Michael Fredman's infinite thought field
Big foot, captured at last…
Today I saw this project – a collection of fascinating Google Street View scenes, some poignant, some funny, some beautiful, some sad.
And it reminded me that I am immortalised in Google’s remorseless digital memory, like a modern day Big Foot, slinking blurrily off into the wilds
This is a photo of me, my grandmother and my friend Manu.
You have to love the child you were, and recognise them in the person you are: Because underneath the constructs of age and experience, that vulnerable, playful, beautiful soul is with you for all your life and will always need love.
It’s a madhouse on the elderly ward, the person I am visiting is cogent so it’s bad for her. Last night an old sparrow of a woman – posh, obviously once beautiful and well to do – wandered over and tried to organise an escape with us. It was fascinating and heartbreaking as she flitted between the here and now and the places and situations of her memory. She offered me a job as her gardener.
I think it’s healthier, curiously, to be confronted by madness and death. There’s a tendency to ignore them, we pretend they don’t exist or touch us, so they lurk like bandits on the road ahead, to leap out and accost us. But they are there, and it is chance or fate that determines whether we are their victim or not.
On the elderly ward everyone sits facing nothing. Ill. Prepared.
London is full of Elephants, 250+ of them, in support of the charity www.elephantfamily.org
have taken to using the rickety dawdles from station to station as opportunities to doodle on my phone, an example here:
Happy New Year! is the hopeful refrain, the mantra we repeat each time the planet revolves around the burning star. This past year has been instructive, but generally very difficult for me, but I have learned at least something worth taking on into the next year.
It is extraordinary (but mundane, of course, really) that a decade has come to an end. This time last decade (1999) I was painted silver, (unwisely using car paint) and sporting papier mache angel wings, at a friend’s ‘futuristic’ themed house party, surrounded by people I cared about. I am still friends with a lot of those good people, but sadly some I have lost touch with. In some instances it was fate, in others, my own efforts. So it goes.
Regrets are inevitable in a life filled with decisions, this decade has given me deep regrets, but also great and profound experiences. I met and connected with some wonderful people. I know that I made the wrong decisions in some instances, but I could not have done otherwise. Hindsight is never there when you need it, by definition.
I fell in love and I fucked it up, I worked hard doing things I believed in, tried to do some good. Had some seriously close shaves. Realised that I had a lot of things that had happened to me in my life that I hadn’t ever sorted out. Took steps to sort them out. I gave up smoking. Learned to like food. Got fatter. Got fitter. Played some music. Essentially, lots of things happened. good and bad.
With the year ahead I hope to make better choices, I hope to be happier, I hope. That is what we do.
Happy new year! I hope that it is a good one for you.
Happy Christmas, here’s a song played after a few drinks and before some more drinks
It is snowing.
A downy grey sky of feather fall.
Heavy in my viscera, memory:
She, rowing opposite me, across
the London skyline.
Upon soft water, swans.
How happy, how loved. How
could it be
that I erased the slim lines of hope from the page?
Choosing instead
the blankness.
The blankness.
The snow erases the worn lines of the world.
Random facts gleaned from here and there:
One such summer I
sun of nothing
took your hand in mine
we
upon the smoothed pebbles
journeyed
down to the sea
Naked
and we slipped
steady
In
Shedding our clothes
our accumulated selves
I loved you
I loved you
That I
was free
Like blood from a vein
Flowing, pulsing with life
and inevitably
Lost.
