Saville’s Inferno
29/10/2011
It’s a Box
The tv what ate me was a monolith, a great hunk of teak and bevelled glass and vented hardboard. It was a tactile joy. I used to bite into the corner edges of the tv, it was solid teak that didn’t take on teethmarks, no whitening beneath a veneer or stain. I’d bite and suck, drinking the essence of the tv in. Kids do this, watch them. I used to lick the screen to experience the sherbet of static. Later, I’d kiss my favourite tv loves full on the lips, and the tv kissed back, they kissed me with a fizz, with the spit and spat of electrical discharge. The buttons to switch channels you depressed, they’d steel caps, and took some effort to cluck home – an initial looseness stiffened to a resistance, you had to ram it home, a jerk of the wrist and piston of the elbow, it locked into place like a knife lodged in the guts of something. The volume, colour, contrast and brightness controls were ribbed and turned with a ratchet tuc-tic-tuc. The on/off you twisted through a hefty thuck. When the tv started up it wheeeeeeeeeewhooooooowhupped, the screen blinked sharply, bluntly, harshly, the noise of a show focused, and, like the smoothing out of a bed sheet, bright warmth, deepening colour, and contrast rushed headlong into clarity – the tv was on. The tv turned off, the picture folded in on itself, white light, flickering and grey, alive, grey, deathly, and that particular greyness behind glass of a CRT telly.
23/10/2011
In the Belly of the Telly
Innocence does not inoculate a child. Trauma effects the innocent. It’s an immeasurable, the experience of trauma without some appreciation of its scale. A molehill will be a mountain, a mountain a molehill. You cannot shelter the innocent, guard them from trauma, especially if you are an element of that trauma. Innocence is not a blindness, nor can it be blinkered. Innocence is informed by mimicry, it tests experience by re-enactment, before it becomes ‘knowing’ (a fluid state of knowledge, reliant on intuition rather than facts). A child will relive trauma, attempting to know it. A child might not know the trauma for what it is. Children create safe havens, they’ll manufacture an eye for a storm. I allowed the tv to eat me, I was Jonah and the telly was my whale. The tv would bleach out everything with the immensity of its colour, its noise, its visions of momentous things (more momentous). When the house became an emotional havoc, I’d dive under, swim deep and get the whale to swallow me. There was no distance between my eyes and the screen – yes, there was, three or four feet, but it was a distance compromised of air, I was letting the tv breathe for me, there was no difference between us, tv and boy, so there was no distance between us.
The tv can serve as a life-raft. Don’t cheapen it with babysitting duties, where will your children go undercover. Parents are responsible for the up-bringing of their children – which means feeding, watering, keeping safe at the very least, tv used to be a safety. What eats your kids now? Where can they disappear to?
31/08/2011
Pants On Fire (Should Be Pissed In)
The tv ate me like the wardrobe ate Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. The television was a TARDIS, bigger on the inside. The tv lied, as books lied to me, there was no magic in the world, no fantasy, no adventure, no thriller you could survive intact. But, still, the tv told great truths, its reality was so real. The lie of that reality, of those Play for Todays, was the fact life has no script, no arc, no particular story (I found it out and I am relieved, we live through many endings, without titles, before there is an end). We are not cameras, for we forget too much. The tv keeps everything, it never withholds, it reruns and reruns, word for word. We lie to ourselves, whether we mean to or not. Our memories are liars. Is the truth that everything lies? Is it the only adventure, navigating lies, choosing what to believe? The tv lies as we lie, and the tv is a better liar because it rejoices in its lies. We are poor liars. The tv didn’t eat me, see. I ate the tv. What do you need of the truth? Whatever it is, will be a lie. I devoured the tv. I did. I held the tv to my head and pulled its trigger…
