Lent Diary, Wed 5th March
A beautiful Ash Wednesday: Spring with a bite, warm in the sun, shot through with shadows. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
We watched John Frakenheimer’s Seconds (1966) last night. It’s full of 60s paranoia and existential collapse: the old orders (marriage, professional life) don’t suffice—perhaps being reborn as a younger, bohemian artist (Rock Hudson) will do the trick. After a life of conformity, whose purpose is now fading, who doesn’t want a little freedom? But being an individual is hard work too: it’s very difficult to be truly alone, even if one is consumed by a passion. But fusion with another and too rapid ego-dissolution, in the form of a Californian Dionysian wine/nudity festival, still leaves one with the problem of the self—in this case, two selves, totally unintegrated: one tethered to nostalgia for a normative life, the other chasing (pure) freedom.
Seconds works because it refuses either option: the collapse of the second fantasy does not resolve back into the first, even though this would give a good strong moral message, but the artistic, experimental, libertine life of the untethered individual turns out to be just as conformist and fettered as the old one: what our hapless self desires is a truly undetermined life—that is to say, a life without any programming from the outside, an authentic life, freely chosen: but in the end, chosen by what, or whom?
We discussed whether it was possible to truly change. The solutions to the crisis of mid-life are well-worn (an affair to feel alive; increasingly to “come out” as this or that, thus being “reborn” like the subjects of the film). But you can’t forget your old life, and it’s still you. You must change yourself and at the same time, what if you could say yes to the demon who comes to you in your darkest hour? It’s extremely difficult to integrate everything we’ve ever been with who we would like to be and who we might be right now. The past endures.
The way out, at least in Seconds, is something like madness or death, also unchosen, and abruptly terrifying: the fully untethered soul is screaming into the abyss, or the desert (many 60s and 70s films in particular have a scene like this). While subtly indicting the increasingly psychologically and culturally sinister nature of contemporary life in a way familiar to us in 2025, Seconds documents the collapse of a certain way of life, the limits of a newer kind, and implicitly suggests that not only can we not only not escape ourselves—we can only learn to better live with who we are, our strengths and weaknesses—but that who we are is only ever meaningful in relation to others, who in turn shape who we are, as we do them. Choose your others wisely.
It was lovely to see a black pigeon on the balcony on Monday, not a different breed from the city birds, but unusual, nonetheless: was your mother a crow?
An enjoyable visit with Q to the “Hereafter” exhibition at Swedenborg House, curated by Simon Moretti. Somewhat bizarrely, the police were using the bookshop to question a young man about a story which seemed improbable and uncertain. There was a lovely dog (not police), with an orange ball in its mouth. Like a genteel version of a scene from Stanislav Lem’s The Futurological Congress (1971).
David Noonan’s ‘Eclipse” (2024), Ithell Colquhoun’s “The Grotto of the Sun and Moon, Nicaragua” (1952), and the cosmic romanticism of Paul Heber-Percy’s “Antiphon” (2024) stood out, as well as Donna Huddleston’s strange, architectural religious modernism.
In the park, the trees look almost subversive. It strikes me that the three contemporary novelists I’ve interview so far all use long-hand: in notebooks, to write the novels themselves, to write letters to others. I write only in my diary this way, or when making notes for shows. We do some automatic drawing and discuss birds and amphibians, the temptation to map human subjectivity onto whichever worldview or technology has just been invented, and the word “scortatory” which Swedenborg uses in a subtitle.
The William Burroughs opening was curious: strangely frozen in time, and more like a teenager’s fantasy of outlaw art than anything, although one of the bullet works is a shattered icon, and there’s a title about death and chairs that Q likes. P points out the frames don’t do the work any favours. Well, the plants in the toilet are amazing at least. We find somewhere less crowded to talk about reading, and writing. Things appear possible again, somehow. The fast improved my smell and hearing, though clouded my mind, reduced to an animal instinct circumventing the brain. Alert dust.