musings

Videotape

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 20:48:34 +0100

Alice Bryant shares her beautiful words with The Blank Page

Serpents of rainwater form like rivers upon the map of my window pane. It’s 2am again, and I’m thinking through treacle, through cut-scenes of holding hands in bars and walks along well-versed pavements. My head is pounding with the weight of all the wine; the motion picture in my mind occasionally freezes - rewinds - to the time we clung together desperately the morning after ecstasy and then dropped each other as quickly as the pill.

I’m through with love poetry. We’re all projecting our own inadequacies and forming our own fantasies and making jigsaw puzzle-people out of indifferent puzzled persons.
‘I don’t love you, I’m just passing the time’ is the mantra of our younger years, and the mantra of our future fears. Difficult to swallow, like Monday-morning porridge or the 10 o’clock news.

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‘The curtains are moving’ he says, his face creasing into a frown, the corners of his mouth turned down. The curtains are not moving.
‘Sometimes this happens...’ he trails off. I nod. I wonder whether the pattern on the blood-red material alarms him; whether the curl of the shapes form devil’s tongues and dismembered organs that coil around one another, a mesh of flesh. All the while I stare at my static vision of this imagined horror, trying to see through his eyes. He did LSD a few weeks back, he explains with pride, but all this distortion seems frightening and ugly and pointless to me. If he wants to exist in a world where he can’t rely on curtains, I wonder what his reality must be.
I turn to him. His eyes are so dark; I have to concentrate hard to see his pupils. We both stare at my window, seeing very different things.

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The seagull perches on the garage roof and gulps down hunks of muscle and meat torn from the chicken carcass.
A woman is watching, looking through the binoculars that her father left to her when he passed away. They date back to the second world war. They smell of leather and the house that she grew up in; she inhales the scent like a child drowning. Her Sunday roast dinners are not left to rot in the stomachs of bins.

One day, she thinks, her bones may give birth to a seed, give life to a tree; the larks jenny wrens and the finches and the jays, they will one day nest in me. I will be recycled.
‘If only all of our hopes could be as humble as the earth we stem from’, she writes, pen pushing against paper, ink staining skin. The gull mews at her from its corrugated perch, beats its wings, leaves.

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‘Have you ever been interested in me?’ she chokes out. He stiffens, studies her thoughtfully for a second.
‘I think that you’re pretty.’ he says quietly, shifting upon the mattress.

What a dull thing to be, the girl thinks.

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‘You know, I’ve never really loved anyone,’ I tell my friend whilst chewing a baguette, bacon fat dripping onto my lips. I lick them clean.

‘You’re drunk’, she says nonchalantly.
I am drunk. I can feel the fog of the alcohol, a dull ache on the roof of my mouth, a looseness in my limbs. Right now I could love anybody; I feel an infinite sense of possibility, and at the same time I don’t give a fuck. I’m apathetic, all out of luck.
I leave my food half eaten on the plate, along with all the other pursuits.

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I’m walking alone under lamplight, imagining what the concrete underfoot used to look like, what the hills used to look like when they weren’t stifled by the grey paving, what the stars used to look like from here when they weren’t erased by the street lamps. I smile at the people that I walk past because they’re there and they’re beautiful and this moment is timeless, this moment is forever, and they walk faster, faces blank, eyes fixed on their destination. They all look like they know where they’re going.
There’s a thickness to the air, and I have a sense that no matter what happened it would all be okay. I inhale and exhale, feel the night pressing on my skull, my eyelids, the hairs on the nape of my neck. Nothing can ever erase how it feels to be 20, on this street, in these clothes, at this hour, in this mind, in this moment. People are getting up for work in a house that I walk past; a man has drawn his curtains, is doing up the cuffs of his sleeves. He pauses, sees me staring. We both examine one another for that moment, seeing very different things.
I carry on walking. The curtains close.

Follow @alicebryant Check out more of Alice's work on her blog http://alicebryant.wordpress.com/

This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank.

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 20:07:02 +0100

The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop waiting. I had, for once, no book, no music, just nothing. So I sat and I watched people; it’s a somewhat slightly sinister past time, but you would all be lying if you said you did not do it. How else do you get to see someone walk into a lamppost, or notice a blossoming romance? People watching is very entertaining, I’m well on my way to solitary crazy cat lady status already, so happily watching people is just another stitch in the knitting for me. I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a people watcher.

But my crazy cat lady status is only half what this article is about, it’s unfortunately not some profound revelation about the nature of people or the beauty of interaction, nothing so ponderous I promise. If you want one, the most I can give you, is that people do odd things when they’re nervous. This is not the point however, my point was, that I ended up sitting directly across from an old lady, also sitting alone. The difference between her and I was that she looked so intensely serene. She was completely oblivious to the world inside the cafe; instead she just stared out of the window, smiling to herself. It was the complete antithesis to me, who, I will concede was having a teenage style internal melodrama. It made me consider (and this bit is the profound part I promised didn’t exist) that in life that there is always a balance, the existence of Yin and Yang etc, light and dark.

For example, one idle Tuesday I was staring out of the window while in a particularly boring seminar, and from the window of my seminar I could see all three stories of a building across the courtyard. In the bottom window there was a couple breaking up, waving arms, shouting, tearful hugging, all very messy; on the floor above there was a couple serenely embracing staring out of the window. It seemed so staged I did look for the hidden camera, but it aptly surmises the point of the article that there is a balance with everything, which brings me back to my general philosophy that everything happens for a reason. It helps with everything if you think that for every action there is a reaction, that for everything bad that happens, there is something else good in the world making someone else happy. In this reasoning, I hope that everyone can reach that kind of serenity, when I am her age I hope that can look that serene and happy when staring out of a window. It’s so Disney, but it’s acceptance of experiences that gives us wisdom and the power to look back over things calmly. That is the crux of this article.

Follow @AlysonClaffey

The fleeting nature of photographs...

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 15:59:31 +0100

Photographs represent an instant of time captured forever, fractionally suspended. That is the beauty of photos, they are able to capture perfectly a moment that would otherwise have flitted by unnoticed. This is perhaps even more possible with the invention of digital cameras, making instantaneous snapping possible. Photography is now so accessible to capturing in the moment shots, that phones are now being established that are becoming of a similar quality to a digital camera, a development from the initial novelty 2 megapixel camera. Take the new HTC phone: the advert, which depicts a man free falling from a plane doing a photography photo shoot with his HTC suggests that it can achieve the same quality as a good quality digital camera. Enough for a professional photographer to complete his photoshoot using just his phone? Perhaps not.

The main point is, is that photography has the potential to capture those small fleeting moments, the ones we won't remember, the ones where we were gazing into space, drooping over our most recent dramas; the ones that will be jolted by a photograph. These are our all important moments which are so often forgotten in the melee of life. This is why unplanned photographs are the best. If people know there is a camera lurking in someone's trigger happy fingers, they will be stiff and on their guard, desperate for a snapshot of reflection perfection. As a result they freeze up, particularly when the full frontal glare of the camera is on their face. It's what causes, what I call Camera Face. That stiff rigid too wide, mirror perfected smile devoid of all natural beauty. This is why I prefer to catch people unawares, head turned, smiling at the ground, looking at a friend. It's what captures life, those gazes people don't know they are doing, the small half-smiles, the reactions to the things people are watching on YouTube. It's the moments that make us interesting and real. Say no to Camera Face. It has dominated for far too long. Follow @AlysonClaffey

On retrospection.

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:00:33 +0100

It's the first thing we think of when we wake up; it's the last thing we think of before we go to bed. We think of it always, wish for it always, but there is no future in the past.