Passing: A Place of Transition
Grief is as much about forgetting, as remembering the dead. Forgetting every morning that she’s not upstairs, but has passed.
Forgetting and disappearances are the stuff of dystopian writings.
These dystopias are our realities, often hidden and forgotten with people disappeared behind closed doors. I am reading wildly the writings of authors who are not scared to face such realities.
Reading wildly: Susanna Kaysen and her book Girl, Interrupted
‘People ask, How did you get there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It’s easy’. ‘And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside the world and resemble it, but are not in it.’
Kaysen introduces Girl, Interrupted with a thought provoking chapter, Towards a Topography of the Parallel Universe. She considers how easy it is to not register the underworld of those deemed mad and locked away. Until you’re actually there, with your newly defined diagnosis. (For Kaysen it was the contentious diagnosis, Borderline Personality Disorder).
‘In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces; flowers.
These are facts you find out later.
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly, at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can’t be discounted.
Every window on Alcaltraz has a view of San Francisco.’
Reading Wildly: Ben Okri and his book The Freedom Artist
Finding freedom isn’t easy. Getting locked up is surprisingly easy, if you take your eye off the ball and don’t follow the said, and unsaid rules of the game.
Finding freedom is something that Okri’s anonymous freedom artists strive for. The ‘freedom artists’ daub on walls the question ‘Who is the prisoner?’, provoking the spark of resistance to whatever regime is dominating them. Okri opens the book stating that we are all prisoners, and in Chapter 6 the nature of one such prison is explained.
‘It is written, in a lesser legend, that in a prison the size of a country there are prisoners who had been there for generations. Their original crimes had been forgotten in the fog of time. Families gave rise to families and were scattered through the length and breadth of the vast prison. There were whole tribes of eternal prisoners.
At first the prison was modest. Then the accumulation of acts designated crimes led to astronomical multiplication of prisoners. Anything could be a crime: deviation from normal thought, unusualness in dress, questions about the nature of time, speculations about the nature of the soul, paintings that distort reality, writings that cause unease, the inclination to think too much. The most serious crimes were those that questioned the nature of reality.
At some time or other most people found themselves on the wrong side of the law. It became necessary to extend the prison till it took on the proportions of a country. Then it was proposed that an entire continent be devoted to containing the exploded criminal population that was humanity. Soon there were more people in prison than outside it. The prison became the world.’
The Memory Police
There have been a number of disappearances. How do I locate what we have lost? What has been taken from us? Our books. Our culture.
In place we have industry bossing us about. Telling us we are worth-less, because we aren’t focused on the next big money-maker. We want to create and share our work. We need some communal place to share what is left of our making. Before all our creating gets mixed up and the meaning is ruined by the bots, by the code, by the algorithms and AI. Our cultural knowledge will be taken and obliterated before our eyes. They came for the musicians first, next it’s the artists and cultural producers. Be strong.
