A woman, dressed in a pastiche of Australian farming wear apparently designed by Studio Ghibli, hurries down Grove Road carrying a huge bunch of lilies in the rain. You see this all the time in Barnes. People don’t dress: they dress up as. You feel a great pathos, a complex emotional upwelling in which tenderness conflicts with disbelief, & don’t really know where to lodge it. It would be easier, you suspect, if you were Will Self.
Mike Harrison
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living in NYC there is a constant parade of humans dressed as themselves, what others think they are, what they want others to think they are and just plain aesthetic invention. I have yet to see your Ghibli lady with the flowers, although I would find it a good pause in the crowd were she to show up on Canal Street. I actually relish such sights–it is a nourishment to my eyes, and a refutation to my view of the world. I have too many opinions, anyways.
But you live in one of the great world capitals of personal invention & reinvention, Mia–I live in Barnes, where they still believe in natural identities. Or, at their most sophisticated, the old patrician idea of the mask that represents a dependable–if now beleagured–sociopolitical centre. People who would, if you allowed them a single term to describe themselves, always, & with an elegantly assumed reluctance, choose “grown up”. & yet here they are, opening the postmodern dressing-up box at last. I suppose that’s the way you can tell a true conservative, a generation late to the party, dipping a toe in a pool everyone else is leaving…
“Dressing up as” might as well be Oxford’s motto. Out in the city centre a moment ago, I stumbled on the devout. Since it’s Ash Wednesday, they’d just had a priest mark their brow with a cindery cross, and that gave them the air of an eerily jubilant Mansonite gang, let loose in the lunch-time crowds. Watching them was an unemotional rabbi, smoking his cigarette.
A lesson for us all there, I feel.
…my best friend and I (we both have sons) once had a discussion where she asked me: when are the grown ups coming back? and I answered (with a certain horror): we ARE the grown ups.
I still cannot quite grasp it.
One of the things I truly adored about the circus was the dressing up–the false eyelashes, the glitter, the velvet sheath around muscles—now it all goes into the paintings. I think your local, late-to-the-costume-box folk need a plunge, however untimely and unlikely. I find it hard to imagine living without any of that….but perhaps I’m odd
Obviously their cosplay is fairly inept. A real Ghibli girl would be more likely to describe herself as “ecologically precocious” before explaining that she will always follow the dictates of her heart.
All of which reminds me: has anyone re-read Vermilion Sands recently ?
Hmmm. I live in the Old Town part of Hastings where notions of “dressing”, “Dressing up” or “dressing up as…” seem to have lost all currency. It’s ubiquitous. Sometimes that’s cute. Or irritating. Or something to join in with. Depends on how curmudgeonly I’m feeling.
As for re-reading “Vermillion Sands”…
I actually gave it a lingering glance just the other day. Maybe soon!
I’m always trying to ‘dress up as’ and always failing. I think I know what I’m trying to dress up as but the end result is something else that I don’t recognise and can’t categorise. In fact, dressing up as has, I’ve come to think, got something to do with my own process of writing. I set out to create one thing and another thing occurs and I’m left watching the results with a strange sense of detachment that other people seem to understand and even sometimes like but which I do not. Poor lilly lady. I know exactly what you mean, Uzwi, having grown up with them all around me. I feel some sympathy and some hatred. Barnes is such a . . . such a strange little sort of studio sitcom set.
Hi L: I knew you’d get her.
My mistake, I think, is that I mean I’m always trying ‘to not dress up as’ and failing at that. The Australian beast-dealer look is very conscious. And a little bit sexy. Was there a pale yellow v-neck cashmere sweater in there somewhere? And beautiful silk underwear I bet. But practical firm slacks? And boots that sound authoritative with a heel just high enough to lend a little fleeting glimpse of power? And chestnut hair, ironed but not too much? Shut up shut up shut up!
Well, Barnes seems to be doing a Shepperton.
Growing up in a leafy white Johannesburg suburb in the 80s/90s, unreality was the order of the day. Other people were always a little too real or obviously fictional, never quite convincing. Certain roads led to spaces that did not officially exist. As for oneself … The realisation of this condition was painful, but now, in my mid 30s, I think it a positive asset. Unreality can always be relied on.
Greg. I was in Joburg a year or so ago. “Unreality was the order of the day” seems to cpature the entire experience for me. Thank you. You should come see my other half’s pictures of Melville. They are like that: “Certain roads led to space that did not officially exist”.
Where and who are you?
I’m an M. John Harrison disciple who lives in Cape Town … I’d like to see those pictures: uzwi is welcome to give you my email address.
Consider it done, Greg.
Re: Lara’s comment: ‘I set out to create one thing and another thing occurs and I’m left watching the results with a strange sense of detachment that other people seem to understand and even sometimes like but which I do not.’
Interviewed in a stodgy arts quarterly a painter whose work I didn’t like either said ‘An artist’s accomplishments are often peripheral to what they think they’re doing.’
The rest of the magazine was indecipherable or at least over my head but that I liked. Whew, I thought. Good it’s not just me then
Reading Vermillion Sands currently, not re-reading, save for one or two. As usual with Ballard, I’m struck less by his imagery (though it’s amazing), than by his obsession with obsession (and only occasionally with his other obsessions.) VS is much more relaxed than the other Ballard I’ve read, much less concerned with absolutely breaking your skull and showing you to be the tawdry liberal-humanist you are.
Why do you ask?
Hi Brendan. I asked because I remember those stories as being set during some kind of economic & political “interregnum” –one long dressing-up party to while away an extended cultural afternoon. The play of Ballardian ironies around that seems as ambivalent as usual; Pynchon, in V, written around the same time, is less sly, & simply uses the D-word outright.
Agree about the “obsession with obsession”, by the way.
Mike – Ballard calls it ‘The Recess,’ and the inhabitants of VS are forever drinking heavily on their porches, patios, etc. It’s all past tense, and the narrators occasionally refer to the Recess’ end, when gov. comes back in and restarts time. If his later work reminds me of a DaDa scream, VS. is languid and obscene as Surrealist painting. ‘Ambivalent’ is the perfect adjective for it, and all of Mr. Ballard’s work, though maybe it should be paired with ‘engaged.’
Don’t remember ‘the D-word’ in V., but then I was 18 and more concerned with reading absolutely everything than understanding any of it.
The Ballard short most in my mind these days is a simple one about some resistance fighters preparing to battle invading ‘Asiatic hordes’ — and simply being utterly ignored, their very existence dismissed out of hand.
Lara, have you seen any Kentridge films? Does having been to Johannesburg made a difference?
http://www.ubu.com/film/kentridge_stereoscope.html
Aside from Ballardian musings – God deliver us from pale yellow V-necked wool sweaters. No seriously.