jacob's ladder (alex ross, 1990)
"Sometimes it tells you to go back to a section beforehand, but most of the time it's just simple instructions."
In 2001, or something like that, I wrote a book. It was called The Ascension, and it was about a man climbing a mountain. He came from a flat area of land, and he and a friend climb the mountain together. Along the way they meet a woman, and eventually the man grows close to her and the friend decides to leave them to traverse the mountain alone. The man and woman then climb the mountain together until she becomes sick. The man finds refuge in a cave, but she dies. There’s a sound at the back of the cave and here the man finds a child, an infant. He rescues it from the cold and continues climbing. The infant grows up, and eventually they meet another young person, the opposite gender to the child, and after some time these two decide to go off together, and the man is left alone again. He keeps climbing until he has no more strength to continue. He never gets to the top of the mountain, but he dreams he does.
It was also detailed with storytelling, each of the principal characters tells a story at some point about a place other than the mountain. There were also extended sections about hunting, foraging, and the general difficulty of staying alive while scaling the mountain.
You’ve never read this book because it was never published. I don’t even believe there is a copy of the book in existence anymore as I wrote it all out by hand, and then on a typewriter. But not on one of these here computer machines that everyone uses nowadays. I photocopied it, for sure, but it was never digitised. I got to thinking that maybe I should laboriously type it out again into a computer machine recently, but I don’t seem to have a copy of the original manuscript.
Hey ho. These things happen. And they happen to me a fair bit.
Sometimes I dream that I have things that I don’t have anymore, or that I know the correct course of action to take about matters where I’m really not sure what to do, and there’s a monumental relief to this in the dream that you can feel running through your whole body. And then you wake up, and feel the ground under your feet again, and the air as you breathe it, and in comes the slow nausea of realisation that you don’t have the object and you don’t know what to do, and everything is just a little more difficult than usual for a moment. I don’t like this feeling. I far prefer the one where the road ahead of me appears clear and navigable, where I know what will happen before it happens, and everything is filled with a youthful recklessness so self-destructive yet joyful that you can’t help smiling, even in the rain.