Tuesday 30 March 2010

The slow road to consciousness

I have to work. Yes, I do a job still in existence, and someone has to do it. It could be counting numberplates of vehicles passing junction 23 on the M25 after 7pm. It could be wrapping myself in tinfoil and moving very slowly down a high street near you, and calling this Installation Art With Slow Moving Body. It could be stapling snails to walls. It could be academic typesetting.

About 3pm, I become aware of the fragile line between survival and death. Sat at the computer for over six hours straight, staring at commas, my mind is in stupor. I am overcome with a sensation that my face is rigid and my body hollow. I may be entering a catatonic state. I have forgotten why I breathe.

I must find displacement activity or die. The least traumatic method to bring myself back to life is visit Ikea. That is a slow nudge from the states of torpor to the place of barely conscious. Here, in a slow and painful journey, I drag my typesetter's carcass from the halls of the undead to the land of the nearly living. On the way, to mark my existence, I photograph bookshelves.



It helps. By 5pm, after a small struggle, I can photograph a tree.


By 6pm I can breathe unaided and photograph this scrap of felt. I find it on the landing, like the droppings from a crafter.


At last, I am almost fully alive! Finally, I am able to conduct a photographic session in homage to Harry Worth circa 1962.


Yes, I am recovered, but for what purpose? Tomorrow I must face the abyss of pointlessness once more, and typeset 50,000 words on validation instrument testing of instructional materials for chemists.

1 comment:

MadameSmokinGun said...

Crafter's droppings and a Harry Worth tribute. I'd say that was more than a day's worth of achievement. I'd be very proud. Especially fitting this around an Ikea visit. I am feeling my once-every-three-years Swedish jab brewing. I am fighting it but my shoes under the bed are crying out in the night that cardboard boxes (ie shoe boxes) are not enough - 'we need canvas and cellophane and we need it now' - can you hear them too? Tie me to the mast!!!.....