What’s all this ‘my friend’ stuff? An image comes to mind of us being members of a panel on a stage in front of a polite audience. At least it is polite so far – when are they going to liven up? And we address each other in some sort of cod parliamentary speakese. Weird!
Loosen up a bit mate, as an Australian might say – at least the phrase came to my mind with an Australian accent – remove that broom handle from out of your back passage!!
I have to admit a lack of research regarding Von Trier though news of his dalliance with Nazi ideology has reached me and it does have the effect of making me ask myself, do I need/want to see this stuff from some Nazi apologist?! I had decided some months ago that I didn’t need to see his previous film review accounts of overwhelming violence embedded in it.
He doesn’t hold back does he!
But on the other hand do we hold back too much? Are we too reticent, too careful?
Or to approach it from another angle, do I (we) want to attract attention? Make a splash, create a fuss? Quite quickly I’m scared.
Briefly in London this week I had the idea to go to St Paul’s to show my support for anti-capitalist camp . . . but a tight time schedule and a certain shyness when it comes to showing my face at a demonstration meant that I didn't get there. I think the last demonstrations I went on were the anti-Vietnam War demos of 67/68. There remains the memory of how easily I was pulled in the direction of what I now watch on the TV as the blackblockers up to their tricks. Not that I went that far, but the impulse was there. What else? The size of the police horses in Grosvenor Square, the pushing and pulling as the hemmed in crowd sought a way forward. And I seem to remember journeying to London on a double-decker bus with the rest of a contingent from Southampton where I was living at the time.
Paul Muldoon, reading some of his poems at the LRB bookshop on Wednesday last, talked of the spaghetti western movies, Clint Eastwood and his (Muldoon’s) early and significant relationship with cinema growing up in rural Ireland. That reminded me of my own responses to the laconic man-with-no-name, coming out of and returning to whatever mysterious place that our imagination might have come up with – an image of a man as potent and free. Perhaps my fear of demonstrations now is that I would both be impotent and trapped. Just think of the Metropolitan Police strategy of kettling and everybody filming everybody else.
And yet, and yet . . . how to stand up and be counted!! That’s the thing about standing up to be counted is it means having to leave the place of mystery. It’s not a million miles from the professional persona of the psychotherapist. A mirror.
What is the slogan branded on my forehead? When I look in the mirror there’s nothing there.