relentless steel wall

In peak quarantine, I had a dream that I was continuously falling forward while flying around a planet made of volcanoes and rivers of lava. I felt my stomach fly into my throat like I was on a roller coaster, and all the while the horn theme at 5:40 was playing over and over, ceaselessly. The image here is very nearly what I saw in my dream as I heard these horns. It's the only piece of music I've recovered from a dream.

Falling Over Lava

dont stop dont turn back

"5.45am: It is a glorious morning and is now broad daylight. We go over in two hours’ time. It seems a long time to wait and I think, whatever happens, we shall all feel relieved once the line is launched. No Man’s Land is a tangled desert. Unless one could see it one cannot imagine what a terrible state of disorder it is in. Our gunnery has wrecked that and his front-line trenches all right. But we do not yet seem to have stopped his machine guns. These are pooping off all along our parapet as I write. I trust they will not claim too many of our lads before the day is over."

Captain Charles May, 22nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment, 91st Brigade, 7th Division

From Peter Hart's "The Somme".


a tangled desert

"About a week after we had settled in, orders came round for a special night firing programme to last until 3 a.m., then to be followed by a half-hour’s barrage on the German reserve line, an intrusive ten minutes on their front system, and raise on to their reserve line. The infantry were to ‘go over’ at 3.40am. It was a night of horror. The Germans knew something was in the wind and shortly after midnight they opened up their artillery on the British batteries who were harassing them. Their fire, on counter-battery work, was better organized than ours. They would put four or five batteries – two 5.9-in, two 4.2-in and a 77-mm all on the same target. High explosive, shrapnel and gas, all at once, for ten minutes. Then they would move on to another target. Twice they came on to us that night. A gun was blown up, a small heap of ammunition went up, an NCO killed and several men were wounded. We were lucky to get off so lightly. With our three remaining guns we turned on the intensive stuff at 3.39am., and from then on we lived in one screaming holocaust of light and sound. Sound! Deafening, screaming, shrieking sound, the whole range of the eardrum, like 50,000 express trains tearing through the air – colliding and tearing on again. Orders could only be passed by signal, no one could hear a verbal order however loudly shouted. It was like daylight. The flickers and flashes as the shells left the guns, not only our gun, but every gun for miles, the yellow flash of bursting shells, the white glare of Very lights and star shells lit up the landscape as in one continuous lightning storm. Indeed man’s efforts outdid the worst electric storm I have ever seen both in light and sound – rendered it a puny imitation – yet it is the only thing I know which gives any idea of the sensations of that night."

Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division

From Peter Hart's "The Somme".

a holocaust of light and sound

warpig bebop

empty promises

avalanche (Cloudkicker cover)

imshigranda does not exist. It is not a place nor a person. It is a nonsense word that I made up. Yet when I fed this nonsense into the great AI hive mind, it created a mystical, vacant world that lives in the mind of a skeleton.

Hessian Matrix

Pinned to spotlight

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