My first book – Reality Dreams – written in 1970-75.

Posted on by Opher

I’m writing up my first book – more for my own satisfaction than anything else. I’m quite nostalgic about it as it took me many years to write. I started it in 1970. It is a collage incorporating cartoons, poems, sketches and a surreal story. I thought I was being really revolutionary. It is a thing of the sixties. I do not think it has any commercial promise but I felt I would like to put it in print so I can have a real book copy.

Here’s the start. What do you think?

Part 1

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The Flux

The universe does not exist in space and time. It has no size, shape or form. Time is merely a measure of change; it radiates out from a point at various speeds, dependent on the energy it chooses to hitch a ride on. Usually it is fast.

Any individual appears to live in a moment in time and space and may continue to live their life unaffected by the reality of this phenomenon. Yet, perhaps, one day they may realise that the finite life they live is an illusion. The moment this realisation occurs and is believed their life will cease to exist. For who can connect cause and effect in an infinite system where time and space are interchangeable? The reality is that our lives are held by a tenuous thread. We have no static shape and the sequence of days that make up the course of a life may be nothing more than a chance progression, an anarchy of ideas in a vacuum.

For finity and infinity cannot exist inside each other. The illusion of one or the other is nothing more than the product of a healthy art of deception. The flow is a poet. Life is the metered scrawl on a clean sheet that is the void.

Each individual must make the decision to choose whether it is finity or infinity that is reality. Whatever they select they should be warned that it is likely to be incorrect. The pattern of life and memory may alter unexpectedly.

Geologically the life of the Earth is recent; the passage of a lifetime a fleeting flicker. For the void the whole universe with its stability of matter and orderly course of time is but a brief interlude. Anarchy is the path that nature treads in order to create the flux.

Nothing that exists in the flux is ever organised in finite terms. The laws that seem to govern space and time are ephemeral.

As I write and you read we may even be the same being.

 

 

Writing – How I started writing and my first project – ‘Reality Dreams’.

Posted on by Opher

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I started writing ‘seriously’ (ha-ha) in 1970. I was in my final year of college and realised that I had a great desire to be creative. I had absolutely no desire to seek a career and earn money; I did not want to fit in with a society that I despised.

I tried doing some art and greatly enjoyed myself. I could see myself as the starving artist in the garret, happily daubing away. I rapidly saw that it was not going to enable me to make ends meet so I kept that as a sideline. Writing seemed a good way forward. I had a head full of ideas, great passion and I thought it was easy. Everyone could write, right? All you needed were the ideas and I had them in spades. I was not after wealth and fame, an audience and modest income sufficient to keep me and my partner – nothing extravagant. I thought it would be a breeze.

I was so wrong.

I had this concept for a first book (Reality Dreams) – a series of vignettes that slotted together like a jigsaw, that told the story of my main character – one Messny Krapbutt – complete with poems, cartoons, art and strange interludes. It started with the egg and sperm and proceeded to death. The book had three parts. The first was Messny’s life, the second was god, infinity and the universe, and the third was surreal (as if the other two sections were not).

I considered it extremely radical, highly original and a multidimensional masterpiece. I was passionate and enthusiastic and bent everybody’s ears until they were sick of my spoutings on infinity and mysticism.

Confidently I sent it off to various publishers and received a bunch of rejection slips – some bland and one scathing – he could detect nothing interesting in my writing style and I should stop right away.

It was salutary but it did not put me off. Even when friends read it and found it tough going I was undeterred. I tried to look objectively at what I had done and I could see that maybe the writing was pedestrian and there was no evident narrative to pull people in.

It was obvious that I was not going to get it published and my dream of earning a scant living from my writing faded. Reality was not dreaming; it was knocking at my door. I had a wife, son and need of a secure income. I went in to teaching to bide me over until I could get my writing ‘career’ off the ground. It was to be a brief interlude.

In hindsight my first effort ‘Reality Dreams’ was a typical sixties bit of crazy metaphysical rambling; typical of its time. It was unpublishable even as a sixties ramble.

I have since rewritten it (back in the 1990s, still on typewriter) which has improved the writing but could not do anything about the concept and structure.

At the moment it sits as two volumes of typed script. I am quite attached to it for nostalgic reasons. One day I will type it up digitally and publish it for my own interest.

Reality Dreams was a toe in the water.