Pure and perfect expression of reality

Dad gave me a lift into Easterby at one and I wandered around town, feeling strangely uneasy and self-conscious. I feel more at home in Watermouth anymore. Why should this be? Lee’s not coming back for a fortnight and I rang both Grant and Jeremy but neither were in.

I went to Erikson’s to get a film for the Minolta ciné camera but was irked to discover that no black and white film cartridge for a Minolta XL Sound-84 has been made for a while now. Not only that, but the existing Ektachrome 160 cartridge costs nearly five pounds. So, at a loss after my fruitless disillusioning hours in town, I bought a 12” by Test Department.

Lee called and told me about a method he’s devised for pinhole ciné filming. He’s had to rebuild the insides of an old Standard 8 camera he got for a fiver and he’s made several turrets of differing focal lengths, each with a tiny pinhole at one end. He’s going to have to calibrate the film, frame by frame, exposing ten frames at each exposure time (making each up to ten minutes in length) in order to produce a standard result, and he’ll crank the camera mechanism by hand. So with each frame exposed for ten minutes, it would take twenty days of solid filming to produce the average three minutes of film—that’s sixty days working eight hours a day. '

Lee doesn’t think anyone else has thought of this before and I can’t wait to see what the finished product will look like. It’s taken him several weeks to work out the mechanics of the process: he had to take apart the camera and then put it together again, a feat of practical skill well beyond me. Gav says he always thinks of Lee as a “tank mechanic.”

Later, I was treated to a fatherly tirade against “left-wingers” and homosexuals, which was more amusing than annoying: “We pander to queer people who live queer lives.” I almost burst out laughing at this. Dad’s safe secure world of blindness and gross oversimplifications is being dismantled bit-by-bit.

There are now twelve aquariums in my room, each with various aquatic and semi-aquatic inhabitants such as toads, frog tadpoles, newts, salamanders and hordes of juvenile axolotols, some no longer than a few millimetres but all exhibiting the familiar broad bland facial features in miniature. Dad plans to sell the majority of them to a pet shop for £1 each.

Statement of the problem: Prose as a medium of communication is imperfect. Words dissemble. Self consciousness, no spontaneity, a lack of creativity, a ‘Pure and Perfect expression of Reality’ never achieved by the arbitrary nature of word-sound and word-structure. All words convey idea/sensation/representation in a rudimentary manner.