Monday, March 26, 2007

FIME FUNNEL



'Time is not a darkened tunnel. Time is but a blocked up funnel.'

In which Great-Uncle Dylan-Savage settles a modern predicament with Victorian-era words!
Writing in 1894:

'In these days, a heady nation finds itself awash with nostalgia for it's past successes; We not only have resplendent pensioners reminding us of the potency of the Great Exhibition over four decades ago, but we see 14 year-olds pining for the time, now subjected to history, when they were but befreckled eight-year-olds living in fear of the very active Ripper in London's grotty Eastern ends!

By the end of the twentieth century, I suppose that adolescence will have stretched, meaning that females of thirty will not be married! And nostalgia will have exploded, meaning that pre-teens will relive in some advanced photographic contraption, the glory of their toddlerdom, and profess to feeling aged and haggard, all at but nine years old! Every person in the land will thus simultaneously see himself as old (with a long past stretching ever backward) and young (with more leisures to come). This I suggest we call the Parallel Paradox, or the Growing Down Stratagem, or somesuch snappy title. I am as much a victim as any other to this condition: I've mourned epochs I never knew; gnashed my teeth over unrequited love with dead strangers I've never met, our eras being separated by millennia. This self-regard is terminal. Might we one day spawn children who cry at birth because their wombic pasts are lost?'

Ah. When Great-Uncle Dylan-Savage speaks, the sound of tacks being struck across their bonces fills the room. For further evidence, see previous posts for trails of his particular artistic inquiry and slithery genius. Great-Uncle Dylan-Savage begets this blog, and the world.

Me? I vividly recall walking to a professional photography studio with my Mum, Dad and sister, not long before my parents' divorce. I remember my seven-year-old brain attempting to store the details of every drain and brick along the way, because I wanted to force my future self to hold onto that moment. I was completely aware at the time, not only of the fact that I would grow old and big many years from then, but that I would look back on my childhood with curiosity and wonder. This awareness threw a gauze over the whole day: As I posed with my sister in front of fictional rural scenes and smiled for the photographic record, I experienced a detachment from bodily goings-on; I was watching my own nostalgia being invented and shaped at that moment, budding and stretching for air, to return decades on. Perhaps some vague awareness of the impending separation of my parents sparked it. Looking at the photographs now, I do not see any obvious signs of the immense self-awareness I felt; There is no I-know-it's-a-dream glint in my eye, no glistening effervescence that is greater there than in any other childhood pictures. But that day, I was acutely aware, perhaps for the first time, that I myself would be looking at these pictures sometime in the future; I could see, immeasurably and uncannily, the timeline of my own life, and how it knots and loops.

My life up to the point of those photographs is a series of semi-fictionalised artefacts (eating a garden snail; pulling on a stranger's ears and shouting 'Na-Nu, Na-Nu!', autistically creating elaborate lines of toy cars) smoothed by repeated retellings at family Christmases to smooth, hard pebbles, identical in everyone's mythical imagination, even (perhaps especially) those that weren't present. As I'm known as the kid who was good, any bad behaviour is forgotten.

Since then, I've always been aware when I am dreaming. It causes me to laugh at the unreal threat of nightmare dreams and be absolutely depressed by the illusory magic of happy ones.

Monday, March 19, 2007

DARING

Daring, n. One of the most conspicuous qualities of a man in security. (Ambrose Bierce)

... and yet, do we not live in a time where despite great comfort, wild feats of abandon, artistic or otherwise, are scarce? Conservative times, ladies and gents, conservative times.

Monday, March 12, 2007

GO MISSING

Self-Savagery no.1100: Fudge your own final curtain. Split the band in a lengthy process that means you're forgotten before anyone notices. Don't stick around for your own funeral. Wreck your career and burn the souvenirs, and don't leave anything for sure. Disappear from public life and visit your Nan.



GO MISSING
I started fires all over, caused worry to my family, who just wanted to know that I was safe. I am the mythical Madoc, revered by the Welsh, I vanished in a huff with the booty. I divided into two, and was spared execution in the tower, when as the Princes we evaded our Uncle's pillow, becoming minor actors overseas. I am the crew of the Marie Celeste, whose telephones ring on and on unanswered, but who enjoy the hospitality of an invisible island. I am William H Bonny, Paddy Garrett never shot me, I escaped in a rented cadillac. I fraternise with Black Bart, who beats me at poker with learning he picked up before his escape in San Quentin. I am the son of Errol Flynn, and when factions of the Viet Cong took me in 1970, they fought with the Khner Rouge over what to do with me; In the confusion, I danced into the trees like my father in his prime, and built treehouses with friendly gorillas. I am Lionel 'Buster' Crabb, and I work on the Gosport ferry in Portsmouth harbour, scene of my supposed death. I keep shards of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze in my rucksack and my pockets, and sell them on the internet to Americans. The body they found was some other John Doe, who fell from the hot walls while drunk one New Years Eve. I am Charles Lindbergh III, perennially in limbo aged three, the kidnappers demands never having been met. I am DB Cooper falling from the sky, prevented from landing by false paperwork and winds. I was Richard Bingham, Seventh Earl of Lucan, until I spent myself in Eastern boudoirs on inexpensive women. I am Roald Amundsen, not swimming in the Arctic, but running a fish restaurant in Eastbourne. I am Antoine de Saint-Exupery, not in the Mediterrainean Sea, but training a guide dog on the Isle of Wight called Little Prince. I was Amelia Earhart, radioing the other Ninety-Nines, giving the girls rousing speeches from the ether (I was not kidnapped by the Japanese, as Hollywood suggested, and I was not as softly pretty as Rosiland Russell; I never met anyone who resembled Fred MacMurray; I was not Tokyo Rose; I never saw Saipan; I was not taken by alien invaders, who did not experiment on me; I was never insane, clinically or otherwise; I simply took off over the Sun and flew, flew until the universe ended). I didn't ever see, contrary to conspiratorial supposition, the passengers and crew of the Avro Tudor IV aircraft Star Ariel that came unstuck in the Triangle of Bermuda, and I wasn't the Rockerfeller heir who grew thirsty and bored in New Guinea. I am Anna Anderson, claimant to the throne of Russia, whose DNA didn't match up to the real Anastasia (who had travels of her own, across the motels of America with a thick-eared patron at the wheel, before leaving him penniless and clotheless in Ohio).

I am Billly Pilgrim, at the beginning and the end, in Cinderella's boots and a dancing monkey's coat.

I am Ambrose Bierce, leaning against Mexican stone, waiting for the shots that shoot me to rags; I am a gringo, beating old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs. I am hoping for epiphanies from evading being known. I am dreaming of all those who walk into the fire rather than into the spotlight. Those that spend a decade in bed or having tea at their Mum's instead of publicly grinding out results. Those that evade, by design or accident, ever being finished. I am van Gogh's destroyed canvasses, Genet's burnt manuscripts, Garbo walking away at forty-four. I am the idea that leaves the brain and expires.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

TOILERS OF THE WORLD, DISBAND!

Self-Savagery 1096: Take advice from no-one, not unless it correlates with your worldview anyway. Listen to the masters only if they say what you want to hear. And so:


'I found things became a lot easier when I didn't expect to win... You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece' Leonard Cohen

''Struggle for life' indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast's crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife's scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butchers shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday!' Vladimir Nabokov