#garbage in garbage out

Prowl screenshots, Part 14

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 15

Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20

Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25

For ignorance, obscurantism, bad taste or stupidity are not the result of simple deficiencies, but of many other active forces, which furiously assert themselves at the slightest opportunity, and do not tolerate any exception to their tyranny.

Inspired talent is always an insult to mediocrity. The need to lower everything to our miserable level, to sully, mock and degrade everything that dominates us by its splendor is probably one of the most devastating features of human nature.

Illustration by Marjorie-Ann Watts for Marianne Dreams.

Writing gets harder as migraines continue. I know that without the flow the content is worthless. As the techies have it - 

Garbage in, garbage out.

Ideas appear through the miasma but they’re disjointed and fragmented. 

I listen to Deborah Levy’s third memoir Real Estate. Like her, I think about living elsewhere. She fantasises about luxury while I fantasise about not having to deal with a faceless slumlord. Even in her discomfiture it’s a cosy listen for me, despite every single detail of our lives being different. 

A phrase swims into my mind - the Platonic house. I have no idea how I know about this. I google it and find I’m right. The Platonic house is that one that children always draw - four square with a pitched roof and chimney, and evenly spaced windows. There might be a line of blue representing the sky, some green around the house, maybe a tree or flowers, and perhaps a portrait of the nuclear family inhabitants in the foreground, scribbled in lurid Crayon. This house endures as the house of the childhood mind, despite most children not living in a detached house with no neighbours nor even knowing anyone who lives in such a house. 

One of my favourite childhood books was Marianne Dreams, by Catherine Storr. In this book a girl is ill in bed. She’s given a sewing box to play with, and in there she finds a magic pencil. She draws her platonic house and that night she dreams about it. The next day she adds details, and the next day. The story that unfolds is about the intensification of this dream life and her relationship with the boy she has drawn inside the house. She gets angry with him and draws eyes on the boulders outside the house and scribbles over the bedroom window. It’s a children’s book, so is ultimately resolved happily, but the slip into a magical realist life where the protagonist must solve self induced and frightening problems is a very human trope. We want to feel along with her, but safely, have the thrill of trouble without the groundlessness of real risk.