Flotsam

There once was an extraordinary man (who’s probably still around if his liver hasn’t exploded yet) called Walter, who could turn a list of silk screening paraphernalia into a sonnet, and often did. He said, “You have to leap into a rose bush with your ‘art”. Deep down I knew he was right, but when it came to choosing between art and commerce, I did not do the right thing.

I once sold my soul to a cellular network provider for a couple of rands and lunch at the Michaelangelo. For two endless years, it went like this: “But can’t you put the logo inside the xmas bauble? Can we make the logo bigger? No, you know we can’t have the logo pink with stars. Yes, we remember the brief for our employee of the month cartoon of Thembi from Merchandising contained the words ‘young, fun and tropical’ but we didn’t mean it literally. Please take the lei, the cocktail and the sarong out, and put her in a suit and don’t forget the logo, and make it bigger.”

People who want to be artists but also need to eat often turn to the Dark Side like this. Their families even encourage it. They shouldn’t, because the artist might never find his way back. Breadcrumbs don’t work, for well-documented reasons. I suggest a stint as an intersection window-washer if you need a couple of bucks, rather. You’ll get less abuse.

Back in the primordial soup of 1998, Walter taught a bunch of sceptical students how to make a pinhole camera. I found mine yesterday, I’d forgotten all about it. It’s a completely magical thing, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had with cardboard and tinfoil. There was philosophy involved, and faith, there were rose bushes everywhere, there were definite rules that had to be followed but only upside down and inside out, and so what you had to do in order to make a picture was sneak round the back and catch it by surprise, before the rules noticed.

What else got lost between then and now? Plenty. I’m going through impenetrable cupboards, drawers, teetering stacks of books and papers and boxes and stuff, trying to throw out junk so I can find important misplaced things like birth certificates/little Buzz Lightyear figurines, etc, and so I can try to think straight, but the more stuff I find the less I throw out and thinking straight seems to be completely out of the question at this point. I’m hoping it’ll all just catch fire so I can be done with it, but I’m also terrified that it might. So I’m taking a little chisel, some fine brushes and a virtual mini-obscura to the chalky cliffs on an Archaeoillogical Preservation Expedition, just in case it does all catch fire. Please excuse the dust, but this is an alleyway after all, remember, not a reception desk. Makes a nice habitat for small fauna and flora, anyway. Like a shipwreck.

Oh, look – Fossil 1: here’s Great Gran’s rabbit-fur coat, f’rinstance. Great Granddad made it for her himself out of some of the bunnies (I can see it clearly, “Och, puir wee bunny! Hahahahaha BANG”) who were having regular tea parties in the veggie patch. The thing is revolting, is a luxury hotel for small fauna and sheds more hairs than twenty mad English dogs in the Karoo midsummer noonday sun, but I. Just. Can’t. Throw. It. Out.

*sigh*


Fossil 2, mothers

Mothers don't know shit.
They ought to know that
if they say "Don’t," you will
and if they say "Do," you won't
but they say "Don’t," so you do
and now that you have a daughter or two
you want to say "Do,"
so that they won't
but you're scared because maybe
just maybe times have changed
and daughters might listen.
Mothers don't know shit.


Fossil 3, lintscapes

Perhaps there was a funfair here,
there, see, with lights strung along the pier.
The deck would have been scrubbed nightly
of ice-cream archipelagos.

Little girls would have chimed
the morning in with coins for the lacquered
pastel ponies on a carousel, pretty breezes
playing among the pigtails


Fossil 4, french musicians

Suleiman Bin Daoud
Had a harem of quarrelling queens
To amuse himself with, in idle moments
Trinkets, baubles, playthings

He'd enchant them all in turn,
fill their seven-veiled nights with
honey’d almonds, sweet ambrosia -
Make them believe they were Balkis.


(Note: these are not poems and they’re not trying to be. They are a special sort of self indulgent post-its, as used by archaeoillogigists and other invented people.)

And so on. Come back in about a year if you can’t stomach it, it should all be over by then, fire willing. I’ll understand.