Falklands
I.
My earliest memory, the first thing I can ever recall remembering, is this very brief image, like a flash, that supposedly hails back from early 1982. If memory serves. I was two years old.
I’m thinking back to the living room at my maternal grandparents’, early evening there about 8 pm tops. I’m standing by my grandfather’s side, just a toddler, as he’s comfortably sitting on his armchair facing the newly-bought 20” TV. There are other people in the room: I think my parents are there too, maybe my uncle. At the very least my father anyway. They are watching the evening news.
The newscaster says something, then the image on the TV flickers then shifts to this gray, cloudy, stormy sky which in hindsight might have been shot in black and white instead of color but then, might not, and there’s the hint of a jet plane in the distance launching a missile against the sea below. There’s a word from the voice-over I can barely recall today, that I can almost hear in my mind right now. If it were not pushing it a bit too far, it would be saying, “Exocet”.
I think that memory comes from the Falklands war.
My thinly-veiled socialist teachers at school would eventually make me call it the Malvinas war though, in the ensuing years.
II.
In spite of all the influence the Cold War exercised upon the entertainment industry back in the day, the mid-1980s presence of the French-built, Argentinean-used Exocet missile is often overlooked yet, in hindsight, it’s there.
Look at your old toys through your mind’s eye and it’s there, alright. It’s quasi-Jungian in that aspect: Vocatus atque non vocatus, most of those toy missiles were Exocets anyway.
Not the GI Joes, though, but the electronic stuff. I’m talking about the rubber-pointed projectiles from all those battery-operated tanks and airplanes, those slim missiles with the short, conic warhead and the triangular dorsal fins.
They were all Exocets.
III.
There’s an early-1980s Elvis Costello song about the Falklands war which I have never heard, not really, but I have come to know because a line from its verses ultimately became the title for an Alan Moore-penned Swamp Thing story back in the day. The story’s title is called, “We could be diving for pearls”.
The lyrics go something like this:
“(...)It's just a rumor that was spread around town:
A telegram or a picture postcard.
Within weeks they'll be re-opening the shipyards
and notifying the next of kin.
Once again,
it's all we're skilled in:
We will be shipbuilding
with all the will in the world,
diving for dear life,
when we could be diving for pearls.”
For many, many years after first reading that comic book, and for no special reason whatsoever, I thought the line was the name of a Pink Floyd album.
IV.
I e-mailed A**** this bit of the song the other day. I told her that was the way I was really feeling about our relationship. I don’t think she cared much, though.
It’s sort of a beat spoken with words anyhow, and if you think about it, I mean really think about it, it ends up setting the rhythm for the way our lives should be lived: Not doing crappy, half-*ssed stuff. Not operating at 10% our actual capacity. Definitely not running a third of the distance. I mean really diving for pearls, you know, making the most of it.
Making the most of everything.
My earliest memory, the first thing I can ever recall remembering, is this very brief image, like a flash, that supposedly hails back from early 1982. If memory serves. I was two years old.
I’m thinking back to the living room at my maternal grandparents’, early evening there about 8 pm tops. I’m standing by my grandfather’s side, just a toddler, as he’s comfortably sitting on his armchair facing the newly-bought 20” TV. There are other people in the room: I think my parents are there too, maybe my uncle. At the very least my father anyway. They are watching the evening news.
The newscaster says something, then the image on the TV flickers then shifts to this gray, cloudy, stormy sky which in hindsight might have been shot in black and white instead of color but then, might not, and there’s the hint of a jet plane in the distance launching a missile against the sea below. There’s a word from the voice-over I can barely recall today, that I can almost hear in my mind right now. If it were not pushing it a bit too far, it would be saying, “Exocet”.
I think that memory comes from the Falklands war.
My thinly-veiled socialist teachers at school would eventually make me call it the Malvinas war though, in the ensuing years.
II.
In spite of all the influence the Cold War exercised upon the entertainment industry back in the day, the mid-1980s presence of the French-built, Argentinean-used Exocet missile is often overlooked yet, in hindsight, it’s there.
Look at your old toys through your mind’s eye and it’s there, alright. It’s quasi-Jungian in that aspect: Vocatus atque non vocatus, most of those toy missiles were Exocets anyway.
Not the GI Joes, though, but the electronic stuff. I’m talking about the rubber-pointed projectiles from all those battery-operated tanks and airplanes, those slim missiles with the short, conic warhead and the triangular dorsal fins.
They were all Exocets.
III.
There’s an early-1980s Elvis Costello song about the Falklands war which I have never heard, not really, but I have come to know because a line from its verses ultimately became the title for an Alan Moore-penned Swamp Thing story back in the day. The story’s title is called, “We could be diving for pearls”.
The lyrics go something like this:
“(...)It's just a rumor that was spread around town:
A telegram or a picture postcard.
Within weeks they'll be re-opening the shipyards
and notifying the next of kin.
Once again,
it's all we're skilled in:
We will be shipbuilding
with all the will in the world,
diving for dear life,
when we could be diving for pearls.”
For many, many years after first reading that comic book, and for no special reason whatsoever, I thought the line was the name of a Pink Floyd album.
IV.
I e-mailed A**** this bit of the song the other day. I told her that was the way I was really feeling about our relationship. I don’t think she cared much, though.
It’s sort of a beat spoken with words anyhow, and if you think about it, I mean really think about it, it ends up setting the rhythm for the way our lives should be lived: Not doing crappy, half-*ssed stuff. Not operating at 10% our actual capacity. Definitely not running a third of the distance. I mean really diving for pearls, you know, making the most of it.
Making the most of everything.
posted by 186282mps at 2:02 PM
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