The madness of solipsism
Conversations with me, myself and I.
Conversations with me, myself and I.
I’ve been thinking about solipsism a lot again today but if you’re here in the hope of some high brow intellectual and insightful breakthrough into this particular madness, well you’re shit out of luck. I’m still coming from the perspective of that surly 14 year old above with the Spandau Ballet haircut or perhaps the idealistic college leaver of 5 years later. My life would change irrevocably just mere months after the above image was taken, and looking upon it now I smile at the thought of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society as he shows his new students an old photograph such as the one above as he implores them to “seize the day”. The 19 year old college leaver would still carry the deep scar of 5 years previously, Robin Williams was still primarily and famously known to me at the time as a space alien living in a young lady’s loft, and I was too busy getting drunk and stoned and having incredible sex in the college grounds whilst my contemporaries hosted visiting rugby and football teams in regional inter collegiate competitions to be concerning myself with thoughts of being the only person who’s ever existed. Are you mad! I was 19, in the prime of my pun intended fucking life, a colossus with hair to spare and a rampant ego sadly and ever so slightly out of synchronicity with any recognised form of reality.
But what is reality anyway?
In the photograph above, and going from top to bottom, I clumsily trod on a goal for a football game called Subbuteo and the prized possession of one unnamed young man in the back row, vied for a place in our yearly starting XI with someone from the second row as well as the third row, and the row I’m in, Spandau Ballet hair and all. Of the 8 young men in the front row, one was an incredibly gifted footballer far ahead of his time, one was a renowned storyteller with a heart of gold to go with a very special footballing ability, one broke my heart in a Junior School Semi-Final before I became firm friends with him in Senior School and another was a highly talented cricketer who enjoyed ripping the piss out of my bowling action on every cricket field we shared for years. Heady days. The kid with the hairstyle and fashion that was always two years before or after its time was incredibly proud to be in the picture above. The image is a little grainy now but I think I see a hint of my trademarked upside down smile, my quixotic calling card if you will. I’m stood in the middle of the greatest footballing talent in Portsmouth and mere feet from a World Cup winner and a genuine national treasure.
Heady days indeed.
But here at the Solipsistic Society we would like to draw your attention to the screamingly obvious and that is Lee, Chris, Anthony, David, Brian, Graeme, Matthew (other names now lost to the mists of time — Editors Note) cannot possibly have existed. These fine young fellows could not exist outside of my own mind and I must have made them up. Made them all up! Same goes for John at my local corner shop and regular sparring partner as we put the world very firmly back into its unruly box every day.
John doesn’t exist?
Are you mad?
Quite possibly but we’ll cross that bridge after we find it again in the nuclear fallout of my cascading mind.
So solipsism falls at the first hurdle in the horse race of life and that’s probably a defining reason why I cling to the fanciful notion like driftwood. I guess I argue for it as a comfort blanket against the madness of a world outside the madness of my own mind. It’s certainly a reactionary defence mechanism and it’s maybe born of a November morning in the year the photograph was taken, and the ghosts of someone else's life.
I keep reading and re-reading the above paragraph. I’m narcissistically very pleased with myself. It reads well and is very me. My brother Andy (very definitely real but not my actual brother) gave me the greatest of writing compliments once when he said, paraphrasing, that he read and saw me in my writings, the real me, and the real me is the creator of the paragraph above and the man who says the same thing over and over again, but after a long and winding road.
Messing around with thoughts of solipsism is a just another self defence mechanism. A reason to reason with the absurdity of life. Too much hero worship of Bill Hicks. Too many kooky books read. Too many known unknowns. Too many illicit cigarettes smoked at the alter of a Grand Old Lady under the brightest of full moons. Photographs become memories. Memories become lost. Minds questioned. Stories told. Stories told of the stories told.
Days seized. Lives lived.
Memories made.
The above jamboree of random words has been brought to you by a man consumed by the concept of memories whilst sat staring at a favourite Salvador Dali print hanging on the wall, and the great man’s interpretation of the death and decay, the beauty and grace and the fractured nature of time colliding with the nature of the unreliability of memory. I’m fascinated by how photographs influence memory. What happens to the human story when you have no-one to tell the memory of what the photograph represents? I bore my son to distraction whenever I talk about photographs being a “time machine” to the past and why perhaps the photograph isn’t as important as all the periphery memories that are conjured from around this image, this memory, this trip back in time. What if the “memory” is completely made up, you wanted something so bad you simply made up a story that you did or, in my case, there’s a grain of truth to a minor story I dine out on given half the chance, but isn’t necessarily entirely true. There’s a large element to my “memory” that is very definitely true but the important inclusion of the interesting crux of the tale?
Not quite.
From solipsism to Subbuteo to Salvador Dali to the persistence of the disintegration of memory, and all from an unreliable narrator who met the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth once and can’t remember a thing about it.
Thanks for reading.
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