Falling Girl (for S.)

Abysses have been big this festive season.  Big and little, global and personal, though in my view they must all resolve into the ineluctable, singular Abyss we're all stuck with.  On the way, however, they seem to take many forms.  Such as: Saddam's seasonal judicial murder, brilliantly coinciding with the first day of Eid (see Riverbend Blog ); the absence of any government spokesperson on the Channel 4 News to discuss the matter; the NHS abyss where doctors can't get work or patients get treated properly; the Tony Blair Bee Gee Holiday abyss.  Not forgetting The Poet's hideous abyss moment when just before the midnight hour he was suddenly overcome with anxiety in case another year wasn't ready to step into the breach, and whether as the last bong of 2006 struck we would fall off the end of time. 

And no end of personal abysses.  Pre-Christmas, pre-New Year black spots that wrong foot you just when you thought you had stuffed your greatest fear down behind the sofa.  New Year's day is for sharing the horror, the horror.

I've had my actual abyss up and running for a couple of weeks now.  It's called Falling Girl and it's attached to my Google homepage (along with a sparky spider who reminds me of how I am no longer frightened of them).  I keep intending to remove it, but each time I move my cursor towards the delete, I find myself staring at it in grim and terrifying fascination. 

I came across the animation a few years back when the girl was transformed into George Bush dressed in a suit, and simply getting his virtual just desserts, a premature hell.  But now it's a young woman dressed in a bra and pants, not I think just for sexist reasons but because her body structure behaves exactly as you would imagine a slack-muscled falling body to behave in free fall and when meeting obstacles.  She falls against a blue backdrop (sky, clear blue yonder) hampered by variously sized opaque white balls which knock her off her course or trap her in some grotesque limp contortion. 

The point is that there is no end to the fall.  She goes on down and down, banging and bouncing on the balls but never arriving at the bottom.  Unlike Bush, she is young, vulnerable, dreadfully solitary and hopeless.  She is the embodiment of the terror you can't describe when you are in deep depression.  She's the worst dream.  The blackest fear.  The abyss.  When she gets stuck  between two balls you can click on her and drag her back into empty space to continue her endless journey.  Occasionally, when she's marooned, I've found myself settling her in a more humanly comfortable position on the balls to give her a rest.  But at other times I set her off again falling and falling and watch, unblinking, appalled, because every now and then or eventually you have to watch the truth of a thing rather than wait for Christmas.

It looks remarkably like the real world to me.  Happy New Year.

Comments

[Claire]

Yeah, I made sure she was sitting comfortably too. Nice to know that someone else reacted in the same way. :-)

[Meredith]

Falling man is similar to boneless girl in that they're both images, I suppose - & one simply reminded me of the other. In the sense that they are both falling forever. Or perhaps I just choose not to think of the end of his journey.

[betty]

When I read your blog I thought, O God, this is going to make me worse - a game to feed my miseries. But I had to look, and my reaction was quite different.

When computers were first introduced into schools, we teachers were allowed to take one home over the holidays to teach ourselves about it. My husband got hold of mine and proceeded to entertain himself by programming it to produce a single blowfly, which buzzed happily, endlessly and randomly around the screen for days.Boneless Girl seemed to me just an extension of this idea, with added elements of grace and resilience and a kind of circus feel about it. She never seems unhappy or in pain. Yes, it is endless, but so? Is that always bad?

How is it like falling man? Surely the horror of those images lay in the knowledge that their fall would be completely unimpeded - in other words, that there was an end.

[Ms Baroque]

Funny; I clicked and looked at her before reading the end of your post. I agree, she's terrible.

Of course, the Falling Man was exactly what I thought of when I saw "Falling girl". The point is that none of this is as abstract to us as it would have been at other times, in the past, and as it should be. It's easy to feel as if the whole shebang is in free-fall.

After the horror of the girl being trapped - folded in half - between two of the "clouds", I realised that I could manipulate her. Then I spent at least a minute or so arranging her crefully on some of the clouds, making sure her head was supported and she looked comfortable, like putting a child to bed.

[Meredith]

I clicked on your link and found that she is actually called "boneless girl"... I wonder if the name has been changed, possibly because of the "falling man" photos of 9/11? Perhaps "boneless" has some comfort for you - after all, boneless folk won't break.