Response to the headdress

My father had a kinaesthetic watch, one that is powered by movement. When he died it stopped; I inherited it and strapped it around my wrist. It began ticking again within the day, but the thing that drove it, my father's heart beat, could never be replaced. I could read the time from it, but could never stop thinking of my father whenever I did. It felt as though I had stolen time from him; like I had taken his heartbeat straight from his chest. It wasn't mine to read. It now lies in a draw in my bureau, silent. It's no longer a watch; it's now a memorial to my father's spirit, its original power source and meaning can never be replaced, and with the passage of the time it marks it has changed and become something more than just a time peace.

 

Like the headdress of the Native American, sitting in a display cabinet in a British museum, my father's watch is an epitaph to a time and spirit not so much lost, as remarkably changed; evolved to something new. It can be worn by anyone, but the spirit it belongs to and the notion it embodies can never be replaced. Wearing my father's watch means I can read the time, but I will never see my father again.

A Square Foot of Conigar Quarry

I look out to the North; a seemingly endless expanse of flat farmed land, like the line of an exclamation stretched across my vision; endless beauty with a greasy punctuation of towering chimneys and Escher's pipelines on the horizon. The blue sky opens above me; water in the dustbowl where I stand; the minute pebble. The fine brown grit beneath my feat bears the scars from a wetter time and an encounter with a pack of BMX; rutted and gullied as if the logic and imagery of this place was fractal; running an identical and recurrent pattern all the way down its spiralling DNA; I'm a part of that DNA; as inseparable as the highest tree clinging on for dear life to a pile of boulders; or the rusted remains of the car lying in the shallow pool deep in the bowls depths; its mettle jutting like tank traps from the water sends spiralling ochre's and reds in outward ripples. I sit at the edge of the tallest ridge dangle my feet over the abyss and watch a parade of ants marching methodically through the rivulets running to the edge, industriously stripping an empty chocolate wrapper; reclaiming territory forever changed by the invader. I smoke a cigarette, enjoying the mixture of nicotine and clean air that fills my mouth and lungs. I feel clear; I understand for just a few moments that I can take on the world and win; that even my scars say something of my beauty, and something just feels inherently at peace. I put my hand in the remains of a nearby fire; blackening it on the thick sooty remains, narrowly avoiding a cut on the standard shards of protracting glass.

 

We would set fires here of a night, sending flickering embers on an ascending dance into the heavens, marring the illumination from the distant industry; whilst the stars opened out forever above us, beckoning and reasserting their dominance of light. We would share more there than anywhere else; exchanging stories and anecdotes between us, over flames and through hushed voices; later some of you lost that awe, that fascination and attention; you grew up and I can never forgive you for leaving me behind your exhausting drive; pumping senselessly and heading nowhere. We were all heading somewhere once, why did we all drive over the precipice, and why have only some of us recovered from the shock as we hit the bottom?

 

You were always a foot to the floor type, driving with a fearlessness that inspired me; I coveted your friendship through pure admiration; now you pace your massive four bedroom house like a declawed lioness, walking yourself into a cocktail party held on the end of a mousetrap. Did you feel the snap across your neck when you elected yourself a ringmaster? I always wanted to be like you because you seemed so free of straight lines, but now you have barred yourself from that, easing off the power and falling in at the back of the queue. Perhaps you were always there; perhaps I just needed an icon to worship and emulate; and perhaps you wanted to be just like me and everyone else; different. You don't talk to me now; suddenly I have fallen bellow your class as you trade artists for programmers, freedom fighters for terrorists. But still, you left your mark; or rather I marked myself with you, a line in my mind to help form the direction of my trail blazing. There was never a sadder loss to security than you.

“Eloquence belongs to the conqueror”; my first memory of the American Indian Other.

When I was little, like all young children I would forever be lost in my own fantasy world. It’s as if my imagination went into overdrive in an attempt to grow up and be the dominant, adult party. I wanted the trappings of adult life; after all, adults were in charge. So a box became a car, paper became money, and a long card tube became a gun. Later these were replaced by purpose built toys, such as my prized third generation action man, his plastic hands long since eroded and replaced with dollops of my mother’s clay. I once got into trouble with my father for dressing him in black and crafting a small swastika armband for him. I placed him at the end of our concrete garden path and threw stones at him, making ricochet noises for a miss and a scream for a hit. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t seen doing this, instead I was caught by my grandmother, who had lived through the Second World War, as I walked back into the house still carrying my plastic “Nazi effigy”, and my game was taken out of context. She took me to my father and I explained myself; he was less concerned than my grandmother, evidently having not been involved in “The War” provided him with a less emotional stand-point. After my explanation was relayed back to my Nan, everything was fine.

So many of my games centred on warfare and combat, I suppose this is fairly typical of boys; an ancient genetic hardwire teaching us how to hunt and defend ourselves.

There was no shortage of toys when I was a child, my grandmother worked in a toy shop when I was very young and would often bring home gifts to win my favour or indulge her own sense of wellbeing. Once she bought a Cowboys and Indians play set; a sheriff’s badge, pistol and hat for the budding colonist roughrider, and a bow and arrow and cheap plastic headdress for the young native, all wrapped in tight film against a card backer; the image on the board showed two smiling cartoon children, wearing the attire and pointing their imitation weapons at each-other.

That cannot have been my first experience since I had already decided which I would be; the victorious cowboy, revolver in hand and sheriffs badge pinned upon thick denim; civilisation against the wilderness and its wild inhabitants. This caused a conflict with my brothers who also identified more with the hero lawmaker than the warrior Indian. Our dispute settled we ran around the garden slapping our mouths and making the well-established, universally-stereotyped Indian war call. When one or the other was “shot” we would perform a dramatic dying scene; waving a hand in front of the wound to simulate the blood jetting from the vein. This was perfectly acceptable.

Before I can even remember, I must have been exposed to some external media that inspired my determination to be a Cowboy rather than an Indian; perhaps it was “Dr. Quine: Medicine Woman”, that my grandmother would insist on watching every Saturday night, or the rare “Western” that my father would watch on a Sunday afternoon.

Then there was the media designed for my age group, such as the “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” book I loved so dearly. It contained a two-page-spread of a traffic jam, with a variety of cultural stereotypes interspersed throughout; there was an Arabic character, identified with a mud-brown skin tone and a turban sat upon a magic carpet, a French character in a stripy shirt, string of garlic around his neck, driving a croissant-shaped truck, and an American Indian, with a red painted face, his exposed chest partially covered by his long headdress, arms crossed and oversized lips pulled down at the corners in a permanent grimace. He sat in his archetypical pose on the back of a horse; I didn’t want a horse, I wanted a car like my dad, or a fast red one like the one moving at the front of the queue in my big hardback book. I, like every other child, wanted to be the coolest hero, and they all drove sports cars and carry guns.