Monday, September 09, 2013
Ghosts
in the Machine
I have just finished the second or third
draft of a short story called Rupture.
The title has strong resonances for me. Life contains ruptures though, being
survivors, we try to gloss them over, smooth them out, fill in the voids and talk
ourselves through the miseries they cause because we want our lives to be frictionless,
running like the well-oiled wheels of dreamy steam trains. From broken
relationships to relocation, from children’s injuries to their untimely deaths,
from dying parents whose desire for a last, healing conversation went
unrequited to unspoken praise and cowardly refusal to challenge, our lives have
events which rupture our hopes and fantasies about ourselves. The aftermaths of
these accidental or willful intrusions stay with us forever, popping up in our
dreams or causing us to adopt aberrant behaviours dislocated from their cause
by denial. Life is tough and in the main we prefer to recount and make
ourselves believe the glossy, Hollywood version of it. Dwelling on the ruptures
makes us morbid and unsavoury companions.
In the short story of which I speak, a
ghostly piece, the main protagonist undergoes a massive rupture of his
delightful existence. The hemorrhaging away of warmth and intimacy begins when
he views, like a peeping tom, a videotape of the family life of people he does
not know.
It was like watching an old
cinema classic in which he felt deep pangs of longing for an actress who might
by the time he was viewing it have lost her glorious early beauty or even died.
All old films contained moving death masks.
I am drawn to old films, not because of
their reputation necessarily, though that helps me to swallow the pill with
a coating of sugar, but because of the surreal sense of rupture. The past has
been ripped out of its continuum and is dangled before me. These once flesh and
blood actors, plying their trade with one-time verve and optimism under the
spotlight of fame, now parade their wares on a screen in my sitting room.
They unsettle me.
Twitter @profjacksanger