Ventiak - an island somewhere in the brain

Victoriana

7 April 2007

Felix is happy. All day he has been singing The Lost Chord in a voice redolent with melancholy. In consequence, the song is running through my head like an advertising jingle. What it could be advertising I do not know, unless it is the Victorian era with its self-confidence and sentimentality.

Quite like our era, really. The main difference, I suppose, is that the Victorians had a solid sense of the value of their society and they lived in possibly the last period in which mainstream English culture took religion as its foundation.

In our world, value rests in the individual and religion has given way to psychology and New Age mumbo jumbo. We don't need God to save and perfect us. We believe we are fully capable of saving and perfecting ourselves. Perhaps in this we share the peculiar hubris and complacency of the Victorians and future generations will look back on us as we look back on the nineteenth century - with a combination of bemusement and distaste that they could have believed ourselves so right and got it it so wrong.

In a sense we are the full flowering of the seeds sown back then - universal literacy, education, the rise of the middle class, a drive towards wealth based on international trade and mass consumption. Perhaps we should strive to understand them better so that we might understand ourselves.

Hypnogogia

6 April 2007

Look, this is a stupid situation.
I can’t sleep.   She can’t sleep.
Well, I could sleep maybe, if she’d let me.
Problem is I snore.   Well, she says I snore.
And I believe her.   I mostly believe her.
Sometimes I hear myself snoring.
Except that if I can hear myself,
I can’t be asleep.   And if I’m awake,
I’m not entirely sure that it can be counted
as snoring.   Can it?   Anyway,
the situation is this.   I start to drift off,
I start to float through that penumbral world
where you see things that don’t exist
and I start to snore.   That wakes her up.
So then she wakes me up.   “Stop snoring!”
she says.   And then we lie there.
She’s too tense to go to sleep because
she’s waiting for me to start snoring again
and I can’t go to sleep because I’m worried
that I’ll snore and wake her up.
Even though she isn’t asleep.   But
she wants to be.   Of course.   We both do.
And the trouble is that if only she’d let me
snore for a while, for maybe no more
than a minute or two I’d pass right through
that semi-conscious state and drift into
the nothing on the other side. And I’d stop.
But I can’t tell her that. Snoring
is one of those things that nobody
has a right to.   You’re allowed it if
you can get away with it but not otherwise.
I mean, if we were both asleep and I was snoring,
who would care?   Although, maybe it wouldn’t
be snoring if nobody could hear it.   It’s like
that tree in the forest that doesn’t make
a sound.   At least, it doesn’t make a sound
in my half-asleep world.   Not that there are
many trees there.   It’s mostly buildings.
Mostly I feel like I’m floating along, as if
I’m driving in a convertible with the top back
and the sky is soft blue-grey, like down,
and I’m looking up at the buildings drifting past
on either side.   There are houses sometimes, brick
with red tiled roofs and little wooden window boxes
full of flowers.   And there are office blocks
and churches.   And I only get a glimpse of them.
I’m only there for a second.   Because if I say
to myself, ‘Ah, yes, I’m here again’, it wakes me up and if
I don’t, I go to sleep and it all disappears.   Although,
maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s me that disappears.
Maybe there’s a real world there on the other side of being awake, a world full of life and energy and goings-on,
a world in which I don’t exist.   Although I glimpse it
sometimes through that hole in time and space
before the dark comes down and I wonder if,
for a moment, in that moment, I am there
and visible to the people in those streets,
an apparition hovering for a second
on the cusp of life.   Do I frighten them?
Or do they know I’m just a phantom
passing through?

Playing Friends

4 April 2007

A fine occasion on yestere'en. The pelicans were out in force. The country's best bookshop, Unity Books, hosted the launch of Marilyn Duckworth's new novel Playing Friends. A polished launch speech from the ever-popular Jenny Patrick and Marilyn's quiet acceptance got the book off to a good start. Those of us who bought copies now look forward to reading it.

I had some difficulty persuading Felix not to attend. He was quite keen for some reason (perhaps he has met Marilyn in a former life) but I was fairly sure that his presence would end in embarrassment, if not disaster. In the end, he was honest enough to agree with me.

For those of you who have never met him, Felix is two metres tall and prone to tweed. Occasionally, this style attire extends to plus fours and a deerstalker hat. He also has a big red beard and a voice that would bounce off the walls even in a railway station. In other words he is noticeable. This would not matter if he were not also one of the most socially inept people I have ever met.

Felix is an innocent. He is without guile and without restraint. I fear that he lacks some essential mechanism that enables normal people to keep their feelings in check. For Felix, emotion is always extreme. The smallest thing can move him - to joy, to tears, to a towering rage. Those of us who know and love him understand that he is utterly and completely harmless but he does not seem so on first acquaintance. Given that he suffers from a fine line in literary envy (based, for the most part, on his utter inability to apply any critical standards to his own writing) you can understand why I was reluctant to introduce him into a gathering of the local literati. Within fifteen minutes the assembled pelicans would have been shocked into silence by Felix's roar of outrage at some imagined slight or injustice. Marilyn might not have minded - she has a nice appreciation of human foibles - but the rest would certainly have disapproved. Someone - me presumably - would have been forced to remove him and take him home. I would have missed most of the evening and would have also been forced to suffer his remorse - a deeply depressing sight.

April Fool

3 April 2007

'I'm surprised,' Amanda says. 'I would have thought by now you would have given us one of those disingenuous little bouts of astonishment at the number of people who accessed this site in the last month.'

'I'm keeping quiet,' I tell her.

'Because it isn't mounting steadily to half a million by the end of July? How many was it in March? Three?'

'I'm not saying.'

'I don't think you need to,' she says, with that sly, infuriating look, as if the whole world is her conspirator. 'Or is this just some sort of April Fool?'

'I don't do April Fool jokes,' I say.

'No? Well, I wish you'd explain that to Rupert. He's telling everyone that Felix's Collected Poems are coming out from Victoria University Press in September.'

'Maybe they are.'

'Please.'

'Well, all right.'

She looks at me curiously. 'I must say, you do seem a little limp. Is there anything wrong?'

'No,' I say. 'Except that I find this time of year a bit depressing. My father died on the first of April.'

'On Sunday?' She looks shocked. It isn't fair to dump this sort of stuff on someone but, just occasionally, I feel I have to talk about it.

'No,' I say. 'In 1951. I was a boy in short pants. It was a formative experience. My first taste of the black side of absurdity.'

'I bet.' She looks worried, sympathetic. 'That's terrible.'

She doesn't know what else to say. I almost wish Felix were here. He would burst into tears over that 'poor, sad child'.

Indeed, I was a poor sad child and I'm surprised and, in a sense, gratified by Amanda's concern. It disconcerts me too. Because, on the one hand, I have got over it. After all, it was fifty-six years ago. On the other, though, one never gets over it.

'You're not kidding me, are you?' she asks, feeling her own vulnerability.

'No,' I say. 'It's straight up. Although it was a couple of years before I began to see the irony.'

'There isn't any irony.'

'No,' I say, ' and that's the real irony.'

 

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