Russian Dolls in Tandem.

Russian dolls in tandem, sit deep on my windowsill. They are elaborately painted, varnished, reflect the light from behind me. There are five dolls in total. All face forward. Each doll stares into the back of the head of its respective elder. Except for the smallest. The only one which is not hollow, has not been bisected. It is the only doll which is whole. But it does not feel that way. This doll stands in defiance of the others. It has its back turned, a blue and red shell. It stares out of the window at the tear stained pane, and the giant oak which lies beyond it.

A blue origami elephant also stares, but this time into the white wall. I made it last week. It is sketchy, slightly malformed, a first attempt. I can see its reverse fold tail poking out from between two fragile hind legs. It sits on a copy of Love is a Dog from Hell. I made two. The second was much better. It has been sent to someone special in the post. These two baby blue effigies seperated by hundreds of miles. I am skilled at tearjerking. Do you feel it yet? I wonder if they think about each other at night. Maybe not. The elephant continues to stare into the wall.

To those who have questioned my tendency to sporadically delete facebook

"We have become alienated from those aspects of life we might consider authentic or real. While our working lives are still ‘real’ (we go to work and pay the bills) they are not as real as, say, farming or building a ship. Instead we spend most of our time at our desks in front of a computer screen, engaging with symbolic representations rather than real, tangible objects. Much of our leisure time is spent engaging in simulated experiences or consuming more information. Existence has become more ‘virtual’ than real" - Brian Nicols

It just gets too much sometimes y'know . . . I feel like a technology slave. In fact the whole idea of facebook is weird anyway. I might as well start listing my problems with it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks these things. Here we go...

--1) (Excuse my pretentious use of Baudrillard(ian?) terms). The fact that hyper-real internet profiley 'me' becomes more legitimate to some people than 'real' real me.

--2) Facebook is too 1984 - let's face it.

--3) (Excuse ridiculous paranoia) Everything I say on facebook is probably recorded somewhere.

--4) Facebook is a bunch of bored people tricking themselves that everyone else isn't bored, and somehow entertaining themselves by watching the actions of many other bored people (How does that make logical sense?)

--5) I become depressed when I realise that I have a better relationship with certain people under hyper-real facebook identity than I do with them in real life, on a face-to-face basis.

--6) It is not good for my brain to be bombarded with pointless information about the (usually insignificant) minutae of the lives of a group of people. (those I do care about I see in real life) ((Those I don't particularly care about ... I don't particularly care about))

--7) Although I hate the thing it manages to suck me back in over the holiday breaks. Yes, this only deepens my loathing for it. And makes me feel like a weak smack-addicted cretin.

--8) The wall feature conditions everyone to masquerade and put on a show for others. It encourages people to present themselves not as who they are, but who they want to be or what they want to be. Basically people trick each other into what they are really like (see concern 1 in my list).

--9) The wall feature is (excuse more pretentious terms) panoptic (in the Foucauldian sense). Everyone is watching everyone else. Every stays in check, they are conscious of being judged by others (also links to point 8 and 1).

--10) Think of all of the things you could have achieved if you hadn't spent however much time on facebook in your life so far? Doesn't it give you a stomach lurch?

Obviously it's a useful tool for keeping in touch with people who perhaps live in other places or are old friends who have moved on. But for me the cons outweigh the pros. Even if not having facebook does result in me missing out on invites to certain events (probably the one main con of deleting it). Oh yeah, and there's something really dodgy in that facebook won't actually let you delete your account - it can only be 'deactivated'. Somehow once you've joined there is no escape . . . a bit cult-ish really.

Anyway, that's for all the people who have asked me why I keep deleting facebook, and asking me when I'm 'coming back' (sounds weird, as if facebook is a geographical place) on occassion. Unfortunately I am too weak to keep it deleted all the time (I am only a puny mortal). As soon as I get back to Cardiff I feel its horrible itch coming back to me. I guess that's the result of too much time in the house. Oh well. I think I'll delete again next week perhaps... My productivity multiplies exponentially when it's deleted. Even just reading a book or daydreaming is more productive to me than watching a stream of information from a group of people (the majority of whom I don't have a regular functioning close human friendship with). P.s. I'm sure that this -----> Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook will be interesting to many of you as well. (Though I'm not sure how legit it is).

(It's kind of painful that I'm making these statements writing on an internet blog, which will then be published on facebook...irony sucks. P.S. sorry for any pretentiousness in this blog post.)

III

Wake up, groggy, dry mouth. The sound of Fairytale of New York drifts up from below. Somewhere. What the fuck. It's summer for fucks sake. . . what the fuck. Today I'm going to go to the library, I swear on it. It's going to fucking happen. Trust me. But right now there is a pumpkin at the end of my bed. I don't know how it got there. It's so smooth and orange. Like a carrot, but round. And bulbous. I swing my feet out from beneath the covers and then snap them back so they rest above. The pumpkin is so smooth and orange on my feet. It hugs them with its no arms. It is my friend. I pet it with my feet. It feels nice. The pumpkin makes a creaking noise. "I love you" it creaks (or something to that effect). Fibrous and organic. In its own little way. Things get a bit intense and I leave.

Get out of bed. Walk downstairs. Each step moans under my feet. I wince after each one. I apologise under my breath after each one. “Poor souls” I say after each one. Each one seems to shout out to the next one. "Owww ooooh owww, watch out!" A chain of useless warnings. The guilt is consuming. Maybe I should go back to bed. Today is a bad day. Walk to the bathroom. Brush teeth. Usually 72 brushes. Left. Right. Left. Right. Always a problem knowing when to stop. Left or right? Things are uneven and unbalanced whenever I stop. Only one solution. Don’t think about it. Keep brushing. Right. Left. Right. Left. Okay now this is fucking ridiculous. Throw toothbrush on the floor. I can’t remember whether I stopped on left or right. Problem solved. The toothbrush lies on the floor, looking like a murder weapon, a short white toothpaste stain reaches out for it . . .

The Magnificent Birth of Future Gareth.

What if you could completely abstract your future self?

As always, when travelling back to a city you haven’t been to a while, new slang emerges, you are confronted with new words and phrases which seem alien. I noticed, on returning to Cardiff in March, that a number of my friends had begun referring to their future selves . . . not really as a form of slang (though this is how I interpreted it at first), but . . . tactically . I heard my friends come out with things like “Oh I’ll just skip work and let future Chris deal with that”, or “I have to go to a funeral tomorrow, but I’ll get drunk anyway, future Matt can sort it out”. This wasn’t just one or two people, but a whole sub-group of friends. At first this seemed strange to me, not to mention irresponsible and maybe even stupid – but the more I got to thinking about it, the more it began to make sense.

I will openly admit that I am awful at forgetting about responsibilities, and having fun. When I know that there is a deadline, or something has to be done, I usually turn down any propositions in favour of tackling the task at hand. Even if I do manage to talk myself into going out, the worry of what needs to be done usually lingers in my mind, tainting my enjoyment of the night. I am one of those people who (I believe like many others), is always looking to the future, basing decisions, such as, whether to go out for the evening, upon whether I will have time to complete particular tasks, or have the ability to fulfil certain responsibilities, if I do go out. I believe this to be a kind of thought process which a lot of people go through.

What I eventually came to realise, is that future Gareth can be a liberating force in these situations. When I think back over the last two or three years – the number of opportunities I have turned down, due to either time restrictions, responsibility, or even lack of money, worries me. If I had disregarded these trivial stock responses such as “sorry I can’t do that, I don’t have enough money”, “I can’t go out, I have to finish reading such and such by tomorrow”, or anything in a similar vein, I believe I would be a much more rounded, richer, and confident personality. The weird thing about ‘Future Gareth’ is that he can only exist if I, or you, or anyone, is willing to completely disconnect the present from the future; to create a mental divider between the two.

I began to realise, that the future Gareth, wasn’t just a run of the mill saying, but, in fact, a complex mental construct... a mental failsafe. In order for this to work, you have to make your future self a complete abstraction of your present self. You might be sceptical or cynical, and pass this off as some kind of pseudo-intellectual way of explaining the idea of burying your head in the sand (you’d be completely excused) – but I’m convinced that this idea is far more psychologically advanced, and indeed, completely different, to just resigning an obligation or responsibility to the back of your mind. The future self, in adopting this process, forces a person into entertaining what is a temporary, mentally existent second self – a twin, a double who is uncanny, one who must become something other than the self – but must by necessity still be the self. Essentially, an alter-ego must be created. An alter-ego who can carry the consequences of irresponsibility, and who the present self can lump guilt upon.

I guess I should admit, that in recent weeks I have begun to use future Gareth as an excuse TO do things, as opposed to conforming to the routine of letting present Gareth reason his way OUT of doing things. I’m not sure that future Gareth is a healthy aspect of my life, for there are certainly echoes of split personality disorder in his creation and successive re-creations. I’m also not sure if he is a sensible one, but, despite these queries, he is a valuable liberating force. I invite you, like me, to let go of your present self once in a while, and let your abstracted doppelganger take the burden – believe me, it feels good, (until you become that guilt ridden twin, and must build another). But really, aside from all that, if I learnt anything whilst at home in Cardiff, it was to use future Gareth once in a while, and to just let go now and then. Life is much more fun that way.
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THIS IS NOT AN EXIT

Lost Highway and Subjective Identity

Ed -Do you own a video camera?
Renee Mason - No. Fred hates them.
Fred - I like to remember things my on way.
Ed - What do you mean by that?
Fred -How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

It would be fair to say that I am a fairly long-standing fan of the work of David Lynch, a man who might be named by some, the king of American surrealism. Having watched all of Lynch's works except the infamous Lost Highway numerous times (mainly in order to grasp an understanding of them) one begins to notice a trend within his work toward making movies about making movies. A stance which actively encourages viewers of his films to read the film's message against itself. For example, in Inland Empire we have the idea of the cursed Polish production being told through the medium of film itself. Alongside this we have the suffocatingly disorienting confusion between what we believe to be the actual movie script, with the script of the fictional movie, which is being filmed within the film. However, to take a step back, we realise that there is no confusion at all, because Lynch has intended for the script to act in this way. What I'm trying to say is, to gain meaning we must take a step back, out of the layers of film. Mulholland Drive also demonstrated this layering effect with Naomi Watts' character (Betty/Diane) playing the role of an aspiring actor, Justin Theroux's character as a director, and a whole host of peripheral characters working on film sets, where the mark at which we place reality becomes lost. I was, then, fairly unsurprised to find Lost Highway addressing similar issues. After a single viewing I cannot claim to have come anywhere near unravelling the many mysteries and layers of the movie, but one thing I have taken away stems from the quote above. Relatively near to the beginning of the film Fred admits to a police detective that he does not like video cameras, he prefers to "remember things [his] own way" explaining that his own memory of things would therefore not, neccessarily, be synonymous with the general consensus of 'history', and past events - the objective history. Throughout the movie there is a confusion of identities. Our protagonist Fred, somehow transforms into another person, Al, who then acts out what we could (feasibly) assume to be a warped account of his past. Similarly Fred's wife Renee seems to shift her identity, becoming Alice Wakefield, the fancy woman of a kingpin. This masking and switching of identity seems to be linked to the idea of subjective, or personal memory, and the idea that history is not completely unchangeable, but, rather, amorphous and impressionable. Once this transformation of identity takes place, we enter into an unpredictable internal world, where objectivity becomes an obselete and, in fact, impossible stance. Instead characters become for themselves, and for others, who they want them to be. Our own faith in the objectivity of film clashes violently with the subjectivity of the characters, who attempt to sabotage what we would perhaps label the 'rational' in favour of the irrational and internal rule of the mind. We are presented with a clash between the subjectivity of human life, and the objective classification enacted by machine. We find, then, that only when the movie's disconcertingly creepy "Mystery Man" comes along with his camera, does Al, Fred's alter-ego, or adpoted identity begin to falter, the subjective construction of 'reality' crumbles, and objectivity 'history' prevails. Through the medium of the camera Al transforms back into Fred. For me, this moment where through the lens of the video camera things become 'real', presents the only genuine exit from the internal, fictional, world of subjectivity - and promises a re-immersion in a world of the camera, which is once again objective. I guess the movie taught me to perhaps see people through a kind of metaphysical video camera. Where feelings, wishes, desires and the warping and distorting power of the mind is sidelined in favour of an all objective frame of view. Perhaps, by evaluating human relationships through this lense of objectivity one can have a clearer view of things, instead of evaluating things according to subconscious and unplaceable desires which are, perhaps, at work without us realising. Lynch seeks to question us further than this though, about the nature of reality, and the idea that a physical manifestation of a personality may be radically different to the body they inhabit. Similarly we pose ourselves the question of whether there can ever be an objective meaning of objectivity itself, and in essence, whether we can even be sure that there is a shared, and objective view of 'history', and not just a web of subjective realities? But I think I'll leave those big questions for another day, to be answered after another viewing. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that Lynch poses these questions very carefully, encouraging us to think about not just our human relationships, but the trust we put in our own perceptions, and our own constructions of 'reality'. I'm sure that on successive viewings more will be illuminated, and the layers of film will reveal themselves. But for now, adieu!_________________________________________________________
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.