Humor Read online

  HUMOR

  Stanley Donwood

  To

  M + I + K

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Sanguine

  Happiness: A Guide

  Scent

  My Week

  Sky Sports

  Fingers

  Dracula

  Head and Shoulders

  Nearly Got

  Bond James Bond

  New Job

  Loyalty Card

  Airborne

  Futile Gesture

  Chip Shop

  Haunted

  Statue

  Seaside Town of Vampires

  Laboratory

  Big Bird

  Machete

  Burning Pub

  Rubbish Time Machine

  A Wet Night

  Love Story

  On Sundays Ring-Road Supermarket

  Aztec Procession

  Acting with Certainty

  Trouble with Neighbours

  Game

  A Quiet Afternoon

  Shears

  Phlegm

  Wage Packet

  Sell Your House and Buy Gold

  My Giro

  Here Be Dragons

  Peace and Quiet

  Condiment

  Straw

  Choler

  For Modern Living

  None of the Above

  Only a Nightmare

  Daydream

  Some Nuclear Reactors

  A Green Park for Business

  Except

  Perspective

  Sweaters

  Murder

  East Croydon

  Inflatable Black-Rubber Stately Home

  Midsummer’s Day in a Graveyard

  Camera

  Attraction

  Melancholy

  Very Cold

  Telescope

  Quiet Beckoning

  Romance

  Island of Doctor Moreau

  Space

  Faded Notice

  Lachrymose

  Designer-Outlet Village

  Rural Idyll

  Beautiful Story About

  Snuff

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  It happened every year. The first year it was not too bad; just a scream that died in my throat upon waking. The details of the dream were already cloudy in my mind; all I knew for certain was that it had been very, very bad. This was when I still had nightmares. I had a lot of nightmares, but this one was particularly unpleasant.

  Everyone has bad dreams; some more than others, some dreams worse than usual. What bothered me was that each year I had the same nightmare, but each time the dream contained the next part, the next … chapter. The events of this dream refreshed my memory of the previous one, and there was no doubt about it: it was a continuation. I became a little worried and I sought out books about dreams to salve my thoughts. I hadn’t paid much attention to books about dreams, but now I found out that there were many. A number of them dealt with the interpretation of dreams, but I wasn’t very convinced by them. I didn’t think that my dreams needed interpretation; they just needed stopping.

  I read Freud on dreams and Jung on dreams; I read R. D. Laing and I read a very odd and disturbing book called Lucid Dreams by Celia Green.* Lucid dreams are dreams in which you know you are dreaming. This alarmed me, as it indicated a fraying of the fabric between wakefulness and dreaming, and the dreams I was having were starting to suggest to me that any sort of fraying of this kind would be extremely dangerous. There were demons in my dreams and I had absolutely no desire to let them out.

  I was perhaps a little crazy. I thought that the nightmares were real, that what happened in them was as important as, or equal to, what happened to me during the day. The fear of the next chapter of one dream in particular – the one that was, I realised, due any time now – bothered me a great deal.

  And naturally it came. It was indescribably terrifying, a horrific, ghastly, full-colour epic featuring baskets full of severed heads, interminable periods of supermarket shopping, an electrifyingly fearsome man who continued to live and speak after I had smashed his brains out in a fireplace, and extremely beautiful rural scenery.

  I woke up, wrenched out of the nightmare as if dropped from a helicopter, pouring with cold sweat, wild-eyed and panicking. I knew now that the ‘man’ I had killed (but not killed) was a demon, or a devil, and that he/it was a particular demon; he was my demon. I felt hopelessly awful; this had, indeed, been the next part of the particular dream I had feared the most, and it was definitely getting ‘worse’.

  I wasn’t even sure if it had been a year since the previous chapter … Surely it hadn’t been? The details of the dream, now, showed no signs of clouding, no amelioration by the daylight. The dream was at least as real as the attic room I slept in, probably more real. It had certainly been convincing. As far as I knew all earthly laws of physics had been adhered to within the dream; perspective worked normally, birds sang in trees, rabbits scurried away at my approach. Even the details were right: the top bar of a gate had been worn by use, patinated with human touch; species of tree were clearly identifiable; the baskets full of severed heads were real baskets, woven from willow, smeared with blood. Dreams were not supposed to contain supermarkets, certainly not supermarkets with special offers and litter blowing in the breeze outside. The only thing that had not been real was that fucking demon.

  I was absolutely terrified. The border where waking life met dreaming life seemed to be in the process of fracturing, and if that happened there was no predicting what might happen next. I couldn’t sleep. That was completely out of the question, utterly unthinkable, if I were going to stay normal and not get any crazier than I already felt. Staying awake, however, brought with it several consequences.

  One of these consequences, with horrible irony, was that my ability to determine whether I was asleep or awake became compromised. It got harder to know which was which, because fighting sleep is exhausting, and an exhausted body craves sleep intensely, no matter what the brain attached to that body may wish for. The body and mind become disassociated, and I became clumsy, forgetful and vague. This was not working.

  Sleep returned to my life and with it came a blizzard of nightmares, but these were merely awful tremors. I lived in fear of ‘the big one’. What I was most concerned about was the fact that ‘the big one’ carried harbingers of my death: not my death in life, but my death in the nightmare. That demon wanted me with a coldly implacable desire, and when he got me I would die in that nightmare and that’s where I would stay, in some unspeakably nasty eternity, everything repeating itself, round and round, unbearably. I knew that there were only a finite number of chapters in that nightmare, and with each chapter the end came irrevocably closer. The end of the dream was the end of me.

  I began to take steps to protect myself. My housemates found me chalking the letters LIVED on the soot in our fireplace, as I was convinced that the hearth was a possible entry point for the demon. Somewhere I had read that this was an effective strategy, the theory being that if the demon sees the word DEVIL written backwards he will return to where he came from, tricked into thinking that he’s in a mirror-world.

  I also began to write my nightmares down. This started as a way to keep track of them, to make absolutely sure of the sequential nightmare, to record and identify any possible channels of resistance. Themes began to emerge: supermarkets, the early hours of the morning (just before sunrise), medieval and Tudor architecture, aliens, demons (obviously), transmogrification, hauntings, enormous evergreen hedges and landscapes that were eerily reminiscent of golf courses, with tre
es spaced at equal intervals and closely-mown grass.

  I edited the written versions ruthlessly, cutting out swathes of text. There was no sense in trying to contextualise these night-time journeys, no point in attempting to fit them with a beginning or an end. As far as I could tell these frightening excursions were all middle. I wrote in the first person, naturally, and in the present tense.

  I decided to dilute my dreams by sending these written versions to a disparate group that I had been corresponding with for several years, in a kind of one-way mail-art. If enough people read the dreams they would dissipate, their power dispersed into the ether like some sort of noxious vapour. I made small booklets and placed them in envelopes, posting them with a sense of slight relief. This was a cathartic offloading of internalised menace that I hoped would help calm the night. I called these booklets Small Thoughts.

  At this time I had been working with Radiohead on the record that was to become OK Computer, in a large mansion house not too far from where I lived. I came across a book about the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I ordered the book of symbols† that he had used as a reference while making such paintings as Untitled (Pecho/Oreja) and Untitled (Per Capita).

  The symbols were a revelation. As well as many that found their partially erased way into the artwork for OK Computer, there was exactly the mark I was looking for. It was a hex, a magic symbol that would bring bad luck and misfortune to demons. Hexes are normally very bad; certainly not the sort of thing you’d like to find scratched onto your front door. This one, however, was extremely useful. I started using it immediately, chalking it on walls (and also, of course, on the soot of our fireplace) and reproducing it in various pieces of artwork, some of them used in the OK Computer artwork, others on t-shirts and posters. The more places where the symbol was inscribed the better; I was very pleased to engineer the pasting of Barcelona’s streets with enormous posters bearing not only the symbol – large, black on white – but also, unmistakeably, the words AGAINST DEMONS.

  Meanwhile I was writing more and more of the nightmares down, pinning them to the page like speaking moths. The internet was another canvas on which to pour these expulsions, and at the same time as building the first version of radiohead.com I started compiling slowlydownward.com. This eventually led to the first publication of the written dreams in book form, as the first edition of Slowly Downward was published a few years later, using texts the publisher Ambrose Blimfield took directly from the website.

  Over the course of a few years the dreams were read by many people, either from the booklets, from a circular tin of dreams, from a bag of dreams, from the website, from the Radiohead artwork I inserted them into, or from the book. The ‘Against Demons’ symbol had travelled all over the world, thanks to Radiohead’s punishing tour schedules, and I had seen photographs of it turned into a tattoo.

  It is impossible for actions not to have a consequence, and so it was that my nightmares ceased utterly. In one dream I learned the name of my tormentor, which helped a lot, but overall I believe it was the concerted attack that stopped it all. The chapters never advanced any further, and eventually even the mild nightmares passed.

  However I do slightly regret their disappearance, as now, of course, I have nothing to write about. Although I remember enough to be extremely careful what I wish for.

  Stanley Donwood, 2014

  * Published by the Institute of Psychophysical Research, Oxford, 1968.

  † Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, by Henry Dreyfuss, published by McGraw-Hill (1967). This is the book in which I first came across the medical notation sign meaning ‘NO DATA’, which I consequently used as the title for two separate exhibitions.

  SANGUINE

  Happiness: A Guide

  No one is happy and if they say they are they’re fucking lying. And I should know; I’ve tried it. I’ve collected all the ingredients of happiness and rubbed the resulting mixture all over myself.

  Not many people have done it. It’s extremely difficult to get any of the ingredients in the first place, let alone all of them. Mixing them properly is also very challenging; a lot of people get it totally wrong by concentrating on one ingredient at the expense of another; an easy mistake to make. What you have to do is lie in wait for each, be patient while they congregate (which doesn’t often happen) and then saunter over, introduce yourself, and invite them back to your place. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  But it doesn’t end there. It’s not simply a matter of assembly; you’ve got to add various sorts of seasoning if the whole thing isn’t going to end up like some nauseating religious marzipan. What you want is an easily absorbed lotion that won’t bring you out in a rash or make you smell.

  Beware of commercial preparations, expensive luxuries, evangelical tautologies, meretricious platitudes and printed hyperbole. Anything that promises fast results or pain-free acquisition should be avoided. Real happiness is, as I’ve said, incredibly hard to attain, requiring years of struggle, hurt, anguish, self-doubt, paranoia, and lengthy periods of agonising melancholy. Anyone who tells you different is either fooling you or themselves.

  Personally speaking, I have overcome these many obstacles. And you can too, if you’re willing to work at it; but, to be brutally honest, it’s not worth it.

  Scent

  I got into a fight in the perfume department of a large store. It wasn’t my fault; I had been trying to choose a nice scent for my new girlfriend and there was a scuffle to my left. The perfume ladies backed away. I was filled, at the time, with a sense of invulnerability that came with having recently fallen in love, and I stepped forward to quell the incipient violence.

  Naturally I was punched, knocked over and kicked in the face, but the broken bottles of perfume released such an incredible bouquet that I afterwards remembered the encounter with a degree of fondness.

  My Week

  SUNDAY

  Turned on the telly. On BBC1 was I’m So Lonely. On ITV was You’ll Never Be Famous. Thought of cranes, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads.

  MONDAY

  Read that for men under thirty-four the biggest killer is car accidents. Second is suicides. Spent a while wondering what third was. Hit my head against the wall a few times.

  TUESDAY

  Something without a name has been eating at my thoughts for a while. Standing in the checkout queue at the supermarket I feel violent, or bored, or hopeless, or depressed, or pointless, or just sick inside. Need only to see a headline of someone else’s newspaper to feel frightened, or frustrated, or alienated, or helpless, or doomed, or just suicidal. Waking up was a battle with my limbs; stodgy, unreliable, wayward, hurting.

  WEDNESDAY

  Woke up. Found I’d forgotten how to tie my shoelaces. Basic cognitive functions then failed with increasing rapidity until all I could do was sit in a chair staring at the wall. Tried to phone for help but my arm wouldn’t move. Eventually

  THURSDAY

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  Sky Sports

  One day I found out that my urine was acting like a powerful foaming agent. I thought that I could take advantage of my ability by hosting piss-scented foam parties in the pub toilets, but the landlord wasn’t keen. He didn’t think that people would be interested. In fact, he said that it was a disgusting idea. I said I’d rather go to a piss foam party than watch the fucking football, but he said that I’m in a very small minority and the big screen stays.

  Fingers

  It is only after I have been at my new flat for some months that I begin to receive mail other than bills and offers to enter prize draws.

  One of my first personal envelopes contains a scrawled message from an old acquaintance with whom I was friendly many years ago. I am distressed to read that my friend is deeply unhappy, and I am disturbed further to read that if he receives no reply to the letter I hold in my hands he will feel compelled to
chop off one of his fingers with a kitchen knife. Days pass, full of inconsequential incidents, until a small parcel arrives. The postmark indicates that it is from my friend. With trepidation I open it.

  Underneath the brown wrapping paper is a little box that bears the return address of my friend. There is also a stamp on the box, but other than this the package proves to be empty. I open up the box, but the space within is likewise vacant. A sense of relief floods briefly through me, and my days once more assume a comfortable aspect.

  One week later, another identical parcel arrives. It too is empty, and I insist to myself that I will write to my friend. Time drifts past, and eventually I have ten empty parcels. It is on a Friday that I realise what I have to do.

  With what I feel is admirable forethought I use my left hand to chop three fingers from my right. With the remaining two, I hack off all the fingers of my left hand. In considerable pain I place the fingers in eight of the parcels. There is a lot of blood, and this makes the use of Sellotape difficult. With eight parcels wrapped, I hold the knife in my right thumb and forefinger. I look at the last two boxes. As always, it is my inability to complete any task that drives me to tears.

  Dracula

  It is summer, and I am persuaded to take a Continental holiday by two enthusiastic acquaintances. Being a creature of habit, I am accustomed to vacations in the seaside resorts near to my home, but the proposition is put in such a way that I find it hard to make excuses.

  We depart, and travel by train to Romania, where, after a series of misadventures, we are all captured by Count Dracula, Prince of Darkness. We are taken in a foul-smelling horse-drawn carriage to his castle, which towers blasphemously above the forests, fingering the torn sky with its crumbling turrets. We are, naturally, rent with terror. It is clear that the Count intends to drink our blood, turning us into undead monsters of the night in the process.