Burn
blogI burnt my finger last night after touching a dead lightbulb. I assumed it hadn’t been working for a while and so got a nasty shock when I touched it and my finger tip was fried. At the moment of realisation, I recalled the same thing happening a few years previously — the gap between incidents being too long to develop any kind of mindfulness.
It feels numb now. I am typing and clicking with it, each time it presses against the plastic I feel a dull throb. A hardened carapace protecting a zone of pain. If it hadn’t been my index finger, I would have been sure that it would develop into a blister. But this index finger is, in comparison with the rest of my body, a hardened world traveller. It has seen things my elbows wouldn’t believe — my knees would be shocked, and my long-suffering shoulders would probably start a campaign to have it severed from my hand. The index finger on my right hand is my go to appendage, my trusty friend, the most reliable tool in the shed.
Last night I watched The Last Woman on Earth (1960), an early Roger Corman film that I had put on my Lovefilm list about six months ago, when I was obsessed with the post-apocalyptic genre.
The premise is that everyone in the world is killed by the temporary absence of oxygen apart from three people — a traditional businessman (Harold), his disenchanted wife (Ev), and his dull lawyer (Martin) — who are scuba diving at the time. The film documents the tension that builds as they try to cope with life in a world without society, where possessions and social ties are meaningless, much of which previews the breakdown in societal relations that was to take place in the in the Sixties and Seventies.
Harold tells them to take things as they come, to do things step-by-step. He is depicted in the pre-apocalyptic times as a workaholic and believes that the need to work is inborn and will be the only thing that will save their sanity.
Evelyn sees an opportunity to get out of the prison of bourgeois domesticity to find out where she belongs and who she is.
For Martin, the end of the world means a collapse of all values. He becomes a nihilist, pointing out that nothing belongs to anyone when there is no societal superego to keep everyone in check. Not that he actually does anything particularly nihilistic (although it is suggested that he might be a necrophiliac). When asked what he believes in, he says: “Nothing Ev, I’m too civilized.”
I am glad that I kept it on my Lovefilm list even if I’m no longer obsessed with the end of the world as we know it. Nowadays, if I see a portent or a step towards the end (further devaluing paper money, the stoking of Middle East tensions, even more debasing reality TV), I anxiously imagine the end, I just nod and carry on. Even if the end did come, I think I would treat it like I treat this burn to my index finger or watching The Last Woman on Earth — an opportunity for new sensations.