Fear and Self-Loathing

I've already talked about how synchronicity can arise during the festival. Today was a day of understanding the self, though I didn't know that it would be when it began.

First The Moose and I made our way back to Hendrick's Carnival of Knowledge and the Odditorium for Zombies I Have Known and Loved where I tried a Poet's Dream Martini before getting my free Gin and Tonic - there's nothing like loading up the brain with booze before 3 in the afternoon but as a friend of mine says, "The sun must be over the yardarm somewhere."

Zombies I Have Known and Loved was a somewhat interactive lecture given by the author of How To Make a Zombie Frank Swain. It was a fascinating journey through the pitfalls of early investigations into the mythology and reality of the zombie and how little we're still sure of. Then it moved into attempts to physically resurrect human beings and animals - though even those may have been hoaxed to some extent. It seems that raising people from the dead and conmanship are close comrades, Lazarus was a master of the shell game.

At the end, and most important for the day's synchronicity, he talked about parasites and how a certain parasite that at least 50% of people in Britain have been exposed to causes people to behave differently. That's only one parasite we know of, it is possible that not all of our personality is human. Certainly, many people have a personality that is not entirely their own in the sense that it comes neither from their genes or upbringing but that is, nevertheless, a part of them.

After lunch we then went to my friend Mike Daviot's Hyde and Seek at C Nova. Hyde and Seek is excellent both in writing and acting, a one man show in which Mike weaves his own life with that of Robert Louis Stevenson around the central conceit of the story of Jekyll and Hyde and how we're not two people we're all both Jekyll AND Hyde. That brief description does it little justice, it was a moving and entrancing performance. It has been in at least one of the more high-profile 'pick of the Fringe' shows (Mervyn Stutter's to be precise) and deserves to be in far more.

With the lecture I heard earlier in my mind my thoughts wandered back to the parasite, could the parasite - alien and yet still a part of us, not separate as we would first assume (and hope) - be Mr. Hyde?

Afterwards we fought our way through the crowds to the Beehive for drinks in the beer garden where myself, Mike and a few friends drank and exchanged theatrical anecdotes until, at 10pm, the beer garden closed and we dispersed. Leaving brought home to me that this was the first weekend of the festival and though the festival is always busy, Saturdays are carnage.

First the beer garden crowd were forced to move like driven cattle out of a pub too small for the sudden influx indoors. Then I was out into the Grassmarket and moving thorough the Cowgate. All around me people were shouting, falling over, running into each other... threats, kisses, lewd compliments and lewder insults... fear and self-loathing.

As I made my still-too-sober way through it and towards my bus I couldn't help but wonder how many of those people were zombies?