You’ve left it a bit late mate

 Posted by at 4:04 pm  Atelier, Fundamental Perversions  Comments Off
Aug 172013
 

photo

“At first I was surprised by her designs, her hopes for me, as though a seamstress should dream her son would be a bank teller not a banker, a druggist, not a dancer. Her aim was too low to have been aimed at, and there seemed little connection between her life and the life she sought for me.”*

Parents and off-spring; what the one has in mind – if anything – and the other has to discern through the darkness, the tragic mists and deceptions of language, the ambiguity of our dreams. A blank canvas, do what you like as long as you are happy. Yet the hope must be there, hidden under the fear of saying the wrong thing. Do I dare aim if the target is too indistinct, smudged by the clouds of fear. But not just the aim: one also has to gather the raw materials to oneself; to prepare for the attack on the world, to make an impression, a dent, a glorious explosion of day-glo colour.

You’ve left it a bit late mate!

Yeah I know, but you know how it is. I thought the world needed a bit of adjusting before I made my moves and besides the luxury of procrastination was always nearby. Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow.

I can almost see the edges, the shadowy episodes, those things that happen outside the official boundaries – not far outside, as I said, on the edges but where things are a bit blurry, Ill defined, or not defined at all, which is precisely the point: what is interesting is precisely what hasn’t been noticed, not put into language, not spelled out, mostly non-verbal, still inside the dream.

Surely the wheelbarrow with its load should have been heavier, but I was able to push it with surprising ease. I’m not, in the ordinary way of things, a strong, muscular creature; never laboured in the fields, nor on building sites, nor, for that matter, in a factory. What sort of privilege was that?

There was no doubt in my mind as to where to go, the route was predestined: some Calvinist trap primed for unwary souls, a sort of gravity for the spirit leading water ever downwards – river, lake, sea.

Am I supposed to take you seriously ? Is that you laughing or is it another thunderstorm building, another extreme weather event? Tragedy and comedy marching in lockstep. Can I keep my facial expressions up to speed. It’s hard when exhaustion slams in and the death mask fixes.

Ho hum, he joshes.

 

* The Tunnel p. 138