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Here's another one
http://www.petetownshend.co.uk/diary/display.cfm?id=49&zone=diary
11 July 2003
The Wave
The man with the red hair and green eyes looked out at the crowd. His gaze
was returned by empty faces looking up at him. The executioner shifted from
foot to foot, his own face hidden under a black hood with a long pennant of
cloth hanging before him that dipped, in some strange vanity, down to his
waist. He held the lever for the trap door firmly back against its stop, as
if it would matter that the condemned man died a few moments sooner than
intended. The bailiff was late. The red-haired man scanned the faces in the
crowd, searching for any sign of emotion: sympathy, hatred or love. But
there would be no expression from the people until the very moment of his
death approached.
Suddenly, his sweeping gaze fell on a ghoulish couple with Quaker-like
head-dresses. Their eyes were not on him. They seemed to be praying
silently, perhaps for the salvation of his soul? Between them, clutching as
if for support to their long, black robes, someone stood, small, of an age
that was hard to determine, with red hair like his own. He could not tell
whether the person was male or female. Nor could he tell whether the person
was a child, or somone much older, but small in frame, with an ageless and
unwrinkled face as some white witches were said to have. He decided the
person might be a woman. The curious, untroubled eyes fixed his, perused him
as an equal. The welcome and distracting spell those eyes cast on him was
broken by the thundering of approaching horses: the bailiff had arrived with
the warrant for his death.
In a few moments the crowd sensed the awful show was beginning and the first
buzz of anxious and excited chatter rippled into the morning air. When the
noose was placed around his neck, the ripple became a roar, the surge of
blood-anticipation causing some of the spectators to laugh and bellow
meaninglessly, or to shout inanities. Most of the crowd knew nothing of the
huge man on the gallows. Offered a hood of his own he proudly declined and
looked down again at the gloomy Quaker couple who had now looked up at him,
their prayers complete, their eyes full of tears.
A moment before the trap-door opened, the little red-haired person - who
still stood partly hidden between the folds of the strange couple's robes -
pushed a smiling, shining face forward and smiled at him. Having done so the
person looked down shyly, breaking the communication in a manner that
suggested this was just another morning, just another day. He could not
bring himself to smile back but kept his eyes on the face, comforted by the
happening in some way. Then, the person - for a moment looking most of all
like he had once done as a child himself, when he was bonny and unsullied by
life, bright, innocent and with a shock of flaming red hair - looked back at
him and waved. With a very small movement of the hand, palm facing him,
moving the fingers from side to side in an almost imperceptible action. Not
a goodbye, it felt to him like a hello, not of great consequence. And then
his life was over.
'So what is the point of the shot of the little guy waving?' The film
producer dropped his head and reproduced the little wave himself, with a
silly face.
'It's in the book,' said the film director. 'It's important, but
unimportant. It's a floating moment, indicating life goes on, death goes
on.'
'Yeah. But how does it advance the story? What does it add?'
'It adds poignancy'.
'Who's the little guy supposed to be? What sex?'
'We don't know. This is just someone in the crowd who smiles and waves at a
man on the gallows about to die. He is a man the small person knows nothing
about, doesn't care whether he was a great man or an evil one. They have the
same red hair, and the little person in the crowd waves up at him'.
'But the film is already twelve minutes too long,' the producer was now
striding importantly back and forth in front of the small projection screen
in the viewing theatre. 'People will see this shiny-face, and wonder why it
is there. Who is it? Why have the film-makers put it there? As the film
rolls they will be expecting the person to reappear, to be significant in
some way. Nothing happens in a modern movie by accident. Even Tarkosvky
didn't have unnecessary clips in his films and some of 'em ran for four
fucking hours!'
'The person is representative of the crowd, but also the passing
inconsequentialities of daily life, the life he must leave behind. People
smile at strangers. It means nothing.'
'If it means nothing - cut it.'
'It means something that it is without deep meaning.'
'It will confuse people.'
'But every day little things like this happen to people, small things that
are of hardly any real significance, but they can change the entire course
of our lives.'
'This guy is about to die. There is no course to change. All we care about
is why the director and writer of the movie want to include a shot of some
little ginger nut who we will never see again - not in this movie. Cut it.'
The smile, and the wave were cut. By a strange extrapolation of affairs the
film on the cutting room floor came into the possession of the director's
girlfriend, a video artist who exhibited at various international galleries.
Transformed into a never-ending loop of film it formed the basis for an
installation at the Serpentine Gallery the following summer. Art critics
slammed the result, members of the public found it confounding and
irritating.
'People wanna know who the person is behind the flaming haired face, what
it's there for, why does it keep going round and round - the little smile,
the little wave. We fucking paid for it!' The film producer loved to tell
this story. He ate another piece of pasta with truffles and laughed with the
certain good humour of a man who knows what the public really want from
movies and art galleries.
The hanged man fell into darkness, and as he ascended to heaven, a long trip
that took several weeks, he saw again and again the flaming-haired face of
the person who had almost imperceptibly waved. He saw the wave, a modest
gesture, a tiny movement, repeated and repeated until the blinding light of
his first confrontation with God obliterated the image.
The pint-sized film extra hadn't meant to smile at the huge film star up on
the wooden stage. Told to keep still and stay quiet, the little person
couldn't contain any emotion: they both had the same red hair. The massive
actor and the little extra could have been related. The little one felt a
bit sorry for the big one because he had been standing up there waiting for
the director to start shooting, waiting - as had they all - for a very long
time.
The little flaming-haired person waved, smiled, waved, smiled, waved, and it
meant nothing much to anyone. It was meant to mean nothing, or very little.
It was meant to mean nothing and so it was. But when Hamish McDonald, a
Catholic beater on the estate of the great laird James Fullarton of
Fullarton, went to the gallows in 1662, having murdered one of Charles the
Second's Protestant agents who was operating under the property restoration
charter of the unprincipled Act of Oblivion, and whose enforcers tried to
burn down his croft, he took the smile and wave to the very feet of God
himself. And God, unlike the life-weary, art-weary critics at the Serpentine
Gallery, never grew tired of sending back to Ireland, Scotland and England
this red-headed angel to brighten the inconsequential moments of his dearest
subjects' lives, Protestant and Catholic alike - especially to distract them
for a crucial minute or two, or even just a second, as the trap-door fell
open, the axe fell, or the torch was brought to the base of the pyre.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Eel Pie Publishing 2003
Image "The Vision" by Donald Pass with kind permission of the artist, from
the collection of Pete Townshend
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