Mother of the Muses

Dan's looking through some implicit polaroids.

I don't think I could go back. Too risky. Because there's no way on God's clean Earth I'd resist the wanderlust. Back to that particular road, to her house, and shin over the fence -

Have you noticed that nobody shins anymore? It's like a lost verb or something -

- to fix my goggle eyes on the wall, waggle head backwards and forwards until the angles are just right. Time it perfectly, as the sun cookie-cuts the shadows with perfect clarity, laid out like a nebula carpet just to the edge of the first too-steep step of the back porch. Spill the same irregular puddle of Coca-Cola, so it looks like the shadow is budding or growing, or bruised.

The first and very good reason not to do this is that I know the people who live there now even less well than I used to know the people whose daughter I was disappearing upstairs with at half past ten every night, laying a translucent smokescreen of yawns.

And God alone knows what the new occupants might be like. You hear things about quiet little towns. Nods and winks with the local plods. Elderly suburban cannibals preying on boarding-house guests and drifters. Huge, silent inbreeds clubbing intruders with wrenches, and carrying them back to theirs for brief but intensely uncomfortable lives of sexual degradation and head trauma.

So, probably not best practice to wander around strangers' back gardens, with or without the preoccurence of shin-based fence-climbing action. A.

B. Even assuming that the perfect time and the perfect angle were to be found, and that the pattern of erosion on that step was regular enough to allow spilt Coca-Cola to follow the same runnels and pathways as before, there'd still be a four-footed carthorse of a problem.

No her. Wearing a child-size A-Team T-shirt and cut-off camouflage pants and halfway through saying "fuck" as her drink falls short, twisting her torso away from the still-tumbling companion piece to the sticky pool of caramelised ant-crack at her feet.

Without which, it all seems a bit pointless.

Photographic memory is at best an inexact terminology, a condition that only characters in cheap spy novels ever have in the pure and perfect sense of being able to remember anything, from any time in their life or anything they had ever encountered.

Actually, you ordered pilau rice.

Not wishing to offend, but you've slightly misquoted Aristotle there.

Little did you know that I could remember the sound made by every pressed button in the whole 23-key self-destruct sequence, then perform it backwards, Doctor Bastard.

Cute. But this isn't that, this is this. Nobody wants to fuck Timothy Dalton, and we do things a little differently in the house of memory.

Here's another one. Cobbles. I can feel them under my feet, slipping in leather-soled shoes, stones damp with spilled champagne, more than a little drunk. Last day of the actuarial exams. I failed, but didn't know that at the time. Thought I'd done quite well, in fact.

I lean heavily on her. The next moment, where I fall flush on my tailbone and scream the place down is not recorded, but that's the image I see clearer than the one on the chemically treated wax paper square. Looking up into her face and seeing this tiny twitch of her lip, this oh-great-another-fuck-up look. Something blank and unfriendly in her eyes before the pity and compassion and just a hint of amusement flooded in.

But that's not what I see either. The first thing I see as that they're just eyes, with no expressions in them at all. Just eyes.

And then I see the other pictures we took with that film. She cut up the ones she took home, cut the neat squares into neat squares and threw them away, told me over coffee, asked me to do the same before heading off to Oxford Street. Which I did, and no great loss since the thought of them, much less the sight, just made me sick and sad and disappointed. But that picture brings them back, clear lines, vectors describing pale skin, as sure as opening that book will bring back the motion and the smell of damp clothing suddenly heated and the pressure on my left leg of the bus journey when I first opened it. Don't even really need to look at the words.

In popular usage, it can mean pretty much anything, from just a very good memory - an ability to recall facts on demand - to an ability to remember visual information (which has something to do with negative space). To, in my case, process recall. What I call "Monkey Island Memory". Click on something, and you get more information on it - a flashback of varying clarity and vividness of how you've related to it in the past.

Which sounds like a useful talent, and certainly takes the strain out of masturbation. But don't offer to trade places until you see my on my knees outside the kitchen door, screaming because I've checked the taps are off twenty or thirty times and all I can remember is the first time I ever checked the taps were off in this flat, four months ago.

It wears you down, and it catches you up. Every corner of this town, every street is lousy with associative action. Walking to the shops remembering walking to the shops remembering walking to the shops. Like Russian dolls. Like worn cinema reels, scratching and jumping. Ghosts of other actions leaving trails across every single day. Step out of sequence and the interference patterns drive you insane. Drive me insane.

It's hard to explain. Do the same thing as you did before and everything is basically OK, although you get this strange dislocated feeling, because you can't remember whether you are conscious of the step you just took or another step just like it days or weeks ago. But as soon as that routine is broken, when somebody stops you in the street, or strikes up a conversation about the paper you bought, you're thrown off step. The filing system starts riffling through looking for things to recall. Colours, shapes, shop fronts, anything familiar gets pulled into the mix, and you end up groinkicked by dozens of distinct bits of recollection.

Photographs are safer, because discrete and distinct - particular thoughts are hitched to particular images, and I can just ride through them and hope that whatever's messing up the pattern has gone away when I resurface. That means you. You are the glitch and until you get the hell out of my face I'll just have to keep going back.

I don't think I could go back. Too risky. Because there's no way on God's clean Earth I'd resist the wanderlust. Back to that particular road, the house where she lived, and shin over the fence -

Have you noticed that nobody shins anymore? It's like a lost verb or something -

- to fix my goggle eyes on the wall, waggle head backwards and forwards until the angles are just right. Time it perfectly, as the sun cookie-cuts the shadows with perfect clarity, laid out like a nebula carpet just to the edge of the first too-steep step of the back porch. Spill the same irregular puddle of Coca-Cola, so it looks like the shadow is budding or growing, or bruised.

Current clown:

18 December 2003. George writes: This List

Most recent ten:

15 December 2003. Jamie writes: Seven Songs
11 December 2003. Dan writes: Spinning Jenny
8 December 2003. Victor writes: Rock Opera
4 December 2003. Matt writes: The Mirrored Spheres of Patagonia
1 December 2003. George writes: Charm
27 November 2003. James writes: On Boxing
24 November 2003. Jamie writes: El Matador del Amor; Or, the Man who Killed Love
20 November 2003. Dan writes: Rights Management
17 November 2003. Victor writes: Walking on Yellow
13 November 2003. Matt writes: Disintermediation
(And alas we lost Neil, who last wrote Cockfosters)

Also by this clown:

11 December 2003. Dan writes: Spinning Jenny
20 November 2003. Dan writes: Rights Management
30 October 2003. Dan writes: My only goal
9 October 2003. Dan writes: The Knot
18 September 2003. Dan writes: The Engelbart Elephant
28 August 2003. Dan writes: The Amity Index
7 August 2003. Dan writes: This Sporting Life
17 July 2003. Dan writes: Touch
26 June 2003. Dan writes: Metadata
5 June 2003. Dan writes: Street Mate
15 May 2003. Dan writes: Usher's Well
24 April 2003. Dan writes: Medicamenta
3 April 2003. Dan writes: Weapons of Mass Construction
13 March 2003. Dan writes: David Sneddon, Bukake Secret Agent
20 February 2003. Dan writes: Mary Sue
30 January 2003. Dan writes: Bait and Switch
9 January 2003. Dan writes: What Never Happened
19 December 2002. Dan writes: Sermon on the Mount the Face
28 November 2002. Dan writes: Ballroom Blitz
7 November 2002. Dan writes: The Photographer
17 October 2002. Dan writes: Diaphragmatic
26 September 2002. Dan writes: A life in the day
5 September 2002. Dan writes: Different Class
15 August 2002. Dan writes: Story and sequel
25 July 2002. Dan writes: Fellatious
4 July 2002. Dan writes: Skin Mag
10 June 2002. Dan writes: The Ibizan book of the Dead
16 May 2002. Dan writes: The Sissons Situation
22 April 2002. Dan writes: UpsideClown and Out in Hollywood
28 March 2002. Dan writes: Nereus' Daughters
4 March 2002. Dan writes: Diomedes
7 February 2002. Dan writes: Text Only
14 January 2002. Dan writes: Civil Engineering
20 December 2001. Dan writes: Nativity
26 November 2001. Dan writes: The Wedding Band
1 November 2001. Dan writes: what dreans mecum?
8 October 2001. Dan writes: Stop me if you've heard this one before
13 September 2001. Dan writes: Mother of the Muses
20 August 2001. Dan writes: I say I say I say
26 July 2001. Dan writes: Bigger, Better, Brother
2 July 2001. Dan writes: Hecatomb
7 June 2001. Dan writes: Dispassionate Leave
14 May 2001. Dan writes: Small Town Boy
19 April 2001. Dan writes: Maintaining the Driving Line
26 March 2001. Dan writes: Cut and Paste
1 March 2001. Dan writes: Redemption
5 February 2001. Dan writes: Blyton the Face of the Earth
8 January 2001. Dan writes: Smoke Signals
18 December 2000. Dan writes: The Loa Depths
23 November 2000. Dan writes: The Limits of Melissa Joan Hart
30 October 2000. Dan writes: Shiftwork
5 October 2000. Dan writes: Dawson
11 September 2000. Dan writes: Testing Times
17 August 2000. Dan writes: Onanova
3 July 2000. Dan writes: Roboto il Diavolo

We are all Upsideclown: Dan, George, James, Jamie, Matt, Neil, Victor.

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