WHAT COMES TO MIND … CARRIE FISHER BEYOND THE POSTCARD
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Carrie Fisher shows how it could be and maybe should be.
_________________________
WHAT’S THE POINT of living if just living is the point?
The thick-colon/bad-breath neo-primitivist who reckons if it didn’t get caught, plucked or scooped up by hairy grunters eons back then it shouldn’t pass your lips now. The moralising vegan, pescatarian, Sagittarian. Another pious lecture from someone who has given up drinking and doesn’t just want you to know – though my god do they want you to know – but wants you to understand how deep, how incisive, how true their insight is that everything that’s wrong with your life can be fixed, as it was in their life, by giving up. Ask them how!
Stay in and stretch; go out but hey, sit down in front; don’t touch that, it’ll kill you eventually; don’t watch that, it will shame you irrevocably; you took what? At your age? Aren’t you embarrassed? ….
… Star Wars didn’t really register on me at the time. Which isn’t to say I didn’t see it (I did, all three of the originals), or didn’t like them (I did, from pew-pew-pewing stormtroopers to regularly, pathetically, attempting James Earl Jones’ voice) or had no interest in the cultural phenomenon (hey, I owned the 7” of Meco’s Star Wars Theme and at least one of the book adaptations, which I think is still in the house, hidden behind the later acquired Heinleins or Asimovs probably).
But the cult as such never really caught on when I was more excited by Blake’s 7 (hi Avon … hellooooo Servalan!), Space 1999 and the TV series of Planet Of The Apes (which “forced” me to give up scouts because it aired on the same night and I had to make a choice between knots, camping and dib dib dib or fantasy simians – which was no choice at all). No regrets coyote, we just come from such different sets of circumstance.
So through the ‘70s and ‘80s and into the ‘90s, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, the other bloke and the hairy one had no more significance for me than any other film characters who weren’t in a Martin Scorsese film or a Woody Allen film or super chilly like Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve or super silly like Steve Allen and Madeline Kahn or who weren’t Susan Sarandon. In anything. (Though Fisher was in Hannah And Her Sisters, holding her own against the likes of Allen favourites Dianne Weist, Barbara Hershey and Mia Farrow.)
But coming across Postcards From The Edge, Fisher’s roman a clef about an actor trying to rebuild her life post-rehab, sometime after watching When Harry Met Sally, put two thoughts into my head. One was that she was just funny, in print or on screen, with her words or those of others, and maybe never more so than when at her lowest, what the rest of the world would call at her worst. My favourite kind of funny.
The second was that she had a fierce desire to live. Not as an alternative to dying, that’s too obvious and natural and hardly revelatory – even if it played a regular role in Allen’s comedies and dramas, including Hannah And Her Sisters, back when it was ok to see a Woody Allen film, and when he still made films worth watching – but as an alternative to merely getting through day to day.
She might take it to extremes of various substances, of various emotional states and romantic entanglements, of frankness – and calling her memoir Wishful Drinking remade that point – but it drove her on, through the famous parents and famous lovers, through the bi-polar and a business that is set up to crush people like her, through, in her words, being both “a light bulb in a world of moths” and the person “who stands on the shore and sobs”.
Look at the way she both curls up and lays out in Stuart’s photo, the enjoyment in the moment, the pleasure of being her and being here. She may have had a couple of champagnes before the photo, maybe was going to have a couple more afterwards, I have no idea. What I do know is there isn’t a lot of her but she’s not wasting any of it being something else.
I can’t pretend I had the nerve or the drive to live at that fullest, nor was I in a position to be quite as care-free, even if I wanted – I quite liked my family and my job and being around to do both as well as possible, and recklessness just seemed stupid – but the idea that you didn’t have to do less did lodge. Especially when I saw it in action closer to home than I ever got to C. Fisher.
Next week will mark two years since the death of a friend of mine whose absence hasn’t felt any less brutal but whose spirit, whose Fisher-esque lust for life, still lingers in the air, where we, the moths to her lightbulb, flutter.
Well before cancer and its attendant bastardry made just existing a clash of wills for her, she lived like the point of it all was to experience. Greek archaeology and Australian electronica, that third martini and another book about the Mitfords, chatting up a group of 20something women sat next to us in a bar and arguing with me about class in Australia, getting a look of disapproval from straightlaced colleagues and a smile of recognition from another “at your age?” clubber.
Like Fisher, there wasn’t a lot of her, though she would tell you with only the slightest prompting that she was taller than Kylie Minogue – only just taller, sure. but just was enough! And she didn’t waste it. And none of us around her could get away with wasting any of it either no matter how narrow or bold our expectations, nor how limited or boundless our circumstances. Which was the point.
You could put that on a postcard. I wish she could.
SEE MORE
Find more work by Stuart Spence on Instagram @stuart_spence
READ MORE
Comments