I was the Dreamweaver

But now I’m reborn

I was the walrus

But now I’m John

The author and theologian C.S Lewis apparently took issue with the metaphor of creation. The greatest writers, Lewis insisted, only rearranged building blocks provided by God. If you had the illusion you were creating, what you actually created was hell. 

The castle is inhabited by other people’s hells. Its building blocks are miniature renderings of infernal creations where the dream of the creator threatened to destroy the form. Dichterliebe destroyed the structure of Schumann’s classical ballet, Boetti killed language, Manson killed the Sixties. Seen from above, the illusion of The Broken Kilometer is revealed: 500 brass rods only appear to be spaced evenly apart by the use of a hidden inclined ramp. Minimalism’s mathematical form is achieved only through the misrepresentation of itself.

Something is hidden in plain sight. Helter Skelter, The White Album, The Beatles in general—it’s all almost too obvious. It’s the paranoid canon, lo-fi beats to study and hear voices to, media guaranteed to make you lose your mind.

Fear is written on the wall, in Maggot Brain font. Fear of madness? But the castle feels more like a pleasure palace designed to induce an extreme state. It’s a pied-à-terre for a bachelor who is perhaps too much in reality, who lacks and longs for the freedom of the schizoid, engineering an escape into the ecstacies of derangement.  

Does a spiritual breakthrough require a psychic break? Lucifer is both conspicuously absent and omnipresent in the castle’s collection, each work haunted by his famous plummet from heaven (the first creative act, according to Lewis) and the cosmic breakup which immediately preceded it. 

John sings I don’t believe in Beatles/ I just believe in me/ Yoko and me.

There is a pause between the words believe  and …in me. 

It’s a pregnant pause, a lilting up, a breath, and finally, a relief. In me.

And then the relief becomes a defeat of descending notes, a let down, a whimpering out. 

It’s a turn inward, a retreat into the self.

The end of The Beatles, the end of ideology, the end of faith, the beginning of John. 

What do we lose when we lose the whole world?

You’ll just have to carry on. The dream is over. 

— Emily Allan