nullimmortalis
…that’s tomorrow!
The King Of Love My Shepherd Is – Ilan Lerman
“‘It's what it was like for Edmund Hillary on top of Everest,’ I said.”
This story, for me, represents very powerfully what it was like to be a boy in a British Primary School in the 1950s, as I was. Not that every detail matches up to my experiences, but the essence is there. The separate playgrounds. Gender bemusement. The sense of God on High. The sense of the aftermath of the War as an immediacy. The Eagle comic. Gobstoppers. Bullying. My dad telling me to stand up for myself . Times Tables. Hymn-singing at Assembly. Nightmares, that come back from time to time even these days.
In this story there are insidious things going on – a mystifying dread of the interpenetration between the physical and the emotional, mingled with what I can only describe, now, resulting from my reading of Black Static today, as the Icarus feeling. Falling into Brueghel’s painted sea and hardly being noticed.
And peers and saints or gods that you trusted that should never have been trusted.
But there is also a sense here – from the mention of Everest and the Eagle – of soaring beyond this story’s ending. More than those hymns ever managed to do for me!
