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Of Reality And Sitars
a dream by Paul Garner's subconscious

I woke in the bushes by the side of an English motorway, somewhat muzzy-headed, grass sticking to the side of my face. My brother, Simon, was waking up with me. The verge we were on sloped up away from the road and was overgrown with wild flora, so much so that I was aware of the traffic but couldn't really see any.

I looked around and was struck by the incredible realization that everything I was looking at was computer-generated. It was like something I'd never noticed before that suddenly became clear. I gazed in wonder at a thistle bush, its purple flowers in full bloom. The simulation was very high resolution; I couldn't make out individual pixels. The stems bowed gently in the wind. I got the impression that as I looked closer at the flower the simulation was seamlessly switching to more intricately detailed modelling to satisfy my curiosity. That would make sense, because the technology required to simulate just this flower in such perfection was mind-boggling enough, and to model everything I could see to that level of detail all the time would surely be impossible, or rather would require a computer every bit as large and complex as the universe it was simulating.

I looked away from the flower and I could sense its level of detail stepping down as the resolution that my eye would be able to perceive diminished, as I pulled away. I looked at the long grass. Each stalk was exquisitely designed; all clearly based on the same algorithm, yet each unique. I peered closer and saw that some of the leaves were authentically dead and browned around the edges.

"Check this out!" I said to my brother, "I can't believe the realism of these models!"

"Yeah," said Simon, unimpressed, as if he'd seen better.

"Look how it changes to higher resolution texture maps, imperceptibly, as you look closer," I babbled excitedly.

"Yeah," he replied again, as if this was maybe last year's model or somehow commonplace.

I wondered what the limits of resolution would be. Somehow I felt that even if I were to examine the leaves under a microscope, the simulation would keep up with my every step, maintaining the flawless illusion of reality.

I ran off into the bushes, my heart full of joy and wonder at the fact that everything I was seeing had been meticulously created, a man-made virtual universe.

As I ran through the countryside the landscape started to change, subtly, away from being an exact simulation of genuine English motorway verge. The plants, free from the constraints of true-to-life mimicry, began to look a little otherworldly, like species that could-have-been. A little sci-fi even. Or maybe I wasn't in the computer simulation any more.

The sun was very bright, the plants were very green, and all very much themselves.

I found myself part of a psychedelic nature video. The plants grew and bloomed in time-lapse-o-vision as I ran among them. The idea of a narrator droned on, without speaking, in the background explaining how the wonders of life often find their fullest expression in the most repellent aspects of nature. My mind left the path behind to become part of an animated film montage. Out of the blue-nothing dissolved a hairy penis-shaped plant that smelled of rotting flesh (though I couldn't smell it on film) designed to attract the carrion flies it needed for pollination. The flies laid their eggs on its bulbous scrotum-tubers perhaps. The montage cross-faded to a close up of two or three cute wriggling maggots on a microscope slide. The slide was lit from behind, and then it seemed that the maggots were crawling across the sky, so intensely blue. We zoomed in further so there was only one maggot, its translucent flesh illuminated so strongly it was like a glowing filament, then brighter still until all I could see was blinding blue sky and the maggot was a squiggle of a sun-beam retina-trace.

I dropped back to earth amongst the otherworldly foliage. An interior radio receiver, within me, picked up informative transmissions from beyond the hills. I was in danger; the Germans were testing a new ultrasonic defence shield not far from here. No one could be too sure of the effective range, since the sound waves were considerably hindered by physical obstructions, like the pyramid hills around me, and the density of vegetation. That was partly why they were testing the device, to better understand its reach. I picked up a transmission; "The station is approximately two kilometres away… effective range varies from around two hundred metres to over twenty kilometres in clear terrain…"

I would have to hope that the hill would be a sufficient block against the debilitating sound waves…

I awoke in a scummy flat, somewhat muzzy-headed. I looked around; there was my friend Peter polishing up an extremely crappy looking hunk of wood, vaguely guitar-shaped.

"Check this out man," he said excitedly, "cool eh?"

I looked at him skeptically. The guitar looked like it had been designed by an overenthusiastic twelve-year-old Def Leppard fan, unfamiliar with the correct proportions of an electric guitar. It was extremely dirty and its finish seemed to be buried under several coats of white house paint. The bridge pickup was only large enough to respond to the vibrations of the three bass strings, while the neck pickup was absurdly large and mounted parallel to the strings, rather than perpendicular as would be usual. There were no strings on this old log of course, but it seemed that, had there been any, they wouldn't have been able to take a straight path along the neck.

"That's a piece of shit mate," I suggested.

"Nah look…"

He rubbed harder with the polish, though paint stripper would have been more appropriate. In one small spot where he was rubbing you could just make out an immaculate sunburst finish. I was taken aback, and I grabbed a cloth of my own and started rubbing furiously.

We were making pretty good progress cleaning up this oddball instrument when I noticed some other equally decrepit guitar shapes behind Pete. One was small, like a mandolin, and another almost looked like a normal guitar, of the kind favoured by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.

"Hey, there's more over there, " I pointed.

"Yeah I found them stashed under the floorboards here… weird eh?"

I grabbed the other guitar bits. Suddenly the crap-ness of the one we were polishing started to make sense. I had been mistaken to think that it was a badly designed homemade electric guitar, I could see now that the three bodies we had were actually all part of one instrument. They fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle.

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed, "You know what this is… it's a bloody electric sitar!"

Wow, how rare must it be? Pretty rare I figured, as there could only have been a handful made by a couple of companies in the late sixties and early seventies, as a misguided attempt to cash in on the brief fad for Indian psychedelia.

Before very long at all we had all the parts polished up to a high sheen and fitted together in what seemed an appropriate configuration. Where I'd thought the neck was on at a strange angle it was really because the thing had several sets of strings; the neck was aligned for one set of strings while the bridge I'd been looking at was aligned for another set of strings, which ran over the neck on one of the other bodies we'd recovered. The mandolin body fitted in there providing a set of drone strings, essential for playing ragas.

We rooted around amongst the junk under the floorboards of our flat to make sure we hadn't missed any components, and to our surprise we uncovered an old 1960-something Gibson catalogue in mint condition. On the front cover were the Beatles, with George Harrison clearly holding an identical instrument to the one we had just reassembled from the bits of guitar junk, in all its strangely baroque, clumsily electrified glory.

I was grinning like a fiend. Pete indicated I should have a go at playing the instrument, as it was now fully strung. And how many strings! The main neck basically had about eight strings, but each was doubled up, or even tripled up, in a manner analogous to that of a 12-string guitar. There were maybe five or six bass drone-strings on the 'mandolin' body, similarly doubled up, and there was at least one other neck somewhere. This thing would be a bitch to tune up! Fortunately it was already perfectly tuned…

I played a simple little faux-raga lick. As I played, a chorus of nasal Hindi women's voices provided counterpoint to my melody, seemingly coming from the guitar itself. It sounded absolutely fucking Ravi Shankar-tastic. I stared at Pete in amazement. I played a little more, to the same effect. It was actually quite difficult to play, in part because of all the triple-strung notes. Plus a sitar has very tall frets; where on a guitar to bend a note you move it laterally across the neck, on a sitar you press down further on the string between the tall frets, and this was an unfamiliar action.

My mind raced… how many could they have made? At least one of them had been owned by a Beatle. Who else would have owned one? Surely only other rock stars, or maybe an A-list Nashville session musician or two, perhaps someone from the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane. There was a very good chance that this rare and unusual instrument would have been owned by someone famous, making it significantly more valuable.

I could hardly believe our luck!

Needless to say, I woke up and it was all a dream.


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Copyright © 2002 - Paul Garner.