Noctary I

I have suffered nightmares since childhood; only God knows why it happens that someone can be so affected by them. Around 1970, when I ended up in a horrendous situation as a “supporter of the counter-revolution” and therefore all my licenses allowing me to work as a freelance artist were been gradually withdrawn from me – which effectively turned me into a PROHIBITED author – I had so many dreams that once I decided to record them in a Noctary. There’s a Diary, so I had a Noctary.

It is interesting that such a variety of hypnotic and spiritual experiences can inspire an idiot like one Ludvík Toman, a program director at Barrandov Film Studios at the time. This drunkard and extortionist instigated a campaign against me (and Pavel Juráček, the film director) to ban us from access to the Barrandov Film Studios, the Film Club and the TV Club. Toman used to drink heavily with another drunkard from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and – as I learnt later – provided his fellow drunkard, Miller, with so many details on me that they could hardly have been more detailed. He died of cancer and was survived by offspring. That’s too bad, as I see it, genetics are genetics. Who knows what we can expect in twenty years’ time. The Tomans who got themselves killed in the forest while pursuing a forest nymph are very few in number. One Toman, who studied in the same year as me at the Academy of Arts and Design in Brno and who came from somewhere around Ostrava, also caused me many troubles. Once when we practiced figure drawing I walked past him carrying my sketchbook to draw the model from a different angle and I poked him as if by accident. When he grudgingly looked around to find out who was disturbing him in his artistic undertaking I replied in a verse triggered by the spur of the moment: Oldřich, Oldřich, neither old nor rich, but a loony with a lily on his belly. This Toman whose first name was Oldřich got so offended that he started spreading rumors about me wherever he went, saying that I tried to seduce him with indecent words, which was a clear indication that he had nothing else in his head but sex, particularly at the moment when we were drawing a naked lady and my lovely couplet somehow got tangled oddly in his head with me and the nude model. Later he addressed me like a communist, saying “Honor to work” and I replied “Hi” which made him ask me: “How are you greeting me?” – I answered: “In Czech.” Afterwards he behaved in quite an ugly, harmful towards me. He got a job as an assistant at Brno University thanks to being a member of the Party. This shows that I’ve never had any luck with Tomans. Once I even suspected that one of them, Oldřich, the loony with a lily on his belly, was a distant relative of Ludvík of Barrandov; that they might have colluded against me when the one from Brno told Ludvík about my attempt to seduce him, which made Ludvík ask to have the film “The Party and Guests” screened for him; being the screenwriter of this film later cost me nearly twenty years of my life. Allegedly, when the film was shown that time at Barrandov, one of the humble servants suffered a heart attack or something like that, I don’t know for sure, but an ambulance had to come for him. I really don’t know. Anything could have happened. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that the instigator of my prohibition understood very well the point of the films which I wrote. With his ability to wring even the last penny from his sudden career promotion he was willing to do anything.

He’s gone now, thank God, but those twenty years I have lost will not be brought back by his death. C’est la vie.So nobody should expect that reading these dreams would be a real gas. Whoever reads it can only be happy that they’re not in my boots. Perhaps they’ll will worry that, by reading this book, something similar could happen in their dreams. However, I believe that these dreams, which I enjoy reading from time to time, are evidence of the subconscious and that they are in fact short philosophical sketches, outlines of the naked body of melancholy. In other words, they’re kind of nudes. Only sketched.