Anxious thoughts made apparent

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 January

There is some quotation from Paradise Lost that would do better than that tag-line, but it doesn't come to me*.

It would not be right to say that I like Erin Hogan's descriptions in her book Spiral Jetta, but only because I do not think that one should relish another's pain.

For what she does is to capture the type of content of anxious thoughts, fears that cannot be reasoned with and so will not be subdued by argument or otherwise abate:


I pulled off into what seemed the largest gap between two scrub bushes and parked the car. There were a lot of little bushes underfoot, and I wondered whether the undercarriage of the car, which had been running all day, might be hot enough to start a fire. I wasn't sure if this could actually happen, but the thought alone made me get back in the car and move it to the barest ground I could find.


Likewise (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):


Still worrying, I checked the landscape and realized that, should I see a faint plume of smoke from wherever I happened to be, I would not have time to halt the nascent inferno, and my burned-out Jetta would forever be marked as the car--and I as the dumbass driver--that destroyed Mormon Mesa. My poor car would share the fate of the rusted-out amphibious vehicle and old Dodge truck near Spiral Jetty.


Further (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):


The thought was too much to bear, so I moved the car again, took a liter bottle of water and poured it over the ground, then put the car back over the wet spot. What more could I do?


Beautifully written, and - so rare nowadays - perfectly punctuated, what Erin Hogan has written just does justice to the intrusive thoughts, with their very strong force, that can beset an experience and undermine one's (potential) joy in it.

Another quotation (from a page or so on):


Now I faced a new dilemma. Clearly there was someone else out there. But would they be friend or foe? I pictured a bunch of sixteen-year-old guys sitting on their tailgate, listening to ZZ Top, shooting their rifles at empty beer cans scattered atop the mesa. I magined what I would look like sauntering up to them out of nowhere. "Hey guys, how's it going?"

[...] I imagined my broken, violated body baking there on the top of the mesa. Snippets of Deliverance alternated with The Accused in my head. I debated going back to the car. Was that cowardly or prudent? Where, once again, was the line between legitimate concern and paranoia?


Maybe the above, if not an interest in US land art, will encourage finding this book. I should leave the final word to Erin:


Maybe it's the salt that keeps Spiral Jetty honest. The work is now almost entirely white. Salt has latched onto every available surface, blanketing it, making it a croûte en sel. It comes across as pink in all the recent pictures I had seen, and perhaps in a certain light it is. [...] But the color one feels overwhelmingly is white: bone white, bleached white, blinding white.



* On reflection, I think that it is 'darkness visible' (from Book 3 or 4).


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here