Eclipse - Flash Fiction

My son’s drawing from the nursery had pride of place of the refrigerator. It probably still does. Just I am not coincident with that fridge anymore. Having climbed into an icebox all of my own with the divorce. That cold-storage of permafrosted love which had once thawed child me into an tepid adult. 

I did manage to snatch an image of the daub on my camera phone. Before my ex removed me permanently from the house with ice tong fingers, while her free hand pincered her nostrils closed. Apparently I smelt more mephitic than whatever vegetation was putrefying in the fridge’s salad compartment, because she refused to provide our son a balanced diet, instead of a sugar-coated and salted quiet life.  

I had to get one of my nieces to load up the image on to my desktop and serve as the screensaver. The resolution wasn’t great, but his palette of coloured crayons illuminated the whole workstation. Pixels brighter than nuclear fusion. Daddy (stick man), (big-stick wielding) Mummy (cropped), beautiful boy (cherubic, seraphic angel), house (forfeited by mulct), tree (fit for a gibbet) and the sun improbably haloing the lot of us. It never failed to uplift me. Except when even the screensaver could no longer save its diminishing energy and the computer winked itself out. If I was in the room, I would rush to stroke the mouse and revive it. Mouth to mouth resuscitation as I planted a kiss on to the boy’s gaily coloured image of the illusory intact. But when night finally culled my own energies, the monitor was left to blinker itself and snatch him from me. Except we romped and capered together undimmed in my dreams.

She denied me updates. Both digitally captured and verified in the flesh. Reports from the school and sporting medals garnered. I hired my new best friend, expert counsel. At his behest I kept a calendar of broken arrangements. I maintained a catalogue of petty cruelties. I devised a register of behaviours deemed detrimental to his development. I made an inventory of lies and calumnies she got him to parrot down the phone, or by mispelled SMS text. My legal docket was overflowing in my computer’s dock. Folders spilling out into the body of my monitor. Each grey-blue rectangle eclipsing another segment of the screensaver. Dead pixels. I was losing him even as I fought tooth and nail to keep hold of him. My screen was saving nothing. Least of all the dying of the light. 

Climate Camp

The fact that the Police have refused to rule out "kettling" coralling/containment and the possible use of blared music to soothe the savage breast or some such is not too far removed from practices condemned as heinous when adopted by torturers.

Remember the blasting of music as Psyops to force General Noriega to surrender when he'd walled himself up in the Vatican's Embassy after the Americans had deemed him no longer a political asset? The official line was that the music was blasted out to prevent the gathered media from eavesdropping on the delicate negotiations proceeding inside the building. But why then opt for the likes of Guns N Roses "Welcome To The Jungle" and Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" to an opera lover like Noriega (and professed hater of Rock & Roll). If they wanted to soothe his mood and make him more amenable, some nice Puccini aria, or even some panpipes beloved of homeopathy suites would have done the trick surely? No, they were trying to screw with his mind.

Scroll forward to Abu Ghraib 'interrogations'. The theme music from "Barney" (inane toddler TV show) and Metallica's "Enter Sandman" played on endless loop as part of the breaking down of the prisoner's mental state. Psychological torture plain and simple.

And now it lingers in the background as a possible tactic against Climate Camp.

My question is are the artists so employed happy to allow their music to be utilised in such a way? Is there any way for them to prevent it happening and thus show solidarity with those being tortured. If they have no power to prevent it, can they at least sting the military/Police for performance rights money? You know Metallica will for a start off... You could feasibly argue that within the confines of a prison in Iraq, such a case for public broadcast would be hard to cinch. But out in the open at Greenwich Park? With hundreds of thousands of witnesses outside the camp, also having their ears assailed? Pretty public to my ears.

So Climate Campers, if the authorities do choose to blast your eardrums to try and make your occupation a little less tolerable, be sure to keep a log of every track played and the time and frequency and send off to the Performing Rights Society to ensure the Cops have a large bill on top of the overtime claims. Then it might force them to rethink their approach.

Have a glass of carrot juice on me.