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Rachel Fleminger-Hudson
The So-Called Thing My world was full of strange patterns, and I began to pull out from my ears the images tied together like flags. Out of the sash window that was flung “UP!”, they were thrown (and later, this would be depicted in a 1975 film, sung out by two nurses dressed in white) and then marched across the street by my worldly and godly neighbours. This was, of course, back in times of tradition and ceremony, of camaraderie, of flags and fanfare. Some of the neighbours, those with a frailer and sweeter disposition, were shocked, whilst tidying up in the street afterwards when everything was smashed to pieces, trodden, torn, and muddied by marvellous and beguiling footprints (who were they? The large adamant bootprint followed by the question mark of a high heel, and then as he dragged her swirling round and round, her mark – the axial point – often blurred) to find some remnants sporting images of naked ladies. I decided I couldn’t help them, couldn’t shelter them from the joy and glory of glamour and sex – at some point they must be shocked.
The thing about sex is, if you don’t have it, it starts to appear in other places, on curtains, sofas, and on walls, and it’s an absolute devil to get out. All good housekeepers know that. And, likewise, if you have too much sex, you wear it around like a veil, partially obscuring your vision. And the wonderful thing I found about life was that most moments were opportunities for glorious smut. And slowing oneself down to 25 frames per second meant that there was a hell of a lot of fun to be had.
I am the machine, I thought, and yet again I returned to repetition. There is a lot to be said about wallpaper, I’m sure, psychoanalytically I mean. Patterns. And I know I’m not the first. By Jove, you could peel off a whole library of references just by saying, William Morris. The man who went mad, the divinity of pattern, the maddening eternity of the repeating carpet, the slight, insidious variation, the sexy meandering wavering, and then rampant desire for new and more style,devouring like a pneumatic hoover, sucking over the surface, but sadly you can never get inside a pattern, despite how claustrophobic a wallpapered room can feel, the years and years of psychoanalysis, years of saying the same things over and over again, and how strange it is to see that you can see yourself from the outside, the character of Rachel, and see her patterns, see them with empathy (“Of course you feel that way”) and in the moment of the act try to stop them, try to rewrite the script of anger and madness, but whichever way you try to subvert the subconscious, to deviate from the train track of desire, you still repeat the same patterns, the machine, the body – how beautiful its programming – it can never stop to say goodbye, made of metal beneath the blood and fragile bones and of course, Richard Hamilton was right, Man, Machine & Motion, but the body doesn’t move forward in space, it moves forward in time, repeating repeating repeating. How many images am I capable of making, or remaking? But I’m not done on pattern, on repetition, on dramaturgy, on Oswald, on the father, the son, and the holy daughter.
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