Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

My timidity usually rescues me from my utter lack of good taste, but not this time, alas. :o


Lesson from my life # 53: Timidity is really an introvert's suit of armor, because timidity is often interpreted -- by those who don't know the introvert well (which, since he or she is an introvert, is nearly everyone) -- as virtue, innocence, respect, cooperation, good will, etc.

But:
"If my thought-dreams could be seen / They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." – Bob Dylan

Now that I've waxed philosophical (with the indispensable help of Bleak&Icy and "the Bob") everyone will forget what I said about wardrobe cones, right? ... right?

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Not quite. Now the concept (or Cone Sept - a new Social Group?) of a "wardrobe malfunction" pervades my thoughts...

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The town impressed me as being much larger once I was within its limits than it had appeared from the prominence just outside. I saw that the general hilliness of the surrounding countryside was also an internal feature of Mirocaw. Here, though, the effect was different. The parts of the town did not look as if they adhered very well to one another. This condition might be blamed on the irregular topography of the town. Behind some of the old stores in the business district, steeply roofed houses had been erected on a sudden incline, their peaks appearing at an extraordinary elevation above the lower buildings. And because the foundations of these houses could not be glimpsed, they conveyed the illusion of being either precariously suspended in air, threatening to topple down, or else constructed with an unnatural loftiness in relation to their width and mass. This situation also created a weird distortion of perspective. The two levels of structures overlapped each other without giving a sense of depth, so that the houses, because of their higher elevation and nearness to the foreground buildings, did not appear diminished in size as background objects should. Consequently, a look of flatness, as in a photograph, predominated in this area. Indeed, Mirocaw could be compared to an album of old snapshots, particularly ones in which the camera had been upset in the process of photography, causing the pictures to develop on an angle: a cone-roofed turret, like a pointed hat jauntily askew, peeked over the houses on a neighboring street; a billboard displaying a group of grinning vegetables tipped its contents slightly westward; cars parked along steep curbs seemed to be flying skyward in the glare-distorted windows of a five-and-ten; people leaned lethargically as they trod up and down sidewalks; and on that sunny day the clock tower, which at first I mistook for a church steeple, cast a long shadow that seemed to extend an impossible distance and wander into unlikely places in its progress across the town."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Another cone in Ligotti! Wonderful! And a peeking hat one!
Thanks.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

For Mr. Lewis and his cone-capped head:

Gradually the huge thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious of having outdistanced the ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant of full silhouette and revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed and half-choked meep of cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that never wholly left it. For the mammoth bobbing shape that overtopped the ridge was only a head - a mitred double head - and below it in terrible vastness loped the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-high monstrosity that walked in stealth and silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape that trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads reaching half way to the zenith.

-- "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" by HPL

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

In the centre Ani kneels before the god upon a reed mat, raising his right hand in adoration, and holding in his left hand the kherp sceptre. He wears a whitened wig surmounted by a "cone," the signification of which is unknown. Round his neck is a deep collar of precious stones. Near him stands a table of offerings of meat, fruit, lowers, etc., and in the compartments above are a number of vessels for wine, beer, oil, wax, etc., together with bread, cakes, ducks, a wreath, and single flowers.
The Sem priest next presents to the deceased (Fig. 9) a cone-shaped offering,[2] and at the same time the Kher-heb says: "Open the mouth and the two eyes, open the mouth and the two eyes. Thou hadst tightly closed thy mouth, thou hast [again] opened thy two eyes."
Ani standing before a table of offerings, with both hands raised in adoration. Behind him is his wife, wearing a lotus-flower and a cone upon her head, and holding a sistrum, and lotus-flower in her left hand.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

CONE OF POWER:Psychic energy raised and focused by either an individual or group mind (coven) to achieve a definite purpose. The most interesting Cone of Power raised in recent history was that of the Witches of England who stood together, despite their differences, to turn Hitler back from the shores of their beloved country.

--Witchcraft Dictionary by Aleister Crowley

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Des,

there is a cone motif in Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows", although he refers to them as 'funnels'. I suppose I would consider a 'funnel' to be an inversion of a cone...

"For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island".

Also, one of my own stories makes explicit reference to the horror of cones:

"Curmudgeon kept his eyes to Uncle's body as he spoke, prodding and kneading the sallow gray flesh with his unusually long fingers. He paused to once more light the wick of his mask before he spoke again:

"You are aware that he thinks in cones, aren't you?" smoke bellowed from the doctor's beak, those oil-dark lenses remaining trained on the writhing flesh of the creature that lay before him". - S. Murphy, 'Uncle Driew'.



The reason I chose the notion of 'thinking' in another shape at all was to confer a spatial sense of the unfamiliar. The cone for me personally also symbolizes concentration or amplification (like a megaphone) so whatever passes through it (in this case, psychic energy) is magnified. It is also significant that Uncle Driew's approximation of a brain was also shaped like a cone. Those upon whom his thoughts were directed experienced a strange and unpleasant nudging from cone-shaped forces of unseen origin.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

I have no idea what any of this means, but news sites reporting on Hurricane Gustav have mentioned something called "the cone of probability"--for example:

"The 11am CST (10am Cancun time) update shows Gustav is out to sea and speeding up once again which means the cone of probability has narrowed."

"You’ve seen it. You’ve heard about it. You’ve read about it. And you’re probably talking about it more than you could ever have imagined. The National Hurricane Center calls it the Forecast Cone, that unsettlingly familiar graphic depiction of the projected path of a storm and the surrounding area representing the margin for error. The Center provides an exquisitely detailed definition of the Cone, based on historical tracks and circles of error and other meteorological minutiae. Joe & Jane Six-pack are spared exposure to such head-spinning calculations thanks to the Cone. The Cone is supposed to make things simple for us simple folk, but, alas, such is not the case."

"As for Southwest Florida, the region remains out of the "cone of probability" of where the storm might strike. However, Daily News forecaster Jim Syoen recommends keeping an eye on the storm throughout the weekend. Check Jim's forecast at the Daily News' weather page or back with naplesnews.com for the latest updates."

I'm sure Nemonymous, master of cones, knows what all this means.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Gustav was named after Gustav Holst (composer of the Planets).

But this is out of my solar system!

Not heard of this 'cone of probability' - but what a lovely concept.

Thanks!

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

A Black Hole needs an 'exit cone'. Hence CONE ZERO.
Tomorrow we find out...

Hence the lemniscate on the cover of Nemo (200)8

Hence, too: Hence, too: Hence, too:
The Fix Review of 'Cone Zero says:
"You can see it coming, of course. It's like watching a disaster from a distance and being powerless to stop it."
The Fix Review of 'Cone Zero says:
"You can see it coming, of course. It's like watching a disaster from a distance and being powerless to stop it."
The Fix Review of 'Cone Zero says:
"You can see it coming, of course. It's like watching a disaster from a distance and being powerless to stop it."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Now I must suddenly express my concern (cone CERN). I should have bought Cone Zero when I had the chance... :rolleyes:, :(, and :eek:!

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Lemniscate is the infinity sign - which replaces the 8 on Nemo 8 (on the cover).

Tomorrow, according to the news, we are all going to die from a black hole.

Cone Zero is another name for a black hole.

And the recent Fix Review, if you read it, predicted this parallel set of events.

Not a good way to advertsie CONE ZERO, I agree.

If I'm right, nobody buys CONE ZERO, because we are all dead.

If I'm wrong, egg on my face.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

I scream, you scream, we all scream for I scream cones....

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Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

For this relief much thanks. ;)

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

The Power of Imagination as prophylactic, Johan.
des

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

An ice cream cone in hand is much better than egg on the face...

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Starship City sat at the foot of the New Hills which rose like steps eastward from the Argumentative Oceans. On the other side of the vast gaslit metropolis, lay the mighty land fissure which still creaked and groaned on certain days of the year. As one approached from the south along the carriageways, one could hear the mammoth rasping of Nature ('Surely, it will crack the world in two, one day!') and see the looming rocketship monument to all those who had died cosmic deaths. The monument was indeed the first sign of the city that the stranger saw: a tall tapering cone-pinnacle or narrow pyramid, curiously like a church spire ready for launch. Soon, it was obvious that this marked the outer limits of the city suburbs - countless ranks of decrepit terraced two-up-two-downs in faded black and white checkerboard, items of washing hanging across the narrow byways and shadowing the queues of gossipers and scandalmongers."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

There was a wafer-thin shell shaped geometrically as a cone would be shaped. It was on her dressing-table, amid the other baubles and gewgaws that littered her untidy make-up ceremonial. She clipped an eyelid with nail scissors, oblivious of the resultant slowly dripping tears. She crimped a brow with a file. Twisted her fingers into laced-up bows. She folded her tongue around a sharp comb, feeling the prongs go deep. She then took up the cone (about walnut-sized) and swallowed it whole. Beauty was skin deep. A fantastic journey by those Zeroists on board the cone seeking trinkets and necklaces down to the unfound troves: the made-up make-up of a month's trawl. Swifter than Swift, she ate her eyes one by one each little-end first – as she felt the cat's cradle of more vessels making her insides even more beautiful with swagged sacks of cone-sewn tumour-roses blooming ... ever blooming into hanging gardens. The dressing-table mirror folded into a twirled shard before her, making her image funnier than in a fairground funhouse. Then just laughter. Nothing else.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Beneath the snow, there was a conical piece of rip-edged flesh with a coded message (D679 BBY) branded upon it. It was never discovered, so nobody would have to face such mystery; nobody would need to explain how a dream could leave bits of itself in the real world. Whatever the case, no party admitted responsibility."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Thanks, GSC! :-)
Today, whilst renovating a bit of the Weirdmonger Wheel, I surprisingly found another cone in my own work (a fanblade fable) that I'd forgotten about:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/fanblade_fable_3.htm


Edited to change link.

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"I bowed down, as if I were on a stage. Only to hinge right back as Angelica Braharniss took advantage of this momentary lack of concentration on my part, with a huge upsurge of energy from the pits of her many stomachs. Cowntess Immaculate milked me so dry that I found myself back in that original cot (or imagined I did) where I once yearned so desperately for a mother’s ripened nipple. Arching my baby’s back and neck so that the lips of my toothless mouth coned up for the feed that wasn’t there. Wet-nurses were few and far between those days. And the doctor who thought he so kindly suffocated me had a monocle and black cape, except everything was in negative, and the cape was as deceptively white as an angel’s in Heaven. But he also croaked and clapped like a seaside circus act."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

She had a jar by her bed – to catch the dreams, she said.

I was a neutral scanner. I was once her sinner, but now her sin-eater. I did not know her name, although I seemed to know everything else about her. Her scanty future. Her even scantier past. Her childhood. Her shadowy parents and those other shadowy figures and less shadowy figures that populated her life. Some were friends, some enemies. Many were neither.

I never guessed that I was one of her dreams - a dream that the jar could never catch, because the emptiness it held and used as bait to catch her dreams did not entice me as much as other dreams.

The others were caught by the jar.

And their punishment? To form the emptiness again … become no more.

Dreams were nightmares. Every dream, even nice ones, became nightmares in the end. The jar caught them and neutralised them. Except me. I was already neutral – that's why the emptiness could not entice me.

The figures were white – and she knew she was right.

The shadowy figures that populated her real life I – as her scanner - left her side to follow.

I took advantage of the time she was in deep dreamless slumber to leave off guarding her and followed shadowy figures that had populated her waking hours. These were her many exes. Those who had loved and left and broken her heart. These shadowy figures were white, a fact that was disguised by the shadows that covered them like religious veils.

The shadows themselves were white. Therefore I had to recognise them as real shadows from their aura.

When I was gone – she snored along.

Despite hating them all, there was one among the shadowy figures who really tried to dig deep beneath my veneer of ordinary hate to turn it into extraordinary hate. He was a cheat. A cad. A blackguard. Worse than I'd ever been. His wispy drapes were more like embedded china clay than shattered shadow.

He hid himself beneath a white frozen mould of misshapen humanity, a pipe stuck in his mouth as a disguise, and eyes that had once been spent as shillings. I followed him in earnest. I wanted to spend my misspent youth in stealing his age or experience (once filtered of its evil) to give myself back some semblance of life or of provenance. Then I could truly love her as she deserved to be loved, once woken into the snowlit world that surrounded the house she slept within. She would then refill the jar with emptiness and sleep again, a peaceful sleep of the innocent, with me inside her bed, instead of out. That was an innocent ambition with which even one like me beset by the diversion of extraordinary hate could foster.

She stirred – what she heard?

I had lost track of my prey amid the other shadowy figures that innocently acted as subterfuge or decoy for that dire cad's own re-tracking to the room where she slept, without me knowing. The forest of night was cliffed with sheer wastes of frosty smoothness. I drifted amid the wide white beacons of shadow, seeking the one I wished to strangle with my own bare and frozen hands to rescue my heroine.

The jar was not just empty, it was no jar at all but Cone Zero.

She had awoken out of it – herself become her own special hero.

I crept away from him, not wishing to interfere with a bad love poem – especially with my extraordinary hate recognised as motiveless madness too late.

I had not even been a good scanner, judging by the forced half-rhyme with sinner. Not even an excuse for alexandrine or assonance. No-man, snowman. Even I couldn’t strangle sense from nonsense.

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"In the old days, children were delighted by the merest stockingful of fruit and coal, and Christmas plum pudding could be sown with any loose shrapnel like threepenny bits or tanners." Rachel Mildeyes (THE GOOD OLD DAYS vol viii. Cone Zero)

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The cameras rolled, and I was lucky enough to be in the live audience. Lucky, despite the cold opening. With the prospect, however, of warming up when...

The front man strode to the front. He was the 77 year old Piero Lopez – a touch of class, free and easy, still swinging it like a 21 year old with the whole of his life in front of him.

The crowd began eagerly clapping along with the music. Each piece contained the blowing of numbered cones, the flicking of projector propellers, the opening / shutting of lens filters, the slamming of fridge doors, the ratcheting of loft ladders, the clatter of manholes, the clamping of wheels, the wild alarums of fire and the clunking of ice-cold cocktails.

The music’s own in-built clapping grew louder then muted then even louder as it merged with the audience’s own applause proper and returned to the instinctive accompaniment of any music allowed to be heard between the slapping of bottoms and the cresting of tone-deaf tops, thirds and piping trebles followed by the lowing of low brass as it burgeoned amid snort and snicker.

Like the words used in description, it was a wild, hip-sweaty scene in a cold cold climate, a whole razzamatazz surrounding the regimented audience that the crowd (mob?) often mimicked in civilised attention to a supposed entertainment. The audience and entertainment together were a single variety show: a cornucopia of escapist skill rather than a chaotic fandango of lost Hollywood dreams.

The absurd abrasions of mind-upon-matter were what all this would soon become when the audience eventually imagined they were watching something on a screen and not a wild indulgence of a live stage-show.

I climbed down from the trip-easies of word and sound. I was a member of those clapping monkeys, or audience as I began to assume it surely always was, gazing at old Piero Lopez's antics on the stage as he directed the jazz rhythms into clearer and clearer contexts of civilisation's near collapse. A catharsis of wanting a catharsis even if that very catharsis was its own destruction. Freak and easy. The words were far too easy. Meaningless and meaningful.

Mean and cruel. Without being as harsh as the winter was quickly becoming outside the concert hall … even as we were shook and shaken to the cavortings of the brass and woodwind and cool percussion. I clapped my own hands more for heat than in appreciation. I'd never liked jazz at the best of times, and this was the worst of times, believe me, despite the enjoyment.

Jazz was really part and parcel of the dire straits we all found ourselves in. During the past, when I was genuinely happy, even the best Jazz Singer had seemed to deplete such happiness; but today the music actually created happiness from a sadness that had earlier contained no happiness at all - despite the white streets outside and despite the white faces inside (whatever their original colour under the make-up).

Piero Lopez was the essence of metaphorical warmth as he was seen to change brass for silver, and vice versa, as this his flute-and-trumpet market held snorting sway amid the increasing swathes of misty breath that the concert hall was seen to contain. A trading arena where nobody now understood what was valuable and what was not. Freezer burns at every turn, as that percussive scorching of the music ballooned in frosty frenzy.

I turned to my side to see if Anabel was also smacking her palms together in desperate pleas for heat to materialise from the braying bells and horns of the instrumentalists on the stage. She was sobbing. We knew as a unit of both of us – knew better than what each of us could possibly know without the other – that this was fiddling with friction whilst Rome froze over.

Piero Lopez held up his hand. I remarked it was gloved. This seemed wrong. Only high fashion ladies in the thirties wore gloves in public. Glove-puppets. Mittens maybe. But not gloves. I stifled my own shouts of recrimination with my decorative scarf. More a Dr Who scarf than a means to keep myself warm. Though it now served both purposes. I was in the audience. I was the paying customer. I could wear what I liked. The band in overcoats however seemed to be cheating some unspoken law of entertainment. But Piero's upraised hand – gloved or not – halted the jazz to the mere grumbling stutter of a single randy sax.

"I woke up this morning at four eh em," he announced into the microphone. Even at the age of 77, he could hold an audience – even an unruly one – in the palm of his hand. And this audience was not only unruly with drink and funny fags, it was now in extremis with a cold coming of it like the three Magi at Christmas and another cold coming from their noses like a tuneless brass band of snorts and brays, including Anabel and me: both of us keeping time with countless other couples in permutations of love and lovelessness, same sex and unsame sex, till the whole world audience clapped their cupped hands to their mouths and horned a desperate call to the wild wild.

Free and easy. The music resumed with the swaying rhythms accompanying an elegant Eartha Kitt in high fashion gloves – as we all approached the thankfully hotter climes we could sense awaited us amid the ring of near death. Even Piero looked baked sooty. Only sound and colour were missing in the silence, as filming disinvented itself by piecemeal time-travel. The coated film of silent unsound dreams with Al Jolson as the chief minstrel entering Cone Zero.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

I hope that everybody who puts on a red nose today will find that it has become their real nose when they come to take it off.

I must not have these nasty thoughts: but how can I help it when they keep slipping unbidden into my mind? Only yesterday, I sat in my garden, concentrating hard, with brows creased over my eyes, literally willing all cars with red dingdongs on their radiator grills, by some cosmic mischance, being on the same motorway system nose to tail, the clown driving at the head of the convoy suddenly braking and creating the biggest snarl-up in the world that even those who compile that Irish Stout book concerned with world records would not believe their eyes when they saw the results of the eventual concertina shunt slowly crocodiling up and down the length of Lesser Britain.

But as soon as I had the thought, I regretted it. I've a heart of gold really, if not a nose of red.

[My next campaign is ridding the world of traffic cones. Chimneys with a sense of humour will have to come later, when I'll likely strip 'em bare of aerials...]

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Unknown to both – an electric ice-cream van had drawn up beside the kerb. Raspberry rippling ... and Magnums making melted chocolate sculptures between the two cones of the gurgling lady with the wafers."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The clouds are churning around the cone of Mount Catanak, with clutches of overlapping lightning sparking continuously within the roiling masses."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The blue one's getting closer! But wait is that a brown cone I see coming?"

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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...'"