STILL THE SAME. STILL DIFFERENT
“Still the Same. Still Different” is written and gifted to Impossible by our Impossible editor Graham Erickson. A justified secondary school truant 1979 - 1981. Fully qualified oblique strategist. Suspected liar. Campaigner for contentment versus status. Nothing. Something. Occasional creative director and lazy writer. Habitual misser of deadlines.
When I was maybe 11 or twelve. The age you are when you enter secondary school. We were given a task by our form teacher. The objective was to describe your own character in as few sentences as possible.
I was a precocious child. I was the child version of my now being.
I was intrigued by Warhol. I was beguiled by Bowie. My older sister had a boyfriend who was a very small-scale drug dealer so I was , at an early age, transformed by Lou Reed.
A time sometime in the seventies. A diet of dried mashed potatoes in packets, orange juice in powdered form. And breakfast cereal that changed colour as you ate it.
A moonage daydream era that had arced as far away from nature and the organic as possible.
The artificial age.
I went into a zone and wrote. I would show them. I unshackled and slipped up into my imagined world. The one informed by Ziggy and Roxy where the sky was filled with stars cut from cardboard and sprinkled in glitter.
My piece of paper was submitted. I can still remember every word of it.
It read:
“I hate nature. I feel at my best in artificial light. I am in love with electricity. When I am at my most false I am at my happiest.”
I even tried to affect a robotic gait and a blank expression as I walked to the teacher to hand him my droid declaration.
I remember I was wearing fluorescent green lurex teddyboy socks.
The sheet of paper was read, snorted at and quickly tossed into a bin by my English teacher who was still suffering shell shock from world war 2.
He insisted I write again. This time a more appropriate definition of my very young self.
I, of course, wrote exactly the same words again.
I handed him the sheet. He duly turned a deep, virulent plum blush flame colour. He asked me what I thought I was doing. He asked if I thought I was
clever.
I replied that his initial reaction had reminded me that my other fascination was with repetition and copying.
I mean. For an eleven year old you’d have to give me that one. Right?
I now live in nature. In a wooden house. I forage. I tend to plants and trees. I eat fresh food that does not come out of foil-lined packets. I know when the owl will appear in the Beech and Birch forest, and I am approaching virtuoso level at cutting logs. As a gesture of commitment to my forest existence I have sacrificed the index finger of my left hand.
And yes.
I am left handed.
I still, however, feel pretty good in artificial lite and I still love Lou Reed. Some things. Huh.
Photography by Michele Cote.
“I can lose my hand and still live
I can lose my legs and still live,
I can lose my eyes and still live,
I can lose my hair, eyebrows,
nose, arms and many other things
… and still live
But if I lose the air I die
If I lose the sun I die
If I lose the plants and animals I die
All of these things are more a part
of me, more essential to my every
breath , than is my so called body
what is my real body”
Jack d. Forbes