6. Screaming in my car

A passage on sorrow, joy, patterning, madness, and mycelium 

[Note for readers who haven't started from the beginning of this series of tales: AF (Annoying Friend) lives in my head. Dick (or Richard, Dickson etc) is a highly educated cat. George (an actual person) sometimes lives with me and the cousin referred to here we met previously in the chapter, 'Pulling the Pin…'.]

Checking emails. Here’s one. From a mystery publisher with whom I’ve already had an exchange or two. He’s a thin, bearded misanthrope who calls himself Michaelmas Daisy (why?). On the strength of a couple of my blogs he’s read, he's invited me to contribute to his anthology due, he writes, before the end of the world, haha, by which he means by the end of the year. He doesn’t specify but the date’s there just above his signature, with contact details and an avatar who resembles a faintly sinister John Malkovich.

Hi (I’ve learned he rarely bothers with a salutation beyond this, too busy and important) pls send some of your more recent words before we go further (or punctuation). I’ve already checked out his site and was surprised to find it looks well-regarded.

So, I copy and paste a selection into an email; then weakly fail to press Send. This means I’ll agonise over what to select and what to reject till the end of the world.

Distractedly I skim though other mail, then start checking texts. An old friend messages Hello. I haven’t seen him in a while. I ask him how he’s doing and he tells me that the sadness he's feeling might be more than he can bear.

Only, no, he doesn’t actually text that, he wouldn’t, because although it might be true it would sound melodramatic, and my friend always uses unassuming language. What he actually writes is, Oh, a bit crap. But it’s not a Thing.  And if he were here I know he’d give that breathy, self-deprecating chuckle of his. But his text just ends with, Only making contact and don’t worry, moods pass.

It’s very hard to read tone in a text. ‘Not a thing’. No thing. Nothing. I know my friend feels melancholy quite often and sometimes he goes spiralling down into silences that can last some time. His ‘grey veil’ as he once described it, lifts eventually, but I worry that maybe one day it won’t. 

Over the next few weeks I attempt to set up a visit or at least a phone chat. He doesn’t answer the phone. Only texts, so much less confrontational (so much more useless). I suggest things like, Let’s go swimming?  Meet for breakfast? 

No, not really up for it, he’ll reply. I’ll be in touch. Thanks, ‘bye. And a smiley or an emoji of a pink flower.

I keep up the contact, not so frequently as to get stalky. Is it enough? Not really, nothing can be enough for people who must struggle to get up once they’re down. Over a few shortish conversations he lets me know that no, miraculously, his lover hasn’t run out of patience with him—breathy chuckle. Is there trouble at work, I ask? No, his job is fine, his employers fair, he is among the luckiest. So add to this the guilt my friend feels for being such a first-world whinger, as he describes himself. He’s just sad. 

There’s a plague of sadness among humanpeople, Dick comments, taking a seat on the arm of my chair on the veranda and looking at me with a most serious gaze. I know. I’ve been watching.

I know you’ve been watching. Watching is what you do, Richard.

Contemplatively.

Yes. 

I’ve seen it, Person. Sadness stalking like Death but without the scythe. 

What does Sadness heft over his shoulder then, if the scythe’s already taken? 

Richard is silent, thoughtful. He licks his flank, twice, briskly, and after another beat or two he hops gracefully down to the floor and tiptoes over to the balcony railing to continue watching the street: a row of parked cars at the kerb; a row of parked cockatoos on the power line above, the shining bits of sea he can see among the branches of the gumtrees. For a few moments he attends with feline intensity to the pale blue sky fragments visible amid the broken blur of the lovely green-grey treeness in the clarity of the early morning light. I want to tell him that I don’t really require an answer to my whimsical question about Sadness, but then he says: A sack. Sadness hefts a sack of broken hearts collected since the start of the last tally. 

A bulging blood-and-tear-stained hessian Sad Sack, I add.

It’s bad enough without you getting hyperbolic, you know, Person. 

Hardly hyperbolic, I tell him. I won’t bore you with the global stats for depression, such a feeble term for so many shades of feeling. 

So we have to wonder, Dick says, we have to ask: why so sad? Why so sad here, in this country which is wealthy and not a war zone? 

Our riches are hollow, I tell Dickens, hating the grandiosity of that turn of phrase even as I utter it. Oh stet, whatever. And those riches came at too high a price. 

What did you pay? How did you pay? 

Oh, with the currency of our life’s energy and love and learning, with our generosity and our years… 

Years and years… echoes the cat. You bipeds are remorseless in your self- and everything-else destruction. 

And what was happening when we were working and earning and paying and playing and ageing, our race spreading all over the world’s skin like dermatitis… 

More like a carcinoma.

Oh Richard, you’re right you know. It’s true. Our poison spreads out and down, deep into the earth and deeper into the ocean’s floor in wave upon wave of uncreation … 

Humanpeople, sighs the cat. Sacrificing creatures, plants, love and art to accolades. And stuff. The convenience of online shopping 24/7. I do get that last bit, though, he confesses. I like convenience. I like things, things you can rub your cheek against or sleep on climb into or eat or…

Humans are a little more demanding than cats, Dick, and they’re after the acquisition of stuff all the time,pretty throwaway things. We’re so suggestible.

True, Person. Ah, people. They’re the worst. 

And meanwhile, there’s ambition and avidity and greed that’s exploded into a massive, uncontainable hubristic death drive that’s out of anyone’s control, blowing up countries and blasting the tops off mountains to dig out the minerals inside them to trade for money and yet more useless  junk and meanmeanwhile there’s AIs doing your shopping for you—so convenient, Puss, you no longer have to tax your brain to compose a shopping list! And meanmeanmeanwhile grabby algorith-ogres are at you even when you sleep, plus all their bright-eyed disciples stealing work you’ve done to lay at their algorith-altar all strewn with discarded bones of your ravaged thoughts, your art and poetry … 

My phone pings. It’s one of George’s cousins messaging:  

If u have shares? Rio Tinto’s going gangbusters! 

Out of control! 

Miners and loggers crowding out the remaining 36 per cent (at last count) of forests, banishing the people and the 3 per cent of wild animals left on the earth and liberating viruses and destroying ocean reefs and devasting sea-life we once thought was infinite while filling the sea with plastic bits and heavy metals and destroying ice floes and then heading back to the mountains and plains to dig deep wide holes in the earth where the colonies of fungi need to live and link lifeforms at their roots all over the planet… 

Ping!  

Sell now!

… oh, those marvellous mycorrhizal networks. If the forests and the fungi were allowed, they’d show us what creative connectivity really means!                   

I’m on the verge of tears, which means I’m probably getting shouty too as I pace the length of the veranda, but now AF’s making his presence known with that irritating ticklish thing he does in my sinuses. 

He now pronounces: We are the catastrophe.

It’s true, AF. That’s what we are!

Person, sshhh, interrupts Richard. Birds are staring. Imelda downstairs is looking nervous. 

And yes, she’s looking up and waving now, mouthing and miming—Can I get you a coffee? I shake my head and say, thanks anyway. Richard sidles up to me, bumps furrily against my leg and urges me inside. 

Ping! The George cousin again: 

Btw I divested from my fossil fuel shares—decided coal’s brutish & who wants 2 b a caveman? 

That’s a thing, I think to myself. Granted. But it’s a very small one and definitely lower-case—

Never mind the Pilbara, I text back, leaving it to her to google ‘Pilbara’. 

I plump down at my desk.  But of course, there are people who aren’t wasteful or cruel, people who look after fellow creatures who can’t look after themselves very well, like nurses and doctors and counsellors, or designers of useful and beautiful things, or teachers doing their best to teach children in jam-packed classrooms whose countries need them to be people capable of independent thought with the ability to imagine being better than we are, keeping an eye out for glimmers of brightness at the edges of things, and looking to coming times so other times can come. 

Dick jumps up to sit on the back of my chair and looks over my shoulder at my phone, which I’ve put on a pile of papers. I see that my friend’s words are buried under a further deluge of investment advice from that well-intentioned cousin. 

I once read, says the cat, the myth—if it is a myth—about there being unknown good people who keep the world going, despite the odds. Nobody knows who they are, including themselves, but there’s thirty-six of them … 

Thirty six? I say vaguely, then click into gear: Very precise, Dr Catness Everkeen.

But true. Exactly. They’re called the Lamed Vav. Google it. I mean Duck it. The cat adds: The Lamed Vav maintain the patterns that have to be maintained.

Or something like that. Maybe the Lamed Vav are ailing… I sigh as my thoughts return to my sad friend. Dickson leans his shoulder against mine. Body chat a la cat. A consolation. Hrreeooo-ah, he says gently.

Hrreeoo, I reply.

But there is still much beauty, Person. Beauty endures, visible or not, making goodwill and justice, because beauty is not, as is sometimes thought by foolish bipeds, a distraction from ‘important issues’ or only for the privileged. Beauty is the heart of the matter, not ‘decoration’.

Not a woman with her face plumped and chiselled or a man self-sculpted with steroids?

Haha Person. No, it is heart.

And now AF’s behind my eyes, making them ache mildly and not too unpleasantly. We enjoy a rare moment when the three of us are almost in accord. Together we picture the teeming, zestful cities where people who aren’t allowed to speak, shout, where people who aren’t allowed to meet, sing… We saw them in action in Italy—those massive rallies against Israel’s Occupation—and a few years before that, during that particularly bad Covid lockdown phase. What is it with Italians? 

Joy and generosity, says Dick. But not just Italians, of course, the cat adds reasonably. 

Jesters and jokers and sex clowns and satirists of all stripes and languages! I add.

Yes! rejoins AF with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. And dancers! And collectors of artefacts you never knew were precious until they showed you. 

True, I say to my invisible friend. And even though monstrous corporations mess with our minds and dump mountains of junk made of poisonous minerals collected by hungry children on ruined beaches, and weapons to maim and kill and watch everybody’s every move, and although witless repetitious songs produced by ‘intelligent’ machines and sung by starlets of soft porn are  everywhere, drowning out the raw beauty of the music people make, there is still art that tells truths, or that mirrors our flawed faces and celebrates the beauty to be found there and tells us, nothing is lacking, we already have it all, all we need, and it is good as it is. There are still oceans and grasslands and electric twilights and pale gold mornings. There are sunshowers and storms lit by violet light and mountains with boiling hearts and grottoes under the ground with walls of crystal, and every year, millions of migrating monarch butterflies. And there are human animals who perform magnificent feats of intelligence and big-heartedness. There are poets and writers and whistleblowers. And there is humour—blessed are the ironists, for metaphors are capable of exposing the nakedness of emperors. 

There is strangeness and wonder and giant cats with amber eyes, says Richard.

And tentacled molluscs with bodies as intelligent as their minds.

Minuscule birds with tiny bells chiming in their throats, mentions AF. And the echolocating code of flying foxes. 

There is a music teacher in Gaza teaching children how to weave harmonies with their voices around the drone of the watching eyes and the killing machines that hover above their heads, day and night.                                                                                              https://www.facebook.com/share/v/172g1BEDit/

 After listening a few times, I get in the car and plug in an old song I love and in a moment I’m shouting-singing up the road and into through the forest and all the while my voice is getting is more and more harsh and raucous, no harmonies here, but there’s nobody to hear the racket I’m making but the kookaburras, and they would get it. I sing until my throat is raw and my face is wet and tasting of salt and my heart a tiny bit lighter.

And later, a fluke, a very flukish fluke: I find a funny old song by Dory Previn called Screaming in my Car. I send it to my sad friend, hoping he will take it in the spirit intended, and smile a little.