http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-V7in9LObI

How poignantly uncanny this video representation of Bill Viola's Ocean without a shore. In a way reminds me of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead and even Almodovar's Volver. Even of course David Almond whose books always return and acknowledge the need for some faith in human connection that can resist despair, cynicism  and death. All the narratives, on some level, give visceral representation for me to the sense of rowing with or without purpose through life towards the altars of the dead.

And it was in this house, and at this time, that George knew that the face on the wall was his own. And then he forgot this knowledge. He threw it away. He cut away at this truth because one day it would meet up with him , having taken another route and after all he had his life to find out that we are always meeting ourselves as strangers in  conversation and only with a soul mate do we know  that we have finally met ourselves.

Sometimes, magic realism works and sometimes it doesn't. On the other hand, you will find those elements in most literature from all over the world - not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavia sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver and Alice Hoffman all use this style.

For a while in the U. S. and Europe, a logical and practical approach to literature prevailed, but it didn't last very long. That's because life is full of mystery. And the goal of literature is to explore those mysteries. It actually enlarges your horizons. When you allow dreams, visions and premonitions to enter into your everyday life and your work as a writer, reality seems to expand.

'You won't believe this but it's true.' The Savage opens with a kind of challenge, an underlining of the credible incredibility of the story the narrator is about to tell,and it is this challenge which ironically gives permission to both the narator and the reader to believe. To have faith. And this faith involves an apparently faithless place, a place where faith has fallen into seeming disrepair, the 'ruined chapel' where the narrator Blue places his character The Savage, living as he does in this separate world from school and rules and  home. For the Savage as his name suggests lives outside the conventional world of routine and domestic relationships. He is Blue's powerfully realised 'alternative' response to the death of his father after  his school counsellor Mrs Molloy, advocates writing down his feelings so he can 'start to move forward' and he finds such  a quasi-direct approach  'stupid' or even 'made me feel worse'.  Instead of his feeling diary, Blue takes a new approach, 'ripped up all that stuff about myself, got a new notebook and started scribbling.' Such decisive physically vital actions seem energising, rather than laboured and self consciously formulated. 'Scribbling' is anarchic as it takes neglects the serious, it embraces flow and spontaneity. Rejecting the words 'about myself' the act of 'scribbling' belongs to another activity where what appears, appears. Words are found 'outside' the parameters of the grief stricken, 'fixed' devastated self, and these words take on an animated  character, a shape, a story. They have  flesh and the distortion of this flesh voices that which couldn't be spoken before. I wonder whether in creating the figure of the Savage, Almond's Blue, creates new parameters  for  the 'real' through which Blue's perceptual bewilderment at the death of his father, can explore a physical response to the world whose power is instinctive and primal.

For the 'Savage' is a 'wild kid' whose isolation and mutism liberates him from regulation and lawfulness. All the commitments and relationships which would link the Savage directly  to Blue's suffering are removed. 'He had no family and had no pals' and such a removal of intimates converts the uncontrollable aspects of loss into some antisocial , aggressively solitary condition, where loneliness is self-chosen, rather than precipitated by events beyond human control-specifically in Blue's case, the sudden arbitrary death of his father. The extremity of the  Savage's intense physicality gives violent freedom to feelings which Blue finds cannot be represented or acknowledged through conventional representation. Trapped inside one suffering fixed body, Blue finds the creation of his Savage character a form of violently rapturous embodiment where even emotions can have new shapes and new behaviours.

This Savage is mute too,  so his language cannot deceive and dencounce him, as Blue's language does when he tries to write directly about his grief. The platitudinous promise of moving forward through such expression reads hollowly and is set against the antisocial behaviours of the Savage,accentuated still further through his rough spelling, his illegible grunts, which give a rawness and kinaesthetic reality to the experience of the Savage. The binary divisions of the world embraced by the Savage are reempowering for Blue. Disorientation is impossible is the world is either this or that.

The Savage communicates too,  a sense of the beyondness of grief, where loss makes us want to clamber out of any place where we have to be irrevocably ourselves and to feel, again and again, the impossibility of the beloved's return. And as if Blue's father's death wasn't enough for the narrator to deal with, then there is also Hopper, the local bully whose taunting of Blue has been a source of pain . The cruelty of Hopper's declaration that Blue's father died as a result of Hopper's dark prediction is again something the school counsellor suggests can be converted into some cathartic healing narrative. However this subject matter, like Blue's grief for his father, seems 'no b****help at all. ' For how can any perspective be gained so proximate to devastating loss? The disorientation of losing someone so close,  dismantles our co-ordinates of the 'daily 'and we feel lost and powerless,disabled creatures who seek always what they cannot find. So what can we look for in our darkest places? We look for rescue, we long for reanimation, being more than half dead ourselves. Little wonder that death makes the chapel 'ruined' and obscure!

Blue's maleness impels him to protect his mother and sister, yet his own fragility makes his quest difficult. He needs help. He needs his own 'knight' to rescue him from the blight of  his suffering. So he writes himself out a knight, a special 'Savage' knight who is both mentor and monster, a creature who like the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight lives in a secluded cave, close to a ruined chapel, where faith and faithlessness combine to test and prove the mettle of the hero, in this case Blue. Yet such a reading does not quite work in this tale. For just when Blue thinks he has written out The Savage, he finds that the Savage had written him 'out'  before. They are both saviours, 'knights' to each other, each part of one another's origins, an intimacy that liberates both from the singularity of the self, and offers a fluidity in terms of what is personal and private, what is possible and what can happen when faith in something is restored.

Blue learns the  weight of being irrevocably himself in The Savage. He knows the isolation of the excluded through his grief for his father and his awareness of his new responisbilities for his mother and sister. Rejecting the 'diary' approach to his emotions, he invents a new story story, where his powerlessness can be assuaged. This new tale  transforms his world. Blue finds a language  through the narrative of the Savage that can give representation to the solitude and  rage of grief after his father 'went away'. He writes 'my kind of story just for myself.' So much of life involves inhabiting stories which stifle and restrict us, which are palpably not 'my kind of story' . However the story of the 'Savage' gives expression to Blue's previously undiscovered resourcefulness . In The Savage  he creates a  narrative  which gives vent to his  deep feeling of abjection and insuffiency which have silently creid out  see the pictures of the Savage) for expression and I do find the new story he creates, a tale of chivalry and courtesy as much as one of primal loss and rage. If the tale is about rebalancing a imbalanced world with its alien words, then such a rebalancing involves integration and fusion-hence to integration of the Blue and green colours throughout the text.

I remember a wonderful week in my first year at Liverpool University when the trains were on strike and I was mean to be reading Spencer's epic Faerie Queen. Lewis's was a huge department store next to the station and they had a paperback section where most of DHLawrence's stories were sold in Penguin editions. So each day I would travel into University reading Lawrence's tales on a coach and as Kate Bush's Cathy once sung of Heathcliff: I' loved him and hated him too'. Returning to him again after years( with the exception of his novella The Virgin and the Gypsy) I still felt the peculiar rush of exasperation at Lawrence's strutting arrogance as he attempts to capture the imaginative singularity of emotional conflict in relationships, particularly within heterosexual marriage. And I do qualify this so ponderoulsy as I am never quite sure if Lawrence is not secretly trying out his own desire for another type of marriage whilst chastising the shortcomings of over zealous, dominant women! 

 Angel Carter once wrote a stunning essay entitled: 'Lorenzo the closet Queen' as he seemed to her very interested in rooting through Gudrun's stockings in Women in Love. This aside, I just wanted to make a note today of his simultaneous brilliance and oddity...the latter being a polite term for his arrogant assumption that his reading of relationships transcends any other pyschological reality. He is a seer, a shaman, a savage pilgrim!

But then no one does hatred and repulsion as well as Lawrence. And that is one reason I admire him despite my anger too. In 'Sun' the wife is 'healed' from the sickness of corrupt modernity through her erotic connection to the purity of the sun and reflects that the 'unsunned' were 'So un-elemental...so like graveyard worms. '  The souls of such human beings are therefore 'cowed'  and the wife's new naked, sunned natural life with her family in some Grecian garden makes her view her 'grey' visiting tourist of a husband as furtive,( DHL's  favourite put down?)  This distaste then  fuels her silent attraction to DHL's favourite fantasy figure, the unspeaking working man whose beckoning sexual 'flame' makes the wife and he 'intimate' - at a distance! The desperate 'mongrel cowering 'of the American husband is opposed to the 'hot shy peasant' who would have provided her with 'a procreative sunbath'!

Is it any wonder indeed that people go on holiday!

Reconciliation is at least a two way movement in The Savage and the exultant dance of 'triumf' after the confrontation with Hopper is followed by the Savage's visit to the home of Blue and his sister Jess. Night has many moral shades and the moral darkness of Hopper ( why is he named this? Bug's Life, Susan Hill's King of castle..all villains) is dealt with before the savage 'renews' himself through a visit to the home of Jess - a secular...'non-rooined chapel' where the feminine rescues the lost male from desolation and the abjection of faithlessness?  In this scene we witness the Savage's attempt at communion with a sleeping Jess through a language he has heard but cannot reproduce directly:  'He tried to speak like Blue and Jess had in the woods that day.' And even though he cannot replicate the actual words themselves, he does find a new , nurturing tonality,  'sound..gentil ...full of tenderness and  care..' He pays homage to this pure 'maiden', offering allegiance and selfless love in a magical, chivalrous way, a strange  echo perhaps of  Arthurian legend and fantasy. Perhaps too it is this link between the role of the savage and that of the protective 'knight' which appeals to readers on a very intuitive level. For even if the reader  recognises or misrecognises  other older stories, we respond viscerally to Blue's hurt by Hopper( and terrible 'wound' via his father's death)  and desire a 'knightly' intervention where some 'champion' may rally about our emotionally depleted hero and save him and his family from lostness and lonely fury. So Blue's writing is a form of prayer, a plea for solace and the Savage's gift is not least the liberation of Blue from the relentless pain of being just oneself:

'When I wrote all that I felt much better. It was great to see Hopper through the Savage's eyes.' A wonderful change in perceptual postion! The Savage is thus a form of  healing double, Launcelot to Blue's Arthur:

 ' I saw him face to face like a reflection, and he was just like me, only weirder and wilder and closer to some magic and some darkness and some dreams..'

Civilisation ironically here  seems to have drained away certain forms of intimacy or the possibility of certain forms of intimacy. Our wounds may remain open as we lack the imaginative, spiritual resources to heal them. By contrast, the proximity of the Savage to BLue returns that which has been lost or denied. The Savage is dynamic and moves emotion, as much as events, shifting stagnancy and privileging change, in himself as well as in BLue. For the savage is Blue and Blue is Savage. The question of who is writing who is tantalisingly voiced in the final stages of the narrative where both characters meet near the 'rooined chapel' and 'we listened together to the darkness and I heard Dad's voice.' How do you listen to darkness? Synasthesia is so apt here.Wounds are heard and acknoweldged. Clairaudience too?  For the savage's darkness has saved Blue and Blue's darkness has ennobled the savage.  Healing is thus reciprocal and I wonder whether this shift from the abject, ungoverned otherness of the savage's situation  to his new respect and care for chosen others, anticipates the eventual integration of both the Savage and Blue. It is as if with the shifting of perceptual positions, the singularity and exclusion of grief can be transformed into something 'processing' and 'alleviating' rather than fixed and catastrophic. I

 I do wonder too about the role of Jess in the text. Both the Savage and Blue are particularly  protective of her innocence and spontaneity, and it is her behaviour which they both adopt when sensing positive change within themselves. 'Jess' and that which she signfies in a fallen world where Hopper can wear death's mask  like the reaper and torment Blue with his father's death, remains pure and beyond contamination. The Savage blesses her through tender touch, an' earthly' sign of something beyond the material, a gesture which empowers Blue and inspires him to declare to a cowed Hopper:' I know about the savage in the night.'

"The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for ever."

Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Galahad at the Ruined Chapel (1855)