Always the pessimist, O had to laugh: he was not the boy who
is nothing; but the boy who is half of something; one spirit of a two-spirit human…and
She, of course, the other half, had
wandered off again, and was nowhere to be found […]
…But not as heartily did he laugh as earlier in the day,
when - for no reason he could think of – he suddenly said out loud, ‘just lie
back and think of England’[…]
And then today he remembered the legend of the riven man,
violently cleft to reveal a block of pure white molten light; standing
stone, star-gate, luminous wound of the Fisher King; follow the light to the other side: come
away, human child, to the waters and the wild; ah, to step across the threshold of the white
room in which David’s beautiful eyes – oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know - had mesmerized, and the white room in which David’s luscious strawberry and cream french manicure – I’ve
left every place - had so enthralled and beckoned him in […]
…so the white room is more than Pure Reason’s iron cage, he
reasoned; the cramped and crippling cell of cultural revolution; boxes, boxes,
boxes, and Adorno’s brutalist straight lines; more than modernity’s whitewashed
facade, or airbrushed Enlightenment cartoons; more than postmodernism’s shiny
surfaces: Carnaby Street, Chelsea, cheap plastic Angels in waxy cornflake packets
(you can’t wait to rip open), Ursula’s Bond-girl belted white bikini, Champions by
the Water Jet, silver wigs, sparkly tights, knife-sharp geometrics,
black and white mini-skirts and matching plastic hats, Be seeing
you, and other tawdry sixties tom-foolery; ha, ha mix-and-match, ready-to-wear,
drip-dri, sta-prest spectacle, and yawning, pop a vacant polo; Deconstruction’s colourless
dream of Strawberry Fields (ab-sent the aching scent of real summer strawberries);
tense, frigid borders of anxiety, and fear of what lies beneath: where x-ray
horrors overwhelm the senses – if the eye
offend, then pluck it out – to keep out the visceral warm blood’s heaving
and writhing coils, incomprehensible monsters rolling in primeval swamps; and Look! There’s something in the trees; it's coming […]
…words collide, plates slide, down deep, down deep; but here
there is safety in strong-box manu-facture: try
not to get worried, try not to turn onto problems that upset you; here there
is good, thick insulation between ego and id; O’s white screen offers intoxicating
glimpses of little savages in ancient forests, eyes that mesmerize and come and
join the dance; but retire to a safe distance, to the airless closet of
modern art and science; watch feet cross and re-cross London Bridge at four and five and six o’clock, a washed-up
artificial hand – never, never il miglior
fabbro: cold, modern, fish-eyed, fascist Pound […]
Now, O knows the difference between the cul-de-sac of positivity
and the wild allure of the Neverland attractions, between death by calculation and
the (eastern) promise of the lush gardens of magical thinking; and he knows it’s still
the same – the nymphs haven’t departed; they just keep awkward hours…
