'What can I do, I don't choose them and I can't avoid them,' we say after each murky dream which, once we are awake, seems to us improper or illicit or which, we feel, it would have been better not to have dreamed at all and certainly not remembered. 'I didn't want to feel that anomalous desire or that baseless resentment,' we think, 'that temptation or that sense of panic, that unknown threat or that surprising curse, that aversion or that longing which now sit heavy on my soul each night, the feeling of disgust or embarrassment which I myself provoke, those dead faces, forever fixed, that made a pact with me that there would be no more tomorrows (yes, that is the pact we make with all those who fall silent) and which now come and whisper dreadful, unexpected words to me, words that are perhaps inappropriate, or perhaps not, while I am asleep and have dropped my guard: I have laid down my shield and my spear on the grass.' Any idea that emerges from the dream-world is often dismissed or invalidated for that very reason, because of its dark, uncertain provenance, because such ideas seem to emerge out of a dream smokescreen, but do not always disappear once consciousness returns, indeed consciousness takes them up and sometimes even feeds them, and thus consciousness coexists with things it did not itself engender; it welcomes them into its bosom and nurtures them and gives them a face and even a name, and incorporates them into its safe, diurnal world even if that means relegating them to a lower category, labelling them as merely venial and gazing upon them paternally, as if every dream that survives the night must inevitably provoke the kind of ironic comment Sir Peter Wheeler made when he finally went to bed, up the stairs and to the left, on the night of that Saturday buffet supper: 'What nonsense,' he said and added, scornfully repeating my words: 'An excellent idea, indeed.' But despite this condescending attitude towards such dream nonsense, I have learned to fear anything that passes through the mind and even what the mind does not as yet know, because I have noticed that, in almost every case, everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind. I have learned to fear, therefore, not only what is thought – the idea – but also what precedes it or comes before.
We perceive and experience the parenthetical time of our absence and all that it involves in much the same way as we do simulacra and fantasies: our deeds or crimes, our own actions and those of others; not only those we commit or endure, but also those we witness or provoke, either unwittingly or deliberately; and during that time nothing is ever truly serious, or so we believe. How right he was, the great playwright and counterfeiter, the poet-spy and blasphemer Marlowe about whose obscure death so little is known, except that it was violent and has become the stuff of legends and has been reconstructed numerous times with impossible exactitude, which is to say that it has been entirely imagined, with the gaze of the imaginer turned towards the dark back of time: he was stabbed to death in a tavern before he reached thirty, at the hands, as has lately been discovered, of one Ingram Frizer, who proved quicker or more vicious or more skilful with a dagger on that 30 May more than four hundred years ago, in Deptford, near the River Thames, which is how the Isis is known in every other place and time apart from when it passes through Oxford, that foreign city which, ages ago now, seemed to be or was my city too and where they call it the River Isis, which is why that is what my memory calls it, the River Isis. How right he was the great poet-traitor, so quick to quarrel, and who never ran away from a fight and who had travelled abroad and who was speaking from his own experience when he had a character from one of his tragedies say: 'Thou hast committed fornication: but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.' And for once there is no doubt that here 'country' does not mean 'patria' or 'fatherland'.
Yes, whatever happens in another country grows immediately faded and faint the moment you return to your own, if not at the very moment when the events themselves are taking place, as if our extreme transience deprived them of all gravity and substance, or as if they hadn't really happened, or had not fallen and weighed upon the world or become etched upon it, or only on the tortuous smokescreens of dreams, from which, afterwards, it is so easy to emerge and which are so easily disowned ('Oh, no, it had nothing to do with me'). And if, moreover, those involved are dead, then what happened becomes even less substantial and less poignant, more ghostly and more preterite, almost as much as the things you read about in novels or see in films, and sometimes you cannot tell the two things apart or distinguish them from what we experience in the nightmares that overwhelm us or from the delirium brought on by pain and fever. Unless, of course, you were the person who killed those dead people or were the cause of their expulsion from the earth and of their definitive silence, whether direct or indirect, unwitting or deliberate, although perhaps the expression 'indirect cause' is meaningless anyway or is merely an acceptable contradiction in terms.
And then there is what Wheeler said about dreams too, and which goes entirely against all that: of the laughter and voices that we hear in dreams, as intense and vivid as those we hear when awake, indeed, often more so, because they are prolonged or repeated and can last all night without their presence fading or without our growing weary – with no rivals in our waking hours and, indeed, unique if they belong to people who have died and who, like the second wife of the blind, widowed poet John Milton, only speak to us again and take on face and form while we sleep – of that laughter and those voices and their words, never before spoken, certainly never while alive, Wheeler said: 'One thing is certain, they are inside us, not somewhere outside… They are in our dreams, the dead; we are the ones dreaming them, our sleeping consciousness brings them to us and no one else can hear them.' And he went on: 'It is more like an impersonation than a supposed visitation or warning from beyond the grave.' ('It's like an unopposed usurpation with no risks attached,' I myself thought later on, 'since those dead have vacated their place and abandoned the field.') And then, if he was right, I thought, in that idiotically chic disco, while what was about to happen was already happening, if he was right, the will or the lack of it barely matters, just as it doesn't matter if something was deliberate or not, it doesn't matter what happened or did not happen, what was only thought or feared or desired, mere deliberations or longings, the more impossible the better, for we can bask in the tranquillity that their absolute impossibility affords us; it makes no difference if such thoughts get no further than apprehension or suspicion, than failed or sterile or never-formulated instigations or persuasions, than the abortive words of an Iago which, over a lifetime, all of us have tasted or will taste in the mouth, whether seeking our own advantage or survival, or bringing down harm and calamity on others: 'all of this is inside us, not somewhere outside'.