Thursday, January 23, 2014

4962. AVENEL (Peter Whitaker)


AVENEL
(Peter Whitaker, 1957)
The idea of artifice was striking - to see it 
brought up and dealt with. It always seemed 
that so many things were left unsaid as they 
went on their ways : no one ever turned to another, 
in Avenel, and just said something to the effect
'all this is pretty just fake. Should we have a police 
force, a school system, a community organization to 
then cover this fakery? Yes, let's. There's a word about, 
(there is also, I suppose, the eternal monotony of passion 
to be dealt with - how all this enthusiasm for things 
becomes, after a while, one big meaningless bore). 
-
I always liked to think of the Roman historian Sallust,
in his saying (on storytelling and myth) about the paradox 
when fiction meets time, 'these things never happened, but 
are always.' Opposed to that, flipping it over, if you will, is the
writer JG Ballard, suggesting, all these centuries later, that the 
relationship between time and artful fictiveness has flayed itself 
inside out (1973 novel, 'Crash', introduction), he describes this 
upside-down world, opposite of Sallust - 'these things happen, 
but never were', referencing this present day : we now 'live inside 
an enormous novel, a world ruled by fictions of every kind - 
mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a 
branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response
to experience by the television screen.' Now we need novelists 
to 'invent' the reality; novels ticking like time bombs. 
-
These sorts of things were always running through my mind - 
this new, strange place, sort of without meaning and yet unformed, 
being formed. Peter Whitaker, trouncing in and out of his raging 
woods, perhaps as it were a place known and seen only to him - 
the same woods others walked to, in and out of each day, but 
easily passed through; the woods that had, instead, somehow 
caught him and from which, within them, he'd never escaped - 
hounding and screaming at the world from a strange netherland 
of half-way, as if somehow, something missed by the developers, 
there was some weird time-hole, gap, black hole of space and 
void into which he'd fallen or been placed only to roam and rage 
and which they'd never covered over. Something like that which 
the writer Ali Smith portrays as 'liminal space' - a kind of space 
in-between, a place we get transported to, like when you look 
at a piece of art or listen to a piece of music and realize that for
a while you've actually been somewhere else. Limino Limbo. 
(A Doris day song from the very early 1960's, deemed sexually 
offensive and kept off of her released record albums, too close to 
sex ('Let the little girl limbo...', an Afro-Caribbean beat, too close 
to an ethnic border, back then, for a marketing man to take a 
chance on in the early 60's). As such, oddities abound. In Oliver 
Twist, in fact, Charles Dickens portrays very well another of these
'half-states' we all experience : '...a drowsy state, between sleeping 
and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes 
half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing
around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed
and your sense wrapped in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, 
a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form 
some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding 
from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the 
restraint of its corporeal associate.'
-
I found myself living that, each moment, self-aware, as well. 
Here's to Peter, wherever he may be - wiped and cleaned, silenced 
and destroyed, somehow, by the same raging masters of some
weird anti-Avenel he inhabited : those half-Gods, half-Demons, 
once then ruling his realm - come back silenced and shut, 
ruined and boxed, like any other one of his father's dug-up 
and uncovered artifacts or bleached, ruined bones.

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