More possibly Covid-related quotes from this 2011 published novel…Continued from here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/more-possibly-covid-related-quotes-from-this-2011-published-novel/#comment-541
Separate quotes from ‘Nemonymous Night’, and future ones discovered will appear in the comment stream below…
THE MAIN COVID (2011) ‘DREAM SICKNESS’ PAGE IS HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/the-dream-sickness/ FROM WHICH THIS PAGE BELOW IS A SECOND CONTINUATION AND SHOULD BE READ ALONGSIDE IT.
Nemonymous Night 
The real City itself, the one around him with covered market, Dry Dock, derelict zoo etc., was perhaps itself a living creature preparing to lift its airport arms and follow its own corpuscles’ flightpaths to the essential Core of things. But then fantasising was a thing you could take to the Nth degree and still allow the brain to survive to deal with more down-to-earth concerns…
The importance of number 19 to Stephen King
https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/19
And here is where I first referred to it in my gestalt real-time review on 18 April 2011 of The Dark Tower series…
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/the-dark-tower-the-dark-tower/
Dognahnyi had returned to his pent-flat and stared at a flatter day that welcomed him back from a short unexpected strobe-holiday: stared, too, upon an even flatter threadbare carpet, which he had not bothered to replace for years, despite being otherwise surrounded by hi-tech equipment together with what he boasted to be an original Rubens on the wall opposite to the other wall where glowed the closed drapes-on-silent-runners.
…and such as the contaminations. Dream spam. Riots in real life between dreamers from different nightmares. Dream terrorism—where no cause was too slight to warrant dream-suicide in its pursuance. Day-dream junk of confused waking.
—and Corelight would skim through like real sunshine to reveal the sorrows of mankind, but also illuminating a way to heal them.
Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream. These viruses are similar to birds with revolving beaks like drillbits, each a little pesky explorer. They multiply by ease of dreams being soaked into the birds’ lubrication-pores. Filters can and do work both ways. Each ‘bird’ burrows from, say, my dream into, say, your dream. It takes a bit of me to you, and a bit of you to me—mixing reality and dream, as well as you and me. Then extrapolate that at a geometric progression. Each ‘bird’ (or dream virus) has its own consciousness but that also multiplies as its mutation increases, not changing its Drill’s body so much, but changing the clouded specifics of its mind, each specific mind becoming a human mind that thinks it has got a human body—plus interaction with other ‘human beings’ of their own kind as if it is real life on the surface of our world, but really they are self-imagined figments within the bird’s cockpit as it lays waste the skins of dream throughout a mass Jungian consciousness. I know it is difficult to grasp these concepts. I have faced the situation in my own mind that I myself may be one such dream virus (or, at best, a harmless dream spam): and I’m easing the skins to open up to the manifold plankton of dream-interstitialists. Birds of Plague riding their luck…
Going to the only cinema left open in the city, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in derelict parks…
“It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever.”
There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz’s flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from a forgotten airport.
What he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.
Nobody.
The Nobody who was ever the essence of loneliness.
Amy was now hoovering the carpet of our Quarantine Quarters in Agra Aska. The Askan authorities had decided—a bit late in the day—that both visiting parties should be held together in camera, to ensure no leakage of disease or, indeed, of dream from the surface. Hataz and Tho, the emblematic pair of young lovers from Agra Aska (and young lovers in actual fact) were also necessarily quarantined in the same room as us—bearing in mind that they had already come into skin-to-skin contact with the dowagers, Edith and Clare.
…sharing their literary passions with the others, should there be periods during the Quarantine when there would be time for all of us to kill.
Being inside that Quarantine room was worse than any hedge-shriving—but we were eventually evicted one by one, having proved our ‘purity’…
Ogdon was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
A hawler is many things. It also means dragging things from inside other people as well as from yourself.
This book is in honour of that recurring dream, in the hope that it gratefully remains a dream, and that, as a dream configuring new dreams, doesn’t mutate into a worse dream, perhaps forever, to become a dream threaded with the surfaces of reality.
I subscribe—that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one… time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse… or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
THE FINAL THIRD OF THIS NOVEL IS APOCRYPHAL….
where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet,
Cross-referenced to PALE FIRE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/#comment-18862
The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.
*
The Death entered Klaxon City.
How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real… well the rest is common sense.
chivvying dream-stewards ensuring that dreams were correctly threaded in the correct order on any particular ribbon of reality or strobe-strand…
a global-warming turning inward on itself with a heat so over-bearing several incremental levels of dream were needed to intervene as a combined firewall to guard against its ferocity. Dream-fighting on a superhuman scale.
Can a planet from which I am able to be thus created, i.e. one called Earth, be more than just the head of the person who first imagined it? An Earth from the Ear to the Ground Who first imagined this Earth? Meanwhile, who imagined the head that imagined another head like the Earth?
“They’re the Healing Chambers.”
Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them—but now suffering from Bird Flew.
The word ‘indelibly’ was added in brackets. It may be rubbed out later.
Beth: Now we’ve rediscovered our love for each other, I get the feeling that they’re splitting us up again by forcing us to be on different sides in a war.
Greg: I didn’t understand all this about a war, until someone mentioned it in a cavé the other day… off the cuff almost. Klaxon seemed so peaceful when we first arrived.
Beth: (Laughs) Peaceful!
Greg: Well, you know what I mean. Citizens at peace with each other, at least, if not with this flipping racket of air signals! (Laughs, too.)
Edith: The war was second thoughts, I gather. Things were getting too boring… and tension *is* required for anything creative to work properly. Even Proust realised that as he created friction as well as fiction between levels of time.
This war, for example. I hear it’s where a person becomes a Flew person and those who are not Flew are still themselves—and they open veins in their bodies to see if they can merge the meats between them—coming together in hugs that blend as genuinely as hugs of love always tried to be.
Beth: Or sex. Not love. Yet, it’s a war. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s not a love-in.
Edith: A love-between?
Clare: That’s a better expression—a love-between, but the meats weren’t meant to merge, because some people have become poultry—some even giant insects—leaving some other people as genuine human meat. And when they try this love-blending business, the meats reject each other. Like transplants in the old days.
but, luckily, Greg and Beth happened to be together when the war first ignited and they had the combined nous to take the path of least resistance (albeit the most unlikely for safety) where the interior of this particular Lethal Chamber, by dint of a lateral irony (an expression that bears repeating), turned out to afford a relative immunity.
(Greg and Beth like myself and Denise today in our own ‘chamber’ of immunity during Corona or as this book might call it, Sunnemo…?)
Turkey-halting, I call it.
The Weirdmonger—upon his now legendary rite of passage through Klaxon’s peripheral mudparks—came across a dreamcatcher hanging in the sky.
a carrier of the bird-sickness in a more virulent form, encouraging people-to-people contamination instead of mere bird-to-people contamination.
The sickness has now reached the surface via man-city—Viet Nam, Rumania, Turkey, later London, even Clacton—then New York, the whole globe infected
Null Immortalis.
‘Nemonymous Night’ ostensibly deals with many current matters (as they happen) and today bird sickness has fallen lower in the sky—and we can only hope that the fiction itself is helping to lower influenza’s temperature and eventually eradicate it.
Even fiction has its own version of pitiful senility amid the other realities to which it ever tries to cling.
The Art of Fiction needs, therefore, to progress towards a stricter and more verifiable account of what happened or what will happen in the final war between humanity and a terrible foe and, subsequently, by extrapolation, to become a means to the end of neutralising the results of that very war.
One day, the absurdity of it all might make them laugh out loud. But, by then, they would have forgotten what laughter might accomplish.
“Tricking the Above, the Below and the Across.”
“Many gazed up into Klaxon’s undersky, shading their eyes from a newly radiant Sunnemo, in fact two Sunnemos as one had emerged from a blindspot to become each other’s ghost and symbolic of the love between Greg and Beth. Within the glowing skin of the master Sunnemo could be glimpsed the silhouette of the Angel Megazanthus itself slowly and repeatedly folding and unfolding its wraparound wings, a vast king in yellow, or a nesting mother-bird, or a token of a horror vision now made divine.”
SunNemo that eventually became Mount Core, or an invisible Corona just as Nemo is no-one?
See also: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/22/not-forgetting-sunnemo/
One or two on above cover in self-isolation disguised as social distancing?
TODAY: Authorial Note: by stub of pencil………
the ending of the Nemonymous Night Apocrypha seems to peter out or dwindle… just like life. As I am finding out, but what remains is the laughter and the unattributable words themselves…
But perhaps such dwindling apocrypha is not conducive to this book ever being a popular one!
NOT FORGETTING SUNNEMO
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/22/not-forgetting-sunnemo/