David Gale’s Peachy Coochy Nites #1

20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.

Season 1: PC#1

Seized by the skull by strangers she struggled to free her eyes from their insistent searching. What were they after? Was it just another gouge or did they honestly think she was hiding something in her head? Not thoughts or ideas but things like keys, a small piece of jewellery, a wire puzzle, a toffee even? What if they were right?

And what if it were a golf ball? What irregular optical phenomena might be generated by the pressure of a small piece of sports equipment on the visual cortex? And what if the anomalies were not visual but psychological? How could she trust her own assessment of what was happening to her? A golf ball, in particular, would roll around, sparking off all manner of false impressions.

And then she understood. It was not Cap Ferrat that she remembered but Cap Gras! The Capgras Syndrome, no less – a rare psychiatric condition in which the sufferer is convinced that people and objects around her are doubles or impostors. Family members are seen as mechanical duplicates or hired actors. Chairs, tables, jugs – all have been replaced by exact replicas.

Breaking away at last from the souwestered fishermen who had been poking about in her head, she ran along the beach towards  the point where it touched the sky. Or what seemed to be the sky. She would never be sure again. Except for one thing. She would dedicate her life to countering the counterfeit,  unmasking the veiled,  bombarding the bogus, exposing the forged.

Moments later she found herself in a wooded area.  She turned to her companion, Peter Cartwright,  from Hertfordshire, for advice. Something about his reply made her instantly suspicious. “Hello! Hello! Who’s a pretty boy? Hehehehehheh!” Could it be that her Capgras was overlaid in some way with a zoological element hitherto unremarked by mental medicine?   

She realised that she was among campers. Their clothing and their table covering were checked. Their equipment was apposite. They seemed very much in love. One of the men stood out from the outdoor crowd because he was wearing a boater. She checked herself – it was not a boater – it was a canoe! She had mistaken Peter Cartwright – for it was he – for a toucan!

“Peter!” gasped Gwen – for that was her name – “I am seized by a syndrome that compels me to trust nothing!” He swept her into his tent, muttering “This is no ordinary camp, Alison! It is actually a still point between worlds, a place in which the eyewatering multiplicity of universes is obfuscated by the generation of pathologies.” “Come again?” said Gwen.

“Alison,” Peter said to Gwen, “even as you listen to me now you are lying in a makeshift sisal hammock. Next to you is another Alison, let us call her Gwen, in a universe where Alisons are called Gwen. She too may be lying in a hammock listening to a man…” “Let us call him Andrew,” interrupted Gwen. “Whatever,” said Peter, “Yes, Andrew is telling Gwen…

…that there are worlds in which psychiatric diagnoses are routinely deployed to deflect attention from the very real problem of inter-universe osmosis.” “Do you mean…?” Gwen blurted. “Yes!” Peter spat. “Leakage!  The very real sense of dislocation that dogs our days derives not from despair or desuetude but distinct discharges from adjacent realities!”

“Fuck a pony!” swore Gwen.  “Are you saying that there is some sort of insidious sideways drift through the veil?” “Yes!” breathed Peter,  “That which Everett and Deutsch considered to be theoretically feasible has nevertheless been widely regarded as prohibited by quantum linearity…up until now.” “Fuck a donkey!” breathed Gwen.

“So those days where everything seems distant and unreal, almost a theatrical display, which I had taken as an index either of psychological inadequacy or, at best, an effect of late capitalism, are actually multi-world slippages?” “Exactly, Alison. Those times when you say something and some fucker criticises it – that’s because he’s in the wrong world!”

“So there are worlds in which everything goes right and people agree with you and that’s where you belong but you might have somehow slipped out of it?” Gwen asked. “Not only that,  Susan,” Peter was excited now, “Even by thinking of such a world you create it! Since the beginning of time every thought has sparked a universe!” “Strewth!” Gwen said.

“Let’s go for a walk, “ she suggested, arbitrarily. “Somewhere I can breath.” Soon they were in East Anglia. Near Thetford. “Which Thetford, though?” she mused. “Alison, this is the thing, there are numberless Thetfords. This is the Thetford that came into being when we began discussing Thetford.” “That’s so far out,” Susan observed.

Suddenly the sky darkened and was filled with a terrible roaring. As if inscribed like flies on a speeding windscreen,  echelon after echelon of multi-role fighter aircraft thundered across the vault of the heavens.  “What world is this?’ cried Gwen. “Why F-16s in a universe created by our aborted thought-patterns?”

Over-identifying with the massive G-forces generated  in the contemporary cockpit, Gwen felt her very flesh rolling like lava towards her chin. “Alison,” croaked Peter throatily, “I love what you do with your face!” “It’s because of you, Peter,  you tyrant,  your mastery of the worlds brings out my hidden plasticity!”

Gwen glanced up.  “Jelly fish!” “No, Gwen, it’s raining men! They are paratroops from another dimension! The veils are being rent! The plasticities are running like lard! Now we can meet the man who didn’t get Pamela Henderson pregnant in 1971!” Gwen paled. “I never knew!” “Lucy. She is a milliner now,” said Peter matter of factly.

But Peter’s insouciance was not to last. From out of the crowd of silk-folding troops stepped a figure that caused his blood to run like ice. Gwen understood immediately. “My God, Peter! It’s Andrew! It’s because I thought of him! He has come from the universe in which Gwens are Alisons and Peters are Andrews. What does he want?”

“I want you, Gwen,” said Andrew, casting aside his canoe in one muscular gesture. “In my universe you are Alison but here you are Gwen, Gwen. I have yearned for you across the impenetrabilities of quantum linearity and now you have thought of me I am free.” Gwen turned to Peter. Peter asked Andrew “I don’t suppose you have a number for Alison?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It Has Always Been There

In a bed at night in a Paris hotel a few decades ago I could hear a couple of men talking in the corridor. I thought they were speaking English but I realised it was another language, one that did not even resemble English. I was hearing clear snatches of English though, and I continued to hear them until I fell asleep.

Shortly after this I realised that all languages were English, it was just a matter of how you listened, where you put the gaps between the words. A bit later I realised that all languages were your own language – this would apply to Estonians, Arabs, Vietnamese etc. Speakers of these languages listening to speakers of other languages could hear their own language providing they listened in the right way and were prepared to put the gaps in at the same speed as the speakers were forming sentences.

This went some way to explaining how it was possible, before everything had been explored, to travel to remote places and to find tribal groups, hitherto completely cut off from ‘civilisation’, who spoke English as if they were English. The members of these groups did not, of course, regard themselves as English because none of them had been born in England. Nevertheless, when they spoke, and when their visitors listened carefully, strings of English words in sentences could be heard and understood.

Sometimes it is possible to get a false positive. I was on a train near Cardiff late in the 20th Century, idly overhearing two women talking in Welsh. At a certain point I clearly and unmistakeably heard the phrase ‘washing machine’. A couple of minutes later I heard ‘Hoover’. I was on the verge of berating myself for not being able to follow the speakers more closely when I saw the mistake I had made: it appears to be the case that Welsh speakers may use English terms when they refer to things that have emerged since the settling of the Welsh language. This is not because there is no term in Welsh for ‘washing machine’ (peiriant golchi), it is, rather, a pidgin formation, perhaps a matter of convenience. I had rather complacently assumed, after ‘washing machine’, that I had put the gaps in the right places and enabled myself to understand the English that lay beneath the Welsh. My mother was Welsh and spoke the language and I think this may, in some obscure way, have limited my capacity to find the submerged English within the conversation on the train. It may be that when the overheard language, in this example Welsh, is salted with straightforwardly pronounced words from first-level English that the brain, otherwise linguistically elastic, cannot process two conflicting sets of gap-insertion conventions, one based on effortless acceptance, the other on the real-time re-gapping of the so-called ‘foreign’ language.

I have discussed my findings with linguists and they have suggested that I may have been unconsciously clustering groups of speech sounds in order to make words that I wish to hear. I understand the psychological principles that are being proposed but am inclined to believe that if this is the case then it is not my wishes that I am detecting but those of others – the participants in the many exchanges that I am able to understand.

I would add in my defence that this psychological hypothesis fails completely to explain the fact that it is not intermittent clusters of English words that I hear but entire conversations consisting of protracted, properly grammatical exchanges.

I am not translating. All languages lie beneath other languages. They are distinguished by differentials in stress and phonetic clusters. There are no words that are not composed in this way and consequently no words that cannot be understood, providing that the listener is able to relinquish conventional modularisations.

§§§§§

Fare

I went to this hippy fair in my home town not too far from here the other day. I had been there before a couple of times and had quite enjoyed it: my daughters liked very much the food and the jewellery from tents and stalls; I liked drinking cool ales on grass; there was a stall selling random artefacts from beyond Europe – I bought an old Indian framed colour print of Krishna up a tree having purloined the clothing of the naked gopi girls as they bathed; I liked the local bands – some of them, anyway.

Among the roaming youth, the dreadlocked white boys and the beaded and hennaed full-skirted women of many ages, I noted that there were groups of older men and women perhaps in their forties, some with greying hair, who stood chatting here and there and looked not like hippies not like the Peace Convoy of yesteryear but certainly road hardened yet easeful as well some with sports coats and some with jodhpurs not posh not horsey, certainly of no fixed abode, the bearing of long established circus family maybe but also quite regal. The men with bands of cloth at the neck, tied round and round with a knot, the women not always full-skirted but a few tattooes and riding boots. These clothes were not costumes, they looked like their wearers’ daywear of choice and the wearers looked as though the outdoors was comfortably their indoors. This place, I thought, was salubrious for them. I think they had vehicles to live in at the end of the day but I couldn’t say for sure.

You should not on the whole try to repeat things. It was a very hot day the other day and on the way through my home town to the common by the river there were great streams of people heading in, from every street converging. It wasn’t that the average age had dropped a few years to the mid teens, or that the beer wasn’t up to snuff – I had a hazy and rewarding pale ale, the current supplanter of the darker beers – but a kind of traipsey feel had taken hold. There were stalls with beads and rings and flowing tie-dye garments and a great many of these; there were stalls with food and many many of these; the bands were shy boys and girls whose systems had little sound. It seemed that within these categories there was little variety and among these islets of equivalence one could only make undistracted passage because not one had a distinct allure that would make marks or leave traces. I know I’m hardly the target patron here but fairs are supposed to be sites of adventure and excess not just traipse’n’trinket opportunities.

The fair as stockade is a welcome notion though, and as they pile into the fenced-off common the thousands of cheerful young attendees seem likely to find the makings of a Saturday asylum. It struck me, however, that the homogenising of the High Street had got there before them, flooding the field with a wealth of barely distinguishable choices. As safe place or benign enclosure it was continuous with the city around it insofar as both offer an overabundance of goods but actually generate a non-celebratory agitation. You can get lots of stuff but it’s not what you came for. Maybe you didn’t know what you came for but although the idea of the fair is deeply embedded its spirit here is elusive, submerged in a torpor of busyness and business.

I looked for the serene older travellers but they weren’t to be seen. My sighting of them a few years ago had prompted romantic daydreams of an offgrid life but now they had moved on. I wonder where they went and what they do there.

§§§§§

Street Peeve

A guy crosses the road causing a passing car to brake hard. The driver jumps out and dashes towards the guy, who is now on the path. I can’t hear what they’re saying through the plate glass but the driver, who is wiry and jumpy, is clearly asking the guy if he wants some. The guy brandishes an opened bottle of beer, possibly a pale ale, held by the neck, at the driver. The driver puts both hands behind his back, as if going for a blade, and continues to enquire of the guy whether he would like to come and get some. At this cusp of ugliness, the guy backs off. The driver sneers and returns his to his car. As he opens the door, the other door, on the passenger side, bursts open. A stout blonde woman jumps out and dashes towards the retreating guy. She screams “You fucking bastard! Come here you fucking bastard! You fucking bastard! You fucking bastard!” She takes a step forward in order to to bend over in order to steady herself against the recoil from her shouting. She continues to scream “Come here you fucking bastard! You fucking bastard! You fucking bastard!” over and over and over. The guy is in retreat. The woman is beside herself. She seems utterly and dementedly and, I have to say, enviably, absorbed and has found an ideal posture, one which will probably allow her comfortably to void her rage without further physical adjustment. After a couple of dozen more screams she straightens up and returns to the car. Just before she gets there she waves to the driver of a car behind her, whose vehicle has been prevented from moving on. “Sorry!” she says politely (I can see her lips moving through the plate glass). I imagine the driver of this car thinking “I might just not say anything here. I might just not react. In any way.”

§§§§§

The Appeal

In 1983 Lumiere & Son Theatre Company was commissioned to make a short film for the flagship Channel 4 arts magazine programme Alter Image run by the television production company After Image. The film was written by David Gale, directed by Hilary Westlake (for Lumiere & Son) and Jane Thorburn (for After Image). The producer was Mark Lucas.

The cast was as follows:

Alison Conway ……. Tamsin Heatley

Paul Darke ………….. Trevor Stewart

Ben Jameson ………. David Gale

Brian Roper ………… Neale Goodrum

The video of this work was uploaded to YouTube, a visitor to which would find this image at the front end:

The canine logo ties the image to the website of performance company imitating the dog, whose artistic directors Pete Brooks, Simon Wainwright and Andrew Quick have been producing exceptional and consistently innovative work for twenty years. Recently the company has added a magazine section to the site, titled ‘New Adventures in Performance‘. It kicked off with an archival Lumiere & Son short film, prefaced by this generous endorsement:

Lumiere and Son were one of the most significant companies to emerge from the British  Independent Theatre scene in the early 70s. Led by Hilary Westlake and David Gale, the work was surreal, ironic, intellectual and very funny. They were unusual at that time in placing as much emphasis on the quality of the writing as on the visual, and we will be looking at this company in depth in a later issue. This made for TV short, more or less typifies the sense of ironic, elegant and articulate threat that characterised their stage work.

Attempts to open the ‘The Appeal’ will be thwarted however. YouTube has deemed it unsuitable for mass consumption, as this screenshot advises:

Should you wish to ‘Watch on YouTube’ you will be taken to this:

Then this:

Irresistible, yeah? No. I can’t be bothered and I actually wrote it. I could describe it to you but it wouldn’t be the same, would it?

13.08.2021 (A Strength Weekly post featuring a fully functioning YouTube video was originally published in June 2019. I only discovered that it had subsequently been blocked this morning.)