Will Self - My Idea of Fun

If this example seems contrived to you, why not try it with something a little less abstract than a philosopher, for example, the visage of the one you love most. Come now, there must be someone to whom you can ascribe such status? Why don't you summon them up, enjoy the charming singularity of their countenance. Now, what can you see? That their eyes are such-and-such colour, that they style their hair just so, that their skin has this very fine grain, quite like microscopic hide? I'll grant you all of that — but not all at once. What you've done with Little Love is to describe an outline for them and then fill it in, piecemeal, as required. As it is to the sympathy, so it is to the photography. You cannot tell me that, when you appreciated the hue of those sympatico eyes, you also managed to take in the raw triangle of the Loved One's tear ducts? And if you did, did you perchance notice if they had any rheum on them, any at all?

That's what's so achingly sad about your love — that's why it bulges in your heart like an incipient aneurism. For the harder you try to cement it to its object, the more that object eludes you.

Let me reiterate: it's not like that for me. I can summon up faces from my yesteryears and hold a technician's blowtorch to their cheeks. And then, once the skin has started to pullulate, I can yank it away again and count the blisters, one by one, large and small. I can even dig into them and savour the precise whisper of their several crepitations.

Now that's how eidetiking differs from yer’ average visualising.

Usually eidetikers are idiots-savants. Many are autistic. It's almost as if this talent were a compensation for being unable to communicate with others. So it's hardly surprising that they don't find much use for their exceptional gifts. From time to time one will crop up on television, giving the donators at home an opportunity to adopt the moral high ground of someone else's suffering. Or else her résumé will appear, boxed in by four-point rules, well stuck in to a fourth-rate chat mag. These prodigies can take one glance at Chartres and then render it in pencil, right down to the grimace of the uppermost gargoyle on the topmost pinnacle. Big deal. That gargoyle might as well be the eidetikers themselves, for all the jollies they'll get out of their unusual abilities.

I can tell you, it wasn't like that for me. I didn't have to spend my childhood in an institution, slavering on the collar of my anorak, and waiting for parental visits that never happened. I was an exception — an eidetiker who could communicate normally, who didn't have to resort to calculating fifteen digit roots in my head, in order to get some kind of attention.

That being said, my eidetiking was something that I was virtually unaware of as a child. Indeed, had I not come under the influence of an exceptional man it's doubtful that anything would have come of it at all. After all, who cares whether someone's visual imagery is particularly vivid or not? Furthermore, how can this vividness be accurately described? I've done my best, but I know that I've begged as many questions as I've answered. Suffice to say that as long as I can remember I've been able to call up visual memories with startling accuracy and then manipulate them at will.

Most of the time I didn't choose to, and for a longish period, in early adulthood, I temporarily lost the ability. But now I've got it back again. Casting behind me, looking over my shoulder, down the crazy mirror-lined passage that constitutes my past, the skill comes in handy. For I find that I only need to summon up one picture, one fuzzy snapshot — serrated of edge, Kodachrome of colour — to be able to access the entire album.

A place that is not a place and a time that is not a time, that's where I spent my childhood. In a place that was chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea and at a time that was never some time but always Now.

When I stand in this place, a high chalk bluff that curls down in a collapsing syncline to the bleached bone of a rocky foreshore, what do I see? Not what I saw as a child, for then I had only the raw sense of imminence to project on to that horizon. Time was child's time, the time that is like water, bulging, contained by the meniscus of the present. Now I have become aware — as have we all — of the true Trinity. God the Father, God the Son and God the Cinematographer. And so it is that I await the word rather than the flesh. For only humungus titles, zipping up from the seam between the sea and the sky, will convince me that I have really begun. Without them it is clear to me that my life has been nothing but a lengthy pre-credit sequence, and that the flimsiness of characterisation was all that was required by the Director, for a bit-player such as me.

My father was a tenebrous, as well as a taciturn man. When I was a small child, say up until the age of seven, he was little more than a shadowy presence in my life. And soon after my seventh birthday he improved upon this status by beginning to absent himself from the family home. He would go off, initially for days but soon for weeks, along the South Coast, from ville to ville, reading in public libraries. And by the time I was ten he was little more than a ghost in the domestic machine. By the time I was eleven I hadn't seen him for a full year and a half. I don't know precisely when it happened, so attenuated had my relationship with him become, but one day I realised he wasn't coming back. I haven't seen him since.

As if to underscore his peculiar irrelevance, unlike most of my recollections, my only memories of my father are not of his appearance, his manner, his wit or his wisdom, but solely of his smell. It's true that I only have to look in a mirror to see what he looked like. For as my mother has never tired of telling me, I am his spit, his doppelgänger. But stranger still is that his smell is my smell. Imagine that! When I lift my arm I get a whiff of him in the urine tang of my hardened coils. And if I smooth down the gingerish hairs on my freckled arm, the attic odour of dead skin is his as well. I think I could make out a case for this being sufficient — this nasal inheritance — to explain everything that follows. But as if it weren't enough to have someone else's bodily odour, added to this there is the Mummy smell. For the world has always smelt of Mummy as far as I am concerned. By this I mean that if bacon isn't frying, tobacco burning or perfume scintillating, I am instantly aware of the background taint. It's something milky, yeasty and yet sour, like a pellet of dough that's been rolled around in a sweaty belly button. It is the Mummy smell, the olfactory substratum.

I'm searching, searching through my portable photo-library for shots of Daddy, evidence of him to support whatever claims his genes may have made to shape and direct me. Ah, here's the bungalow — starker, leaner, than it later became. The trellis-work around the door supports a spindly climber, Mummy holds little Ian — who's one and a half, maybe two? — like a misshapen rugby ball that someone has passed her; and which she wishes she could immediately pass-kick forward, beyond the touchline of maturity. But in place of Daddy, there's just this painted-in glob, this fuzzy outline. Somebody has got at my eidetic memory and retouched it. They've removed Daddy the way that the Stalinist propagandists painted out Trotsky. When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station and mounted the crude, hastily erected rostrum, Lev Davidovich was there. But as Vladimir ranted, Lev, like some Cheshire Cat, began to fade, the planks started to show through his brow; eventually all that was left was a stain.

It's the same for the rest of my childhood. At all the Party Congresses that we know Daddy to have attended, he has been negated, erased, excised from the picture. Whether propped against the bonnet of the family Mark 1 Cortina (same birthdate as my own), or sprawled on the sheep-cropped and sheep-bedizened grass around the Chantry, it's the same. Only Mummy and Ian, or Mummy, Ian and maternal relatives — plus this Daddy-absence; this Daddy-vacuity; this Daddy-erasure.