The Butterfly Effect: An Easter Coda

Good Friday. Opened my curtains to the open-wings of the butterball, seen through a halo: still in the same spot, on the grass under the tree beneath my window. Footballs fly into nets; butterflies fly into nets – butterfly nets. Goalposts are made out of wood – have a crossbar; Jesus was - captured - crucified on the cross. Butterflies are crucified in display-cases.

It’s Easter; but I don’t start the day on an egg. Tofu-on-toast. The label on the bread (from Waitrose) says, ‘The Terence Stamp Collection’, and there’s a picture of the actor’s head – Stamp’s head – the size of a postage stamp, on the wrapping. Stamp played a butterfly collector cum kidnapper in, ‘The Collector’ (the 1965 film of John Fowles’ book of the same name). John Clegg (Stamp) is a lonely man - with non-existent social skills - who one day wins a fortune on the football pools. With his new-found-wealth he gives-up work, buys an isolated house in the country, kidnaps a young art student – whom he’s been long admiring from a distance, but with whom he is unable to make normal contact - and adds her to his ‘collection’ of beautiful petrified objects (butterflies).

Greg’s, Clegg’s, Stamp’s, hopeless obsession with butterflies - a fantasy made true by football - observed from a distance: a socked football - that once flew - chewed (by a dog). Dogs are kicked; Dogs fly; and there’s a breed of Spaniel called, The Papillion (Butterfly) Dog. I chew-over these associations, as the tofu sticks to my tongue, like a stamp. 

It’s Good Friday and another kind of ‘collector’ – the cleaner - patrols the garden, collecting rubbish. What stopped me making ‘normal contact’ as she plucked-up the butterball between her pincers? Why didn’t shout out the window: “Don’t kidnap my butterball. Leave my butterball alone”? I’m still in that big sock (my own butterfly net), and a mouthful of tofu is no excuse for allowing a rare butterball to become landfill: extinct. 

Jesus rose from the dead on the third day – from a cave. In ‘The Collector’, Stamp keeps his young art-student, prisoner, in the cellar. 

I fall through the rubbish-shoot into the basement and join the butterball in the bin. At last, I’ve shed my sock - my sin: like Jesus shed his shroud; but I'm not him. And so it came to come: the butterball rose from the dead on the third day and ascended to my bedroom, on a broomstick. Why not? Jesus travelled on a cross.

‘The Collector’ was published in 1963, and the film was released in 1965. I was born bang in between, in 1964. 

Stuffed Sheep and Talking Trees

So Camera clubs’ far and wide still consider lambs and nudes good photographic subject matter for their competitions: lambing and modeling – who are we to judge? Camera clubs can judge for themselves - award rosettes to the tastiest lamb or nude. Here’s some advice (from a “black-list” of nudes) on what to avoid if you’re thinking of entering (fancy your chances in) the ‘nude category’.

But have you considered entering a sheep? Or what happens when two fully-grown men - photographers – stuff a camera inside a sheep and deceive other wild creatures? Or have you given a thought to a young model – Ricky - a mere child who speaks because he’s got Jesus inside him?

Some notes on the Stuffed-Sheep Camera:

A stuffed sheep could be made useful to photograph birds living on moors and mountains. It had been " set up lying down," and a hole left in the chest for the lens of the camera to peep through. Finding a sandpiper's nest in the bottom of a lonely little ghyll far up in the heart of the fells, I placed the camera, minus the legs of the tripod, on a flat stone in front of it, focused, put a plate in position, and, attaching about fifty feet of pneumatic tubing, extended its full length in the direction that would give me the best view of the bird's nest. After carefully placing the sheep over the apparatus and tying the wool on the chest back, so that none of it should wave in front of the lens, I erected my little hiding tent at the opposite end of the pneumatic- tubing, covered it with rushes, and retired inside, to wait the home-coming of my " sitter." I had not been concealed ten minutes before a shepherd arrived on the top of a steep hill above me, and began to send his dog round the stuffed sheep with the intention of herding it. When it failed to move my animal, the old man broke into unprintably hard terms concerning his canine assistant's lack of intelligence, but the poor, libeled brute knew more than his choleric master, especially when he came to leeward of the sheep, and caught the aroma of the stuffer's workshop.

I once used a hollowed-out tree as a changing-room (see Dropped Trousers, 19/11/09); but beware of artificial trees – tree-trunks containing photographers. But there’s a worse kind of tree than a tree that can see: trees that talk too!

Geraldine and Dave have a little boy Ricky and they teach him how to play golf and they talk with him a lot.

She must be a great mother because her Ricky is always talking; and all the time he’s talking, he’s smiling! She even asks him: “Ricky, how come you’re always so full of words and smiles”? And instead of answering: “because trees talk too” Ricky smiles and says: “Because I have Jesus in me”.

A Meeting Of Three Partings

Alfred Jarry said, “The work of art is a stuffed crocodile”. At first-sight this seems absurd, yet when you think about (decode) it, there's a profound and serious point: art is not the wild beast we’d like to fool ourselves it is - it's anything but - in fact art's really rather tame and prone to being eaten away by time – has no real bite.

One rare exception - art with teeth - art that still pricks, is ironically, Jarry’s brilliant, The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race”(1896); a report of The Crucifixion written from the point of view of the commentator on a cycle race. J.G. Ballard appropriated Jarry’s Passion to describe modernity’s most famous crucifixion - the Kennedy assassination - in his speculative novel, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Talking of crucifixions: imagine you’re out walking – wandering through a wood  - crossing Wimbledon Common (as I often am) – and all at once in the bracken, suddenly finding Jesus: The Savior, flanked by two thieves, all three leaning-up against trees - hands in their pockets - playing with themselves. “Here they crucified him, and with him two others –one on each side and Jesus in the middle” (John 19:18).

What I found in Jesus (Jacques) was a kinky gaze; it's as if his eyes are undressing me - the ‘king of the Jews’! But as I looked more closely at their heads I saw this tree-hugging trio were unified by their partings: what we’re really looking at here is a meeting of three partings: the triple departure (on the cross) of Jesus and the two thieves, subtly expressed in hair. The Parting of the Red Sea is another biblical example; on that occasion, explicitly expressed in water (Exodus 14).

Jimmy Nail’s best-known hit (and every nail needs hitting) was called Crocodile Shoes (see Crucifying An Album Cover: Nailing A Nail, 13/12/09). In the mid 1980’s, long before Nail released (murdered?) Crocodile Shoes, I had myself photographed naked with a mouthful of nails, a drill on one hand, a stuffed crocodile in the other.

An ant -Adam Ant, inspired the photograph; or more specifically his song, Stand And Deliver. Imagine being held at gunpoint by an ant – robbed by Adam. And even though my body language says Adam, the photograph shouts Eve. I wanted to be depicted handling a serpent; the stuffed crocodile - he was a stand-in (the picture was taken in Dublin).

I didn’t like the way the photograph turned-out –never printed it and since have lost the negatives – only the contact sheets survive. But twenty-five years of close contact with other contact sheets have taken its toll; the emulsion has melted – my skin’s disintegrated. But look: time has been kinder to me (to a stuffed crocodile even) than it has to Adam Ant.

The Wart Went

I got my first ever wart on the last day of Lent:

My nana Dot rubbed a chunk of raw-meat on it,

Then told me to go and bury it.

After about a week the wart went.

Rector Seal, he always parked his bike on top my nana’s,

In the graveyard - she was inside doing the church flowers.

I can see them now, locked like a couple of locked spanners,

Up against a gravestone.

Nana Dot said, he needs all the help he can get, pray for him,

Reverend Seal’s got trouble with his waterworks.

It turned-out to be a kidney stone.

But the miracle of the wart and buried meat

Led me to operate on Seal’s seat.

Splatter-proof in my cycle cape

I studied the anatomy of his bike:

Imagined the break cables and water bottle

Circulating Seal blood - full throttle.

There was even something scrotum-like

About his old leather saddlebag.

And I knew I’d made the right decision

As soon as I made the first incision;

Through the epidermis of Seal’s saddle,

To the blubber-like foam in the middle.

I cut round the colon of springs

To the sound of the choir practicing hymns,

Yet when I hit skeletal frame,

I settled on burying a chunk of the fat-like foam.

Before patching up the scars

With a strip of tape from the handlebars.

Nana Dot died years ago.

But Seal’s still on his bike as far as I know.

Nana Dot cradling, not glue-sniffing (traced), 1987

Reverend Seal was the vicar of St Mary’s Church. My grandmother, Dorothy (nana Dot) adored him; she was a tireless worker for the church – an “Excellent Woman” - Barbra Pymesque; tidying the graves; arranging the flowers; organizing jumble sales; ringing the bells; mending prayer mats; teaching Sunday School; attending funerals (often, the burials of complete and utter strangers – she lived for funerals).

Both sides of the same page of the Parish Magazine, announcing my baptism, 1964

I don’t know whether or not Dot noticed that an advertisement for ‘Complete Funeral Undertakers – Day and Night’ happened to be printed on the reverse-side of the page announcing my baptism in the Parish Magazine. The irony would have been lost on her though; given a preference, she’d have attended a funeral over a baptism any day.

The hand of my father (son of Dot), a Sunday-painter, sketched the outline and I added the colour, in this Sunday-school depiction of “The Cradling of Baby Jesus”.

Looking at it now, I appear to have got my bible stories reversed. My image reads more like the post-crucifixion gathering at Christ’s tomb than the ‘Birth of the Infant Child’: Mark 16:1-4 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

My chalk ‘Cradling’ is a direct copy (combination) of two sleeping bag advertisements from Climber & Rambler magazine (home of rock walls and boulders, the home too of Peter Storm). It’s as if I were painting the contradiction of my baptism/funeral collision from the pages of the Parish Magazine: plagiarism by anticipation?

The loner in the sleeping bag was based on Reverend Seal.

There were three women involved: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome; they planned to bring spices to apply to the body. Apparently the women did not know that the tomb had been sealed and placed under guard. The sealing involved a cord that passed around the stone, and that was attached to the rock wall with sealing wax that had been impressed with an official Roman seal.

Shady Cradle Roll Certificate

It’s not much of a leap: from cagoules to sleeping bags, via a cycle cape (doubling as a surgeon’s gown). Especially when bridged by a vicar called Seal. But isn’t the concept of hermetically sealed metaphors a contradiction? Vicars, like the rest of us, when sealed in hooded-sleeping bags, resemble seals. Perhaps now you can see why I’m so obsessed about stalking Peter Storm in Peter Storm in a storm (see “Storm-Proof”, 26/11/09). Larkin was right: you can't escape your wrong beginnings. But they are great levelers, sleeping bags: they reduce us all to the same sealed, seal state; as well as making us vulnerable to the same fate: very difficult to defend yourself against a golf club attack when you’re in a sleeping bag.

Sunny Cradle Roll Certificate