Sometimes, perhaps too often, I dream of my high-school class. We gather in a time pocket: formal as our yearbook snapshots, acne retouched by the kindly photographer. Once and again we meet in a football huddle; I can dreamsmell the sweat that none of us now has the time to raise. And 15 years’ trouble is unanticipated. No November 1963; 1968 gone altogether. A second opportunity for Vietnam, Watergate: events still avoidable. Things change. My son tackles me now. Hard. But, on Sunday, there is a pocket very like the one I dream. Not the Christian liturgy, that has become a fashionable item: People fashion and refashion it. I mean the funnies. Their people, too, gather in a time lapse without future or the chance of doom. Comedy is static. It conserves.
They appear in strict rectangles. There is an aptness to that. Isolated; I remember a hotel in Venice surrounded by water. I perceive a selfsufficiency, a wholeness in islands. Venice isn’t too convenient for street rioting. The funnies have a tough, impermeable cell wall. Very little of the Sixties, the Seventies has filtered through. What does filter through is caught by antibodies, made harmless. There are exceptions, but surprisingly few. The newspaper comics mock Relevance.
Comments