Monday 21 July 2014

Freudian Slip

"I've been worrying about some new work" I said this afternoon. I had meant to say "wondering" but having failed my cbt introductory course, it came out all wrong. I once announced (in a meeting) that I had made a "freudian shit" so this one is perhaps not too bad. In fact, for me, the acts of worry and wonder are common bedfellows.

The work I was worrying about is going to relate to Houdini's famous "bridge jump"escape. The one where he was variously locked in mail-sacks, bound in chains, welded into milk churns etc and dropped into a river. They weren't, as far as I know, illusions but physical acts of escape.

In Ipswich at the moment there have been calls to put up safety barriers on the Orwell Bridge in an attempt to stop the jumpers. There have been further calls not to do this as said barriers will inevitably spoil the bridge's architectural elegance. Obviously these people do not feel that its beauty is affected by the regular sight of a plummeting suicide. I'm not sure where I stand on the matter, will the barriers prevent suicides, or will they just divert them to more mundane locations and methods? Anyway the point of the "bridge jump" is that it is nearly, but not quite, a suicide. This is, I suppose, why people liked to watch it.



Some readers may be worried here that I may be considering some form of artistic self endangerment. Fear not, cycling over the Orwell Bridge was the closest I ever came to a near death experience and it is not something I intend to repeat.

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