Salvador's Blister.

takes many shapes

I went looking for my copy of Salvador Dali’s autobiography because I wanted to write something about blisters and instead I found my copy of Laurie Anderson’s ‘Stories from the Nerve Bible’.

I’d been wondering where that had got to.

It was on the far side of the bookshelves, behind the armchair Pete gave us, sandwiched between a book about the Landsberger Stadttheatre and one which instructs you into the mysteries of hand made tiles.

Pablo the cat was asleep in the armchair, so I rubbed his tum.

By then, my espresso was ready - expressed even - so I sat down with a cup – orange – of pure black, and opened Laurie’s book.

The page I fell randomly onto describes her experiments with taking proverbs from other languages and listening to them backwards to see if they sounded like anything in English.

Which brought me back to the blisters, that you think I might have forgotten.

Somewhere Dali wrote about how, when he had a blister, he would play with it and never pop it.

This seemed, for him, to be an analogy for the creative process but also how a physical process could aid the creative.

Something like that.

It might have been a spot and not a blister.....

No.. I’m pretty sure it was a blister, but I can’t find the book to back me up.

I wondered at this point, which is oscillating betwixt past and present, if Laurie - if again questioned randomly - would offer up an insight.

She doesn’t/didn’t but she did offer this – “You’re driving and you’re talking to yourself and you say to yourself: Why these mountains? Why this sky? Why this road?

I was driving whilst I was playing with my blister.

Except it wasn’t a blister, but a memory.

A memory like a blister - in so much as it wasn’t fully formed and there were actions that I could take to pop it, but if I did it would have been less satisfying than letting the thing grow.

Incidentally, at this point I recall an article that appeared in the Guardian newspaper earlier this week that suggested that people should stop using ‘whilst’.

Call me retrograde if you like but I just don’t think ‘while’ works in that sentence back there.

What do you think?

Let me know.

You might, whilst you’re pondering that, also ask ‘where is this going?’

Here – I GOT IT!

Well, close enough.

I managed to let it settle on only a few letters of the alphabet and then Gates started to resonate.

I had to step back, let the fiddling cease and the blister to settle, before renewing the invitation for the name to bubble up.

Oyster.

Dexter.

The ‘- er’ felt correct, and then everything stopped and I had Aster Gates.

Aster gates.

Close.

Really close.

Gates?

Close them.

So then I popped the blister.

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