(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.
