N is for Nimbus, Night-time, Names, and Numbers. It is not for Normal, because I don’t know what that is.

 

N. The midway point. We’re halfway there, folks, and when we get there we’re all in for a surprise.

I went to my Chambers Dictionary to make sure I knew what Nimbus meant before I wobbled on with it. The first word that struck my when I opened the book was this: NEPHELOMETER. I wish I’d known of that word before I randomly plucked Nimbus from my cerebellum. I want a Nephelometer almost more than I want a copy of “Becoming Duchess Goldblatt”. But more of that later.

I thought I knew about Nimbus, and I was right. It was generous of Chambers to confirm it. I often feel as though I have a nimbus of my own: Jenny certainly does. A cloud of glowing light, surrounding its source. Jenny’s nimbus glows like a Chopin etude; delicate, flowering, as tough as old boots, and gentle as a lamb’s fleece. My own isn’t so nuanced. I feel often that there are dark reds in my nimbus, and fluorescent blues.

Shut your eyes for a moment and concentrate on your phosphenes: the various shapes and patterns that appear. Press your eyelids for an explosions of colour. These colours and shapes are hallucinatory in their manner, but not in their reality: an hallucination deceives, whereas you know from experience that the colours behind your closed eyelids aren’t “real”, whatever that may be. These are the colours of my nimbus. See them, and beware.

I experience this effect at Night-time, a part of the day when all sorts of mysteries abound. Owls and bats fly at night, as did the Britten Nimbus, an aircraft of great vintage. Of course, they only flew at night when circumstances were dire. They were more of a daylight aeroplane, and hopped from island to island. Although they never went from the Orkneys to the Falklands.

Oddly, I often “see” a field of pure blue when I close my eyes. I also see numbers. Columns of Numbers running down, Matrix-like, except they’re black on a yellow ground rather than green on black. So – did I take the red pill or the blue one?

I also see words. Semi-sentences, moving too fast for me to read. I don’t have my glasses on anyway. But words are easier to cope with than numbers.

I really don’t understand Numbers. I know what they’re for, and I can occasionally do reasonably complex mental arithmetic, and can work our percentages to a reasonable degree, but numbers often swirl when I see them on paper.

Which, naturally, brings me to my wallet. I was shaking the dead moths from my wallet the other day, and of course everything fell out. There’s a lot of stuff, I thought. My most important card, my Library Card. A rewards card from the baker and another from the local Cinema. There was my Driver’s License, a couple of EFTPOS cards, a receipt or two, a what-the-fuck-is-this-for card or two.

They all bore my name, and a number. Idly, I checked it out: I had 12 cards, 8 with my name and a unique number. My Library Card doesn’t bear my name, but it does have a number: a repository of words identifies me as a string of numerals. Hm. I am identified with one name, but also with a variety of numbers. Long numbers.

Numbers on cards, numbers on power bills, my IRD number, my health / hospital number. Even my car’s rego number has a number.

I well remember watching the TV series “The Prisoner” a hundred or two years ago. It’s a cult classic: if you haven’t seen it, check it out on You Tube. It’s an existential story, the challenge between an individual and the state. “I am not a number!” cries the chief protagonist.

But, of course, we are. Sigh.

 

An observation from me (an attempt at a Goldblatt-ism):

Love letters are born in the subconscious, flower in the conscious, and perish in the self-conscious.

 

A quote (not from Goldblatt), which I enjoyed:

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.

I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me.

That came from a chap called Terence, a playwright and former Roman slave, in 167BC.  

 

N-Poet quotes:

OGDEN NASH

I shall never see a billboard as lovely as a tree.

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.

 

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

 

ANAIS NIN

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, does protect you from age.

 

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

 

BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT.

This is a book I spotted at the Library the other day. Normally I wouldn’t look at a book like it, but – for some unknown reason – I pulled it from the shelf and took it home. The cover featured neither a swastika, nor a Spitfire, nor a suit-wearing man running away down a dramatically-lit street. It isn’t – gasp! – science fiction.

I opened it yesterday, and am half-way through it today. I have already ordered a copy from Books A Plenty, our independent bookshop.

It is a marvel. Written by the popular author “Anonymous” it is a memoir of the author and her creation, Duchess Goldblatt.

Check the Duchess out on Twitter, and enjoy. A better heart and mind it is difficult to conceive of.

And it is filled with Duchess Goldblatt tweets.

Examples, chosen at random:

I need an app that issues hourly reminders telling me which day of the week it is and that sorrow and joy are inseparable.

By the way: the earth got a little crooked and was running an uneven groove in its axis, so I added four hours to last Thursday to correct.

I plan to die by exploding into a million bits of light briefly illuminating my true form: a piece of paper that combusts and disappears.

 

NEXT TIME: O IS FOR OARSUM.