Struck down with a vicious bug. What you get for dissing publishing and capitalism. I don't believe in this germ stuff. My mother used to put soda crystals and large amounts of Dettol in my baths to get all the nasty little germs off me. Though I suppose I was the nasty little germ she was trying to wash away. I believe soda crystals are used to clear drains. Her other use for Dettol was cleaning the lavatory bowl.
Anyway, three days in bed with my bug (lack of soda crystals probably) and the world has physically disappeared. Unless you count reading the paper (655,000 deaths during the war in Iraq) or watching television which I totter downstairs to watch and ruin for the Poet by coughing just when the pathologist lifts his head out of the corpse with the vital clue, or the psychologist announces that this kind of psychopathic murder could only have been committed by...cough cough cough...Luckily the whole point of watching TV is to see which of us can figure out what is going on and whodunit before the credits finish, so we guess that this kind of psychopathic murder could only have been committed by a psychopath. We watch CSI (only the Las Vegas version), Law and Order, Wire in the Blood (last night), Midsomer Murders, Morse (but not Taggart, there are standards of a sort) with rapt attention.
Insides of bodies and insides of minds are, I suppose, all that there is in the world to fascinate us (I guess the origin of the universe has its moments). Peering into bodies, getting corpuscle-eye views of what exactly happens when a bullet rips through the human envelope, watching ex-living people being butchered for internal investigation gives us a sense that we really do have all that stuff inside us and that, for now, it's intact. Not the hollow men we feared ourselves to be. It's quite a restful and heartening narrative compared to the other one about minds. The parade of serial murdering crazies every night on TV is for what? To persuade us that we are not crazy? To make us less worried about being dull of mind and life (never mind, it's better than having an interesting mind that requires the rape and killing of young women/men/mothers/left-handed cellists). Or, which is probably nearer the truth, it's just basic narrative. Someone does something, someone has to find out who did it and why. It's pure and uncluttered. And the further the mind of the killer is from the bog standard normal mind (you know the one you and I have) the more we can sit back and enjoy the story.
Ordinary everyday craziness is ordinary and everyday. That's what makes it horrible rather than interesting. Real craziness, like real violence is nasty, frightening, sad and usually embarrassingly stupid. That's because it's done by us regular folk. But let it become narrative and it becomes fascinating, deep, intriguing. Think Crime and Punishment, and then there's the tale about a mother who put soda crystals in her kid's bath in the hope of dissolving her? There's a wonderfully mad, psychologically gripping story in that. So much easier than brooding about the reality of the adventures of the mad, greedy, self-righteous men who demanded the invasion of Iraq and the 655,000 (so far) who have died of it.
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