I, Lucifer
“If I really am going to say everything just as it occurs to me and be honest about it, then I must start here”
– David Mapp, Алёна VI
So, here we have the fourth wall. The little ambiguity I had surrounding The Electric Angels is going to be gone. As unnoticed and unimportant as that obscurity may have been, I’ll miss it. Now it’s me talking, and I mean really talking – in that retained manner you’re forced into when there is no longer an allegorical hidey-hole to peek from.
This is not the project that I had in mind. I don’t know who knew, or if it was ever even apparent, but I started this blog off with the intention of writing the diaries of people who never happened. That is all prose really amounts to, I suppose, and that has been the main staple of this project, but it was intended to be more succinct, thicker, stranger. One world full of however many people it grew. Of course, I know that isn’t what a blog is for.
It’s time to reorganise this mess. From the start I’ve been using song titles or lyrics to title my work. This is silly. There are a few cases where this has worked, but mostly it seems awkward and forced. Yes, some of you may recognise the title of this post as an album by The Real Tuesday Weld (spotify, go on), but as I said, sometimes it works. I’m also going to go through everything and actually tag it properly, as if this were a normal blog that I’d expect people to read. I may retitle work or add introductions, I may not.
Lately writing has become harder. Most submissions here have taken me some time between half an hour to a couple of months to complete. But now, all I have is this solitary fragment of an idea which has been slowly chipped at for over three months. And here’s what is unusual: in that time, nothing else has been able to keep in my head. But more on that later. My problem is, as far as I can make out, that I am losing the world.
It started off with music. If you’ve ever tried to read while desperately tired or intoxicated, and for a moment found letters to just be scribbles and wiggly shapes; that is how music sounds now. Strands of noise. Of course, I can still hear. If I want to dance with someone, it is easy enough to analyse the pace, key and tone of the music and deduce an appropriate response, but it is as though a vital step is missing. And now:
Shapes are slowly fading too. My little Hans Bellmer, one of my favourite artists. I could prattle on for ages about this picture (and I do strongly recommend giving his series of dolls “La Poupee” a thorough look), but really that is a memory. Looking at the picture now I could never say why I liked it. There was a girl there, once. And she had a sense of distorted, carnal luxury about her, I remember. Now it’s just black and white shapes and I’m hoping to Deity that someone can convince me otherwise. Without sound or pictures it becomes difficult to remember why we read or write in the first place. This condition isn’t permanent, I remember being here before, but the stay has never been so long or extreme. Enough bleakness, I have an idea, remember?
Somehow I still have my slowly evolving, continually half forgotten idea, written down safe in more places than I’d normally care to hide it. I can no longer remember what image meant, if it ever had a meaning. It started with Jacques Lacan:
“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”
and from there, who knows. Funny how a thing evolves. From the beginning I’ve seen this as a short film, which is awful because I’ve never made one. Either I was to wait until someone stopped by and explained how, or I could do this properly and sit down and have a stab at learning myself. I chose the latter, in one of my sporadic bouts of practicality, and I’ve been doing my homework. It turns out that you can easily access scripts for well known feature films online. This is impressive, I was expecting some half-hearted copyright laws to make them harder to chase down. It has turned out to be a lot of fun (The biggest learning curve being the tragedy that was the screenplay for Silent Hill. I managed to get my hands on an earlier write of the script and, by Samael, there was promise). Like dissecting anything else, it’s a gutsy endeavour and gruesomely educational. I have this eerie, tingly feeling that this will be the easy part.
The Electric Angels 