Profane Exegesis/Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness 8

I feel that sense of morose sadness coming upon me again. Like a bitter-sweet
melody. Corny, but that expresses it perfectly. Like distant music, imperceptibly,
drifting in on a breeze. Unknown worlds, modes of being, lives lived elsewhere, at
the very edge of consciousness. Anywhere out of the world. Sometimes I think I
must hate this world. But everywhere can seem interesting, almost quaint. This flat.
Untidy, poky, unkempt. Even the odd cobweb. A single mouse running around
occasionally. It’s very discreet. An elusive pet for almost no upkeep. My only
companion for months now. Except for the dreams. As persistent as ever. When
you’ve lived quietly for a while, with not too much distraction, not too many
interruptions, dreams seem to develop a life of their own. The vivid becomes very
vivid; your very own utterly surreal home movies. More like an alternative world.
Oft-times I’ve been imagining what it would be like to go back in time, to see
old shops etc. This likely stems partly from recalling the two grocers on the corner of
the street where I grew up. Thinking back to that, and becoming aware once again of
the unreliability and imprecision of memory. And of language. Vague snatches of
images. Some pillars, the rows of shelves, perhaps a door near the back of the shop.
Just asking to be explored as a kid will, but out of bounds. I was a terrible thief as a
kid, but rarely tried it on with these shops. Too close to home.
My mother, commenting once on the solidity of the old council flat we lived in,
remarked that they had been built in 1938. Perhaps that’s how long it took to
complete them, because I once saw a photograph in a window of the Courier Office
of the whole area from the Law Hill, taken in 1932, and the row of flats were in the
process of being built (We lived in number 38 on the top floor). I find it impossible
to picture that time as a reality. I do understand it’s all relative. That a knowledge of
history helps, not least local. But the irony there is it can increase the sense of
frustration. Of distance from it. As if the reality of it can come so close, but not quite
close enough. You know that everything you can think of is a kind of fiction. The
reality of it forever out of reach. And if you were there, it would be no more
remarkable or tedious or demoralising than the present, forever culturally based. Our
perception of others, and ourselves, dictated in any society by ones place in the socio-
economic system. Everyday demands. Making sure the bills get paid. Or just
striving to keep body and soul together through the random demands and sadistic
peculiarities of an arbitrary school system and aberrant parents. No question of the
reality of the world and ones everyday experience there. The world too much in your
face. Then you just wish it would go away. It’s so easy to fall into the fantasy of the
past being a more pleasant period. Like dreaming of living an idyllic life in the
country.
I have to ask myself where the impulse comes from. Is it solely based on a kind
of wishful thinking – an inability to face ”reality?” A form of escapism? That
sometimes we can feel we’ve fucked things up so badly we turn into a kind of Billy
Liar? We all want to be heroes or at least seen as heroes, just as he did, to make up
for the ordinariness of his life. What if your life is so extraordinary in a way, that you
didn’t recognise it? So much so, you would do anything to lead a ‘ordinary’ life?’ –
whatever that is exactly.

Sept 10. The weird thing about childhood is how it can seem more real
than later life. Every experience is vivid and new, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Every perception seems magnified. Supremely unconcerned with such adult
necessities as having to make a living, one naturally gravitates towards what makes
life worth living with barely any conscious volition in the process. If it’s interesting
and isn’t too threatening, then it’s worth pursuing. Insects, birds, comics, books,
animals, all were fair game – especially birds. There were few things more
fascinating to me. Girls maybe, but that was far more problematic. Birds could be
observed and even interrelated with in a way that wasn’t so different from following a
story or watching TV. I could feel myself more as the observer than the observed. It
was another aspect of the world I could explore with a sense of relative detachment
yet feel deeply involved. They were alive – conscious, sentient beings I could feel
affinity with. They experienced fear and apprehension as well as had a form of
freedom I could never experience; they could fly – whenever and to wherever they
wanted. They even flew to far off countries in the summer or some of them did such
as Swallows or Swifts. I was stuck in the here and now with my crazy mother and
having to go to school.
But in the summer holidays I was free for the most part for six weeks and could
read and explore to my hearts content. I could draw for a bit then stop when I wanted
to do something else. The notion of drawing or even painting for most of the day
most days would have seemed like a kind of prison. I didn’t write much if at all as I
knew my mother would read it and that made it impossible to be natural – writing
was for school with a set project or subject. It was a different situation and mindset.
At home a whole other dynamic was in place that had nothing to do with expressing
myself except in my head which was where reading came in. I lived what I read and
took it out into the world with me as the books brought another world to me. When
Bunter and the gang visited Egypt or Bob Hope and Bing Crosby did the same in
their Road Movies, I was there to, each blending into the other for me, yet strangely
similar. After a long period reading that Bunter story to stop for tea when my mum
came in, it was as if a part of me had been there with them. The present felt less
solid, less real than it usually did. It was a natural ‘high.’ I could feel oddly detached
from the world, from the overbearing present even though I knew it to be real in a
way that a film or a story – ideas – weren’t. Or so I assumed.
Nor would I have wanted to read all day, every day. I didn’t set a timetable or
draw up involved plans or a complicated series of graphs for what I wanted to do.
When I felt like going out I went out. It helped if the weather was fine. There was
the whole neighbourhood to explore. Oddly enough I enjoyed reading in the sunlight
– I was as liable to stay in and set up a cosy nook by the window, even closing off the
rest of the room – and that world, by pulling the curtains together so that I had my
own little cocoon-like space, and I’m sure that was the objective. My womb with a
view. My little timeless moment, protracted for as long as I could make it last. My
snowball’s gambit in hell. But it seemed to work as a mood arose in me like music
and the world expanded – I only had to look out of the window; there was a whole
world out there and then some. The shining sun alone was proof of that.
My mother and others might think they ruled the world and me along with it but
none of them could equal the might of the sun or fathom its origins along with the
rest of this world and the limitless universe beyond. Whoever made the sun and the
stars was clearly in charge, and that was the same being who made me. They didn’t
own shit. My mother seemed to be wrapped up in self-created woes and trivialities it
seemed to me. The world could be a fascinating place if only she could see it, if only
she would stop and look. But I was beholden to her for what freedom I had of
course. Wherever she got the money, it was her that fed and clothed me and found
the (council) flat we live in that kept a roof over our heads, as she would sometimes
remind us in her belligerent, ‘nerves at the end of her tether’ way. Everything became
a means for her to see herself as unreasonably overburdened and victimised in the
pursuit of making us – mainly me – feel more guilty, ungrateful little wretch that I
was. My books, such as they were, were merely a reflection of my selfish
acquisitiveness and self-centredness as well as a reminder of my father who had
aggrieved her so much, as ‘he was a reader as well.’ My talent and occasional
inclination for drawing – at least she couldn’t read it – only served to reinforce that
perception as if these were intolerable provocations I had set up intentionally, clearly
possessed by some malicious or devilish intent designed to push her over the brink of
what sanity she had managed to retain in the face of such protracted and fiendish
onslaughts to her innocently good-intentions and well-being – malevolent little fucker
that I was. If ever she might have felt this was all a little nuts, her natural self-pity
and sense of self-righteousness would save the day like any good tunnel-visioned
fundamentalist.
Not that she was religious in any way, but she was a true believer all the same –
in hatred and guilt. The actuality of it was that it was to repeatedly experience it in a
haze of bewilderment and incomprehensibility. On other days she seemed reasonably
calm. I likely picked this up on some level and that was when I stayed in and read for
a while. But my immediate world was to be explored, as intimately as possible, and
in the naturally acquisitive way of boys, that meant accumulating a collection og
birds eggs in whatever way I could. They would be the stolen, forbidden fruit of my
endeavours, the potential and future life of the embryo chick within, a necessary
sacrifice for the artistic beauty and uniqueness of my feeble little collection – feeble
compared to the riot of colour, texture, and even shape, contained in my little
Observer’s book of bird’s eggs that I carried around with me in the hope of finding –
or ferreting out – something rare. No wonder we wolfed down hen’s eggs; they were
the dullest of the lot. It also made it easier to make the progression to seeing it as
relatively harmless to decimate the ‘offspring’ of other birds.
I think I was motivated by greed mainly. Mostly it was Blackbird or Thrush,
distinctive as they were, with the occasional ‘Starry’s’ – Starlings, which to me, were
quite exotic, as they reminded me of small crows, for which reason I felt a bit more
sorry for them with their odd stilted gait and charmless rasps. They were like the
outsiders of the species – unattractive and awkward. That just about covered my own
self-image. After I had two or three each of their eggs there was no reason to take
any more. House-sparrows eggs were as common, but I came across others such as
Linnets and House-martins and possibly Goldcrests and Bluetits. It could be difficult
to differentiate between some of them as they were quite similar and as there was
only a single illustration for each in the book, that made it all the more ambiguous,
whick of course, only made it all the more tantalising, increasing my reluctance to
give them up. It was a question of balancing the scales of a subdued but tangible
sense of guilt along with the usual drive to please myself and keep them just in case.
I had developed my own code of (mis)conduct to keep my conscience in the red as I
saw it. That was to take up to two eggs if there were five in the nest – and desirable,
and one if there was three, and one or two if there were four, depending on how much
I wanted them. Two was more problematic, but my acquisitiveness often got the
better of me and I’d take one anyway. I can vaguely recall taking three from a four or
five, as I felt guilty enough at the time to recall it now. I probably let one slip through
my fingers as I ‘blew it,’ or it burst with the pressure as happened if I was too
impatient or the egg was more delicate. But first you had to put them up to the sun,
holding it between thumb and forefinger to see if it was ‘guggit’ – close to hatching.
If it was, we put it back, as carefully as we had extracted it. Sometimes it could
be difficult to get ones hand into the nest again while still holding the egg; then it had
to be left to roll the rest of the way, again as carefully as one could. That always
worried me as I could never be sure if any of them had cracked. There was no point
in trying to blow a guggit egg – sticking in the pin through to the other end and
swirling it around as the hole would be too big for the contents to get out. Sometimes
this happened either due to impatience or carelessness, or because it was a dull day or
as with pigeons eggs whose shell was thicker, it could be difficult to gauge just how
developed the embryo was.
This was also when the eggs were more likely to burst. A case of I’ve started,
it’s dead, so I’ll finish, as a partially shaped snot of gloop would dangle obstinately
from the bottom of the egg like some obscene horror movie in the making, as one’s
ears popped with the effort of huffing and puffing. I could feel my bad karma
mounting by the second. It was an eye-opener to realize many other kids didn’t give
a toss either way, as when, standing by the old deserted tenements close by where we
lived, we saw some older, tough lads we knew climbing the stairs of the tenements
opposite, on their way to decimate the group of pigeons that nested there, only I never
saw that coming as I assumed they were only out for the eggs. Their procedure was
to give the eggs –all of them – a perfunctory glance and broadcast its state to the
others, though I only ever did it in two’s on my own. ‘Guggit’ one or two repeated as
they smashed the eggs to the ground.
I felt this was needlessly callous and destructive. Then one or two having
cornered a pigeon or three, held them, letting them go at the last second as they tried
to kick them like a football. This only had the effect of making me feel angry and
helpless. More shocked than angry -that they could have such utter disregard for
feeling, sentient creatures. I never questioned how our sausages or chicken came to
be on our plate but I took that to be a matter of convenience and commerce; that as
with my eating them, it was ‘nothing personal.’ I couldn’t get my head and emotions
around it. This wasn’t indifference but indifference to their own sadism. It was
gratuitous sadism for the sake of it.