Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Mount Core was a mostly extinct volcano, poking a nose-cone above the plateau that verged on the outer homesteads of Parsimony township where Greg, as Gregor, spent at least one of his childhoods. And, today, we approach Gregor’s preliminary involvement in the major events that were to happen later in the future."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"One day, all the boys, enemies and friends alike, huddled in tree-dens along the banks of the Balsam River. They could faintly see the Core cone through an early dawn mist. Ogdon suddenly slipped and fell headlong into the untamed river. As he was swept along further into the plateau land, one could hear his dying snorts for help. But he did not die. Dognahnyi will tell you that. For Dognahnyi had jumped in, half an hour before.

The River Balsam never let anyone die, you see."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Mr Dognahnyi, who was now sitting at the river's edge, wringing out his black gown, looked up with shillings in his eyes. Meanwhile, Ogdon saw a man walking down in great strides from the topmost cone of Core. And this man was laden with an oar as big as himself. As he grew nearer, the man's upper black lip turned to a hair-curling snarl and, staring with flame-shot eyes, he began to wheel the oar around him like an ocean liner's giant propellers threshing those bottomless seas towards which Balsam surged. And Ogdon smiled as each cataclysmic oar-thwack bit harder into his own spineworks."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"In the distance, Gregor could see the faint nose-cone of Core. Although still extinct, it granted the horizon a spark of character: a relief to the otherwise unbrokenness stretching around him like an empty washing-line."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Nowadays, Gregor can only cry himself to sleep before waking up in the form of an insect-legged worm on his own bird-tongue and of another exploring the catacombs of his left ear. Yet his sleep at first flows mercifully free from Ogdon’s dreams, a premature burial quite as blank as an unused school blackboard – except, eventually, for a cock-turned weathervane’s swirling bonecrack spark, followed by twin lights shining within a wrinkled heap of translucent skin, megazanthine lips hooting black words ... whilst Core sported twin peaks (rather than the single cone which history books claimed).

There remained separate eyes in the Nature cupboard: two Stars of Bethlehem, not one."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Greg could just discern the tannoy-system strung with wires that had emerged from the earlier hawl-pulleys as part of one giant soundweb of communication – and the tannoy’s loudspeakers themselves were shaped like large human ears rather than the more normally acoustically-efficient cones. A decorative system that didn’t lose its irony in the transit from symbol to reality. One clockwork-type of tannoy (it needed to be kept wound up to keep its emissions of noise at full swell) was so violent in these emissions that it was fast burying itself into the ground … as if extreme sound was a downward motive force of drilling within Inner Earth, as well as being a wind-source, even a tornado torque."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The waitresses were generously supplied, almost one for each table.

The tea-room was very swish, plenty of smooth freshly laundered white linen, silver napkin rings embossed with antlered deer and pentinent youths, sturdy chunky heavy-duty yet good quality cutlery ... and large bowls of fresh flowers pricked out in bright colours and still drenched in dew.

He ordered a tier of cakes, licking his lips at the thought of the custard slices, cream cones, coconut pyramids, battenburgs topped with whipped almond, spicy bread-and-butter pudding baked to a rich brown crust, waffles dripping in wild honey...

The particular waitress attending to his needs was no older than his own daughter, the prettiest of the whole bunch, he thought. She wore a uniform which, rather than hiding her figure, accentuated its more sensuous angles, as if an artist had finished off an otherwise boring portrait with the subtle pastel striptease of water-colour."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Nobody mentioned the colour. Indeed, could darkness be any colour other than black or, at best, grey? A monochrome of darkness, gathering in around them more like mist than darkness proper. Yet, they could still see the even darker shapes hunching upon the distant terrain towards which they hiked. Nobody mentioned the colour, as it did not come up in conversation, bearing in mind the preoccupation caused by the difficulties underfoot.

'Hey! Look – are they volcanoes?'

Mike pointed at the rough cone-shapes each with an odd flame-like plume fitfully being spat by what he assumed to be some of earth’s many apertures.

Sudra quaintly described them as 'Redoubts' – but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, simply for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. 'Redoubts' in itself was not a funny word."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Greg had two recurring dreams of characters that he called (from within each dream) Edith and Clare. In one dream, they were twin sisters and, in the other, complete strangers who meet up and conduct an even stranger relationship. In the latter dream, they did not live in a city wall but in a tied cottage near a tree with an enormous knotted girth of crusted bark – about twenty-five feet in circumference at its base but a normal amount of various branches emerging in a tangle from the tapering top of this over-sized cone-topped trunk – making it seem like a normal tree from about eight feet high onwards. A bottom-heavy tree that was called a Canterbury Oak."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

(Sure, it's a stretch, but has anyone thoroughly either cogitated or conjugated the potential fullness of the "cone" phenomenon?)

"It will be remembered that Ogdon had been dirty and unkempt during those far-off days in his South London home. Now, his visage, although pale like some effete angel, was golden-trimmed and shining. His clothes were robes of some garlanded religion – an offshoot of a peculiar Dunsany cult. His eyebrows arched like some intellectual Conan of the Spheres as he responded to my hypothesis of self-creation:

'I am looking at you. I am taking you in. You are like the hero of a romantic book. Your locks are dark. Your brows are deep and reasoning. Your lips are full and delicious. Your beard is grey-streaked with wisdom. And I have never known you different. You are you. And you were you before we started this trail of mind and inner-mind...'"