chrisbhanlon

In the cab beside me a long soliloquy would express the young man’s stammering inchoate dream, then as seen from the heights of the city, painted lights began to swirl and mix in the rain dripping off the unseen artist’s brush. I took observations in pencil on the move that I wrote balancing the page on my thigh, would never look at them again, ripped out of something that hardly belonged to me. 

Dad and I looked at the mountains that bordered their property, fenced with gravitas much as we were trying to do with wire, low gullies chiaroscuro in the deepening shadows, fingerprints of lines half seen, ridges of box and cypress shadows; he was shepherding the family after retirement as best he could, a sadness at the vastness of his paternal ambition broke through very briefly at times like this. And that mountain.

He would ask respectfully, as we coughed out our genetically shared rheum nosed allergy, while we then stacked hay bales in the last acts of the working day, what value I saw in my work driving a taxi, and his response, when I told him, invoked his Shakespearean uncle, the peripatetic chemist who walked the streets and recited to passersby well into his dotage. I knew it was a compliment. 

When I worked it seemed like a city of millions lurched along only well known arteries of escapist grog and grief. 

The mother locked in lifelong care of her disabled daughter, in her eternal deep sleep, who pled to be helped, and held onto my arm as she said sardonically she was frightened now even of the crawling shadows. Tenderly she relinquished her story to my care, her grief so exposed no point in dissembling. 

It seemed to me what I wrote down in those notebooks was off from the main highway of belief of what is generally known, but perhaps could be valuable for this reason alone, so I should not let it slip through my fingers unexamined.

Humus on the forest floor, the edge of knowledge, edge of my knowledge anyway, truth sought for its own sake, the fantail surely would scratch and turn over my observations into some redeeming use.

Perhaps I was eyewitness of the almost missed, or I was the lost drunk who fell overboard at night, and washed up with the seagrass on some undiscovered continent. 

Sensed something deeper but unproven at the very back, felt there was no sense to it or any way to articulate for many years, to do with this sort of ebb and flow of events in the cab.

Meaningfully parceled performances often alcohol loosed, random, festooned, staged, threats on the tongue – seeking the heroin hit straight out of jail, then a minute later the richest man in the country enters, I read it off his credit card.

They changed seats in my cab and you could hardly tell the difference.

In the background one arrival posed a question for consideration, the answer suggested by the next.

Mothers’ children one now in my headlight on the outbound freeway, made a mistake that was now immaterial, for he was crushed in the metal cloak of roof and doors nowhere to look but back at me.

While he heaved I took off my shirt to wipe his blood; then elsewhere days later a young man lay alone on a northern footpath, would be like a piece of cardboard if left there for a day or so, his viscous blood flooding the concrete, the centre of his thoughts loves and dreams.

Ex Hypnopompic Hallucination Feb 16th 2026

… There is a moment between sleep and wakefulness when a commanding voice may be heard, coming perhaps from a drama from further back in the dream. It seems to be the sudden intervening authority of an awesome power …

... After that  moment, imagine how his authority and importance now swelled up to impose various doctrines and religious themes born for the adherence of others…

You might think that if I had this experience of a voice and invisible presence of biblical dimension I would by now have opened at least a small church though more likely, considering the power of the experience, be talking to millions.

I was singularly unsuited to a religious calling. With my jaw wracked open in fright in that moment staring deep into the retractable lamp on the bedside table, I was pretty sure this was meant for someone a few doors further down the hallway.

Tried church but felt uncomfortable. When the archbishop walked into the cathedral every word he said was unsubstantiated to me. I felt self consciously that he was marking me out among the crowd which I suppose he was not, so that I started looking for a place in the side chapels where I might privately address my thoughts.

Before I could move the dancing had started, so that I lurched unsteadily on my heels and tried to bob about but could not connect with the emotional flows of the congregation.

I realized when the woman clutched my hand, that unfortunately the energy straightway began to part around both of us and not just myself. She could tell I was not much good at suspending disbelief and no better as well at dancing.

I believe there was no other way than to be here at the limits of a solitary and very stubborn type of figuring which is where I can still be found.

 

Only two left now includes the lady with hair tied so that it pulls her face taut and who makes proprietorial comments about him.

You know she says addressing the subject, you only drink since you are under pressure. 

The subject has shrugged off one by one his clothes and now has the baleen look of a former athlete. 

His sympathetic mate takes one last filched beer away in the dark then she follows as he advances steadily toward catalepsy in movements till only myself the stranger is left. 

Sit down he says to me.

He tells of swimming race across the heads he won for his father who could not walk and also of the woman whose life he saved.

I am thinking his stories are like the touching up of paintings on a psyche.

He tells of the award and says to me big head still as bronze I don’t like your words just listen.

I had not spoken but he was right, words were thoughts yes, I was trying to figure was there any gesture I could make to try to help him. 

Couple so much life left in them, son with disability, woman must have been his mother. Extravagant tributes flow joyfully from her, she is taking him out, explosion of colour and hope, such a wonderful luminous day. In those summer days, the bright sun, see the pure shapes it makes lighting up bricks, the concrete honored, the trees lightly burnished, as they both went forth. Death was never far away and edging closer, something in us forgets and helps us to believe this life can last forever, something in the way we are made.

Qualities of the human body and its psyche evolved to give an evolutionary advantage and so be more likely to be passed on and normalised.

There is a moment between sleep and wakefulness when a commanding voice may be heard, coming perhaps from a drama from further back in the dream. It seems to be the sudden intervening authority of an awesome power.

Without the benefit of the hard headed skepticism which we have also evolved as a species, it could only be as it seemed – presence and voice moved though a veil from another world.

The digestive parts were perhaps at war with each other sparring and gurgling while the sleeping brain for its part had tried to withdraw amid troubling fears of relationships with loved ones and always lurking death.

After that  moment, imagine how his authority and importance now swelled up to impose various doctrines and religious themes born for the adherence of others.

The whole charismatic show for a thousand years collapses apiece if you take away that moment he mistook his own mere inner voice for the interactions of a god.