I Want To Live In An Oarhouse

At school, once a year, we had this thing called ‘Project Week’. Mixed groups of pupils (accompanied by a couple of teachers) would go off Youth Hosteling or camping, always in beautiful places like The Lake District, Wales, and Devon. We camped inland, we camped next to the sea; but it never made a blind bit difference: the girls, in their sleeping bags, always looked like mermaids. But they didn’t taste like mermaids (which I imagine to taste of the sea: fishy). 

One dark night a couple of us (boys) were crawling – literally, on all fours – around the girls’ tents when I knelt on something sharp. I felt my knee: it was wet. I thought I’d cut myself on a tent peg (an occupational hazard). I licked my hand: tasted blood. To better assess the damage I stuck a match. I hadn’t cut myself; I’d knelt on a used-tampon jammed into to opening of a flattened Coke can - thrust-out-from-under-a-tent.

I was recently reminded of this cautionary tale - a tale of poor taste (paw-tasting tale? Pour tasting tail, even) - when I found myself on all fours, tracing oars... tracing oars on rolls of wallpaper: I want to live in an Oarhouse. When I’ve finished decorating, the sitting room will look it’s been papered by something from the Laura Ashley Broadmoor Range… and my oars (like my home) will be open to contradiction: “Ooh, those oars are so well hung”. 

And I’m not having any paintings or photographs on the wall. No. I’m going to go out and get me lots of short, bright coloured skirts, and dress the oars - long-legged oars in short skirts. I’m going to paper the sitting room, hall, kitchen, and, of course, the bedroom. But if you have a children’s bedroom (I don’t) - and feel life-size oars might be ‘a bit much’ – you could consider scaling the oars down to the size of a Barbie doll’s legs and printing them on background of jolly coloured wallpaper. The short skirts might be inappropriate in the children’s room though. You could try painting slightly see-through sleeping bags over the junior oars: use watercolour to achieve the transparent paint-wash effect, and again, use vivid colours; watercolour sleeping bags are also in keeping with the overall mermaidness of the project, and after all, sleeping bags are appropriate to The Bedroom. But beware: condoms are also associated with The Bedroom, and a certain slippage (seepage?) can take place during the painting or drawing of a mummy-shaped sleeping bag: it can accidentally come out like a condom (an easy mistake to make; times, I've seen it done). And I’ve tried a condom on a Barbie doll - she looked as mermaid-like as any fully-grown woman in a sleeping bag does. So be warned! You don’t want your children waking-up to the sight of a room full of oars wearing condoms.

Finally, whilst I was tracing all those oars, I composed a poem: a bedtime poem.

If jellyfish swallowed goldfish whole,

You’d have a natural goldfish bowls.

But if mermaids swam out of their sleeping bags,

Like crocodiles burst out of eggs,

Wouldn’t mermaids walk on oars, instead of legs?

   

For more ideas about ‘useful things you can do with oars’, see my piece: “The Floating Photographer and the Mermaid’s Oars”, in Glen Jamieson’s superb new book: “Suspicions of a Peninsular Town”, YH485 Press, 2009.   

The oars and the photographs (of me) belong to Lucinda Wells, who also owns a sleeping bag and lives by the sea. Beyond that, there’s no connection.

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.