There comes a point when I need a break from the seemingly endless French Flute Sonatas that haunt early morning (ie afternoon here) Radio 3, and I have had enough of shouting at yet another Tory who seems to have forgotten the UK has been suffering under the rule of the Eton 'elite' for a very long time. In these times I turn to audiobooks, and scroll through endless stuff on Youtube in the hope of finding something interesting.
Yesterday I discovered a reading of J G Ballard's Kingdom Come. This is set in the towns around Heathrow, and concerns the malign influence of a huge shopping mall and the rise of a fascist/consumer cult based on violence and racism, for when your life is defined by the wandering of a mall and the purchasing of consumer goods there is only violence to bring excitement. Although deeply disturbing, there is an element of satire in the fact that the narrator is a failed advertising executive, and therefore partly responsible for the rise of the mall and the central position of shopping in everyone's lives. I am still listening.
But yesterday there occured one of those odd moments, an strong sense of deja vu. This was during a description of an apartment, the last home of the narrator's recently murdered father. I knew the description, I knew every sentence before it had been uttered, and as the description continued there was a feeling of the world shrinking, of there only being the light on the table, the voice from the computer, and me listening to something I already knew. I have not, as far as I can recall, read this novel, but at sometime I must have read that description, for the sense of familiarity was overwhelming. But it felt as if I was split in time - there was me listening in the present, and, in a not too distant future I was listening as well, so that the present me was remembering what the future me was listening to.
At this point I should reach for various philosophical and scientific tomes on the nature of time - which is an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so (spot the quote). But I think it is mostly due to present problems, to not venturing forth often enough as the weather has been less than friendly lately. I do not like summer, and endless hot days fill me with despair, I am a child of winter and much prefer autumn.
That sense of deja vu has caught me a number of times recently, is this because I am mining my own memories for ongoing artworks? Maybe, maybe...
To quote Week Ending, "Makes you think...."
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