Nobody's Subject

Once upon a time there was a country, surrounded by sea and covered in forest that was quite nice; the people who lived there were decent folk who were pretty much all alike except for their dreams.

One of them decided to cut down the trees where he was and he discovered that he was on a hill, so he built a house there and put a sign outside saying: this is mine. The other people thought he was mad and ignored him.

One day, one of the decent folk had a dream to cross the waters to see what lay beyond. He cut down a tree and started to build a simple canoe but the mad man on the hill came along, said: that’s mineand took the tree up onto his hill.

This went on for a bit until the dreamer got fed up and asked his brother to help and so a fight ensured and the mad man on the hill killed the brother, so the dreamer decided to move to the other side of the island, where he built his canoe in secret and sailed away. I guess he made a sail to go with his canoe.

The mad man now had quite a lot of cut trees so he built a bigger house and made a bigger sign saying: this is mine, go away, and the people did, they thought the mad man had got even madder.

Another mad man who had four brothers, who were all very lazy decided they liked, the big house on the hill and climbed up there and chased the first mad man away. And because he did, run away, the five new mad men built a few more big houses and put up lots of signs of their own. They also built a fence around everything and put a very big sign up that said:keep out. The other dreamers either moved across the island or built their own canoes (and sails) and sailed away to see where the first dreamer had gone. They found their own beyonds.

Sometimes other mad men tried to do the same as the other mad men and cut down trees and built houses with signs on hills and believed the hills were their hills. And sometimes there were mad women who did the same, but not so often. And sometimes one group of mad men attacked another group of mad men and ended up with two hills; sometimes three.

Meanwhile there were lots of other people having different dreams that mainly didn’t include the mad men (or women).

One day, someone who had lived alone in the deep forest and knew none of this went for a walk and saw the distant hill and also saw another someone sitting by a lake dreaming. The first someone asked the other what the thing on the hill was and the second someone looked up and said: just some old dim gonk.

Her eyes were blue, the colour of the lake, and his eyes were the colour of the forest and they fell in love that night, partly because there was a full moon and partly because of their dreams that were full of moonlight. And they made children. And the children made children, and they were all dreamers. And the term dim gonks got used more and more and later got written into a dictionary as the first insult to be recorded.

The mad men and women grew to dislike it and sometimes smashed up the dreamers dreams in revenge, which just made the dreamers use the term more and more as well as making their dreams stronger and stronger.

One night, also one of a full moon, a mad man became even madder – he would have turned into a werewolf and howled if he could have – wrote dim gonkwith his own blood over and over and over again on the table top where he was sitting. Sometimes he wrote gonk dim, sometimes nkogmid and even gominkd before finally writing kingdom and running out of blood. The next morning other dim gonksfound him lifeless in a pool of blood and scribble and decided it was a message from god, something they had made up in their delirium one drunken night, and they changed all their signs to kingdom, keep out. And they started to proclaim: I’m king!

If you can’t get rid of an insult, it’s best to own it. 

The mad women did the same for a bit and then one day one amongst them said: that’s queer, I’m saying I’m king but I don’t look the same as you. Someone misheard and thought they had heard queen and very quickly the mad women were running around saying I’m Queen, always using a capital letter and it caught on among the kings who became Kings, and sometimes they fought over who had had the idea first, spilt more blood until there was just one.

The dreamers left them to it.

 

It was a full moon last night, 7.34.06pm central European time. I left my country a long time ago to travel to another, where there are no kings and queens but plenty of trees and warm seas. I’m not sure where central Europe is exactly but one day I might cut out the shape from a map, hang it on a pin and tried to calculate it.

 

But maybe that would be mad.