The Time Machine

There has always been a theme in my blogs, a sediment running through the more overt glittery facade of the tales I tell.
Its feels to me like a very dark coal seam, or maybe for instance, the cold current that suddenly runs over your feet when you paddle out too far in the sea on a hot summers day.

Its the feeling that whatever I'm instinctively drawn to, whatever rings my bell or floats my dinghy in the here and now as an adult, no matter how I attempt to rationalize my fascination in practical terms - with a piece of art, a book, a movie, an old chest of drawers or an entire culture for example - I know that my attachment to these things was first decided way way back, when my primitive psyche was first being shaped and sculpted as an (almost) immaculate baby-child.

My neuronal welcome mat I believe was laid down long before any conscious effort on my part to open up and receive the cultural signals or road maps that would hold a lifelong fascination.

Scientists say that if you tweezered out a piece of brain the size of a grain of sand from your nut, it would contain 100,000 neurons, 2000,000 axons and 1000,000,000 synapses – and all these bits of sloppy stuff are chatting away to each other 24/7.
The human brain is truly awesome: it has been calculated that the number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.
All those connections, meetings and relationships fizzing away. All those baroque neuronal architectures whispering their strange electro-chemical languages.

I know loads of psychologists and neuroscientists especially Freudian's and the cognitive school would agree to this to some extent. Papa Freud though, would reduce development down to my childhood sexuality and how mummy and daddy did, or did not scare the shit out of me when I were a lad, and the neuro-crew are so boring with all their sterile clunky diagrams, which are far too objective and blunt to capture the unique amorphous and delicate sensory cajoling of the signs, smells, colours and images that were my real daily bread when a mere babe.

Imagine the avalanche of novel data that assaults the senses at every moment when we are new to this experience called ‘waking life’.
We feel the world in an instinctive poetic way during this period, we feel around ‘things’ without the baggage of the intellect orchestrating our experience and emotions. We accept or reject various aspects of the vivid sincerity of Reality because it creates a physiological response, not an abstract theorem to be tested in a cold laboratory.

How can you really isolate and examine why you like and love - the things you like and love? That stuff that swirls around you all the time like a cloud of gnats, then suddenly: something grabs your attention, something deeper than conscious awareness, it enfolds you in its warm gooey gravity, leading you back home again to your young/old poetic self.

I suppose I’m being a bit Proustian here: actively searching for those little triggers or doors to a seemingly lost time. Most of the time, all we are ever afforded is glimpses, little epiphanies, flashes of familiarity that momentarily warm the heart and remind us of who we were are really are.

I know that my ‘poetic remembrance’ project is ultimately doomed to fail according to the mandate of hard science: my hypotheses can never be ‘empirically tested’ of course, its too unique, indistinct, and ungraspable by crass objective measures…its just messy me and you at the end of the day.

But that’s the beauty of soul mining, it’s a creative process at every stage, there can only ever be ‘correlations’, analogies and metaphor’s – science 101: ‘Correlation does not mean causation’.
But I’m happy with this,

The writer Albert Camus once said that every artist (and I think the artist in everyone) is forever attempting to return to that first pristine perception, the unpolluted primal cognition of childhood: a flower, a sky, a mothers smile, a butterfly or whatever. We all secretly and not so secretly sometimes, yearn to reach that state of grace or blissful communion with the world as it really is, in itself: raw and undiluted by habit and experience.

I think…feel rather, that the things we are drawn too instinctively are the subliminal clues to this perfect world. They pull us back – often violently – to that time when we didn’t judge anything, didn’t try to work it out, it just was, is and always will be like that underneath the patina of gathered dirt called experience.
Sometimes, the most trivial preference may be traced back through its chain of sensory/emotional associations to an Eden when it, or something related to it – a colour, shape, smell, taste etc made you feel safe, loved, protected and unique.



Its fun to practice retroactive deconstruction with your own life, after all, there’s no better subject than yourself.
Here’s a couple of brief examples, they may seem comical, but do they hint at something a little deeper?
As early as I can remember until the age of about 7 or 8 years old, my paternal grandfather would spoil me at least once a fortnight by buying me an Airfix plastic modelling kit – usually of World War II fighter planes and bombers.
He said it was for me, but I know he loved making them too, and often did all the intricate stuff himself. The colour of these kits straight out the box was usually a pale eggshell blue.
I’ve always had a particular fascination with this colour as an adult and a painter/signwriter in my younger days.

Show me a tin of Cyan blue enamel, or an oil tube of Cerulean and for some reason I start to feel creative, excited and in some odd way – reassured. Paintings and artists, which use or exhibit this colour prominently always give me a bit of a buzz too. Over the last few years, I’ve wondered if that colour triggers an emotional return to time when I felt most safe and happy.
Those times spent with my grandfather were a haven from my arguing parents, and the boredom of the family home. Me and gramps just made stuff, and he gave me his time and made me feel special - accepted me for just being little old me.

I’ve also noticed – this may be stretching it a bit – when I do abstract art, or just mindless doodling, I tend to paint and draw flowing aeronautical shapes: pointed wings, tapered cylinders, graceful sweeping lines – like those aeroplanes I used to make all those years ago. And the main shapes are never linked, but discreet objects, separated and floating in space, held by thin cords usually, and narrow tubes…just like those kits used to be straight out the box.
Anyway, sounds crazy, but still, makes you think doesn’t it.
What’s your favourite colour?