Where do ideas come from, mummy? #3

On an earlier post, Doctor FTSE described the Walker Art Gallery as 'A mine of ideas' and of course I haven't mentioned these yet as a source of inspiration:

The Idea Mines of Disturbia in the outer districts of Conscious are rich picking for fossickers if you get there at dawn.  Dig deep in the dark of what seems to be your own psychosis and thought-bats will be disturbed, circling up and around you and out of the cave mouth, always turning left. 

It's a dangerous place - rhymes and reasons leach intoxicating gases. The canary in the cage still sings, but the songs get steadily bawdier and are now accompanied by a small mouse on a trombone.  It’s very bluesy – you always get that from mice.  You’ll need a hard hat on that soft head because grains of truth and falsehood drip down on you – indistinguishable from each other in this light. Here's your maiden aunt's madiera, here's a magic monsters appearing out of empty boxes in a leotard spangled with sequins (each one chipped from the marble heart of a thalidomide angel). 

Voices flutter in your ear like tiny people reciting the rules of forgotten institutions: you must not wear red after dark, or smoke a pig, or scratch another persons arse, or dress as yourself, or redeem all the coupons, or complete the trick mathematics that will send you into a parallel universe where shit is luminous green and truck drivers are welded into their seats forever and daisies take a year out now and then to go travelling – you see them in deserts, on barren mountains, tossed on stormy seas telling each other how great the soil used to be. 

But you obeyed the rules and you haven’t fallen, though there are precipices here that could send you tumbling down into kaleidescope canyons, diving for butterflies lying waterlogged on the ocean bed.  What are you looking for?  Why did you come? With your pick axe and thesaurus, and everything turning into a poem: a bag to catch the story in and hold it as it squirms, a honeysuckle hunger and some bones to feed the worms. The wonder of it all, the wonder of it all - a hundred men digging for compliments on the outer slopes and you in the brilliant darkness with kisses coming at you, covering your face though it’s grimy with day-old dreams.

"Nurse!  She's come round again!"

More about ideas here:

Where do ideas come from mummy? #1

Where do ideas come from mummy? #2