Front cover to SLF single Gotta Gettaway
(Rough Trade, 1979)
Although Daventry Road is far, far removed from Wisteria Lane - and although I'm certainly no Bree Van de Kamp - it appears that my Essex exile has resulted in my becoming a desperate housewife caught up in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning and caring.
None of these activities are particularly objectionable in themselves, I suppose. And it's true that Lawrence was never happier than when baking bread or attending to the daily chores whilst Frieda lounged in bed smoking cigarettes and thinking of her lovers.
But the domestic life isn't for everyone: even as a young child I despised carpets and comfortable chairs, potted plants and knick-knacks. I could see they were covered not only in layers of dust, but in falsehood.
As I grew older, I realised that at the heart of every family home lies none of the humility and sweetness spoken of in the song, but secret hatred and unspoken disgust between the sexes and generations.
And this was why the Stiff Little Fingers single Gotta Gettaway (1979) struck such a powerful chord with me at the time and continues to resonate even now ...
And this was why the Stiff Little Fingers single Gotta Gettaway (1979) struck such a powerful chord with me at the time and continues to resonate even now ...
Yeah! Whatever that obscure single has to say (and it hardly matters what it says) , Lawrence was rightly adamant we gorra get away from our horribly upholstered existences, which breed so much falsity!
ReplyDeleteI don't see how it is any more dignified to dismiss what people who loved you gave you. It is better to accept that parents, like us now, did what they could, and then, if possible, do something better ourselves.
ReplyDeleteHaving just moved into a Georgian attic here in Dublin (that I have the strangest and happiest feeling was waiting for me here all along), I've been spending the last few weeks - to use a wonderful word supplied my friend Sharon White - 'curating' and homing every last crayon, candle and clock. And it's felt like a true labour of love, in which I've been re-reading letters from past friends and lovers, rediscovering precious photographs, and recapturing ripped scraps of vital writing for new ponderings and fashionings.
ReplyDeleteSo I adore what others might regard as my mere 'bric-a brac': my taxidermist's crow; the Munch painting that symbolically documents my crushed engagement (and survival of same); my Janus-faced lamp. Other items of occult significance are arranged behind a black voile. For me, my domestic world, at its best, concretises my aesthetics, poetises my memories and 'ensouls' my life. Its contents are also potential conversation starters with those rare beings who matter, or might matter.
Some might find my alphabetisation of my film and music collections indicative of a pathological anality, or my extreme valuation of my domestic environment a kind of narcissistic religion. So be it. For me, my house anchors me in a unique world of my own making and meaning, and creates an outer order that allows the chaos of my mind to meander and move.
Let us say the poet's task, then, is to reclaim the world of domestic 'objets' as an expression of individual vision and feeling from the bourgeois sterility of accumulative wealth, sterile inertia, and smug comfort. Otherwise the dust of middle class torpor - not to mention the pathological confinement of the Oedipal triangle - indeed clings to everything. Objects are far too important to surrender to middle class commodification.
One might even claim this is what keeps an object-oriented ontology on track, or at least balances it against the seductions of inwardness. My favorite possessions, like the above mentioned crow, are strange to me too, and become stranger by the day.
Such a project is one which Oscar Wilde lived to the end, famously going to his death with the peerless remark: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” (Here's to the household as a life and death love affair!)