Ben Platts-Mills
Resolution
Its true. I’m not attached. I cannot trace my motives. Causes are shrouded from me. I act blind. I can only tell how I feel. The result is all I ever see. Try as I might, I cannot trace the past, make a concrete path, a line that is myself. I am only moments, stripes of sulphur streetlight on the concrete. A taste, a tear, a tightening in the throat. Outside this notebook that’s all I am. The best I can hope for is to catch myself, occasionally, as I blunder, and put right a few of my mistakes, a precious few, sweep up a little, apologise, career onwards once again. Everything is always new. I am not nearly as clever as I think. I am not remotely as fluid, as sensitive, as I expected to be. What happened? When did I grow into a man?
Poor Pinocchio, he can’t win. Every time he tells a story, Jiminy Cricket makes his nose grow longer. All he wants is to be a real boy. He’s just trying to do what real boys do.
Who is Jiminy Cricket? He’s the little insect that lives inside your ear. You hear him as though he sat upon your shoulder but really he is inside you, coiled there where it’s warm. He is a worm. The Blue Fairy brought Pinocchio to life. What he wanted was consciousness, what he got was a conscience. Easy mistake to make.
Squash the bug under foot. Tap it with your thumb. Wipe it against the brickwork. Deliver yourself, Pinocchio, from the little voice in your ear.
The future is as clear to me as the past. I can tell the past only as well as I can see the future. Its like a mains water leak in the road - it bulges up through the concrete in the shape of a jellyfish. It goes out from the centre. There is no line.
I am at once tough and inconsistent. I am made of wood, but nothing I do makes any sense.
Ben has a piece in Attack!!!! 3: What is it Like to Be a Bat. He is my long-time collaborator and everything he does is brilliant.
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