Scenes from an Arthurian Childhood
A sea of bright buckets. This is where all
summers wash up eventually, with their wooden lolly sticks and makeshift tents
of towels. There’s a pier full of machines to predict the future for sixpence,
Don Quixote’s donkeys eyeing up plastic windmills, stiff flags of the Home
Nations, and cordoned-off mines from a receding war. I dare myself to dive,
fully clothed and weighted with loose change for the arcades, into transitory
pools in which shrimp dart amongst shipwrecks and dumped nuclear waste; and I
dare myself to fall in love like a moonstruck teenager with the glam rock
choruses that swell from the Scooby-Doo boardwalk. A pedalo pushes through the
bobbing plastic, bearing six queens in dark hoods and modest bathing costumes,
each carrying a Middle English-Mandarin phrase book and a disposable camera. Pack all you can carry in your largest
suitcase, says one, in contemporary English with a slight Breton accent, the recycling centre is closed.
Silent
One foot on
the first step of a ladder, the other on a departing train, you’re in a scene
from Harold Lloyd, your trouser cuffs riding up and your owl-round glasses
flashing in surprise. Behind you there’s a pasteboard building tumbling down;
in front of you a screaming heroine tied to the track, a flimsy bridge falling
like straws, and a sheer edge giving way to sky. You cling to a clock, stopped
at 2.45, and smack black lips in hapless concentration. Above you, a bit-part
actor in a monkey suit swats planes across a painted city; and below you? There
are leaves on the line and nobody notices. No one is fearful lest you fall. You
blink and suddenly cinemas are closed; every bridge has been burned. One foot
on the first step of a ladder, the other on a departing train, you’re torn in
half before you even think to ask what you’re reaching for or where you’re
going.
Art Will Eat Itself
Sheets tacked up as makeshift screens, the
gallery is a slideshow of insignificant moments, with Kodak colours and melting
ice creams. It’s part art and part suppressed memory, curated from cardboard
crates bearing nothing but dates. The mood is retro-kitsch and the buzzwords
are nostalgia and liminal, as twig-thin critics humph and snigger
with glasses of prosecco and paper plates piled with cheese and pineapple cubes
on sticks. There’s a photo of two pale children standing in a tiered fountain,
followed by one of an old woman in a dress that looks to be made of Edwardian
wallpaper. My dad, cigarette clamped thoughtfully in his patient lips, fiddles
with a projector, oblivious to heat and voltage, while Mum makes sure
everyone’s comfortable and has all that they need. My aunt from Canada falls
asleep on the floral sofa in front of a picture of herself on a boat that
appears to be sailing uphill. A blogger takes a selfie with her and someone
mentions Lacan. At the far end of the room, a picture flashes up of a teenager
mummified in toilet paper while their companion is too blurred to make out any
detail. Light beams stumble through thickening fug but the bright and beautiful
still step outside to vape. Someone mentions Paik, another Warhol, and someone
who could be part of the installation, a freelancer for the local press, or a
freeloader off the street, mutters arsehole. Mum carries in a lime jelly
moulded like a rabbit as, behind her, there’s a brief flash of a girl and a boy
in blue school uniforms, before the room is plunged into darkness. 1973,
says a familiar voice that no one can quite place, and Dad starts singing Ghost
Riders in the Sky.
I am
walking down the line of least resistance between school holidays and a softly
crumbling house. It’s cold but sunny and a number of my friends are dead,
sharing cigarettes in the park and filling their blazer pockets with horse
chestnuts. Through a process of cultural osmosis, they’re quoting catchphrases
from shows they’ve never watched, blithely indifferent to their lack of any
stake in the future. I call and wave, but they’re laying back beneath the long
grass with daisies growing out from their eyes. Leaves crisp and fall. Barely a
few minutes later, I arrive home, but it’s just a blue door propped against a
sandcastle and when I drop my keys a gull rips them away, out across a sea
bobbing with tugboats and destroyers. The holidays are pretty much over. I
knock twice and everything falls down.
Tricked
Tricked into
promises, we make rash sacrifices: colleagues, friends, family; total strangers
who don’t even realise they’re part of the story, though they should have read
Propp, Campbell, or at least the small print. There’s a flip-chart in a
warehouse, a spreadsheet calculating deviations, a file left on the Circle
Line, a leaked memo; each one stating the facts and bending the truth so far
that it spirals back like a shell that carries the voice of an ocean impatient
to reclaim everything we assumed was ours. When the stats lie – or when we want
them to have lied – we exhume mythographers, table-tappers, Paul the octopus,
Achilles the cat; anything to make collateral damage appear noble. Nature or
nurture, it’s what we always do, and a promise written on falling snow is still
a promise.
Oz
Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental
academic, whose work has been published in countless journals worldwide and who
has read and held residencies in the UK, Europe, the United States and
Australia. He has published nine full collections and chapbooks, including Learning
to Have Lost (IPSI/Recent Work, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery
International Book Award for poetry, and most recently the prose poetry
sequence Wolf Planet (Hedgehog, 2020). His next full collection, A
Census of Preconceptions, will be published by SurVision Books in late
2022. With Anne Caldwell, Oz has edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose
Poetry (Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice
(Routledge, 2022). Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity
University and remains at best a rudimentary bass guitarist.
www.ozhardwick.co.uk
