Edward St. John Gorey’s 1957 work, The Doubtful Guest, in an Edwardian England setting is (like his other works) absurd and very arresting. Very arresting in the sense that while being generally bizarre, it has layered meaning in an unsettling sort of way. The plot is about an indeterminate sort of guest {in the sense of the guest being neither man, nor animal, nor bird but in a generally amorphous sort of way, all three and more}, walks into an Edwardian mansion uninvited and unannounced. Without bothering about niceties, jumps into the hall and generally stays put. Ubiquitous. Refusing to leave, yet utterly uncommunicative and completely unresponsive. The guest indulges in various unrelated, unrelatable, antics while making itself at home. In a most strange way, the guest {that’s all Mr. Gorey calls it} stays on and as Mr. Gorey concludes the tale, stayed on and still stays on…in the mind’s eye at least.
I refer to Mr. Gorey and his Doubtful Guest because a Persistent Guest took hold of my mind and quite like the book’s Edwardian landlords’ mansion’s peaceful invasion, refuses to vacate my mind.
I cannot remove this Persistent Guest, cannot quell it, cannot ignore it. Worse, unlike Gorey’s Doubtful Guest, mine is unquiet, it jeers and mocks when not seducing me with promises which range in very wide swathes from venting rants to self-expression to self-actualization. This blog has come to be and has been spawned by the Persistent Guest, and is, therefore, a matter of melding. I call attempted exorcism of the Persistent Guest, Far Afield. The term paints a feeling of distance, a horizon to peer and squint at. Aperture and aspect ratio which offer expanse. Expanse dwarfs giants as surely as it distracts the tinnitus caused by my Persistent Guest. Therefore, this allusion to the illusion of horizon. I must carry the confounding earworms over the horizon, there’s no recourse to anything else.
With the stammering coherence this blog has, it shall not be obvious (never more than necessary in the point it makes). It shall never be politically, morally or courteously correct. Not Rabelaisian either. A cross-hatch; never straitjacketed. An urchin, but not quite fully one. A graveyard cast of mind (sometimes), a predilection for black comedy (sometimes) but overall, lifted by the helium of joyous disdain. Bons mots – yes. Malice – yes, a little. Feigning and fawning – no. It seems to be a changeling, or a throwback or a mutation of some sort. It does know or shall sure know where it stands in the world. Until and beyond then it must plod on. If you have read and reached so far, I suppose you are puzzled. The feeling is mutual. I too am puzzled about this plot, hemmed by verb and adjective, I purchased in cyberspace. I shall develop it in a meandering style you might enjoy.
Far Afield is both whiskey and aspirin, rope and scaffold, bed and board. I will not shy away or tarry from the only thing in its ken: blunt but never obscene (at least not anymore than the obscenities one is subjected to daily), offering fact as freely as viewpoint, and an occasional waltz of the mind. That’s what I think this blog will look like. Neither pretty nor ugly, but worth a look, even a lingering one if I get lucky. It has been said; a lot of it. I rest my case with the assertion that much as I love Pink Floyd, this is not just another brick-on-the-wall.
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