Tuesday, December the 14th, 2004

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The Dark Night of the Soul

Today is not only the Hooting Yard website's first birthday, it is also the feast day of St John of the Cross, author of that classic work The Dark Night Of The Soul. I recommend a thorough reading of the text, if only to remind oneself that this is the original, and is not to be confused with Park No Lip's Korean underworld pulp potboiler The Dark Night Of Seoul, which is in itself a classic, but in a different way.

Alas, in his dotage, Dobson did get the books mixed up, which is why his pamphlet A Full And Frank Commentary On “The Dark Night Of The Soul”, Wherein Certain Controversial Theories Are Proposed Which Have Led The Author Into Fist-Fights With Sailors Outside Tough Drinking Taverns In The Marseilles Dockyards (out-of-print) is such a scrappy piece of work. Reading it, one can only rue the day that Dobson accepted medical advice from a charlatan, and began to take regular infusions of a so-called “patent embrocation for the cranium” which made his last days such a trial.

Aloysius Nestingbird commented “If I ever get my hands on that quack I will strangle him with string and fling his lifeless corpse off the end of one of the jetties to which I have the right of access after a series of lengthy court cases which you don't want to hear about, believe you me”. Nestingbird said this to me—spitting vitriol—while we rummaged around in a battered old bureau somewhere deep in the Dobson Archives, trying to find evidence that the pamphleteer had ever actually visited the notorious French port. That he once spent an afternoon in Le Havre, accompanied by a chuckling maniac, we well knew. But Marseilles? Could it be that the title of Dobson's late pamphlet was a piece of fantastic embroidery? If so, his entire career would take on a new complexion, and an unwelcome one.

Before Nestingbird and myself were able to complete our search of the bureau, a hot and unexpected lamentable thing happened, and we had to abandon the building. As we blundered our way towards the perimeter fence, a messenger ran towards us bearing news of a new Yoko Ono installation. There was only one thing to do.

Bafflingly, the bureau has since disappeared, and with it any chance of completing the magazine article Was Dobson In Marseilles?—A Discursive Analysis, for which Nestingbird and I had been promised a few pounds, or if not that much at least enough for a potato each. But penury, it seems, is destined to dog my footsteps.