I am a camera

I have a history.
  And I am a semi-functioning camera.
  Sometimes the image being photographed was of such blinding intense light
the film burnt out and the image was lost.

There has been recent talk of siblings, families and parents.
  I have wanted to wade in with my own threepence worth.
  (But have felt my voice would be unheard, as I'm the fucking Joker round here).

My original, natural, parents were both displaced from their homelands by
the joint efforts of that nice Mr Hitler and Uncle Joe Stalin: my
birth-mother was a German-speaking inhabitant of Prague, sent as a girl with
her family to Austria; my birth-father was Ruthenian (oddly, the land of
blond-wigged Warhol), and was also sent to Austria.
  In 1958, when I was conceived, he was forty-eight and she seventeen.   He
had a family, a wife and children, of his own.
  She was sent to UK to have me here.
  He took a gun to his head and finished it.
  She had me, and returned to Austria.
  (Nowadays abortion is quick and easy.....)

I was fostered by an absurd UK couple upon whom God had decreed
infertility.......God had, in that small matter, been right.
  They were entirely unsuited to parenthood.
  They were both scientists.
  They saw me as an experiment, a blank slate from another culture.  Such
was the post-war horror of the theories of Naziism, the idea you might
actually inherit anything genetically was quite revolting.  All was nurture.

(There is a story here from my foster-mother's mother, who happened to be
staying at the house when I was delivered.......not vaginally, you will
understand, but by a nurse and retinue of officials in a car:  the
foster-grandmother dandled me fondly upon her knee; whereupon the
foster-mother snatched me away with the words, 'He is not to be given any
physical contact whatever lest it turns him into a Nancy.')

I was of course an immediate disappointment, and a Nancy (or Dorothy) I most
certainly was.
  Thus began a reign of the most violent physical terror you can imagine.
  Not from the da.
  But from the ma.
  Physical violence towards your own children (except that I wasn't) is
hardly excusable in ^any^ circumstances; but maybe it's easier to bear if at
least there's a pattern to it, a predictability, a readable
cause-and-effect.
  But there wasn't.
  I would be lashed out at for the least reason, and often for none.  Many
is the time my camera has chosen to forget, by overexposure, the family
dinner table quite suddenly being thrust aside, amidst a clatter of plates
and cutlery and food on the floor, so that the ma could seize me by the
collar and beat me about the head and the shoulders.
  There was no rhyme or reason.  Her own muddled head was all that decreed.
  (I don't believe I myself, for all my suicidal tendencies and intentions,
am mentally 'ill': she was).

The da had an amusing habit during these incidents of somehow just not being
there.  He could shift his posture in his chair just ever so slightly so
that he was gazing out of the window.  Furniture might be smashing around
him, plates breaking, food landing on the floor.  His thirst for the line of
least resistance meant he didn't comment; he was willing to see me
sacrificed so he could keep sweet with her.

I may have painted a scene where this little poof-nancy-boy took it all
defencelessly.
  Only so to an extent.
  I can't express strongly enough what determination I steeled up with.
How much I hated them.
  Loathed them.
  Dreamed of living alone.
  Poof-boy developed an inner strong world, and promised himself that as
soon as we was legally able he would leave..........

.........which happened.
  (In fact, poof-by was ordered to leave and informed never to return).

(So: was poof-boy a poof because:
  a:  of the trauma of being divorced from his birth mother soon after birth?
  b:  his proto-ma was domineering and his proto-pa weak?
  c:  it was genetic, and proto-ma could smell it?)

Poof-boy then worked in London....life was a scream.
  Then in Madrid....scream?....it was an orgasm.
  Then in Nottingham, in order to get a house.....bit of a yawn.
  (Ouch: now it starts to hurt)
  Troubled times.  Changing jobs.  Drinking.  Smoking pot.
  The iron will dissolving.
  Marriage.....(to a call girl).
  Several years out of 'official work', charging for 'school-room scenes',
caning old men with a stick in my front room, shouting abuse at
them.....they'd all say how realistic the lines I delivered were: (that's
because the words were HER words).
  And now I seem to have drifted back into 'proper' work, farting about in a
college talking about violence in the media.

I left them at the age of eighteen.  I only once went back.  (I like to
pretend I've never been back).  You could see Windsor Castle downriver from
their house; Windsor Castle burnt down in '92.  I got sentimental...(and
wondered if anything might have come from those flames: well, forgive me - I
was in Jungian analysis at the time)...and wrote.  They replied.  I visited:
slept in my old bedroom.
  All seemed fine.
  I returned home to my own house, full of notions of the healthy process of
reconciliation.
  Then I got a letter.
  She might as well have splayed me across the dining table and beat me
about the head.....the violence she unleashed in that letter was
devastating.
  Now, since then, there really hasn't been any contact at all; and when I
die, pre-deceasing them, there's no record here of their address or their
names.......they won't know.

There's a marvellous Italian movie, Cinema Paradiso, where the old man of
the village says to the departing boy, 'Never return.'

Never Return.
  I can't think of one single event in my life where, for sentimental
reasons of forgiveness, I have returned and then have found I had made the
right decision.
  Not one.
  (Do not return to your vomit?)
  If you break away, stick with it.
  I have: (and I'm bitter).
  (If you stay put, and they help you out with your phone bill/rent/mortgage,
or you know you will inherit their millions, the abuse they heap on you is
the payback, and you have little right to complain: you either get out, go
alone, and manage alone - or you accept the goodies and shut the fuck up).

I am a camera.
  But what I have seen has made me break.
  I hardly see anything now; I think maybe my lens is damaged.
  I am very very tired.
  I have hemmed myself in to a friendless-familyless corner.
  I can't say I regret that.
  But I do regret everything.
  And I am very very tired.
  I have never been in love: no one has ever told me he or she is in love
with me.
  What more reason do I need to tell me it's time to go?
  And I never believed I might stop joking on ASH and say all this.

-purple-sunset

Last update: Wednesday, April 14, 1999 22:57