By Alan Rogers, London
There has been much goings on. Much muchness.
The tuning fork of existence has been struck again and once more we can feel that perfect pitch burning our ears. Bravo, bravo, shine on you crazy diamond.
The stay of leave granted; the aftermath of the party is tomorrows problem, let’s enjoy tonight.
Gotham city 2021
Prologue: wretched inspirations
Good writing. I like that term.
Discrimination is evil
The thing I fear discriminating against is
Justin bieber
So. These are two statements. The first we can all get behind. Yep lets plant our flag on the anti-discriminating end of the battlefield. The second; well, you fear discriminating against Justin Bieber? This makes no sense for a number of reasons, l live in hope they will be resolved by the film.
Everyone wants to unmask me. But this is the real me – riddler/the batman
I have a theory that we are all a matrix of emotions that embody traits and characteristics that signal our individuality. But it is a work in practice.
Justin bieber?
Indeed.
With a tortured tension, I have become water
Restlessly. Violently. Seeking the ocean
I have become water that does not reflect
Water that is afraid to reflect
I am a dangerous man when unleashed with words
– charles bukowski
I like these words; Nietzsche and Bukowski mashup.
No – one has influenced me more
Than charles bukowski and batman
No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our first weapon is surprise…
They both overcame their wretched universes
Bukowski said ‘I don’t hate people. I despise them’
“beating me with that strop taught me something”
“what did it teach you?”
“HOW TO TYPE”
“when you get the shit kicked out of you long enough, and long enough and long enough. You will have a tendency to say what you really mean”
It is a life strategy to look back at trauma in your past to try and explain what kind of person you have become. Personally, I am not sure it explains anything. I think it is self indulgent. But it is good to own that pain and recognise it for what it is; the foundation of self.
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime…
Was recorded by the rolling stones in 1968
It was composed in the key of c major
It was the first song recorded for the album
Let it bleed
It is a good song. Stones trying to be Beatles, but nonetheless a good basic song that was layered up nicely.
The three verses address the topic of
Enforced identity distortion
Identity crisis. We all suffer (I think). It is what makes some of the lyrics of this song so relatable. With men, we are subdivided into ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta’. What nonsense. We are neither and both. I have no use for pigeon holes, but (I guess) we all want to know how we are perceived.
Each verse captures the essence
Of initial optimism and eventual disillusion
With the resigned pragmatism of the chorus
It is a universal truth. It was before Jagger (and many more before and after) sang it. And it remains regardless of how good the song is.
A doppleganger always gets what a doppleganger deserves
Which is?
WARNING
Charles bukowski wrote
If you’re losing your soul
And you know it
Then you’ve still got more soul to lose
Which is a good thing? No?
Those who escape their shadow
Never talk about it
And nothing bothers them after that
TITLES
Ah. Dalek relaxation tape. Good move.
Each of us has
A shadow self
Everyone carries that shadow
And the less it is embodied
In the individual’s conscious life
If it is repressed or denied
In an attempt to isolate it from consciousness
It is liable to burst forth
In the form of aberrant behaviours
That reveals
The thing the person hides from
Doppleganger
Right. So what you are saying here is that we all have split personalities, and that if we try and suppress one of them, it will fight back? Interesting hypothesis.
An exact double
It knows your thoughts
“how do you know that your’e the one?”
“you don’t know”
This is a great thought experiment; if you were cloned, and your clone was an exact replica even down to your memories, which one would be the real you?
But it is of course impossible, so it remains a thought experiment that is interesting but pointless. A good storyline for a sci-fi episode.
Part 1: ego te absolvo
The traditional phrase which declares
That a penitent is freed
From the consequences of sin
Only if you believe.
Many people ask
Who is my doppleganger?
When maybe they should ask
Who’s doppleganger am I?
I think that the term doppleganger has been misconstrued to mean someone who looks like us.
In a world of billions there are bound to be people who on first look appear exactly like us. It is rare to meet one, but it must surely happen.
What would you do? I suspect you would ignore that person and carry on your way. Like the rest of us, but the image of them would be burned into your memory.
YOU
CANT
ESCAPE
YOURSELF
“I don’t want to save the world”
“I don’t even want to save me”
Back to Nihilism.
TITLES
Part 2: dopplegangers fill the space available
Sooo many questions.
The dopplegangers imaginary power & resonance
Is dependent on the level of estrangement
Between yourself and intimacy
What is intimacy?
Are you also the horniest person you’ve ever met?
Are you touched by who you are
Do you often touch yourself?
Very personal question. Probably.
Part 3: don’t blame me. My doppleganger made me do it
The doppleganger is a conceptual phantasy
But the strength of such copies of yourself
Is lost as soon as any attempt is made
To force the phantasy into coherent reality
The same is true for visual seduction
This sounds like academic philosophy.
Discernment has a doppleganger
And her name is revelation
When your body shakes in anticipation
It is not palsy or drugs
It is your doppleganger emerging from you
The enemy within escaping outwards
Or a chemical reaction to neurones firing in the major cortex.
Ours is the only period ever
To have sought to exorcize this phantasy
To transform the operation of the doppleganger
From a subtle interplay
Into the bland excuse for the escape of repression
This sounds plausible. But is pretty much unverifiable.
We accumulate experiences during life
And we also accumulate roadblocks
In the form of aggregate of shame
Forming a false self and counterfeit spirit
This counterfeit self becomes your doppleganger
A thing capable of doing what you would not dare
A way to present yourself in a dark world of forms
Sounds appealing. And I would say; likely.
If you were to meet your total- stranger doppleganger
They would only differ from you proportionately
They would be braver than you
More resilient to the opinions of others
It would be more perfect than you
More comfortable in its skin than you
That does not make sense to me. Why would the doppleganger be a more perfect version of yourself? Are you basing this on the fact that we all sufferer from self deprecation?
It would be everything you aren’t
A doppleganger is a husk of ectoplasm with pretensions
And what are you going to do?
Pretend like she doesn’t exist?
But she does exist
Not in that creepy house down the street
She lives in you. Over there
This is a great point. What if your doppelgänger was of the opposite sex? What if yours was a male and mine was a female? Would they be able to understand each other?
And in moments of devil may care freedom
That you give yourself free of shame
That is her surfacing to have a look around
To have some fun with conventions
And respectability
Your doppelgänger can be blamed for everything it seems.
Your doppleganger makes it seem as if it was a dream
With hindsight, it all seems too real
A misaligned moment never to be spoken of
Until the next time
And the time after that
All the world’s a stage…etc.
And if you feed your doppleganger freedom
She won’t force her way into your life
She will become you
And then you won’t even remember who you were
Most of us are searching for answers and any answer will do.
Hoping that the uniform you now wear
Becomes an imperfect methodology
To provide true anonymity
Despite a multiplicity of bilateral self-lies
Wow. There’s a verse in every sense of the word. WRT the sentiment; I can relate.
Flesh cannot reach every recess of the mind
It cannot document every emotional chord
And it cannot splice the discordant pieces within us
But a doppleganger can
Flesh cannot. But the brain is an amazing organ.
It becomes responsible for the sanitized accounting
Of the mind’s false depictions
A slick tool of manipulative identity craft
Making it impossible to separate the teller
From the telling
This is always the case though, isn’t it? We are always trying to account for the various selves we present.
A problematic pairing of algorithmic look-alikes
Based on the essentialised ethic of sexual attributes
Then one day
You catch yourself walking behind your doppleganger
Now your doppleganger
Is walking a divergent path to your life’s choices
And you are obediently following
Sometimes we consider whether the choices we made were the right ones. This is a fools errand. There is no use speculating on ‘what if’s’. The future is not mapped. The past cannot be changed, and there is no way of knowing whether a different choice would have produced a better result.
Dopplegangers come for your soul
And stay for your leftovers
They are unburdened by the inertia of human nature
Spooky.
After a lifetime of negotiation with your doppleganger
You realise the words you could have said
Or left unsaid
Because dopplegangers sip on amnesia
As they change the destiny of your journey
Are you mistaking doppelgängers with dementors (from Harry Potter)?
I have a doppleganger
It is very real
And it lives close by
I should be thankful
That there will be only one of us left standing
When it is all over
Then it will have been all worth it.
When I recite the rote details of my life events
It slithers further into, and out of me
Every touch with truth alters it
It leaves bite marks on the body of truth
And you know how much I like a good biting
All people deserve respect
But not all actions do
This is very true. Not the bit about the biting. The bit about respect.
‘I believe that to be in any creative field,
Be it as a writer, artist or film maker,
There is something terribly wrong with you’
Charles bukowski 1920-1994
EPILOGUE;
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can
Very poetic.
I experienced a power within myself
That was not aligned with my conscious ego
It forced me to adopt a path that was quite foreign to the rest of society
But before I was able to obey this power
My fear of judgement needed to be crushed
I often felt that this was a pity
That this process had taken so long
Because I really hate wasting time
Fear of judgement is a thing. Not sure it can be crushed as you say. But I guess you could repress it
Even poison tastes good when you’re starving
Why do we embroider everything we say
With special emphasis
When all we really need to do is simply say what needs to be said?
How do we know what needs to be said. And worse, what if the people we are talking to do not want to hear us?
CREDITS
‘if you spend your life
Sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity,
You get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them -f. Scott fitzgerald, the last tycoon
When you have less of something, it becomes more valuable – joker / the batman
Amen.
This was more poem than I was expecting. I like the concept even if I were a little sceptical of the content.
The introduction of Mr Beiber was not (in my mind) resolved.
Hope you are well,
Kind Regards,
Alan
Missy Jubilee replies
Excellent feedback Alan. Thank you
I haven’t put ‘The Blackest Hole’ up yet.
I would make the excuse that the Patreon debacle got in the way
But if I was to be truthful, there were a number of points in there that tweaked me
I have spent a lot of time thinking about them – and hope to reply with a more considered response
This is not saying that I took your comments negatively.
Just that they touched on aspects that I protect assiduously – such as freedom to wander narratively without being bound to any formula or level of comprehension
But I also acknowledge that I have triggers, and must not give into first reactions
With regard to the Justin Bieber motif, it is thus
I like music
Actually I love music
Good music
And I think Justin Bieber produces god-awful music
But the fact that someone had the creative foresight to hear a JB song, slow it down 800% and make it the sound of the Batmobile (which if you hear it in the theatre is heart pounding) – is one of the most lateral and creative acts I have ever witnessed.
It made me aware of my own discrimination against such popsters (I actually mis-typed that as poopstars – and thought, appropriate)
Therefore the Justin Bieber reference applies to about 10 seconds of the film – a droplet of sound in an ocean of vision
And I don’t take time to explain that
Because I invoke my creative freedom ticket to do whatever the fuck I want, otherwise I should be working in retail
I live by the edict that not everything has to be explained – because it plays to the dumbing of the populace
Sometimes, quite a lot, I make people figure it out
It’s like Zoomba for the brain
Sometimes I do things just for me. The Justin Bieber piece was just for me. Everytime I see a Batmobile, I will think more betterer about Mr Bieber.
Some may call it a tribute. Others an indulgence.
But doing what I do, I don’t have to attach a tag to it
When I do, I’ll know I’m on the downhill slope towards mediocity
Love always
p.s. thank you for making me think deeply about my words