Speaker 1: Everybody dies. Everybody Isn't that? So you tried to get
Speaker 1: into the long draw today? Didn't you try? How do
Speaker 1: the they'd come back? They didn't you? What Secret Night? Express?
Speaker 1: By Alfred Noise. It was a battered old book bound
Speaker 1: in red buckram. He found it when he was twelve
Speaker 1: years old on an upper shelf in his father's library,
Speaker 1: and against all the rules, he took it to his
Speaker 1: bedroom to read by candlelight, when the rest of the
Speaker 1: rambling old Elizabethan house was flooded with darkness. That was
Speaker 1: how young Mortimer had always thought of it. His own
Speaker 1: room was a little isolated cell in which, with stolen
Speaker 1: candle ends, he could keep the surrounding darkness at bay,
Speaker 1: while everyone else had surrendered to sleep and allowed the
Speaker 1: night to come flooding in. By contrast with those unconscious
Speaker 1: ones his elders, it made him feel intensely alive in
Speaker 1: every nerve and fiber of his young brain. The ticking
Speaker 1: of the grandfather clock in the hall below, the beating
Speaker 1: of his own heart, the long, drawn, rhythmical ah of
Speaker 1: the sea on the distant coast all filled him with
Speaker 1: a sense of overwhelming mystery, And as he read the
Speaker 1: soft thud of a blinded moth striking the wall above
Speaker 1: the candle would make him start, and listened like a
Speaker 1: creature of the woods at the sound of a cracking twig.
Speaker 1: The battered old book had the strangest fascination for him,
Speaker 1: though he never quite grasped the thread of the story.
Speaker 1: It was called The Midnight Express, and there was one
Speaker 1: illustration on the fiftieth page at which she could never
Speaker 1: bear to look. It frightened him. Young Mortimer never understood
Speaker 1: the effect of that picture on him. He was an
Speaker 1: imaginative but not neurotic youngster, and he avoided that fiftieth
Speaker 1: page as he might have hurried past the dark corner
Speaker 1: on the stairs when he was six years old, or
Speaker 1: as the grown man on the Lonely Road in the
Speaker 1: Ancient Mariner, who, having once looked round, walks on and
Speaker 1: turns no more his head. There was nothing in the
Speaker 1: picture apparently to account for this haunting dread. Darkness, indeed
Speaker 1: was almost its chief characteristic. It showed an empty railway
Speaker 1: platform at night, lit by a single dreary lamp, an
Speaker 1: empty railway platform that suggested a deserted and lonely junction
Speaker 1: in some remote part of the country. There was only
Speaker 1: one figure on the platform, the dark figure of a man,
Speaker 1: standing almost directly under the lamp, with his face turned
Speaker 1: away towards the black mouth of a tunnel, which, for
Speaker 1: some strange reason plungung the imagination of the child into
Speaker 1: a pit of horror. The man seemed to be listening.
Speaker 1: His attitude was tense, expectant, as though he were awaiting
Speaker 1: some fearful tragedy. There was nothing in the text, as
Speaker 1: far as the child read and could understand, to account
Speaker 1: for this waking nightmare. He could neither resist the fascination
Speaker 1: of the book, nor face that picture in the stillness
Speaker 1: and loneliness of the night. He pinned it down to
Speaker 1: the page, facing it with two long pins, so that
Speaker 1: he should not come upon it by accident. Then he
Speaker 1: determined to read the whole story through, but always before
Speaker 1: he came to page fifty he fell asleep, and the
Speaker 1: outlines of what he had read were blurred, and the
Speaker 1: next night he had to begin again, and again before
Speaker 1: he came to the fiftieth page, he fell asleep. He
Speaker 1: grew up and forgot all about the book and the picture.
Speaker 1: But half way through his life, at that strange and
Speaker 1: critical time. When Dante entered the dark wood, leaving the
Speaker 1: direct path behind him, he found himself a little before
Speaker 1: midnight waiting for a train at a lonely junction, And
Speaker 1: as the station clock began to strike twelve, he remembered, remembered,
Speaker 1: like a man awaking from a long dream. There under
Speaker 1: the single dreary lamp on the long, glimmering platform was
Speaker 1: the dark and solitary figure that he knew. Its face
Speaker 1: was turned away from him towards the black mouth of
Speaker 1: the tunnel. It seemed to be listening, tense, expectant, just
Speaker 1: as it had been thirty eight years ago. But he
Speaker 1: was not frightened now as he had been in childhood.
Speaker 1: He would go up to that solitary figure, confront it
Speaker 1: and see the face that had so long been hidden,
Speaker 1: so long averted from him. He would walk up quietly
Speaker 1: and make some excuse for speaking to it. He would
Speaker 1: ask it, for instance, if the train was going to
Speaker 1: be late. It should be easy for a grown man
Speaker 1: to do this, But his hands were clenched when he
Speaker 1: took the first step, as if he too were tense
Speaker 1: and expectant. Quietly, but the old vague instincts awaking, he
Speaker 1: went towards the dark figure, and the lamp passed it,
Speaker 1: swung round abruptly to speak to it, and saw, without speaking,
Speaker 1: without being able to speak, it was himself, staring back
Speaker 1: at himself, as if in some mocking mirror, his own
Speaker 1: eyes alive, in his own white face, looking into his
Speaker 1: own eyes alive, the nerves of his heart tingled, as
Speaker 1: though their own electric currents would it. A wave of
Speaker 1: panic went through him. He turned, gasped, stumbled, broke into
Speaker 1: a blind run out through the deserted and echoing ticket
Speaker 1: office onto the long moonlit road behind the station. The
Speaker 1: whole countryside seemed to be utterly deserted, the moonbeams flooded
Speaker 1: it with the loneliness of their own deserted satellite. He
Speaker 1: paused for a moment and heard, like the echo of
Speaker 1: his own footsteps, the stumbling run of something that followed
Speaker 1: over the wooden floor within the ticket office. Then he
Speaker 1: abandoned himself, shamelessly to his fear, and ran, sweating like
Speaker 1: a terrified beast, down the long white road, between the
Speaker 1: two endless lines of ghostly poplars, each answering another into
Speaker 1: what seemed an infinite distance. On one side of the road,
Speaker 1: there was a long, straight canal in which one of
Speaker 1: the lines of poplars was again endlessly reflected. He heard
Speaker 1: the footsteps echoing behind him. They seemed to be slowly
Speaker 1: but steadily gaining upon him. A quarter of a mile
Speaker 1: away he saw a small white cottage by the roadside,
Speaker 1: a white cottage with two dark windows and a door
Speaker 1: that somehow suggested a human face. He thought to himself
Speaker 1: that if he could reach it in time, he might
Speaker 1: find shelter and security and escape. The thin, implacable footsteps
Speaker 1: echoing his own were still some way off when he lurched,
Speaker 1: gasping into the little porch, rattled the latch, thrusted the door,
Speaker 1: and found it locked against him. There was no bell
Speaker 1: or knocker. He pounded on the wood with his fists
Speaker 1: until his knuckles bled. The response was horribly slow. At
Speaker 1: last he heard heavier footsteps within the cottage. Slowly they
Speaker 1: descended the creaking stair. Slowly the door was unlocked. A tall,
Speaker 1: shadowy figure stood before him, holding a lighted candle in
Speaker 1: such a way that he could see little either of
Speaker 1: the holder's face or form. But to his dumb horror,
Speaker 1: there seemed to be a seer cloth wrapped round the face.
Speaker 1: No words passed between them. The figure beckoned him in
Speaker 1: again without a word. The figure went before him up
Speaker 1: the crooked stair, with the ghostly candle casting huge and
Speaker 1: grotesque shadows on the whitewashed walls and ceiling. They entered
Speaker 1: an upper room, in which there was a bright fire burning,
Speaker 1: with an armchair on either side of it, and a
Speaker 1: small oak table on which there lay a battered book,
Speaker 1: a battered old book bound in dark red buckram. It
Speaker 1: seemed as though the guest had been long expected and
Speaker 1: all things were prepared. The figure pointed to one of
Speaker 1: the armchairs, placed the candlestick on the table by the book,
Speaker 1: for there was no other light but that of the fire,
Speaker 1: and withdrew without a word, locking the door behind him.
Speaker 1: Mortimer looked at the candlestick. It seemed familiar. The smell
Speaker 1: of the guttering wax brought back the little room in
Speaker 1: the old Elizabethan house. He picked up the book with
Speaker 1: trembling fingers. He recognized it at once, though he had
Speaker 1: long forgotten everything about the story, remembered the ink stain
Speaker 1: on the title page, and then with a shock of recollection,
Speaker 1: he came on the fiftieth page, which he had pinned
Speaker 1: down in childhood. The pins were still there. He touched
Speaker 1: them again, the very pins which his trembling, childish fingers
Speaker 1: had used so long ago. He turned to the beginning.
Speaker 1: He was determined to read it to the end now
Speaker 1: and discover what it was all about. He felt that
Speaker 1: it must all be set down there in print, and
Speaker 1: though in childhood he could not understand it, he would
Speaker 1: be able to fathom it now. It was called The
Speaker 1: Midnight Express, And as he read the first paragraph he
Speaker 1: began to dawn upon him, slowly, fearfully, inevitably. It was
Speaker 1: the story of a man who, in childhood, long ago,
Speaker 1: had chanced upon a book in which there was a
Speaker 1: picture that frightened him. He had grown up and forgotten it,
Speaker 1: and one night, upon a lonely railway platform, he had
Speaker 1: found himself in the remembered scene of that picture. He
Speaker 1: had confronted the solitary figure under the lamp, recognized it,
Speaker 1: and fled in panic, had taken shelter in a wayside cottage,
Speaker 1: had been led to an upper room, found the book
Speaker 1: awaiting him, and had begun to read it right through
Speaker 1: to the very end at last. And this book, too,
Speaker 1: was called The Midnight Express, and it was the story
Speaker 1: of a man who in childhood it would go on
Speaker 1: thus forever and forever and forever. There was no escape.
Speaker 1: But when the story came to the wayside cottage for
Speaker 1: the third time, a deeper suspicion began to dawn upon him, slowly, fearfully, inevitably.
Speaker 1: Although there was no escape, he could at last try
Speaker 1: to grasp more clearly the details of the strange circle,
Speaker 1: the fearful wheel in which he was moving. There was
Speaker 1: nothing new about the details. They've been there all the time,
Speaker 1: but he had not grasped their significance. That was all
Speaker 1: the strange and dreadful being that had led him up
Speaker 1: the crooked stair. Who and what was that the story
Speaker 1: mentioned something that had escaped him. The strange host who
Speaker 1: had given him shelter was about his own height. Could
Speaker 1: it be that he also? And was this why the
Speaker 1: face was hidden? At the very moment when he asked
Speaker 1: himself that question, he heard the click of the key
Speaker 1: in the locked door. The strange host was entering, moving
Speaker 1: towards him from behind, casting a grotesque shadow, larger than
Speaker 1: human on the white walls in the guttering candlelight. It
Speaker 1: was there, seated on the other side of the fire,
Speaker 1: facing him, with a horrible nonchalance, as a woman might
Speaker 1: prepare to remove a veil. It raised its hands to
Speaker 1: unwind the sere cloth from its face. He knew to
Speaker 1: whom it would belong. Would it be living or dead?
Speaker 1: There was no way but one. As Mortimer plunged forward
Speaker 1: and seized the tormentor by the throat, his own throat
Speaker 1: was gripped but the same brutal force. The echoes of
Speaker 1: their strangled cry were indistinguishable, And when the last confused
Speaker 1: sounds died out together, the stillness of the room was
Speaker 1: so deep that you might have heard the ticking of
Speaker 1: the old grandfather clock and the long drawn, rhythmical ah
Speaker 1: of the sea on a distant coast thirty eight years ago.
Speaker 1: But Mortimer had escaped at last, Perhaps after all, he
Speaker 1: had caught the Midnight Express. It was a battered old
Speaker 1: book bound in red Buckram. Everybody dies, everybody there. That
Speaker 1: was Midnight Express by Alfred Noise. And sometimes you see
Speaker 1: it as the Midnight Express. But the version I've got
Speaker 1: from the anthology I got was Midnight Express. So the
Speaker 1: first thing is I'll tell you something about Alfred Noise himself. So.
Speaker 1: He was born in eighteen eighty died in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: He was an English poet, storyteller and popular man of
Speaker 1: letters who his career traces a revealing archromade Wardian romance
Speaker 1: the mid twentieth century cultural critique. He was born in
Speaker 1: Wolverhampton and the West Midlands, in on sixteenth September eighteen eighty.
Speaker 1: His dad was also Alfred and his wife was Amelia Adams,
Speaker 1: and he spent formative years in Aberystwyth in Wales, where
Speaker 1: his father taught Latin and Greek, and the Welsh coast
Speaker 1: and mountains left a permanent mark on his imagination. In
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety eight he went up to Exeter College, Oxford,
Speaker 1: where he rode energetically and studied fitfully. The often repeated
Speaker 1: anecdote that he missed part of his finals to seize
Speaker 1: publisher about his first book is essentially true. His debut collection,
Speaker 1: The Loom of Years nineteen oh two cost him a
Speaker 1: degree but secured him a reputation. The volume was warmly
Speaker 1: received by established figures such as W. B. Yates and
Speaker 1: George Meredith, and it sold well with the general public
Speaker 1: as well, so after that the decade after that he
Speaker 1: became famous. This was his arrival. So between nineteen oh
Speaker 1: three and nineteen oh eight he issued a stream of
Speaker 1: verse volumes, The Flower Rolled Japan, The Forest of Wild
Speaker 1: Time Poems, which contained the Barrel Organ, and he quickly
Speaker 1: became one of the most commercially successful poets in English.
Speaker 1: The High Women Imagine being a commercially successful poet these days.
Speaker 1: The High Women, first published in Blackwood's magazine in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh six and reprinted the following year in forty. Singing
Speaker 1: Seamen and other poems, remained his most enduring worker, Ballad
Speaker 1: of Doomed Love, remembered for its incantatory refrains and vivid,
Speaker 1: almost cinematic imagery. The same time, he embarked on a
Speaker 1: large scale historical narrative, especially Drake and English Epic, which
Speaker 1: he did over nineteen oh six and to nineteen oh eight,
Speaker 1: a twelve book blank verse treatment of Sir Francis Drake
Speaker 1: and Elizabethan SeaWorld, which aligned his poetic manner with that
Speaker 1: of Tennison and the late Romantics. By his early thirties
Speaker 1: he'd done all this, you know, when he was a
Speaker 1: young man. He published multiple substantial volumes, gathered his work
Speaker 1: in collective form, and became, in the phrase of one critic,
Speaker 1: the most popular poet of his generation among ordinary readers,
Speaker 1: even as more fastidious review as being the cool on him.
Speaker 1: So he was a professional writer as well as a
Speaker 1: literary one. He wrote in short stories, essays, criticism, and
Speaker 1: fiction alongside poetry, and was industrious in cultivating Transatlantic audiences
Speaker 1: he saw the bulk of the people lived. In nineteen
Speaker 1: oh seven, he married Garner Daniel's, daughter of an American diplomat,
Speaker 1: a union that anchored him socially and emotionally to the
Speaker 1: United States. He had successful lectures there in nineteen thirteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: and he was appointed as professor of Modern English literature
Speaker 1: at Princeton University, where he was until nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 1: His students included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson, and
Speaker 1: his public persona urbane, patriotic eloquent, made him a natural
Speaker 1: platform figure. He had further experiments in narrative poetry and drama,
Speaker 1: such as Robin Hood plus He's Robin Hood play Sorry
Speaker 1: Sherwood nineteen eleven, which was later retitled Robbinhood well. In
Speaker 1: the First World War, he was rejected for frontline service
Speaker 1: because of poor eyesight, and he worked for the Foreign
Speaker 1: Office alongside John Buchan on propaganda and morale building projects.
Speaker 1: He wrote some conventional patriotic verse and setales, and also
Speaker 1: produced more reflective work, notably the long anti war poem
Speaker 1: The Wine Press, which depicts in unsparing terms the suffering
Speaker 1: and futility of modern conflict. The Victory Ball, inspired by
Speaker 1: his disgusted post war frivolity in London while the Dead
Speaker 1: was scarcely Buried, became his best known war poem. Its
Speaker 1: refrain under the dancing feet are the Graves indicts the
Speaker 1: forgetfulness of the living. After the war, he continued to
Speaker 1: produce fiction and tales of the uncannic ghost stories such
Speaker 1: as Lucitania Weights and The log of the Evening Star
Speaker 1: are still anthologized, are they? Though this anthology? I've got
Speaker 1: quite an older one to nineteen eighties one, so he wrote.
Speaker 1: He was an agnostic originally and became increasingly preoccupied, preoccupied
Speaker 1: with relationship between science, faith and civilization, and he wrote
Speaker 1: a trilogy called of poems called The Torch Bearers Watchers
Speaker 1: of the Sky in nineteen twenty two, The Book of
Speaker 1: the Earth nineteen twenty five, and The Last Voyage nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: His private life in the twenties was marked by loss
Speaker 1: and reorientation. Garnet Noise died in nineteen twenty six when
Speaker 1: they were visiting friends in Saint gen dulus I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's French or Spanish. Saint gen Duluze.
Speaker 1: I guess Luth would be in Spanisher, not with the
Speaker 1: Cumbrian accento, an event that pushed him further in Wood
Speaker 1: and Sharpeney's religious search. In nineteen twenty seven he married
Speaker 1: Mary angela Man, the widow of a Catholic officer, and
Speaker 1: he himself was received into the Roman Catholic Church. And
Speaker 1: then he wrote a book about how he became a
Speaker 1: Catholic in nineteen thirty four. So he then settled in
Speaker 1: the Isle of Wight at Lyle Coumney Ventna, and he
Speaker 1: was a defender of tradition against the disintegrating forces in
Speaker 1: the modern world. He might choice of Shakespeare, Milton Johnson,
Speaker 1: bove All, Tennyson, I've got a lot of notes on him.
Speaker 1: And then in these final decades Bouts of ill health
Speaker 1: and failing eyesight forced him to dictate rather than write.
Speaker 1: He spent much of the Second World War in North
Speaker 1: America lecturing for the Allied cause, before returning permanently to
Speaker 1: the Isle of White in nineteen forty nine. Alongside serious work,
Speaker 1: he produced lighter pieces, notably Childham's children's verse Daddy Fell
Speaker 1: in the Pond, the title piece of A nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: two and he died of polio and the Isle of
Speaker 1: Wight in June fifty eight and was buried in the
Speaker 1: Catholic Cemetery Saint Save Years at Totland. By that time,
Speaker 1: his reputation had sunk. He was an embodiment of an
Speaker 1: obsolete sentimental format sentimental formally conservative strain of verse. But
Speaker 1: he keeps coming through. Now. I thought this was an
Speaker 1: interesting story, really, So This One Midnight Express was published
Speaker 1: on the third November nineteen thirty five, significantly in an
Speaker 1: American newspaper supplement called This Week in many anthologies, So
Speaker 1: when we look at it, we think it's not the
Speaker 1: story that's important. You could probably give the bare plot
Speaker 1: in about two sentences and lose nothing, should we do it?
Speaker 1: So basically, a man reads a book as a small
Speaker 1: boy which haunts him. He finds himself in that situation,
Speaker 1: and he finds himself kind of in the story, just
Speaker 1: repeating it round and round and round, and it's a
Speaker 1: bit horrific. There you go, we'll not really sure what happened.
Speaker 1: But what we have is we have this low, insistent
Speaker 1: field of dread which settles on the reader. And when
Speaker 1: you find out what technically what happened. So it isn't
Speaker 1: the narrative that creates the dread in some cases, you know,
Speaker 1: in a traditional suspense novel, it's the narrative that racks
Speaker 1: up those emotions. Whereas this is the descriptions. You can
Speaker 1: tell he's a poet, the poetic nature of the prose.
Speaker 1: The imagery, you know, very significant imagery. What we got,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know you could paint. You could do
Speaker 1: a fantastic graphic novel of it. Actually, so somebody should
Speaker 1: do it, not me. I can't draw. But you know
Speaker 1: you've got the Red Book, haven't you? That? Very the
Speaker 1: book read bookrom book and the where he you know,
Speaker 1: him reading it with the stolen candle stubs in this
Speaker 1: Elizabethan mansion bag on what a picture. And then you
Speaker 1: have him pinning the Then you've got the illustration that
Speaker 1: he doesn't want to see of the lonely platform with
Speaker 1: the single figure and the pins in the book, and
Speaker 1: then basically you have then it morphing. So he's on
Speaker 1: that platform and then you know, it's so visual, is
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to say. And then he goes. Then
Speaker 1: he's greeted by this sear cloth. It's like a Muslim cloth,
Speaker 1: I think around the face. And I should have actually
Speaker 1: looked it up rather than just guessing what it was.
Speaker 1: To me, I saw this figure with a like you know,
Speaker 1: like they make puddings with Muslim Muslim Muslim Muslim. I
Speaker 1: was mixed those two words up. They're quite different in meaning.
Speaker 1: And you know, over his fiast, as we'd say, and
Speaker 1: he's led up the stairs with candlelight and you can
Speaker 1: just again the graphic imagery and he sits in this
Speaker 1: room with the fire and the armchairs, and there's the book,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's it. It's just the images. And
Speaker 1: so I think it's the it's the weirdness a little bit.
Speaker 1: It's like the just it's the dreamlike nightmarish quality of
Speaker 1: the images. It doesn't feel totally real. It is it's vibe.
Speaker 1: I keep coming back to this, don't I so? And
Speaker 1: it's a dejah vous terror as well. It's you know,
Speaker 1: we've been here before. I'm going to come back to
Speaker 1: that in a minute. So you know, it's it's a
Speaker 1: clearly set up. It's a short story. I mean, it
Speaker 1: is one of the shortest ones I've done for a
Speaker 1: long time. I'm usually doing the hourly ones, and I've
Speaker 1: been doing the long added The Willows by Blackwood, I
Speaker 1: did Great god Pan by mac and the first Book
Speaker 1: of the Beatle by Richard Marshall. These are all like
Speaker 1: three hour jobs, you know, and this is a much
Speaker 1: shorter story. It's nice to have a bit of a change.
Speaker 1: So when I was reading him, because of the poetics,
Speaker 1: I was, you know, you've got like the Highwayman, and
Speaker 1: you've got Walter Delomairez the Listeners, haven't you? And who
Speaker 1: was a poet? And of course one of my favorite
Speaker 1: book I'm looking at and I was Behold This Dreamer
Speaker 1: and Anthology by Delamaire. So there is something about Delamare
Speaker 1: is really good at conjuring these gothicky images. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of All Hallows. But you know, a lot of his
Speaker 1: books are like that. They've got a vibe, you know,
Speaker 1: and he's a very poetic writer. But I would say
Speaker 1: that Delamare has more story. All hallows is it's kind
Speaker 1: of short on story. It's a little bit like this,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the other stuff we've done by
Speaker 1: Delamare has a bit more story. So when we think
Speaker 1: about the so Delamaire tends to dissolve plot into mood,
Speaker 1: whereas noise hardens plot into a loop. In this story,
Speaker 1: childhood encounter book within the book and then they're strangling
Speaker 1: that follows us back into the opening line. I mean,
Speaker 1: this idea of a story within a story is sort
Speaker 1: of very Arabian Nights. What was his name, Irwin? A
Speaker 1: book called the Arabian Nightmare and he, oh, what's his
Speaker 1: first name? Is famous Arabist and he did this story
Speaker 1: based on the Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights famously our
Speaker 1: stories within stories, and it's a it's a technique of
Speaker 1: nesting a story within a story, which I really quite like.
Speaker 1: And there's that's what we're seeing here. But you know,
Speaker 1: so we say Walter Delomare tends to dissolve plot into mood,
Speaker 1: and this is this loop, where As you may argue
Speaker 1: that Delomare understructures his tales until they're almost pure implication.
Speaker 1: I think of the last one we did, the Recluse.
Speaker 1: You know nothing which happens in that really, and they're
Speaker 1: almost pure implication. Almost nothing happens, and nothing is what
Speaker 1: disturbs you. That's still a maire so noise. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, although he's a poet as well and uses
Speaker 1: that imagery, and I've just been talking about the imagery
Speaker 1: and the vibe that he conjures with the candles and
Speaker 1: these faces and the lonely I've just said that there
Speaker 1: isn't a lot of plot, but it is essential to
Speaker 1: the drive of the story. I think. I think the
Speaker 1: point I've just made there is quite weak, if you
Speaker 1: don't mind me saying, now we've got this idea of
Speaker 1: the trapped cycle, my mind being what it is, it
Speaker 1: runs off into tangents, doesn't it. So I just knocked
Speaker 1: the microphone. Sorry. So the tangents that I came to
Speaker 1: were Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return, and of
Speaker 1: course Black Mirror, and and also Lewis Borges, you know,
Speaker 1: the Argentinian writer with these kind of loops and playing
Speaker 1: with time. So what we have we think Borcas's stories.
Speaker 1: You know, we think a Groundhog Day, of course, the
Speaker 1: movie Groundhog Day, whereby you're stuck in his repeating loop.
Speaker 1: So it's it's it is, It's not an unfamiliar trope.
Speaker 1: With Borcas. We have like the Circular Ruins, where the
Speaker 1: dreamer spends his life constructing a man in dreams, only
Speaker 1: to discover at the end that he himself is in
Speaker 1: another's dream, you know, immune to fire because he's not real.
Speaker 1: And then we have not necessarily circul but sometimes circular
Speaker 1: but self referential, the Library of Babel, the Immortal Garden,
Speaker 1: the Fucking Path Death, and the Compass, where characters moving
Speaker 1: structures that repeat branch your full back and the terrorized
Speaker 1: in discovering that one's freedom is framed by an inhuman design.
Speaker 1: I think this is a really important theme. It isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily implicit in this story. Well, no, it is implicit
Speaker 1: in this story potentially, but it's not explicit, whereas in
Speaker 1: some of the Borcher stories. It is whereby this idea
Speaker 1: that we believe we're living a free life, and yet
Speaker 1: we are doomed to repeat patterns. Do you see what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, and so certainly that's what's happening here. He
Speaker 1: doesn't suspect there's a boy that he is trapped in
Speaker 1: a loop that he's going to he's going to be repeating.
Speaker 1: And of course, you know Black Mirror, the very successful
Speaker 1: speculative fiction series on TV. It often uses these literal
Speaker 1: or digital loops, and they have the White Bear, which
Speaker 1: traps his protagonist in the daily reset of terror, amnesia,
Speaker 1: in public humiliation, humiliation. The same scenario is performed again
Speaker 1: and again as punishment and spectacle. The repetition itself is
Speaker 1: a toment that we have Black Museum extended with digital
Speaker 1: cookies forced in the cycles of suffering and display. And
Speaker 1: the anthology as a whole hints that uploaded consciousness stuck
Speaker 1: in endless inescapable similars, and then we have this idea
Speaker 1: of eternal, indefinite route but they usually coded as hell.
Speaker 1: So you get this, you can you can do different
Speaker 1: things with this. So the Groundhog Day could be hell,
Speaker 1: but there's there's comedy in there, and there is a lighter,
Speaker 1: and there's a possibility of escape, and in this story
Speaker 1: there is no I don't think there's a possibility of escape.
Speaker 1: In this story the amid Night Express, not even amid
Speaker 1: Night Express, Midnight Express. This guy's going to loop around.
Speaker 1: It was introduced to him as a child, and that
Speaker 1: was the kind of it, the tip they should have
Speaker 1: been the tip off, and he's doomed to just repeat
Speaker 1: and go around. So in a sense, it is almost
Speaker 1: an imprisonment, a hellish imprisonment. So different writers play with this.
Speaker 1: Usually it's implicitly awful. It's usually quite horrific, this idea
Speaker 1: that we will never escape and related to that. So
Speaker 1: I think you can have it where it's just like
Speaker 1: a feature of you know that the sun goes comes
Speaker 1: around every day, the year repeats itself. We don't find
Speaker 1: these essentially horrific. But and so on the one hand,
Speaker 1: we can have these loop stories whereby they're not horrific grind.
Speaker 1: I don't find I enjoy groundhog Day. And some of
Speaker 1: the barker stuff is just interesting. It has an edge
Speaker 1: of unpleasantness, I think, But some are explicitly some of
Speaker 1: the black mirrors of is explicitly horrific. We're stuck here.
Speaker 1: So my point here is that in some cases it's
Speaker 1: just a feature of natural The natural system like the
Speaker 1: sun coming up. In others, there is a hint that
Speaker 1: there's a malign intelligence behind it. And this is what
Speaker 1: I think links it totally. My mind skips over, but
Speaker 1: I think these are you know, Germaine links. We have
Speaker 1: the love Crafting idea of cosmic horror, whereby we are
Speaker 1: the pawns of huge powers. And I think often in
Speaker 1: Lovecraft were mostly in love Craft. It's not that they
Speaker 1: have they just we're nothing to them, you know, It's
Speaker 1: like us stepping on an ant hill. So but our
Speaker 1: lives are totally conditioned by these huge things, and we
Speaker 1: find out about it, we're going to go mad because
Speaker 1: our insignificance. But what I'm driving at in some of
Speaker 1: these stories we edge towards not the just the cosmic insignificance.
Speaker 1: So we have it's just a feature of the natural world.
Speaker 1: And so what you know, like in groundog Day, I
Speaker 1: feel like and then we have, yes, it's a feature
Speaker 1: of the natural world. These are these huge, powerful things
Speaker 1: that could crush us, but they don't mean it's any
Speaker 1: harm that you don't care about us, but it's still
Speaker 1: fairly terrifying. And then we edge into this idea that
Speaker 1: actually this is being done in kind of some kind
Speaker 1: of demonic way, and these loops are deliberately created for
Speaker 1: us out of wickedness and evil in order to make
Speaker 1: us suffer. Do you see what I'm saying now? This
Speaker 1: I always was really interested when I used to work
Speaker 1: with people with paranoid schizophrenia, because this is a recurrent
Speaker 1: feature of paranoid schizophrenia, particularly that they feel that they
Speaker 1: are not that this whole thing is a facade. It's
Speaker 1: a Truman show if you like, and this isn't Truman's
Speaker 1: is not in a loop, of course. So there are
Speaker 1: two ideas of the idea of the loop, and there's
Speaker 1: the idea of the world being controlled by shadowy, evil
Speaker 1: forces who don't mince any good. But you can put
Speaker 1: the two together and make it especially horrible. So what
Speaker 1: I'm saying about the paranoid schizophrenics, I used to find that,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes there were religious so it was demons
Speaker 1: who were doing this, and demons were in control of
Speaker 1: the world, and demons were trying to manipulate them and
Speaker 1: had power. And then there was the other ones that
Speaker 1: were you know, it was the CIA, or it was
Speaker 1: the KGB, or was m I five or it was
Speaker 1: the police, that those were really common, but always it's
Speaker 1: shadowy forces whose most tives are very unclear. And when
Speaker 1: you press these people about why they'd want to do this.
Speaker 1: I remember doing this kind of technique. Very lovely woman,
Speaker 1: and she had this idea she'd probably be dead now.
Speaker 1: She had this idea that she was being watched by
Speaker 1: the police, and they'd fixed cameras in her This is
Speaker 1: really common because being watched is really important in these
Speaker 1: paranoid delusions, and they'd fixed cameras in her house, everywhere
Speaker 1: she went. And so I did a kind of a
Speaker 1: CBT thing and deconstruction of it, which is to say, well,
Speaker 1: where's the evidence for this. Let's reduce it to absurdity,
Speaker 1: you know, reductio ad absurdum, and let's think about this.
Speaker 1: So why is it? Well, because she'd been on holiday
Speaker 1: to Spain and she'd had this thought, which they call
Speaker 1: the psychotic insight, which is usually nonsense. And then of
Speaker 1: course when you build on that, very often that everything
Speaker 1: follows logically, but it's the initial psychotic insight which is
Speaker 1: the delusion. And this in her case, she believed that
Speaker 1: the Spanish police thought that she was a prostitute. So
Speaker 1: you might arguably say, well, well there are lots of
Speaker 1: prostitutes in Spain and they don't do this to them.
Speaker 1: And they and you know, even if they thought the
Speaker 1: Spanish police thought you were a prostitute when you'd left Spain,
Speaker 1: you weren't their problem anymore. You're only there on holiday. Nobody.
Speaker 1: In her view, it was such an important thing. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I was burgled, I had my car broken into. They
Speaker 1: never even turned up. Man, you know, why are they
Speaker 1: going to do this? I didn't actually say that, but
Speaker 1: you know, so I'm saying I can't see it would
Speaker 1: be a p and there are prostitutes in where we lived,
Speaker 1: and they don't do this to them, or do they
Speaker 1: Well she didn't know that, but they did with her.
Speaker 1: So then we worked out I said, well, how many
Speaker 1: rooms have you got? We worked out how many cameras
Speaker 1: and it was a multitude of cameras are in the
Speaker 1: garden as well. And I said, so let's think about this.
Speaker 1: They've got somebody having to this is before AI. Somebody
Speaker 1: have to watch these cameras, and they've got to do
Speaker 1: twenty four hours. So they're going to be a shift
Speaker 1: system and they've got to be paid they've got to
Speaker 1: have holidays. There's going to be sick sickness, somebody's going
Speaker 1: to have to process it. There's going to have to
Speaker 1: be analysts looking at it. And they've never even approached
Speaker 1: you to accuse you of anything. So this is phenomenally expensive.
Speaker 1: And of course she said to me, she's a lovely woman.
Speaker 1: She said, oh, yeah, I can see that. That doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense to it, I said, And I thought
Speaker 1: I was getting somewhere, you know. And then she said,
Speaker 1: but look at that leaf, And I said, well, she's moved,
Speaker 1: hasn't it. I don't know, Yes, she said, it's moved
Speaker 1: since I was last year. They've been here. And so
Speaker 1: this idea of the paranoid obviously, this is only one
Speaker 1: of many, many cases, this paranoid observation. And you see
Speaker 1: it in a less strong form, a weaker form, in
Speaker 1: sort of conspiracy theories, These ideas that people would go
Speaker 1: to a huge lengths to pretend people have gone to
Speaker 1: the moon, and the arguments they'll raise a sound on
Speaker 1: the face of it superficially attract Well, it's very expensive
Speaker 1: and much easier not to go and just to pretend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but you know, why would you do that, or
Speaker 1: you know that the world's flat and it's just been
Speaker 1: withheld from us that aliens are in touch with but
Speaker 1: the governments are just not letting us know. And this
Speaker 1: idea of shadowy powers who were deceiving us. Now, don't
Speaker 1: get me wrong, I do believe that the governments do
Speaker 1: deceive us. See, there's an there's there's an issue of
Speaker 1: a kernel of truth in all of these things. It's
Speaker 1: is when you've extrapolated to huge things. That's my I
Speaker 1: mean a lot of people, I swear to you, a
Speaker 1: lot of people will be listening to this who believe
Speaker 1: these things and they think and I've been called it.
Speaker 1: I had one guy contact me, called me an agent
Speaker 1: of an asset of the deep state. I'm like, they
Speaker 1: don't pay me, mate, So you know, if I am
Speaker 1: an asset, I want I want paying conditions set out
Speaker 1: and I want to be generously paid, and they're not
Speaker 1: paying me. So of course if they offered to pay me,
Speaker 1: I would refuse, just as we're clear anyway. So anyway,
Speaker 1: so I've gone a long way about that, this idea.
Speaker 1: And let's talk about Fredrik Nietzsche. So Fredrik Nietzsche famously
Speaker 1: had this idea of the eternal return. So he was
Speaker 1: a German philosopher. He came across his idea or he
Speaker 1: concocted this idea in eighteen eighties, and it was only
Speaker 1: these fundamental ideas, and he talked it was so important.
Speaker 1: This actually sounds like a psychotic moment. Actually he had
Speaker 1: this in August eighteen eighty one. This is usually how
Speaker 1: they strike walking by Lake Silver Plan in Switzerland, when
Speaker 1: the thoughts struck him with the force of a revelation.
Speaker 1: Sounds like a psychotic inside to me, what if everything occurs?
Speaker 1: But what I mean by that is it feels tremendously significant.
Speaker 1: So if you ever thought and you think, oh well,
Speaker 1: Coronation Streets on half past seven, doesn't hit you with
Speaker 1: that revelation. Or you might think, do you know what,
Speaker 1: I think the council is wasting my council tax money
Speaker 1: and that doesn't hit you with the revelation. But it
Speaker 1: might be, you know, you might have this wonderful inside
Speaker 1: that whoa, this is the most important things in slave spread.
Speaker 1: I have a mission now too, And this is something
Speaker 1: welling up from the unconscious. You're being possessed by the
Speaker 1: unconscious in this idea, and that isn't the same as
Speaker 1: the demonic possession. So anyway, there's nature and this idea,
Speaker 1: everything occurs, reoccurs. You must live the same life again,
Speaker 1: innumerable tile times, in every detail. So he writes this
Speaker 1: in a stark thought experiment at the end of book
Speaker 1: four of the Gay Science, known as Joyous Joyous Science.
Speaker 1: It's not they don't call it gay science anymore. I
Speaker 1: got a version of it, and it was called the
Speaker 1: Joyous visten Shaft joyous Knowledge. I eyed in English, but
Speaker 1: it's translated from German. And then then it becomes the
Speaker 1: central motif of Thus spoke Zarathustra eighteen eighty eight, eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty five. Family from working and come on, and he
Speaker 1: struggles with the horror then the demand to affirm this doctrine.
Speaker 1: So this idea of cyclical stuff. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: if it was a belief, and it's not clear to me,
Speaker 1: and it may be clear that somebody's read in more
Speaker 1: detail that he actually believed this was the truth, and
Speaker 1: we just we just cycle through the same life in
Speaker 1: every detail. We don't know it. And it becomes a
Speaker 1: thought experiment in his philosophy, and what it is saying
Speaker 1: is if you knew that you were just reliving this
Speaker 1: life exactly as it is to return eternally, and you're
Speaker 1: you can affirm it, you're complaining and go, yes, I'm
Speaker 1: living my life as I want to, and if I
Speaker 1: have to live it all again, I affirm it, and
Speaker 1: I will do that. If you recall in horror from it,
Speaker 1: you you know, this is the thought examerly and there's
Speaker 1: something wrong with the way you live in your life.
Speaker 1: I think that's the basis of it. And then and
Speaker 1: then he's earlier than the existentialist. But we get to
Speaker 1: something like Jean Paul Sartre who talks about good faith,
Speaker 1: which is this idea, you know, you need to live
Speaker 1: your life in a way that you that you can
Speaker 1: philosophically sleep at night with it, that you you know,
Speaker 1: the things that you do are in accord with how
Speaker 1: you believe you should be living your life. Because many
Speaker 1: of us, many of us have ideas that we should
Speaker 1: be doing this, but we don't do it. And in
Speaker 1: Satra's terms, that would be bad faith, and in I
Speaker 1: think in Nietzschees terms, that would be you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: you would be recoiling from this eternal Recouncil. So the
Speaker 1: link between this is just this idea. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that Alfred Noise is making this point. I'm saying I
Speaker 1: think my whole point has been that the idea of
Speaker 1: the eternal return is horrific, easily slips into horror. But
Speaker 1: Nietzsche's point is you should live a life that you affirm,
Speaker 1: you say yes to it, not erasing suffering, not by
Speaker 1: editing the past, not by doing anything different, but just
Speaker 1: just accept your life. And he called this amor fati
Speaker 1: the love of one's fate. And this, to me again
Speaker 1: is really similar to Albert Kamu's idea of the accepting life,
Speaker 1: you know, the absurd. You know, he was said that,
Speaker 1: you know, life is absurd and there is no comfort
Speaker 1: in it, but you've got to accept it as it is.
Speaker 1: So I meaning cas Camus life. You know, he no,
Speaker 1: he lived through the Second World War, or he lived
Speaker 1: through the Alga He was Algerian, his French Algerian. He's
Speaker 1: you know, all the bloody Algerian War there. And his
Speaker 1: view was, you know, this is dreadful, this is awful.
Speaker 1: He didn't he didn't go along with it, but he
Speaker 1: and yeah, any suffering that one has in life. You
Speaker 1: just accept it, you know. And so he has this
Speaker 1: famous point about Sisyphus, you know, the myth of Sisyphus,
Speaker 1: who's condemned every day to puck push the rock up
Speaker 1: the hill and it rolls down. He pushes it up.
Speaker 1: Now we can easily imagine this is being hell. This
Speaker 1: is the eternal return as hell, isn't it. So Camus says,
Speaker 1: we need to imagine Sisyphus happy he's living this life.
Speaker 1: But he affirms the life. This is the Nietzsche idea,
Speaker 1: the amor fati, this is my fate. I affirm my life.
Speaker 1: How do you respond? So it's how do you respond?
Speaker 1: You see, it's a it's a big ask your choice.
Speaker 1: So so basically radical responsibility. You are responsible for every
Speaker 1: choice you make for all ways. No merely a phase.
Speaker 1: It's no temporary and you can't justify it. This is
Speaker 1: terrible now, but history or God uposterity will redeem it.
Speaker 1: You have to live in it. Now. It's hard. It's hard.
Speaker 1: It's hard, so you live in good faith to accept
Speaker 1: that each act. I'm mixing my metaphors here because of course,
Speaker 1: NEETs you would say amor fati the affirm in your life.
Speaker 1: It's to talk about good faith and bad faith is satra.
Speaker 1: But if you live in bad faith is to act
Speaker 1: as if what you do now does not fully belong
Speaker 1: to you, as if you could disown it later or
Speaker 1: tuck it away. So basically like when you eat that
Speaker 1: chocolate bar. You don't want to eat that chocolate bar,
Speaker 1: but you do. You go, ah, yeah, I'll make up
Speaker 1: for it later on, or pretend I didn't do it,
Speaker 1: or I'll go to the gym. I'm logging my calories,
Speaker 1: but I won't log that one. This is bad faith,
Speaker 1: you know. Whereas if you eat the chocolate bar and
Speaker 1: you log it and accept it, that's good faith in
Speaker 1: a in a simple way, in an oversimplified way. So
Speaker 1: if Nietzsche's demon says this will happen again, and Camos says,
Speaker 1: CAMRA's not tied up to the I mean he talks
Speaker 1: about Cissus and repeating that, but live it lucidly and
Speaker 1: without resignation, because don't become nihilistic. So the two sides
Speaker 1: of it really are, don't you know, accept responsibility for
Speaker 1: your life, live it as you feel you should, don't
Speaker 1: give yourself excuses. But in the same same way. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: be happy doing it, accept it. You know, no metaphysical guarantees.
Speaker 1: So anyway, so that's about all I want to say.
Speaker 1: And it's just my mind zipping about. And so it
Speaker 1: led us from this very simple vibe story of Albert Noise,
Speaker 1: which I thought was very well done, to looking how
Speaker 1: this eternal return theme has been handled, initially by somebody
Speaker 1: like Borges in fiction and also in the Black Mirror.
Speaker 1: Then looking a little bit about how although it doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily trip into a cosmic horror version of we are
Speaker 1: being controlled by forces beyond malign forces, evil forces, but
Speaker 1: certainly that hovers there at its worst as psychosis. And
Speaker 1: then we looked at, you know, this idea of the
Speaker 1: eternal return as almost demanding of us to live in
Speaker 1: good faith with it. And this is our life. Take
Speaker 1: responsibility for your life, live it happily, don't give yourself excuses,
Speaker 1: don't pretend things are going to be different, just you know,
Speaker 1: affirm your life as posed. So it's a bit of
Speaker 1: a wonder, but why not he makes up for the
Speaker 1: short story. It was a short story. So I've gabbled
Speaker 1: on for three times down into the story. Some people
Speaker 1: will complain about that will be coffee being thrown at walls,
Speaker 1: mugs will be smashing staining the world. Coffee stains really
Speaker 1: hard to get out of Magnolia paint as well, and
Speaker 1: especially if I've got the right kind of paint. What
Speaker 1: you find is when you're washing the coffee off, it'll
Speaker 1: come away or take the paint away. I mean you,
Speaker 1: I'd thrown the coffee at the wall many many times
Speaker 1: when I've been listening to podcasts and people have said
Speaker 1: things disagree with, thrown them at the wall. And then
Speaker 1: there's all the flat earthers and all the other people,
Speaker 1: the chem trail people all going you're a deep space asset,
Speaker 1: not deep space deep deep state asset. But maybe the
Speaker 1: same thing, because the deep space people are the ones
Speaker 1: who are controlling everything. Maybe that's how it links together. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Try not to be too insane. If you feel if
Speaker 1: you feelly becoming psychotic, do some gardening or build a wall.
Speaker 1: You've got to get in touch with the real world
Speaker 1: the earth, Walk your dog, pay attention to the flowers
Speaker 1: and you'll find there's a great healing in those men.
Speaker 1: Listen to the river, watch the sea, look at the clouds.
Speaker 1: Don't go any deeper. Just look at them. Dig that's it.
Speaker 1: That's my advice to you. Pick up stones and build
Speaker 1: a wall, do something useful. There we go. Yes, more
Speaker 1: bonkers than normal this week, but you know it keeps me,
Speaker 1: keeps me in work. Everybody dies, don't they. That's what
Speaker 1: you do. There Isn't that sting you tried to get
Speaker 1: into the lock drouble today? Didn't you try? How do that?
Speaker 1: They'd come back? And didn't you? Secrets a