Imagine if poems barrelled passed you over the long grass, and you clutched at their tails as they went by and forced them onto the page backwards to rearrange at a later date. And if they didn’t, if they came to you ready-metred in an orderly fashion, that felt too shamefully plain, so you lied about the backwards part.
Imagine being a man who, over his second drink, says things like “anyone who wears a turtleneck would be the murderer in the whodunnit!” and now imagine being a woman sitting opposite him, wondering how long it’ll be before she can leave, as he starts to explain the difference between a million and a billion using an analogy that compares tennis balls to the diameter of the sun. Imagine if you were always preoccupied by something really bad.
Imagine if I were you and you were the type of misguided person that wants to get married to the tune of a requiem mass and becomes sentimental at the thought of ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling being read out at their own funeral. Imagine feeling that when I am you I am worse than when I am me on at least two counts because of this.
Imagine being the person who called depression a black dog. Imagine having so much free time suddenly that you co-produce a film about the end of America starring Ethan Hawke; settling into Christianity because you aren’t resourceful enough to buy heroin; entering the new year on a downbeat because clock chimes have always come at you tock first. Imagine being constantly aware of the ground.
There is an alternate night where you weren’t there at that exact moment that led you to realise that that gifted, soulful person you always idealised always has one eye on the same imagined audience as you, rather than doing it all for their own benefit. And there is an alternate day where you continue to imagine them wrong and can’t know that she lies and has been putting the poetry down painfully, and forwards, all along.
When Charlie Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind he called the memory-wiping company Lacuna Ltd because a lacuna is part of a manuscript that has fallen away leaving the remainder intact but disordered and Charlie Kaufman understands that life is nothing but the present moment indexed into stories we tell ourselves about how it went and how it's going to go: a state of insatiable fullness.
The woman in the newsagent is hovering six inches above her body with the people she wants to kiss in clothes she can’t yet afford, whilst she compares the use-by-dates of milk.
Imagine putting a permanent fish on your arm only for someone to acknowledge it with words as wise as “With koi, you don’t tend the fish, you tend the water.” Imagine realising that well-tended water is the only image in the world that your arm would look more like if, in the cold light of the present moment, it had just been left alone.
