Chapter One—Take Off

What good is a writer when they don’t write? As much use as one sheet of toilet paper during a case of the runs. I apologise for the colourful metaphor, but that’s about the size of it. Anyway, that’s why I’m on this plane, travelling to the Philippines—to finish this bloody book. This book, which has literally eaten years of my life, like a disease. This book, which has consumed my very being with its incessant call, like a drill in my mind. This book, which has....

‘….clouded my soul in a storm of apafee’, Voltaire says nonchalantly, peering over my shoulder at my laptop from the seat next to me.

‘No’, Frederick Nietzsche declares, leaning forward in the seat next to him. ‘Zare is a better vurd for zis clouded. I vaunt to say burn, over and over, viv metals. How are you saying zis in English?’

‘I believe the word you are looking for is corrodes’, Isaac Newton adds from behind us.

‘Yes, corrodes. Like acid I sink’. Nietzsche leans back contentedly.

‘The problem is not so much corrosion of the soul, as a divided one. He must bring harmony to his being; unite his unconscious and conscious mind in his self; avoid the archetype of the failed writer’.

‘Not possible. The path that leads to complete satisfaction is, as a rule, obstructed by ze resistances which maintain repressions’.

There goes Freud, always the downer to Jung’s upper. I swear the pair of them are like Tom and Jerry sometimes. They’ve come over to join the discussion from their seats across the aisle.

‘Sigmund, I feel your input is not appropriate at this juncture. We should encourage the boy’s sense of hope for this trip’, Jung says.

‘Not gratify his unconscious desire to fail? Freud replies. ‘Fine, live in a dreamworld’.

At this, Jung nearly chokes on the pipe he snuck onto the plane, and there is loud laughter from the French contingent, all of whom sit in a group near the front. This includes Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, and Emilie du Chatelet, plus various other intellectual types that have been turning up over the last few years. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

‘Perhaps, the analogy works better if it is presented as a maths problem you must answer. Say you have had to solve the equation of the book’. It takes a lot to get Einstein out of his game of chess. ‘Your move, Hobbes’.

‘To admit he does not know how to finish the book is the start to finishing it, gentlemen’, Socrates states, whilst attempting to stop Plato and Aristotle running between his legs and beating the crap out of each other. Those two are just like a pair of naughty 12-year-olds. Socrates’ statement sets off a passionate debate amongst all the other Greeks in the middle of the aisle. The Greeks—never ones to allow the inconvenience of not having enough room to swing half a cat, get in the way of a good chinwag.

Jonah comes out of the toilet, ‘Perhaps he is still running away from his destiny’. Yes, that Jonah.

‘Maybe destiny choose us. Maybe we choose destiny’.

This is Nishida, an eastern philosopher from Japan who has become a good friend. Him and his mate Lao Tzu, a Daoist thinker from China, sit in the lotus position on their seats near me, being irony.

‘I believe our destiny is largely in our own hands’, Frederick Douglas responds, an African American abolitionist who I met down the pub.

‘Guys, I’m trying to write, OK?’

This book, which has taken over my life these last x number of years. That’s probably the best way to describe it as I look around at my travelling companions. There’s quite a few of them these days; I haven’t even mentioned all of them; seems like they’ve taken over the entire plane. It occurs to me, writing this, that you may well be wondering who all these people are. Maybe you know some of them. Maybe you know all of them. Maybe you don’t. I didn’t know many of them myself when it all started. But they’ve been with me now the whole time I’ve been writing this thing, and some have even become friends. So their story is my story, in a messed-up sort of way. There is one noticeable absence from my travelling party. To introduce him is to take you back to how it all kicked-off; to explain why I’m now flying to the Philippines, even though I hate flying; with no clue as to the reason other than a nagging scratch that has evolved into a thorn in the flesh, i.e. this bloody book. My story begins, like some stories do, with a dream...