On my bookshelf – Facing the Dragon (2003) – Robert L Moore

Robert L. Moore (1942-2016) was a Jungian analyst and professor of psychology, psychoanalysis and spirituality, also a champion of Kohutian “self analysis”. Self analysis is a school of psychoanalysis which seeks understanding of the nature of the unconscious “self”. We might think we know our “selves”, but mostly what we think we know is a collection of memories that makes up our life-story. What actually motivates us, whilst shaped in part by that story, is largely unconscious, and the unconscious part of us is so complex, so bewilderingly vast, it’s taken a century of psychoanalysis to even scratch the surface of it. Meanwhile, this lack of understanding of our selves, both individually, and as a species, threatens to overwhelm us as we are assailed by forces entirely of our own making, but which we seem no longer able to control.

The unconscious engages us in dreams and reveries, in a language of emotionally charged images. It shows us something in the imagination, but its meaning is never literal. So we dream of a dragon, but the dragon is a metaphor for something else. Dragons feature large in myths and stories all over the world. A myth is a story that’s been pared down, sometimes over the millennia so it contains only its most potent and reactive essence. We read a mythical story, and even if we do not immediately understand it, we react to it, and it holds our attention like nothing else can.

Myths are a shorthand way our ancestors found of passing on the secrets gleaned from their own times, secrets of how to live properly, how to live in harmony with others who might appear superficially different to our selves. Thus, we avoid the worst in human nature, which has a pathological tendency towards murder. In order to do this, we have to live mythically, while at the same time renewing the myth for the times we are living in, so the story remains relevant for each passing generation.

The problem with our own culture is we have lost our way with myths. We have dismissed them as belonging to a more primitive, pre-literate, pre-technological era. Yet we look around at the world, and we see that it is filled with so many poisons, all of them entirely the result of pathological thinking, and we struggle to begin to analyse it. So we’re not actually as smart as we think we are.

The human race is very old, and in all that time it’s been telling stories, weaving myths, so whatever the situation we are in, there’s a good chance there’s already a myth that defines it, already a story told by someone who has been this way before. But the difficulty is, it’s often impossible to identify the myth we’re in, just as an eye cannot see itself.

In “Facing the Dragon”, Moore boils down the world’s ills into a dragon myth. Dragons have two aspects. One side of them is evil and chaotic. They fly about breathing fire and razing our civilized structures to the ground. It takes only a small metaphorical step then to identify our world, our civilization, now, as besieged by rapacious dragons. But remember, these are not literal dragons. It is us who does the dragon’s work, killing, lying, and razing cities with fire. The other side of the dragon, the positive side is its potent wisdom and its creative energy. So, like with Saint George, there are rewards to be gained from facing the darker aspects of the dragon, and slaying it.

Psychologically speaking, Moore equates the dragon to the human propensity for self-inflation or grandiosity. We think we’re perfect, or we’re the centre of the universe, or if only people would listen to us everything would be all right. Then reality hits, and we feel small, we react badly, we feel jealousy, resentment, hatred, indeed the whole gamut of Evil’s play-book. Moore is very much concerned here with the nature of evil as it works through the collective human experience, and how we can identify it both in ourselves and in world affairs. Spotting the dragon at work is crucial because that’s the thing with dragons: if you deny their existence, they get bigger.

One of the most striking Dragon motifs Moore identifies, and which resonated with me was :

The chief tactic of evil is to present the human individual and community with a false, deceptive representation of reality. In short, it lies.

This is not so much a self-help book as an attempt to encapsulate our collective pathology in a myth that underlies the nature of our times. It is based partly on edited transcripts of lectures Moore gave to, among others, the C.G Jung Institute of Chicago, and the Parliament of the World’s Religions but, although it is intended primarily for the psycho-analytical and the theological community, as an interested layman I found it both accessible and enlightening. First published nearly twenty years ago, the book has proved prescient in many ways, and reveals us as an increasingly benighted people living a dragon myth, yet blinded by the fact we no longer believe in dragons.

No wonder contemporary world events leave us feeling so bewildered.

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Being interested – in stuff

I don’t know why I’m studying French. I’ve only been to France twice in my life – well, to Paris. But they were mad-rush airport-and-hotel business-trips that could have been anywhere. It was hardly the Paris of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”. The Provence of Ridley Scott’s “A Good Year” would have been better. I could have settled then into a rural backwater, a crusty ex-pat-gone-native, pigged out on red-wine and cheese.

I’ve been learning French since I was eleven, dropped it at twelve, then picked it up again in my forties. But I always found it difficult to make more than stilted Pidgin conversation with it. Still, it would have been good to sit at a French pavement café and order, in French, without the waiter saying to me, in perfect English: “it would be much easier, mate, if we both spoke English.”

But with one thing and another I never did make it to France for pleasure. And then this Covid thing has put the Kybosh on it for goodness knows how long. So there’s no point labouring the language learning, is there? Except I’ve discovered this language App on my phone. It’s called Duolingo and I’m addicted to it – been brushing up my French like Billy-O.

I don’t know what use I’ll put it to. And I admit it does seem rather a small life’s ambition to order un croque-monsieur without le serveur smirking. Or is that “une croque-monsieur“? The gender thing throws me. I mean like how in France a glass is masculine, yet a cup – not that much different in functional terms – is feminine. To a native English speaker this seems an unnecessary complication. Or are we missing something? Do languages with gendered nouns reveal something philosophically profound about that nation’s culture? I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking too much about things. But then I like doing that, so no harm.

I mean: Esque il y a un raison ces choses est intéressant de moi? Well is there? A reason these things are interesting to me?

So, there I am sitting at my table and the waiter comes over and I order my stuff in French. But I do it with a strong Lancashire accent that sometimes confuses even Englishmen. Could it be he’s thinking it would be cool to be English, as much as I’m thinking it would be cool to be French? Because, you know, that’s it with us humans. We’re always exploring the possibilities. Always une touche de glamour sur l’inconnu. A certain glamour about the unknown.

Except of course, in times of chaos, fear has us shutting out the unknown. This can be anything beyond our normal boundaries – boundaries of state, of trust, or even just our day to day experience. Thus, we can be abused in certain parts of England for speaking Arabic, or having a black skin, or for wearing a face-mask.

Depuis quand sommes-nous devenus si peur de tout? When did we become so afraid of everything?

I could read some French poets perhaps. But then I’m barely familiar with the full range of the British. So there’s no mileage in that, beyond the satisfaction of discovery of course. Or I could read Proust’s seven volume tome, A la recherche du temps perdu, in French? That might take some time, especially considering I got no further than the first chapter in English. Yes, we thrive on challenge, but we should also pick our battles.

I suppose that’s it though: challenge. Chaos is what we face on a daily basis. It is our lot in life, but there are times when chaos wins out. It becomes a fire-breathing dragon, devouring the foundational structure of our societies. It burns away the certainties, devours our courage, and we seal ourselves off from fresh experience. We lose our fight against the dragon, and become much less than we can be.

It’s a small thing then, persevering with a foreign language one is unlikely to use. It’s just one of the many things that pique my interest, but each of them wins back a little order from the chaos. It lays a foundation to my affairs. And in seeking to make sense of things, anything that piques our interest, we slay the dragon, restore balance to our bit of the world, perhaps even improve things a little. And if enough of us do that,… well,…

Je pense que ç’est la raison nous dois la faisons.

I think that’s why we’ve got to do it. Just be interested,… in stuff.

It beats the hell out of chanting slogans, and leaving abusive comments on social media anyway.

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To be with you

From the outside, the school looked much the same, but on the inside time had left its mark. I remembered drab walls, a sort of uniform eggshell blue, but now it was all pastel shades, and the corridors, which I could still hear echoing to the sound of footsteps and sliding bags, were hushed by coordinating carpets. The classrooms were neater, brighter,… less formal, and of course there were computers everywhere.

It all seemed much smaller. I looked around, puzzled by this reduced scale. Were my other memories similarly distorted? Were those lovelorn moments, those feelings of pubescent despair, also exaggerated, blown up out of all proportion?

The metalwork lab had gone, ripped out, along with the subject to be replaced by something called “technology”. I thought I knew about technology. We had rebuilt vehicles in this room – Mini Coopers, Escorts, even a vintage Alvis, and we’d raced them at Oulton Park,… but technology now consisted of making things from cardboard and coat-hangers.

I picked up a curious contraption made of paper and flimsy dowelling. It had been crudely painted in primary colours and resembled a sort of three-dimensional Picasso.

“What does this do, then?” I asked.

“Well,” said Mr Shaw,… “It sort of flaps its wings.” And then, registering my surprise, he went on defensively: “It’s not so much the object that’s important, as the way the children set about tackling the problem.”

“Right,…” I said.

Working out how to get an engine back into a car was a problem to be tackled. This just looked like,… well,… I don’t know what it looked like, but not much, that’s for sure.

“There used to be lathes in here. And in that room over there, there were drawing boards, rows and rows of them – I got my best GCSE grade in engineering drawing – that’s what set me down the road to being an engineer, I suppose.”

Mr Shaw smiled patiently. “We stripped that lot out years ago,” he said. “It wasn’t relevant any more. We’re not in the business of raising factory fodder now. No factories anyway, are there? And good riddance too. Children deserve better than that. We see ourselves as being more in the business of turning out well-rounded adults.”

Is that what I’d been then? Factory fodder? I suppose it was true. But I’d risen to become  a designer, a professional engineer. Oh, I know the factory had used me up now and was preparing to spit me out as redundant, but it had paid me reasonably well for my trouble, paid for the mortgage on my house, paid for a newish car every four or five years. Isn’t that more what it was about: making an honest living?

We finished our tour back in the reception area, where I was left feeling like an antique. By the age of sixteen, I’d learned the rudiments of cutting metal here, and how to produce an engineering drawing to the stringent requirements of British Standards. I’d stripped a Cosworth engine down to piece-parts, de-coked it, rebuilt it and watched it powering a Ford Cortina around a race-track. But it was all irrelevant now, like me, it seemed: irrelevant, brushed away by a bright new order, crushed beneath legions of brightly coloured, useless flapping things.

“Well, thank you, Mr Shaw. I’m glad I came. It all looks very nice,… very neat,… very em,… stimulating.”

Children were traipsing by, a long procession, hundreds and hundreds of them, heading from the assembly hall to their classes. Where would they go, I wondered, when they left this place? Shaw was right. There were no factories any more to open their doors every September to swallow down the latest batch of fodder. But even well-rounded adults needed jobs, needed money to live. Perhaps more of them went on to college and university than they had done in my day, but what then? They couldn’t remain students for ever? Could they?

“I’ll be off, then,” I said, and then as an after-thought I asked him: “I don’t suppose you remember a girl called Rachel Standish, do you? Same year as me. Dark haired,….”

He shrugged, glanced at his watch. “Sorry,” he said.

“It was a long time ago.”

Sure, too much water had passed, washing away all trace of Rachel and me. The world we had prepared ourselves for had begun to change almost the moment we had walked out of the door. I wondered what she was doing now. Had she found something of more lasting relevance, or was she looking back, like me, and wondering what the hell it had all been for?

I mounted the bike and cycled off slowly. There was a familiar heaviness, like I’d always felt after another day leaving this place without hearing Rachel say those words. I didn’t know if this was good or bad, because my more recent past had been void of any feeling whatsoever. Even my divorce seemed to have left me with nothing but a kind of sickly numbness. This particular pain, of Rachel, was a quarter of a century old, but at least I felt it. It proved I was still capable of feeling something, so I gathered the pain around me and I savoured it.

I retired early that night, lay in bed, twiddling the dial on my ancient VEF radio, tuning in to the static around 208 metres Long Wave. I was straining for the sound of Radio Luxembourg, for Bob Stewart and the top forty. But there was nothing,… just impenetrable white-noise where my youth had once been. What I was contemplating was impossible of course. You can never go back.

I looked over to Rachel’s photograph, a grainy enlargement from an old form taken all those years ago.

“I want to be with you,” I said.

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In Durleston Wood

The morning draws on and the sky becomes a deeper grey, while the air drifting down the valley grows cooler and not so humid. A change is coming. The sycamore leaves in the deep of the wood begin to show their backs, a paler green lending contrast to the shadow, and I smell centuries of life rising, centuries of decay and renewal. There will be rain.

I descend the bank to a narrow ledge by the river, along which there runs a sketchy path. I follow it downstream, nosing through low branches to a hidden bend, half remembered, and to a broad shelf where there lies a ring of rounded river-washed stones, and the remains of a recent fire. It’s hard to believe it’s still here. I built this ring as a boy, here on this dry bank – nothing combustible close by, nothing to risk a fire getting out of hand in the dry season.

I’ve thought of this place over the years. In the meantime, some other soul has adopted it, a sympathetic soul too; there is no litter, no orange peel, or chocolate wrappers to disturb the harmony of the wood – just the scent of those centuries, and the ever present rippling of the peaty Rye.

I gather dry grasses and twigs, then set them in the ashes contained by the ring, and I light them, then add more fuel to the flames and while the fire grows, I take out a screwdriver and dismantle the gun. The stock comes off easily and I lay it across the fire. It steams for a while, as if in disbelief, then darkens suddenly and begins to burn. Before removing the barrel, I cock the spring to make sure time will ruin it. Then I take off the telescope and unscrew the focusing lens to expose the delicate graticule and its adjustment.

The river runs slower here, bulging out to a hundred feet or more, and slowing to a ponderous glide as it takes the bend, so that towards the far and inaccessible bank there is an almost stagnant pool bottomed by deep silt. I toss the telescope into the middle of it, then the mechanism of the spring and cylinder. The barrel I lay between two rocks and strike it with a hefty stone, bending it. Then it follows the rest of the gun into the silty pool,… and is gone.

I remember the gun as an accurate weapon. More than that, the gun represents for me the lore of the wood. It belongs to a time beyond the ken of today’s children. But the days of guns in Durleston Wood are over, and it’s better it should meet its end here by my own hand, than be sold on, perhaps to fall into the hands of a misanthropic teenager, to become corrupted as a breaker of windows and a killer of cats.

Guns mean something else entirely to people these days.

It’s partly this sentiment that has brought me back to the wood, but there’s something else, something in the ritual I do not immediately understand. It is a sacrifice of course, an offering. It is a letting go, the sending of a ripple into the past, so the past might offer something back to me, now.

It’s then, glancing up from the flames, I realize I am being watched. It’s a woman, dark skinned, gaunt, crouching perfectly still among the sleepy balsam on the opposite bank. I had thought myself alone. Suddenly though I’m looking across the silty waters of the Rye into a pair of eyes, watching me.

How long has she been there? What must she be thinking?

I call over : “Hello?”

But she takes fright and is gone, snatched back into the shadow of the wood. And for a moment, above the thickly lapping sound of the river, there comes the sound of a chain being dragged.

From In Durleston Wood.

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Can’t sleep? Can’t dream? Ask the English.

Dreaming – Jozef Israels 1860

The way of the West does not suit the dreaming life. Indeed, we do everything we can to suppress any intrusion of unconscious influence into waking experience. Instead, we work, we party, we spend long hours in front of our devices, numbing our minds with junk images, junk tasks, and junk narratives. When a dream does pierce the blank wall of our materialism, we dismiss it. It was just a dream, we tell ourselves. But what if that dream could tell us something useful we didn’t already know? It would make sense to listen, wouldn’t it?

When the analytical psychologist, Carl Jung visited Africa in 1925, he was interested in studying the dreams of isolated tribesmen, but to his surprise he was told by a medicine man he didn’t dream any more. After the Colonial powers came, he said, everything changed, “that dreams were no longer needed, because the English knew everything.”*

That a people could use their dreams to guide their lives seems primitive to the rational mind. Yet anyone who has sat down with a big dream, say the morning after they have dreamed it, cannot help but be affected by it. A big dream can colour the entire day and provide an emotional undertone that’s hard to shake. Some dreams we remember all our lives. That they can be so powerful suggests that to dismiss them is to lose our connection with important aspect of living.

The art of dreaming is not taught. You have to listen to other dreamers, read their books, sort the wheat from the chaff, and just do the best you can. But it’s inevitable, when we do stumble into a dream, we no longer have the sophistication we once had to deal with them properly. It is difficult to accept for a start we did not create the dream ourselves, that we are the dream’s guest, that the dream is the landscape on which we walk, its characters the fragmentary but autonomous denizens who can help or hinder us on our way. Only by accepting this can we play our proper part as pilgrim and, come morning, reflect usefully on the experience.

It’s natural for one interested in dreaming to want to push the boundaries. To whit, the Rolls Royce of dreaming is said to be the lucid dream where we enter the night-land fully conscious. Then we can make of it a playground, and all the characters we meet there our play-things. But my intuitions warn against the lucid path, and I consider myself fortunate I have never been able to dream lucidly.

Enthusiastic reports from lucid dreamers tell us we can take the dream over and have a hell of a time, flying about and having the best sex ever with whomever we can dream up. But that’s like colonizing the dream world, and then, like the bushmen in Jung’s day, our dreams become mere husks and psychologically useless, because the Ego, like the Englishman, knows everything.

Still, that the lucid dreamers have established such doors are open to human experience suggests a greater role for the dream than we give credit for, but we should tread carefully. The dream is no place for the crass, hedonistic tourist. But if we have lost our way with dreaming, or worse, if we have lost our way with sleeping, the techniques of the lucid dreamers can help enormously.

We close our eyes. What do we see? Do we see nothing? Look again.

The darkness behind closed eyes is not complete. It is grainy, speckled with colour. There are pale areas, like clouds, and they drift in the midnight blue. Deprived of visual stimulation, the mind idles with pattern. But if we can focus the inner eye upon them, the patterns will take on more recognizable forms. We do not willingly imagine these forms into being. They are entirely spontaneous and will show themselves if we allow it. They will be indistinct at first but, with practice, we can develop an inner vision that is capable of staggering clarity and detail.

At some point, say the lucid dreamers, the entire field of vision becomes active and detailed, and we can simply step into it at the point consciousness falls away. This has never worked for me. I am asleep long before this happens, and that’s fine. I prefer to lose my self-awareness and be of the dream rather than consciously in it. But as a way into sleep when the mind is otherwise resistant, this is a powerful method. I also find the dreams more vivid, and more easily remembered on waking.

We are alive at a time of deepening world crises. Without the counsel of dreams our mental well-being depends upon whether we really do trust the English to know everything. And if not, then where do we turn? We each have access to a wise, inner voice, through our dreams, but it’s been forgotten, and it’s rusty. It has forgotten how to speak to us, as we have forgotten how to listen. Few are interested anyway, and willingly join the downward spiral of our culture, presided over by the joker archetypes, and all the strutting demi-gods of chaos.

Chaos is inevitable, but it’s also a bad place to be. It is an indeterminate period of transition, and with no guarantee it’s leading us to a better place. When the ground is shifting daily, and reality is frozen out in a blizzard of lies, the rational mind is of no use to us any more. Only a keen native instinct, born of the dreaming life can tell us where best to place our feet, so we’re not constantly unbalanced by whatever damned thing is coming next.

*Jung – Memories, dreams, reflections (Kenya and Uganda)

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His world of marvels

I understand why they took my father. To most people he was one of the nameless who went out nights, worked his shift, and came back tired. Someone was watching him though, someone who knew what he was really about, and that’s why they took him. He was also a writer, you see? He was an explorer of ideas, a lover of maps and books, but only those closest to him knew about any of that.

They took him long before he’d had time to perfect his craft, long before he became really dangerous to them. He was still coming to terms with his powers, getting into his stride, finding the words. But I suppose, given the course he was on, they felt they had no choice.

At weekends, I’d wake to the sound of his old Underwood typewriter as he hammered out pages of manuscript. The Underwood was what he used to capture words that seemed right to him. But after a while he’d end up destroying them, having decided they were no good. Meanwhile, the rest of his work, the more speculative ideas, he’d write up in his notebooks which he’d consult from time to time, searching back for fresh avenues to explore, for things he’d missed.

He had a neat hand, a draughtsman’s hand, so his notes and diagrams possessed a beauty that went beyond whatever they were actually saying. After they took him, a man came asking for his notebooks. He said he was a friend but, I’d met him before and I knew he wasn’t, not really, and I told him we hadn’t kept them. He came again forty years later, a wizened old man, still on the trail, still something deceitful about him. I told him the same thing. Even after all this time, you see, it pays to be careful.

In the afternoons my father and I would be off scrambling up some nameless gully on the moors. It was in such places, where the rocks broke the surface, the earth hinted at its secrets, and he would scratch at them, peer at their traces under a magnifying glass. He was good at finding pyrites for me – fool’s gold – not that he was fooled by it. He was never a seeker after gold, not the ordinary kind anyway, but he enjoyed splitting the rocks for me to see. And then he’d tell me we should always be careful not to chase after everything that sparkled, because it might not be what we thought it was.

Yes, it was a different kind of gold he was hunting, a secret thing, the philosopher’s gold, I suppose you’d call it, a mysterious thing hidden since the dawn of man. It wasn’t that others wanted to take it from you, more they had to stop you getting hold of it in the first place, because that kind of gold was the key to everything, you see? That’s why it was so dangerous.

Often, my father and I would be out over the hills where the old maps said the standing stones used to be. Balmy days and bleak days, we would seek their traces in the dun-coloured grasses. I could see those hills from my bedroom window, miles away. Indeed, I could see the whole moor spread out like a map, and then there we were, he and I, in the map itself, looking for the stones, solving mysteries.

My father said he believed the stones had marked the passage of the seasons, in ancient times. That they weren’t there any more is the reason we’d lost our way, he said, and that was why no one ever looked at the moon any more, or could name the stars. This was important, he thought, and it was thrilling to me he was on the trail of a thing that could restore such marvels to the world. It was this, I’m sure that roused the same forces that had taken the stones and hidden them away, this same power that had taken my father.

The night they came for him, I hid his notebooks. I would decode them one day, I thought, but I’ve had them fifty years now, and they remain as puzzling as ever. Which of his ideas are worth the smoothing out into clearer prose? Which are the fool’s-gold sparkles of frivolous intrigue? I don’t know. Mould mottles their pages, and they’ve become brittle. It adds a fragility to their beauty. But still, I guard them, though lately I’ve been thinking the secret isn’t in them at all, not like I once thought anyway, not a clear arrow to point the way. I think the secret lies elsewhere, off the edge of the page, and you have to ride the beauty of them, as if on a butterfly’s wings, to get there.

Besides his notebooks, I have his watch but I don’t wear it. We inhabit different times now. He was spirited away to a place where I fear he must walk the moors alone, and without his maps. The watch still ticks, though the date is faulty, settles between days, as if pointing to another reality, one in which my father has been trapped all these years. But I have the feeling that in continuing in the spirit of his work, I am asking the same questions he asked, and if I can reveal the answers, those who took him have no reason to go on holding him, do they? They will have to let him go.

I have written a million words by now in search of answers, and in that time I have grown old, much older than he was when they took him. But I will bring him back. One day I will pay their ransom. Then I might wake again to the sound of that old Underwood, as my father banishes the emptiness of night, and restores to me once more his world of marvels.

Thanks for listening.

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Schopenhauer and the blue-haired girl

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

Arthur Schopenhauer has been called the gloomiest of philosophers. He describes the world as comprising two things: there’s the way we see it – the representation – and then there’s the way it actually is – the will. The ‘will’, he says, is blind. It’s an instinctive energy, a universal imperative whose sole purpose is the creation of life. We witness it as a relentless turmoil for ‘being’ and survival.

There’s something beyond the will though, something transcendent and blissful, but it’s near impossible to get at, which is a pity because, taken at face value, ‘the will’ is not a pleasant thing at all. In the natural world it is red in tooth and claw, creatures devouring one another other, us devouring creatures, even when we don’t need to. Similarly, we are devouring the planet itself. And even when we’re not actually killing or pillaging, we still find ways to compete, to dominate and thrive at the expense of others. The striving is endless, and pointless. This is gloomy stuff indeed! But Schopenhauer found a way out.

Simply put, we are moved by beauty – well some of us are. Some of us are so enamoured of the pointless striving and posturing instead, beauty is lost on us, and we soon find ways of corrupting it. Yet beauty, the sense of it, stuns the will, and opens a door to something other, something transcendent, even divine – if that’s your thing. To cultivate an aesthetic sense then, according to Schopenhauer, is our only way of seeing through the veil of ceaseless toil and catching a glimpse of transcendent meaning. What it is, exactly, is hard to say, because we don’t actually see it. But we can feel it.

Beauty manifests itself in many ways, but for Schopenhauer at least, music is its highest form. Music is a question of taste of course, and I’m sure Schopenhauer would have struggled with Slowdive in concert, which brings us to the blue haired girl. If this clip is still up by the time you’re reading me, look out for her in the audience. If not you’ll just have to imagine her. She tells us how music feels, by showing us how she feels it. With tears. We can read Schopenhauer until he’s coming out of our ears, and not many do these days, but if we want to understand what he’s going on about, all we need do is follow the blue haired girl.

 

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