don’t mention the war
Given the time machine, is there anything I can say to help my progress?
the war
This year I watched Colour of War, a documentary of World War 2. It’s novelty is in wholly having colour footage. The topic is surreal in colour.
The first part mainly concerned the bombing of London. I expected part two to be the same: colour cameras must have been rare and expensive. But the second featured the D Day landings.
It featured the US submarine Pampanito fishing Australian POWs out of the Pacific, days after sinking their Japanese captors. The Pampanito is now a floating museum in San Francisco.
With the Battle Box and Changi Prison in Singapore it haunts me.
The war haunts Kurt Vonnegut. It forms the atomic atheist core of John Fowles’s The Magus. The war (not Victorian London) forms the basis of hacker history, laid out in Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.
But my ghosts are those of stillborn predecessors. I do not know the war, not even through relatives.
The war is surreal.
“Think of some of what Dali or Magritte were doing. It’s ‘heightened reality’ in a way, where fantastic elements are introduced to put ‘normal life’ in sharper focus. There’s also a link with postmodernism - the way that ‘art’ ot ‘literature’ or ‘myth’ intersect with reality.”