Today has seen some exploration, outside and in, not all of which I dare to scribble down here. And, most importantly, today Lady E. must be given two more from the garden, after a week of neglect.
Today's was one of those rare mornings when I couldn't bear to switch on the 'Today Programme' after getting up, early again, my mind still full of dream fragments I didn't want to shake off quickly, such as:
A woman colleague at AFP too two-faced in "reality" for my simple liking, who'd become someone destined to pull one of my teeth in a vivid amateur operation ... beds and bedrooms ... a bizarre search at that woman's request for fire-fighting equipment which required an odd exercise in needing to open a door with the right kind of electronically chipped plastic pass card ... stumbling into a velvet-lined, plentifully cushioned room with a kindly, elderly lady who had what I needed but complicated matters with her forms and demands...
The place was crawling, fluff-balled, purring and miauling with cats, including one distressed looking kitten which perturbed me until the lady said, "Don't worry, he's just been a washed pussy, not shaven, but washed..." ... a necessary white lie about where the blaze had broken out ... and, half buried under disarrayed sheets, blankets and more lazy felines on a kind of mezzanine bed, a high-breasted, wasp-waisted, fine-featured and clearly wholly naked young girl with fair skin, cool blue eyes, a big smile and a dishevelled tangle of dark curls. She had obviously just emerged from an immensely satisfying act of love (but with whom?), with one large aureole of a surprisingly dark and still semi-erect nipple bare above the sheet and ... ooh, là, where was all this?
No "interpretations" solicited, thanks very much all the same.
Somewhere out there, there's a collective blog which consists of nothing but these images, the stuff of many contributors' dreams, often boring but occasionally fascinating, while the Dreams Foundation makes a bilingual meal of it all, could I be bothered to eat there.
Such mornings are a luxury, despite the cruel, tight band of a headache that generally has me in its grip on awakening, with the time to ease myself gently out of such a colourful dream world; not having to switch the radio on for news, news and more news... then the Net for African affairs...
Then came the brief "panic attack", with a glance at the clock and the thought that at the same hour next week, in the price to be paid for this enforced holiday, I must already be running underground into the noisily crowded Hades of the Métro, set for another day of Africa editing all on my own. Meaning some 50 countries with who knows what threatening to break out where yet again: pestilence, starvation and film festivals, AK-47s in the hands of teenagers drugged utterly out of their skulls and fashion parades, horseback Arab militias perpetrating atrocities against villagers and breakthroughs in trials of new anti-malaria drugs...
And everywhere, the musics, the bustle of fabulously colourful markets, the noise, the blazing heat, the glorious rich smell of some of the soils, thunderstorms and vast open skies, the laid-back pace to life I love so much about the continent, the time to talk, the legends of magic taken for granted.
End of panic attack. This, simply, is life, ancient and modern, and its constant information overload.
 And then I thought of Lady E.
As often I have these past days, knowing her near and holding her so distant: the prudent fool I've been -- perhaps -- to suspend connections, wishing in my black mood neither to call or write to somebody so new in my life and so immensely attractive.
There was no way I was going to hunt down such a treasure at risk of drawing her, dragging her down with me into the semi-private and still only partially apprehensible inferno of the week I've endured.
But it's over. And I'm back with that so little I know of her yet, apart from the relaxed feeling her company gives me, her broad interests, quick mind, the irresistible appeal of that fair sculpted face with the wise mouth and the wonderful eyes.
It was hard with my mother, still stratospherically cruising, who told me when finally I 'phoned her: "You absolute wretch, I've been so, so worried about you, where have you been, last thing I knew you were in hospital!"
"Oh come on, you'd know quickly enough if I was dead or anything worse," I said. "Don't make such a fuss!"
"You didn't even acknowledge the pamphlet I sent you."
"What pamphlet?"
"One called 'Inside Out', I posted it days and days ago."
"Well, thanks, but I haven't got it yet. Anyway, if you wanted, you could always read the blog, Mum, that's still there."
"But I do sometimes, at the public library. I'm really not happy about it, it's not good for you, and it's often perfectly incomprehensible!"
"Thank you. Just tell that to the Faithful Five ¾."
"The who?"
"Nothing. It varies. Forget it."
But in the mailbox, the pamphlet had finally arrived.
'insideout: people with manic depression can become experts on their own mental health.'
By the hitherto unknown to me Manic Depression Fellowship.
Great! And that not long after another from my kind brother in Scotland: 'Irritable Bowel Syndrome: The Natural Answer to Good Health.'
Well ... I should be much more grateful than I was, most especially for this morning's delivery, it really doesn't do to kick thoroughly well-intended gift horses in the teeth. But it's no good.
I feel quite entitled to fret often about other people, but how I loathe it and squirm when they worry about me! That's not on; it comes as a cruel blow to my amour propre, such hard-won self-knowledge as I've got, and the unshakeable notion that I'm certainly no more badly screwed up than anybody else and in some respects very much less so.
Even my easily forgeable signature provoked a comment from the police inspector when I put my name to the several pages of my statement on the May 1 murder.
"What a splendid signature!" he said.
"You've got to be kidding! My signature's just the scrawl of a kid, an early adolescent -- always was! And anybody could copy that."
"On the contrary," the inspector said. "I often work with graphologists, you know. That's a very good signature. No flourishes, no underlining, no dots. A clear first name that speaks of a man who has fully assumed his role as a father and identity, while that surname says you've accepted your responsibilities as a mature citizen in society."
Well, I was a little flattered, if surprised.
"I used to have to cheat with 'o's," I confessed.
"'O's?"
"They used to be all scrunched up, badly needed rounding out. The most ill-assumed sexuality, you know..."
"Well, it looks fine now. Still cheating?"
"Oh no -- I have to squish them! But as for your squiggle..."
"I've got two signatures," he replied. "One rather like yours, and this one for all the paperwork and signing cheques."
The Wildcat waxed effusive last night about her "fantastic" Sunday evening.
It was immensely entertaining in every detail, a tale I'd love to tell in full: her chance to snub the Don Juan of her town's haute société for the movie director who zoomed in on her swift as an arrow, a delightful man uncomplicatedly keen for her company.
It was lovely to hear her so happy.
Briefly, I was her miracle worker of the hour. But all I'd done -- with a curse or two during an earlier conversation -- was employ my Net wizardry and struggle with bits of a half-remembered foreign language successfully to reserve her a ticket for an occasion I considered she'd really be a gloomy idiot to miss when she was clearly set to be the "star of the ball".
She'll kill me, not for the first time nor the last, but I can't resist one of her double punchlines.
It must have been about two-thirty in the morning when the gallant film-maker asked not "Can I," "Could I" but "May I kiss you goodnight?" -- ah, how it matters, each little accuracy of chivalry, in whatever the language! -- and the Wildcat said: "Of course not, you're a married man!"
"You never told me that bit; or, well, only sort of..." I reproached her, given the woman's talent for making each saga sing by recounting it backwards.
"Anyway, that never stopped you before, did it?" I teased.
But, needless to say, she'd already recounted the whole splendid story to a confidante far, far closer to hand.
The kind of dangerous confidante who says: "As if that kind of detail ever bothers anyone who is somebody in a town like this!"
She's learned a thing or three, the Wildcat, aiming ever higher to get what she deserves.
Oh. And she did let him kiss her.
"It was a very nice kiss."
It was all in her stars, anyway, much put out though she was when I dabbled in all that nonsense on her behalf (supposedly) nine or ten months ago.
Should I really also have brought my relative incompetence in such arcana to bear on the delectable Lady E.'s state of affairs?
I very nearly feel guilty about that, but goodness ... utter rubbish or revelation, the outcome certainly sat very well with the few knowns in my possession and was fascinating and even almost alarmingly erotic when it came to the unknowns.
That's to say, there was a time -- the era of the scrunched "o"s -- when I would have found those erotic elements alarming, but these days, they can only fill me with longing and a probably hopelessly misplaced hope!
I've realised that she's a cunning lass, Lady E., managing swiftly to extract a maximum of information from me while making sure she reveals as little of herself as she can get away with.
'Nuff said, more than enough.
 Rambling apart, you can see I've at last recovered some of my form from the new desktop. 'Final Fantasy: (mostly Rotten Tomatoes, but still 44% fresh) the Spirits Within' I enjoyed every bit as much as did the Kid, taking it simply for what it offered.
I've temporarily mislaid the name of the real actress who served as model for the animated Aki -- an Italian? -- but she's a stunner, though I don't recall anything as sartorially simple as a bikini.
And she's an improvement on last week's desktop, which was one of the wittier "everything is 'true', nothing is real" kind of variations on Matrix themes...
Dr. G was so determined yesterday to have me dig very deep in search of whatever triggered my extreme and long-lasting emotional response to the sudden shock of awful violence (she even managed to get me somewhere with it all), that I clean forgot the excellent question the Wildcat has been recommending I take up with her:
"Whence your capacity, Nick, for such profound empathy with other people, the way you get inside their heads and let what happens to them get far too much inside you?"
Heaven only knows. I'm not even sure that it really matters very much, except that it's such a mixed blessing, both a great gift to be grateful for and an occasionally painful burden. A year ago, I just wanted to find the off switch.
And for most of the time up until then, I didn't even know what empathy was, even when a certain kind of person told me that "at least half your problem is empathy".
I'm not certain that I want to know too much.
Israeli consultant and writer Dr Shmuel Vaknin has sensible suggestions on empathy, coming to a conclusion I can only agree with and bemoan:
"Empathy - supposedly a spontaneous reaction to the plight of our fellow humans - is now channeled through self-interested and bloated non-government organizations or multilateral outfits. The vibrant world of private empathy has been replaced by faceless state largesse. Pity, mercy, the elation of giving are tax-deductible. It is a sorry sight."
During my black spell, I was inclined to give up on my current re-reading of 'The Magus', one of the books I could only identify with very strongly as an adolescent.
There are any number of discussions of this dense and ambiguous novel on the Net, along with what purports to be the John Fowles site, which reminded me that once I saw the havoc Guy Green wreaked on the book when he ruined it by dilution into an empty vessel (IMDb) of a film.
However, despite the feeling that I'd had more than enough mystery and masque for a month, let alone magic realism à l'anglaise, I'm now glad I persisted, to be drawn once more into the deadly game of life Nicholas Urfe learns by unlearning on the Greek island of Phraxos in the 1950s.
Coming back for the third time to this multi-layered and humanistic story -- well-linked by 'The Guardian' -- I still regret that Fowles felt so compelled to "improve" on it with the revised version, but never mind.
I've also simply lived so much more since the very first reading that I'm far less inclined to accept the Fowles view of the quintessential part played by "hazard" in our existences. Still, it's a notion he deeply explored with far more insight and skill than ever Luke Rhinehart was soon to do in that much over-rated bestseller, 'The Dice Man', which has suddenly reassumed cult status.
Any hope I had of further exploring certain "tricks done with mirrors" in tonight's excursion she has blown.
The Wildcat.
Dice woman!
"Oh Nick! I'm getting nervous now," she calls to say. "What if he --?"
"Don't even start that," I warned her. "You're off again."
"What do you think he would do if I called him and said I was too frightened to meet him tomorrow after all?"
"Don't be such a silly girl. But what do you think he would do if you turned up at the café and said that you had been a little frightened of coming? Why complicate things?"
"How come you've become so wise all of a sudden?" Schlack! Who, me?
"I suppose I must have learned something."
Yes, and not without a little help from the Wildcat herself, skittish creature that she can be. Not to speak of Natalie's funny little gems ... and still I haven't finished 'Augustine's True Confession', which I prefer to sip in small doses, like the odd return visit to marvellous 'meryfela'.
Whence I was led at my downest to Robert Anton Wilson, who has got about as much time for the moody blues as the Fowles of the Sixties had for any god but those of human fabrication...
 And if you've got to the end of this,
well,
congrats!
I suppose.
At least it's kept me from diving so deep into Lady E.'s eyes again that I'd scare the wits out of her even before I'd found out how to swim in there...
It's truly the spirit within that fascinates me every tingling little bit as much as the shapely form without.
11:19:22 PM link 
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