The Ecstatic Silence: 8
He cultivated a way of going straight up, fueled by resin, plastic sheets, scorched floorboards and extended unbearable summer-times. He became no more than a characteristic of physical processes. Elsewhere he was the burning as opposed to being whatever it is that burns. What burns has removed itself from modern physics. His parents watched him with a growing sense of triangulation, and a closure of sorts. Johnny became that sort of queer error characteristic of certain erroneous progeny following the repopulation programme after the second great war. He had the quintessence that struggles to absorb present times. In the liquid images of cinema and the electric production of poured architecture his romantic attitude cheapened and he pursued a reorganisation of maniacal error unwaveringly.
It was as he ended adolescence that he knew that matter must be doubly uncanny and explanation always diverged from truth. The eternal life would be one cultivated by the metal wing and grounded pig, a suspended disbelief standing on its own two feet. He read Fourier round about this time and wasn't that impressed. Except for this:
'Columbus, to arrive at a new continent, adopted the rule of absolute deviation; he cut himself off from all known routes, he entered into a virgin ocean, without taking into account the fears of his century; let’s do the same, proceeding by absolute deviation…’
A melancholic addiction to eye abuse and lemon over-fixation, he would harness bitterness to over-active unravelling.
'My behaviour back then,' he admitted in a late interview, '... in many ways mimicked that of the Sitka spruce. It was an evolutionary corner. A cul-de-sac with an exit. A virtuous spell. In relation to the development of metal flight,' he explained.
'There were several spruce trees nearby. The problem with trees was that they weren't metal, nor were they plastic. The nature of woodlands and forests, but also the lone tree standing in the middle of a field - you pass them often in the UK on drives to sinister family picnics - became for me horrifying absences. I was unable to process anything from the past as serving the present. Or vice versa. There was just no communication. I projected incarnate longings onto trees as extreme objects of physical and emotional distortion. Alternatives were suppressed in a forlorn attempt to deliver both conduit and core to my fetishised substitutes. Huge metal cars and planes and other engines of instrumentalist, technological modernism filled my dreaming nights as Cordelia ideals. I was crafting the rhetoric for later erotics. Looking back at this phase it was disingenuous. Think about the way the organic and technological are beginning to fuse. Medicine passed on to buildings what it learned from submarines. Optics are a branch of missile technology applied to architecture.'
His childhood was in a place where coal mines ran labyrinthine tunnels beneath his feet right out to the North sea. Gravity is almost another word. Every now and again slopes become steeper. It comes out like a casting. Every rough draft was two steps forward and three more. We cannot survey and control this filling. Does he look like the same kid he was when fourteen? We can't help you with that sort of thing. Essentially, if you have to ask there's little point going further. You're doomed. Go play with your troll. Lay down some bet on a tatty carpet and wait for the breeeze to bring you empty metaphysical asides and pipe obsessives.
By the time he's left his thoughts are slurry additives.
