The What is Love, Anyway? DVD is nearly ready to send away to the BBFC to get a certificate which means we're maybe two or three months away from it coming out. As you'll be aware I like to pack my DVDs with extras and there's already some good stuff on this one including Me1 and Me2 playing for the Chris Evans (not that one) Trophy, a couple of bits from my wedding speech, some interviews and six hours of audio Warming Ups from the tour. This morning I recorded a couple of last bits of stuff on my camcorder - reading out a bit that nearly made it into the show and then going through my 1985-6 diary and discovering what other poetic triumphs I was penning around the time that I came up with "Tom's Life". I had had three ear-marked, but as I flicked through the pages I found a few more that I had totally forgotten about, so you'll be able to see my genuine reaction to these lost masterpieces. I suspect that a publisher will be in touch as soon as this DVD hits the market.
Most of them are pretty patronising and superior, pointing out the meaningless of the day to day existence of most people, with only me understanding what life is really about, looking down on the world and judging it. One of them "Journey to the Mountains" is about the choice I have to make as an 18 year old in my life - do I take the easy route around the lake, along with the trudging masses, who know no pain or emotion and who don't realise that the path never reaches the destination anyway. Or do I take the chance of diving into the lake and swimming through the strange hot/cold water, which brings pleasure and pain, which might consume and drown me but which is my only chance to reach the place I want to be. It's both ridiculous and weirdly fucking spot on. Except that probably the people in the lake are the idiots who will never get to the mountains (let's face it, if you're going up a mountain the last thing you want to do is swim) and the ones who opt out of ambition and dreams who have the nicest time. At least in my poem many of the people who take the lake route do die in agony, screaming before disappearing beneath the waves which again is a pretty accurate prediction of the fate that might befall me.
It's interesting though to read about how I was feeling as I took the first tentative steps into adulthood, from a position where I am probably halfway through that journey (unless unexpectedly swallowed in an eddy). You'll have to buy the DVD to hear the poem in all its glory. What you won't hear is me treading water in the middle of the lake, shouting back to the young idiot at the edge to go round the long way. As usual when I go back 25 years and visit myself I end up first laughing and then quite liking this confused and naive child. In some ways he's much stupider than me and yet in others much smarter.
But if you enjoyed the recent entry
about the odd house with the knitted boy at the window I did find the poem I wrote about the Devon farmhouse with the viscous alsatians (though too late to add to the DVD) so I will share that one with you here:
Farmhouse near Totleigh Barton
An isolated farmhouse.
Lonely as a mind.
Cracks in the paint, holes in the wall, smashed windows,
But somebody lives there.
Faintly chalked on a rotting door -
BEWARE OF THE VERY VISCOUS ALSATIANS-
There is something strange.
Violent words hold more than warning.
It is a notice saying, KEEP AWAY,
With more than a hint of relish.
The windows illuminate only surface clues.
Each sill is packed with flowers,
But at one window an artificial Christmas tree,
In the middle of summer.
In the upstairs windows are three identical plastic dolls,
Clothed in different colours.
Still in their boxes,
Still in their polythene [I THINK I WAS USING THE WORD STILL IN TWO DIFFERENT WAYS HERE QUITE CLEVERLY, BUT SOME MORE STUPID READERS MAY HAVE MISSED THAT SO I THOUGHT I WOULD POINT IT OUT]
Their unblinking eyes, their unnatural stance,
Frighten even in daylight.
Like rigid babies, suffocated and entombed in their cardboard cots.
They send a shivering snake through our bodies.
What is inside those dark rooms?
One says with vivid imagination,
"The inhabitant is a sweet looking old lady,
Who sits knitting with sharp needles.
The darkness hides a life-long secret.
She once stopped her baby's screams with a quick thrust,
Splattering the sleeveless cardigan.
Since the moment of murder, Havisham-like she has altered nothing.
The tree remains where it stood,
Unfed dog skeletons guard her doors,
The child's dolls remind her of what was
And take the murdered baby's place as she suckles them at night.
She has not left the house for fifty years."
One says, quelling his sense of fear,
"The inhabitant is a frail old man,
Who wants his life filled with religion and peace.
Frightened of a violent, bloody world
He makes his home a haven.
The dolls and flowers softly reinforce his image,
The tree reminds him continually of his God,
His warning is a bluff
To keep the contradictory outside world away."
One says, seeing a joke in it all,
"The inhabitant is both sane and secure.
He is a young man, who wished to frighten and confuse mankind,
And laugh in their faces from his dim retreat.
The warning elaborately mocks unfriendliness,
The Christmas tree shows the irony of one day's celebration a year,
The dolls demonstrate how frightening innocence can be."
An isolated farm-house,
Lonely as a mind.
Cracks in the paint, holes in the wall, smashed windows,
But somebody lives here.
As we move away the answer is far beyond us.
You see. He's not a total fucking idiot.
