Monday 22 December 2008

Dead of Night 2







Mirrors, staircases, attics, cellars, fireplaces, dolls, dummies, cats, sheets, graveyards, woods, deserted streets. And all this with the most reassuring middle-class domesticity. The secure is an illusion. Beyond the mirror lies the true world. Or one just as true. It is a very English ghost story, this pretence, this dual existence. Call on the old demons: class, repression, puritanism, tradition: everyone a burial of some sort. It takes a foreign doctor to doubt the warp and weft of it. 'Crypto-amnesia. Do I make myself clear,' he asks. But the old lady answers him in the crispest, coolest English way, with a casting out, before another presents him with Hamlet's father's ghost. Back with Sigmund and Karl.

The dummy to come.



2 comments:

Gwil W said...

Santa comes in dead of night
Please Santa don't give George a fright
But bring him socks and inspiration
For he's the best poet in the nation!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
from Gwilym.

George S said...

Thank you, PiR / Gwilym, and a very happy Christmas and New Year to you too!