every angel is dread

Separation

We see a father from a point behind his shoulder. We know that he is a father because a good case can be made for his being the most recognisable father in western culture. We look with him into this image, which is a still from the cartoon that birthed him, The Simpsons. The still is selected at random by a Python coding script linked to a twitter account that presents a constant flow of such stills, one every thirty minutes. Many of them are banal. But some of them, like this one, seem animated by a strange charge that has nothing to do with their original context. When I sense this charge, I turn into a very minor form of a curator, but a curator all the same, because I retweet it. I present it as something not random.

Why did I retweet this image as opposed to two-dozen others? What is it about this particular one that moves me so, makes me think in terms of the poetic? To begin, I think it is to do with the distant scene he gazes on (with us, for we share his view): a marquee, balloons, strange thick stillness. I think, too, that it might have something to do with the fence that separates him from that view, the same way that in Vermeer’s view of Delft, if the comparison is indulged, water and shadow separate that painting’s small figures (who are turned from us like the father, Homer Simpson) from the mysterious sunlit pinnacles of a distant city. Which is to say, I think it has something to do with allegory.

In the very earliest days of school, in the infant class, we were taught a song that was to educate us about loneliness and the importance of inclusion. This song, like an opera, had figures in it representing types — namely a chorus ring of children holding hands, representing inclusion, and a figure ejected from that ring. That figure was a child with a bird-like voice who alone sang the words, “I’m lonely… I’m lonely… I’d really like to play,” as she separated, peeled away from the singing circle like an atom, becoming loneliness itself. This communal performance was not fiction as it is understood by the modern mind used to novels and TV box sets, where complexity, back-stories and nuance are the order of the day. It was something more primal and simple than that. It was allegory. And it was so potent to my infant mind that the memory of the song and its universe, a curious mixture of fiction and experience, of concept embodied, burns with an intensity that memories of ‘real life,’ whatever that is, do not.

Stillness

The merest blur clings to the image. That, plus the TV network logo in the lower right-hand corner, reminds us that what we are viewing is not a ‘frame’ but a ‘still’. It is not a static image painted by an animator or animators, but an interstitial fragment of stilled time, mindlessly harvested by the Python script, chained to the twitter account, as it follows its coded instruction, every thirty minutes. The mere blur somehow makes the still more still, paradoxically so, because what is the blur only the ghost of movement?

The phenomenon is not new to me. From the regrettable miasma of my mid-twenties comes something as rare as a hen’s tooth, a memory of clarity. In a Dorset Street town-house, known to its denizens as ‘The Pit’ I found myself, with three fellow zombies, creatures I did not know, in a small front room, where a tea-coloured curtain was pulled against knifing sun, at the tail end of a house party that had run from the Saturday night into the Sunday afternoon of a bank holiday weekend.

“Put on a good DVD,” came a voice, as I went upstairs to the toilet to freak out in private.

“Jackass,” said the same voice, answering itself ten or twenty seconds later.

Sometime after that, I returned to the room, to find it empty, with the curtains pulled and everything half dead in light that was a mix of dead tea and shining silver. On the TV screen was a frozen silent image. The DVD, it seemed, like everything else in that front room that tea-coloured morning, was cursed, and it had jammed. The image was so frightening I could only look sideways at it at first. It was Steve-O, one of the masochistic pranksters from the popular TV show. He was naked, and he was contorted in some impossible blur of limbs and splashed fluid. His face was a sinewy rictus of animal pain and suffering. There were red scratches on his flesh, like teeth-marks. Over this display, like the tweaked fabric of eternity, were snowy zig-zags of electronic interference, the ghost of movement that made the stillness more dreadfully still. When I now think back to that fright, Francis Bacon’s screaming popes come to mind, as does the innermost ring of Dante’s hell, the ice lake where the treacherous, like atoms, freeze apart from one another. Feeling like I was submerged up to my chest in cold water, I gasped and switched off the DVD. I’ve often consoled myself with the vague thought that eternity somehow equivocates with peace, but Steve-O’s howling face said otherwise. And Homer Simpson, forever turned from us, forever gazing across his neighbour’s fence at a striped marquee and balloons, is not immune to dread. As Rilke so weirdly has it, ‘ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich’. Every angel is dread.

Resolution

I have lots of recurring dreams. One of them is about the patch of bog in Cavan where I spent childhood summer days turning the turf that would keep our house warm during the autumn and winter. The bog had two levels of elevation. Our turf was on the lower level, which was black, wet and geometric, with lines of cut peat that extended towards a vanishing point. I knew that part of the bog like the back of my hand, and I was not entirely fond of it, because I associated it with drudgery and monotony. I made such a bad worker — reticent, bored, and distracted by chats with my reticent and bored identical twin brother, and also by the sight of the other level of bog elevation. The higher level. It was a plane of uncut land which was covered in purple heather. Over it, in miniature, so that they were small as pixels, white butterflies spiralled and winked in the air. Far, far out across it was a lightning tree, a blackened, twisted solitary shape, not inhuman. I only ever saw it from that distance, which remains in my dreams of the bog. My slumbering imagination will not let me near that tree. I jump awake from these dreams with a sense of loss that’s as physical as it is psychic, and well past breakfast there will be part of me that feels like a child separated from their parents in a busy shopping centre.

Vincent Van Gogh, in one of his early letters to his brother Theo, writes ‘I once saw a very beautiful picture,’ but what he describes seems more like a recollection of a dream, or a scene from life, because it includes agents who move in a landscape and talk to each other. From a twisting country road at sunset, a pilgrim views a mountain ‘far, far away,’ and there is a city on the mountain, ‘whereon the setting sun casts a glory’. The pilgrim meets an ambiguous figure, an old woman with a paradoxical nature, being simultaneously ‘both sorrowful and rejoicing’. He asks her if the road goes all the way to the city. “Yes, to the very end,” she replies. He asks if the journey takes all day long? “From morn to night my friend.”