious sincerity to his doubts. His scholarly learning enlivens the text like so many characters in Huxley. But yet always, how shall we say, there is one supreme scholar on the verge of the truly mystical realisation. The authors themselves are no doubt that man."
 He had created a sort of vestibule. The air was of the ecclesiastical. He had evoked it and I saw that as a tremendous achievement and yet his motive was to undermine. He had made a hurdy-gurdy out of religious paraphernalia.
 And from a female womb comes the 'Son of Man'. In the name of the Father, the Mother, the Son and the Daughter, so let it be.
 In the ante-chamber by the dim light of candles tourists view all kinds of perverse acts in seaside flicker machines. Pagans suggestively play with wooden phalli, even the males. And my friends allow me to tell you these scenes are as nothing compared with the brutalities of war, the bayoneting, the slit abdomen, the severed limbs of the Somme, the tortures of Nanking.
 Are these massive breasts real I wonder? Even in the early morning there is the hum of diesel engines.
 One day's fasting, one day lived in quietude is the beginning of emancipation. The world becomes a dream from which the dreamer slowly awakens. Little by little the points of intersection will fall away, the old habits be seen for what they are. The bottle of choice wine remained unopened. How long it had been there the undertakers could not say.
 "On other days I feasted like a king, For such is the nature of this world."
 Parts of the city are experimental. One is called Needle Park, another Fisneyland. But the travelers in converted buses are being moved from dump to dump, no-one can make any money out of them. The boys who deal in the hard stuff can pay off the elite, or rather those who make the elite possible.
 I moved from one novel to another and in one I found the Elite Coffee Bar. Its inhabitants wore white shirts that glowed under ultra violet and they consume highly synthetic 'designer' drugs at considerable expense. They drive cars which give off awful synthetic music at the noticeable volume. The intention of the occupants is to say we go to expensive raves and use new, 'class' drugs. We are the new class of successful mods and we owe it all to the decisive policies of the latest right wing government, 'so up yours plebped' . These and such like are the current terms in use at Cafe Elite.
 Some kids paused at the derelict building under an orange street light and threw stones at the delapidated windows and here I echo Huxley's ironic use of the words . . . "of such is the Kingdom of Heaven".
 A great stone head lay on its side beneath the Ziggurat and ancient tower where the gods of nature and the sky gods were worshipped or placated. Some poor souls ate earth, others grass before they succumbed. One day I would learn the meaning of craving for bread or a baked potato. Hunger accentuates the senses. Food smells overwhelming, a plain cooked runner bean as good as any luxury food. And yet they pay farmers not to grow food in the United Processing Community of twelve nations.  Surely it would be possible to pay farmers to grow surplus food for the famine regions of Drew. "Alas my son money is the measure of man's alienation. If you have nothing to sell at incredibly low prices which ran then be resold elsewhere at incredibly high prices, you will never be able to import enough food to set aside for drought."
 Blessed are the destitute who turn to God, for in their demise they shall ascend to Heaven at the right hand of the Patriarch.
 And beside Him were crucified two thieves. Of these one repented. Christ died relatively quickly but what happened to the others no-one can say. Only that one ascended to Paradise to be with our Lord.
 Though these be but stories great truth lies behind such legends and myths. The goal of 'world conquering', '0 Thou of Noble Birth' is laid before thee in symbolic terms by parable, hermetic and cabalistic subtleties. 'Seek and ye shall find, Knock and it shall be opened unto you.' Beware the trappings of excess. 'Know Thyself' is written above the Temple Door.
 "Raw juice therapy can dissolve out some of the deposits."
 The Door of Excess leads to the Therapeutic Sanatorium and
frequently requires the Labours of Rectification. Be glad oh my
son that Allah is Indeed Merciful.
 I was at the end of a fifth day of a fruit diet which included bananas, some vegetables and avocado pears plus honey and molasses. Even with these foods, craving for starch develops very strongly.
 I looked along the deserted blocks of offices and dormitories. The roadway was overgrown with weeds. The architecture classic thirties administrative buildings . . . might as well have been looking along an avenue at Auschwitz? It was from this and other such frontline airfields that Lancaster bombers were sent to places like Dresden to roast human beings alive!
 "Monboddo was a naive do-gooder by all appearances. His speeches of utopian merit kept him in the inner circle because of their universal appeal to the ersatz emancipation of the masses. Sludden on the other hand was a semi-genteel manipulator who had risen from a social strata one step above Docklands. His brash manner and manipulative power made it easy for him to progress in the hierarchy. Lanark alias Thaw, a vaguely authorish type of intellectual expired in a Kafkaesque-like ploy whilst trying to rid society of loud-mouthed troublemakers, without himself having even a Marxist or Liberal Democrat pedigree. Hell purgatory, and a limp utopia, beyond functional realisation are all he had to offer. Cabaret style insights cannot do much more than act as safety valves for the mildly critical middle-class waverer."
 "That is all very well McAber but you're missing some of the finest elements of a humanitarian critique aren't you?" said the friendly Quelf.
 "Perhaps," admitted McAber pulling up his collar against the sudden chill of the frigidair section of the supermarket.
 The connection between high heels and concentration camps, it was pointed out to me by Jools, is 'restriction of movement'. High heels weren't made for walking.
 "Most human moves are predictable. The pagan broom symbolises the cleansing process. (Clean up your moves citizens.) That predictable afternoon stroll down the High Street could be turned into a noctambulist walk, more desirable than somnambulism at least."
 "Perhaps also predictable," countered Quelf surveying dirty seaside postcards from the corner of his eye.
 The phosphorus plant blew up today as a result of an underground gas build up. Reports of casualties are as yet unconfirmable. The number to ring is 335 8890. Willoughby was retrieved suffering from shock, his pockets filled with in the circumstances excusably filched cigars.
 "Everyone is a mutation," he explained over coffee. "It cannot but be as the genetic code is mutation par excellence. The wings of a dragon-fly or even mosquito are in evolutionary terms connected to the wings of an angel, in concept at least."
 "Let us plant trees in a replica of Stonehenge." The table-talk had turned to other matters.
 "Rub the button", a slogan that emerged as from a dream. The contemplative and solitary ape sooner or later finds the sex glands and starts to rub. The final ape has a different button in his hands, the nuclear trigger. Dare I postulate that surpressed sexuality is explosive?
 "As Nietzsche said man is something that must be overcome."
 "Even as progenitor?" put in Quelf.
 "Most probably."
 "And you say the aids virus is copyright . . or is it patented?"
 "The patented virus even down to its individual Pasteurised genetic imprint has been filched by the U.S.A.! Virus can be traced to their laboratory of origin by genetic finger printing. Virus batches are a bit like human beings in this respect. Almost unique individuals, like human beings. The French isolated some and the Americans appropriated them." (The Americans eventually won the patent rights, the allegations having been successfully refuted.)
 
 
 
 

(The Dream Machine was partly inspired by 'Lanark' the fantastic novel of Alasdair Gray)