What kind of mental process supports a vision of courgettes? By posing this question he was not seeking how it is that he factually saw an actual courgette, or any other actual vegetable, or indeed any other actual object at all.
He posed the question to himself without answering it after he had had a vision of courgettes, unprecedented in his previous experience, when he was doing an Elvis Presley impression on the lavatory of his small north London flat.
Recently whilst on holiday, he had witnessed an Elvis Presley impersonator, but this person had merely focused on the externals, mimicking the late Vegas period Elvis in a white, bell-bottomed suit embroidered with fake diamonds; he should instead have sat on the shit pan, semi-comatose, half naked and fat whilst falling asleep. That kind of thing could get someone a professorship in Fine Art nowadays, but what would the tattooed drunks who normally witness Elvis impersonators have made of it?
"Kim Sable?" as Tonto said to the Lone Ranger.
It was whilst in an advanced "Elvis" state, verging on consciousness, verging on death that he saw the courgettes. It was a state where thoughts extend themselves, the brain internally supplies half the next part of perception processing as the sensors shut down (or at least go into a "guard" state). In this state you can start off with an orange in your hand, you can peel it, you can eat it, taste it, throw away the peel, spit out the pips, feel the juice drip into your beard and be reminded of the evening in Cornwall when you sat on the beach with the curly haired girl; and still wake up with an untouched orange in your hand.
Or you might be woken by the thud of an orange hitting the floorboards of the lavatory and bathroom (combined) of a small north London flat and see it roll to the skirting board.
You could be here, there or anywhere, on any number of bus, on any street, in any concrete canyon, up a down or alp, hopping across any boulder fields, gliding in any pleasure boat. So why does one see courgettes?
It is not quite a dream, it is more vivid than a thought (for all his thoughts were typed on beige paper) but it is green repetitive and relentless. The wretched vegetables seem to be positioned horizontally overlapping one another like roof tiles and they're not doing anything. In "fact" no stems or leaves or ground from which they are growing can be discerned by him, so it is not clear whether the envisioned veg is a living, growing plant or plants or plucked fresh and shown in some sort of Greengrocer's display.
If the pseudo-sight of these green fruit was dredged up from some sort of brain disc de-fragmentation process, whereby semi-recollected globules of memory whizzed about between sections of his cold porridge, then these courgettes had once somewhere been presented by some irritatingly jolly costermonger or on some soulless hypermarket shelf.
He had probably never seen a courgette growing, he could only recall the obese marrows of the paternal compost heap in Fulham, so the origin of the courgettes was as a random offshoot of processing. If so could they genuinely be termed a vision?
They weren't technically a hallucination, because he knew that he was "Elvising" when he saw them (or almost immediately thereafter) but did they, like the visions of the Peyote-god reported in some (probably faked) accounts of cactus -induced visions, originate in some numenological manifestation of a meta-courgette?
They could still be part of a collective consciousness passed down faintly from whatever proto-celt neolithically domesticated the first wild courgette. Perhaps what he was seeing was a long lost memory of the huge courgette herd that once covered almost all the Eurasian landmass and, probably, the lost continent of Berenginia.
"The Pope has a urinary infection." A radio announcer said.
The courgettes vanished and with an arthritic knee-creak, he went over to the medicine cabinet, he placed one foot on a wooden stool, leant across and pressed a lever which sent some other stools off on their journey to the sea and now he was ready to commit fungicide between his toes.
He posed the question to himself without answering it after he had had a vision of courgettes, unprecedented in his previous experience, when he was doing an Elvis Presley impression on the lavatory of his small north London flat.
Recently whilst on holiday, he had witnessed an Elvis Presley impersonator, but this person had merely focused on the externals, mimicking the late Vegas period Elvis in a white, bell-bottomed suit embroidered with fake diamonds; he should instead have sat on the shit pan, semi-comatose, half naked and fat whilst falling asleep. That kind of thing could get someone a professorship in Fine Art nowadays, but what would the tattooed drunks who normally witness Elvis impersonators have made of it?
"Kim Sable?" as Tonto said to the Lone Ranger.
It was whilst in an advanced "Elvis" state, verging on consciousness, verging on death that he saw the courgettes. It was a state where thoughts extend themselves, the brain internally supplies half the next part of perception processing as the sensors shut down (or at least go into a "guard" state). In this state you can start off with an orange in your hand, you can peel it, you can eat it, taste it, throw away the peel, spit out the pips, feel the juice drip into your beard and be reminded of the evening in Cornwall when you sat on the beach with the curly haired girl; and still wake up with an untouched orange in your hand.
Or you might be woken by the thud of an orange hitting the floorboards of the lavatory and bathroom (combined) of a small north London flat and see it roll to the skirting board.
You could be here, there or anywhere, on any number of bus, on any street, in any concrete canyon, up a down or alp, hopping across any boulder fields, gliding in any pleasure boat. So why does one see courgettes?
It is not quite a dream, it is more vivid than a thought (for all his thoughts were typed on beige paper) but it is green repetitive and relentless. The wretched vegetables seem to be positioned horizontally overlapping one another like roof tiles and they're not doing anything. In "fact" no stems or leaves or ground from which they are growing can be discerned by him, so it is not clear whether the envisioned veg is a living, growing plant or plants or plucked fresh and shown in some sort of Greengrocer's display.
If the pseudo-sight of these green fruit was dredged up from some sort of brain disc de-fragmentation process, whereby semi-recollected globules of memory whizzed about between sections of his cold porridge, then these courgettes had once somewhere been presented by some irritatingly jolly costermonger or on some soulless hypermarket shelf.
He had probably never seen a courgette growing, he could only recall the obese marrows of the paternal compost heap in Fulham, so the origin of the courgettes was as a random offshoot of processing. If so could they genuinely be termed a vision?
They weren't technically a hallucination, because he knew that he was "Elvising" when he saw them (or almost immediately thereafter) but did they, like the visions of the Peyote-god reported in some (probably faked) accounts of cactus -induced visions, originate in some numenological manifestation of a meta-courgette?
They could still be part of a collective consciousness passed down faintly from whatever proto-celt neolithically domesticated the first wild courgette. Perhaps what he was seeing was a long lost memory of the huge courgette herd that once covered almost all the Eurasian landmass and, probably, the lost continent of Berenginia.
"The Pope has a urinary infection." A radio announcer said.
The courgettes vanished and with an arthritic knee-creak, he went over to the medicine cabinet, he placed one foot on a wooden stool, leant across and pressed a lever which sent some other stools off on their journey to the sea and now he was ready to commit fungicide between his toes.
The courgettes had prepared him for this act, perhaps they were a harbinger of the Pontiff's demise?
P.R. Murry
