Everyone should have their own windmill, their own thing to tilt at, their own eccentricity. Every member of this crew was odd. They all had a little something wrong in their heads, and it was this little something wrong that brought them together. They were all engenderers of chaos.
When they got on the train, speeding towards the great underwater tunnel, they brought havoc to the first class compartment which they had now established as a base for filming. Jim had managed to sabotage a whole family’s peace of mind by getting them to move three times because he needed their table. He managed to alienate all the fellow passengers because he kept pointing at them, saying how odd they looked, and urging Sam to film them all as interesting specimens of stressed humanity. And Sam, in his element, did close-ups of many faces, dashing from one to the other, pointing his camera at couples away on discreet holidays, at businessmen on secret missions, at old ladies who wanted to be left alone, and at families who had an instinctive dislike of the camera’s intrusiveness. Jute was herself busy on mysterious trips, tearing up and down the aisle, kicking and bumping into people accidentally. Husk and Riley were rushing around with clapperboards and films, behaving as if the most significant and sacred events were taking place. And Propr kept dangling his furry microphone over people’s heads like a white fruit or a Dada exclamation mark, as if he were trying to record their thoughts. Every now and again he would tell people to be quiet, till one of the passengers couldn’t stand it any longer and burst into an explosion of expletives, swearing at us for wrecking what he had hoped would be a peaceful journey.
This man was so apoplectic that Jim became fascinated by his rage. Seeing him as an instant metaphor for the stress of the world that had given rise to the Arcadian legend, Jim immediately directed Sam to film the poor man. This made his rage even more towering, and self-destructive. It was wonderful to behold a man so vainly bursting his lungs to illustrate the leaping theme of our journey. For one illuminated moment we all gazed at him, mesmerised, for he was modern man, helpless in his illogical intemperate fury, ranting and lashing out against the universe, tumbling into madness, beyond redemption, powerless, alone, alienated, spinning out of control, less than a man, less than an animal. He raged like that against everything that his exhausted brain could conjure, government taxes, difficult women, asteroids, cancers, ruptured colons, hospital closures, shopping malls, terrorists, absence of private spaces, Loch Ness monsters, child molesters, inconsiderate musicians, pointless television programmes, too much sex everywhere, too many old people; then, abruptly, he sat down, collapsed into a heap, and then shrank, and went on shrinking till he was nearly invisible. The camera stayed on him the whole time till he had exhausted his radioactivity. The camera knew it, and recognised a distant cousin in the radioactive disintegration: the man had been possessed by Hades.
After the possession passed, as after a thunderstorm, the air cleared, and we began to see.
For a moment filming stopped. We sat down to our breakfasts and stared out of the windows silently.
We watched our own lives go past in the shape of the suburban houses, the drab back gardens, the houses that seemed sadder and more monotonous as we sped on.
We were in time’s hurtling capsule, death’s speeding capsule. Oh, those back gardens, those tilting houses, the lives lived in little paces, such mightiness in potential in such small places. Such drabness, such sameness. We sped past them all, past the back view of our lives. The way it seems to strangers, never to us. What have we settled for, under this glorious sun? How did our lives lose so much colour, so much outline? The back view of suburban houses is the very mirror of our receding soul: of Hades advancing, of time shrinking, of death anonymising.