Reweirding Gawain, the Once and Future Hero of the Postmodern.
Reviving:
The course of Arthuriana can be followed throughout literature for nearly ten centuries, and entire lifetimes of research could -and have been- applied to analysing the cascading series of verse, plays, prose, music and cinema that have followed. The 13th century alliterative verse poem Gawain and the Green Knight has endured centuries of popularity, the anonymous Gawain-Poet continues to draw in readers and academics from across a spectrum of disciplines. Gawain himself appears in multiple Arthurian tales from the French romances to the Victorian nursery collection and the Hollywood blockbuster; from at least the 11th century to the 21st. From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Henry XIII, for Wagner, Tennyson, Twain, Ishiguro and Armitage -and many more- Arthur and his cohort have proven to make for ultimately retellable stories. But Gawain, or Gwalchmei, is most likely older than Arthuriana, his precursory origins are as a hero of the Welsh tradition and he bears strong resemblance to other Celtic figures, particularly Cuchulainn and Pwyll Pen Annwyn. The Green Knight’s challenge, the game of blows, the quest, the exchanges; the strains of his story can be heard across Arthurian and non-Arthurian tradition alike. Traditionally inscribed with qualities of religious piety and a penchant for zealous defence of King and maiden alike, his character broadly embodies notions of Arthurian chivalry.
Each revival of Arthuriana, each Arthur and each Gawain, is inscribed with their own particular set of cultural values, made distinct by their own backdrop of history. The revival of Arthuriana has often played out as a revival of the era in which it has become (at least aesthetically) synonymous- the Medieval. The era in which Alfred Tennyson wrote his famous Idylls of the King was thus illustrated by the intensely stylised Medieval revival of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were transparently inspired by Tennyson’s verse, the work and aims of the Brotherhood neatly aligning with the tales of a homosocial fraternity engaged in a struggle to reform the moral and social habits of their contemporaries. The legacy of these Victorians was to inscribe the characters of Arthuriana with a concentrated mythos of misogyny and imperialism that echoes to the present day. Tennyson for example, whose infamous Idylls are commonly read as an anxious reflection upon Victorian masculinity, created a Vivien who was an amalgamation of literary villainy and a projection of the most negative aspects of womanhood. Edward Burne-Jones paints her in The Beguiling of Merlin, sullenly spellcasting from a stolen tome as blossom falls around her from the hawthorn that creeps inexorably to entomb Merlin. Frederick Sandys paints her, modelled by the Romani woman Keomi Grey, scowling and holding a sprig of the toxic flowering daphne, framed iconically with a fan of peacock feathers. Medea, Eleanor, Circe, and countless others receive a similar treatment. Gawain too falls victim to Waterhouse and his fellow Victorians, depicted almost exclusively at the most ignominious and defining moment of his history- his failure to retrieve the grail.
And so it follows that present in The Green Knight (2021), are many of the classic themes which have made Arthuriana so everlastingly popular: courtly games and forbidden love, otherworldly and supernatural influences, a hero’s quest and, most significantly, a moral reflection on honour and Man’s responsibility. However, a significant conclusion emerges from tracing the history of Gawain within Arthuriana to Lowery’s 21st century iteration of him: he has become a hero of the postmodern.
Resurrecting:
To look at Gawain and how and why, in 2021, he was resurrected and his story re-told: in his nine centuries of re-writing, Gawain has journeyed on page from a virtuous hero- once more beloved than Lancelot- through a spectrum of identities ranging from ineffectual and comedic, to weak and of compromising virtue. Gawain’s later writers have had a legion of Gawains, with a spectrum of personalities, narrative functions and histories, from which to cobble together their own. Xan Brooks summarises historian Ad Putter and succinctly explains: ‘Gawain is confusing because he is a composite, the result of centuries of rewriting’ (Brooks, 2021). Eventually Gawain has become the palimpsestous character that today must hold index upon index of meaning, an entire meta-signification of himself. His textual reputation precedes him: Gawain represents the simplified conventions of the chivalric, and complexly so, as he perennially fails to achieve them. He’s ripe for re-writing, for reinvigorating, uniquely well positioned to aid contemporary reflections on personhood, concepts of masculinity, femininity and social order which have been similarly overwritten and constructed in response to other recycled notions of such. Despite its archaic mandate, the chivalric code of the medieval is relevant today, through our fallible Gawain, as he struggles against both his honourable and human impulses. In 2021 he fails to resist temptation yet again, but the version of Gawain who agonises over such actions is a dummy knight, a cardboard cut-out on which is projected expectation and reality. It is evident that our current era is as much characterised by its tremulous definitions, anxieties and conflicts over gender, sexual, cultural and national identity as Tennyson’s was.
Where the Victorians enjoyed their Medieval Revival, the progenate movement in our present era can be described as something like neo-medievalism, a term popularised by critics such as Umberto Eco and used to describe the 21st Century’s renewed interest in the Medieval. This use is particularly apt in the common instances of boundaries being blurred between the historical and the fantastic, or the historical and the convincingly ahistorical. For a stark example of this wilful transgressing of the boundaries of the real, the mind is drawn to Marion Zimmer-Bradley’s Society for Creative Anachronism, whose unofficial motto is ‘doing the Middle Ages as they ought to have been’ (See appendix D). In recent years, there has been a cultural impulse towards the Medieval, but within it also the Pagan, the Norse, the pre-Christian, evident in mainstream culture as well as the pockets of subculture that have persistently engaged in these reimaginings. In recent literature, television, and cinema we can view popular reconstructions of the Medieval in, for example: Game of Thrones, The Witcher, The Lord of the Rings, Vikings, The King, Cursed, The Last Kingdom. This impulse is, like the Victorian, to redefine the Medieval, to romanticise it, and to create works of fiction that revel in their contrived appearance of historicity. Eco describes the 21st century’s renewed interest in the Middle Ages as ‘a curious oscillation between fantastical neomedievalism and responsible philological examination’ (Eco, 1973). But, he warns, ‘the Middle Ages, we have seen, can also be taken as a model for a Tradition that assumes, by definition, to always be right’. (Eco, 1973). In our collective reimagining of the Middle Ages, we reveal and reinforce an undercurrent of cultural, political and social ideology.
In the last handful of decades, neo-Medievalism has also been present as the impulse to Celticise Arthuriana, and to reposition the Arthurian romances within the binary perception of the opposition of Roman rule and Christianisation by a re/constructed idea of a ‘native’ Celtic or Pagan citizenry. In in the early 2000’s emerges the example of Francioni and Fuqwa’s film King Arthur (2004), where Clive Owen plays Arthur, envisioned as a Roman officer and in which Kiera Knightly appears as a leather clad Celtic warrior-Guinevere. Here we witness the process of Arthuriana’s re-inscription with contemporary cultural values: a Guinevere who embodies idealised Medieval femininity clearly doesn’t align with 21st century expressions of womanhood, so she must be remodelled. King Arthur’s Guinevere has, in 2004, at least superficially reclaimed agency in her role and garb as warrior. However, the cynic might suggest that as one of the colonised Celts- and with Arthur aligned with her coloniser- the power dynamic within Guinevere’s story remains as conventionally unbalanced as the original. Persistent in King Arthur is the echoing mythos of Nationalism played out in the return of our once and future king, breeding the idea of a ‘reclaiming’ of Britain, making Britain great again, a dreaming of a time before the fall of empire. The danger of such a mythology needs little explanation.
Revising:
If Fuqwa’s King Arthur intended to convey a realistically gritty, ‘historical’ edge to Arthuriana, and in banishing the Victorian vision of the chivalric, invent a modern Medieval, what then is The Green Knight’s goal? The most common and well-established analyses of the classic tale of Gawain and the Green Knight focus on the signification of the symbolic Wildman intruding into Arthur’s court as the nobles feast on Christmas eve, brandishing an axe and a bough of holly in a Pagan affront to all Christendom. In this popular formulation, the Green Knight represents the heathen, the natural, the wild; he is an inversion of Arthur. Lowery’s Green Knight is no less a Wildman, in fact he is only nominally the shape of a man: with the appearance of being made from tree bark, and a voice which thunders like a cracking bough, his head itself shaped in a crown of foliage. Unlike Arthur, he does not wear the crown, the crown is part of him. With this plain symbolism in mind, a first clue to the tone of Lowery’s interpretation of Gawain and the Green Knight is in its title: The Green Knight. It’s as if he’d made Romeo and Juliet and simply named it Juliet. From its outset, Lowery’s film privileges the marginalised.
Following, perhaps, a similar impulse to the Celtification of Arthuriana, contemporary consideration of the Welsh or Northwest origins of the Gawain-poethave sketched post-colonial analyses, reflecting on the historic subjugation of Celtic nations by the English. While there is perhaps a contemporary relevance to be found in an analysis of Gawain through the lens of English imperialism, I suspect there is limited productive discourse in relating the colonising of the British Isles by the Romans to current or recent experiences of oppression. In contemporary threads of the neo-Medieval, a confused discourse of nationalism and bigotry has taken hold, with many groups and individuals utilising (as did the Nazis) Norse mythology or re/constructed notions of Norse, Germanic and North European Medieval society to support belief systems rooted in white supremacy. In making and discussing the media of the neo-Medieval, films such as King Arthur and indeed The Green Knight, we are collectively engaged in constructing a fictional narrative of the Medieval. It is vital to acknowledge that, while Arthur and Gawain are fictional, they speak to a real world’s common history and future. To return to Eco: ‘long life to the Middle Ages and to the dreaming of them, provided that it is not the dream of reason. We have already generated too many monsters’ (Eco, 2009).
From Henry XIII and his bid to separate the Anglican church from Rome, to notions of empire and British exceptionalism, and even reaching so far as the New Age movement, Arthur and his legendary unification of Britain has served often and well for the nationalist ideology. In the words of Angeline Rodriguez: ‘the story of King Arthur, and Arthurian myth itself, cannot be separated from his position as Britain’s vaunted ür-imperialist” (Rodriguez, 2021). This inglorious history is something director David Lowery is undoubtably aware of and responds to in The Green Knight. In the casting of Dev Patel as Gawain and Sarita Chowdry as his mother (the sorceress Morgan), it appears that Lowery resists the privileging of the white, Southern England-centred perspective that has so often typified the revisioning of Arthurian legend. In a similar manner, The Green Knight engages loyally with the Gawain-poet’s text and its author’s regional origin. This can be observed in the Welsh/Northwest accents of the royal couple and in the spoken pronunciation of Gawain’s name, which is commonly pronounced in the modern English way as GAH-wane, but pronounced often in the film as the Middle English GOW-in. Whether this linguistic authenticity is an attempt at historicity or diversity is ultimately ambiguous, but it is plain that Lowery seeks to shift at least something of the unspoken hierarchy within Arthuriana.
However, Otherness might be considered a location of power. Dev Patel’s Gawain is thoroughly postmodern because he is Other; he does not sit comfortably within the reductive schemata of either heroism or villainy in the dichotomy of the Chivalric. As The Green Knight commences, Gawain gives every appearance of a whoring, drunken gad, sat not at the round table with the famed brotherhood of knights he ostensibly wishes to join, but in the tavern with his lover. We meet Gawain as he wakes, a bucket of water thrown unceremoniously over his sleeping head. Christ is risen. ‘I’ve been at mass’ he tells his mother, as he arrives home reeking, we can assume, of sex and wine. ‘What, have you been drinking the sacrament all night?’ she replies (The Green Knight, 2021). It is clear that Lowery’s Gawain is an outsider on multiple fronts: in the chivalric context he is a poor excuse of a Christian, a junior, nameless, soon-to-be knight in a court of better, bolder men. To the (post)modern audience he is forgivably flawed, but displaced and unfulfilled. It’s uncertain if his distance from his uncle and aunt, the almost translucently pale and decrepit Arthur and Guinevere, is simply due to his uncourtly behaviour, or if there is, as critic J.M.Tyree suggests, ‘the whiff of prejudice and marginalisation in the air surrounding the family hierarchy’ (Tyree, 2021). Without venturing an opinion on which came first, the bad behaviour or the exclusion, Rodriguez simply suggests that Gawain’s desire to prove himself worthy of greatness reads as the ‘familiar sting of assimilation’ (Rodriguez, 2021).
That Morgan too is Other has arguably been a longstanding location of her power. Morgan, in Arthurian legend, belongs to the Other through her associations with the supernatural, with the Otherworld and sorcery, and it is her Otherness which habitually frees her from the expectations of Chivalric womanhood. In The Green Knight we observe her perform a work of magic with a group of other sorceresses of colour that chant, entranced, over runes and scraps of bone. The camera shows two duplicate scenes: Morgan moving as counterpart to Arthur, her mouth forming his words as he makes his Christmas speech. Her ritual summons the Green Knight and so begins Gawain’s quest for glory and position; the wheel turns, fortunes are reversed- and we cannot doubt her power to influence Arthur’s court. However, a possible reading of Chowdry’s performance in this moment is that she does not escape the exotifying gaze to which her Pre-Raphaelite sorceress siblings were subjected. Picture Keomi Grey modelling as Morgan, wrapped in a tiger skin and emerald-green Kimono, coded in a racially fetishised display of threatening and mystical female power (see appendix A). Has so much changed since? But it is by no means absolute that Patel and Chowdry’s South Asian presence in an otherwise Caucasian court must be exclusively interpreted as racially Other. As Tyree argues, this casting ‘throws into relief the fictional albescence of imperialism in nationalist English mythology’ (Tyree, 2021). Morgan herself is a palimpsest of Morgans, and many of those were much maligned in their journey through history. Perhaps introducing a fresh layer of racial context to Morgan’s classical ostracism also serves to complexify and enrich her character. It is challenging to say with certainty that her Otherness is a valid source of power if it is rooted in her sorcery, but not valid when located in her racial Otherness. She, like Gawain, is contradictory. The Green Knight’s Morgan is not merely a scheming power-seeker, seductress or destroyer, she cannot claim a straightforward grasp to power yet neither is she powerless. She is a mother who tests, endangers and protects her son. That Lowery leaves her postmodern-ly ambiguous is probably the best gift she has been given in centuries.
One event that cannot be translated equivocally by The Green Knight, it seems, is the Battle of Badon. Here, on Gawain’s journey, we enter an approximation of Tennyson’s ‘deathwhite’ mist, the fog of the battlefield that also appears in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. For Tennyson, Ishiguro and Lowery, the mist signifies something similar: the fog of war, a confusion or madness that descends and upends concrete notions of justness, loyalty and honour. The mist represents a Britain in turmoil. But, as Gawain travels through the aftermath of the battle, where Arthur was notoriously rumoured to have slain nearly a thousand men, The Green Knight conveys a definitively made point on the abject destruction of war. Gawain encounters a pitiful scavenger in this bleak hinterland. ‘Are you a knight’, he asks – and Gawain denies it: ‘I’m just passing through’ (The Green Knight, 2021).
It is hard to not link the desolation of this battlefield with Gawain’s end, as a harrowed, unloved king that has devoted his life to ‘honour’, to conquest and violence. But this death, as we find out, is not his true death, but a potential death, a choice. In this, the penultimate scene of the film, Gawain sits, his castle besieged, with a terrified, bejewelled trophy-wife and dead son, looking about him and realising the rewards he has reaped -or will reap- as Arthur’s heir, as the new coloniser-king. He removes his magic girdle, pulling it fist over fist from a concealed opening in his clothing about his waist, as if it were entrails. And then he is undone, his head topples and rolls across the floor. Gawain has made his choice. He rejects honour, he rejects the role of coloniser-king. He awakes from his vigil in the green chapel, still on his knees and cringing fearfully from the Green Knight’s axe. ‘I’m ready now’, he says.
Re-weirding:
Reweirding is a word of the postmodern. It is a term often applied to landscape and environment: an appeal for place to be perceived with a multiplicity of meanings and purposes. Landscape punk, the broad and joyously ill-defined movement to which reweirding belongs, seeks to move away from the singular perception of nature as pastoral idyll- a perception our Victorians were devoted to- and resists the view of nature as controlled or stewarded by Man. In The Green Knight, a reweirding of Britain begins. It transcends dialogue, utilising uncanny cinematic effects to suggest Gawain’s journey has taken him beyond the normative ordering of time, into an otherworldly geography and temporality. Morgan’s spellcasting scene is the first of a handful of significant scenes in which the camera pans in an orbit of 180 or 360 degrees, displaying the passing of time. This is not linear time, but an otherworldly temporal register: of inhuman time, time reversed, decisions made and unmade. In these moments of potentiality, we can observe a referentiality within Lowery’s storytelling: at these moments, The Green Knight seems to say, Gawain’s story could diverge along any channel, freeing both Gawain and his audience from the conventions that have long followed his footsteps. Gawain -twice- even manages to achieve death and resurrection through this weirding of time and, crossing into this other world, he encounters talking foxes, headless ghost-saints, unearthly giants. A narrative technique of the neo-Medieval is apparent here: a gloriously noncommittal relationship with the supernatural. Vikings, for example, has its characters interact with oracles, demigods and living myths, without ever insisting that the audience perceive these entities as truly belonging to reality. They could be mortal or they could be more, but that Ragnar or Gawain believe is enough convincing for an audience to suspend a little disbelief. The epistemological incoherence is the magic, the potentiality of the supernatural’s category crisis. The audience is just, blearily, aware that we do not belong to the same world as them. The Green Knight invokes this liminality, à la Midsommar, with Gawain’s ingestion of psychoactive mushrooms as he roams the wild spaces, searching for the Green Knight. We are drawn with him into the Otherworld, invited to speculate, to experience the psychogeography of the mythic landscape of Britain.
This landscape is simultaneously Pagan and mystic, overwritten and scarred by the church and imperialist, but it is also conscious: embodied as the Green Knight himself. The Green Knight is at once the anthropomorphised Wildman, who, as Ann M. Martinez notes, subversively wields Man’s destructive axe (Martinez, 2016). Yet he also manifests as Bertilak, human lord of the Otherworldly Hautdesert, whose green chapel is at once the wood in which Gawain stands but is also concretely made of the stones of a ruined Christian chapel. While there has been sensitive thought given to reshaping Bertilak de Hautdesert (the mortal form of the Green Knight) as a steward of the land, as in Martinez’s analysis, this idea of a hybrid steward who symbolises the mutual co-operation of both humans and nature is rather too close to the paternalism of aristocratic land management (Martinez, 2016). Martinez’s optimistic vision of Bertilak looks more similar to the watery Tom Bombadil than an image of the conscious landscape rising up and claiming agency. Bertilak and his counterpart the Green Knight need not necessarily be two binary sides of a coin, but are rather both hybrids- neither is entirely supernatural nor entirely mortal. The Green Knight is Nature anthropomorphised, and Bertilak is Man, an inextricable aspect of nature. Bertilak’s domain is similarly incoherent. His home is superficially human, he has all the furniture and trappings of humanity, but his house is uncanny. An old blind woman, symbolically mirroring Morgan, roams the house, unacknowledged. The Lady de Hautdesert is a noble, mysterious double of Gawain’s common lover, Essel. In this realm, Gawain must abide by one rule: whatever he receives that day, he must exchange with Bertilak. This game, like the game of blows at Camelot, has the exterior appearance of a courtly game of manners, but its subverted meaning, in the Otherworldly land of Hautdesert, has the potential to make a much more complex diversion.
The exchanges can be analysed through a queer lens as a contrivance of Eve Sedgewick’s erotic triangle. Traditionally, the gifts that Gawain receives are kisses from Bertilak’s wife and he is honour-bound to deliver them to Bertilak. Just like Pwyll, that must sleep every night for a year beside Arawn’s beautiful wife, the two men in the formulation are, it is convincingly argued, allowed to express a measure of desire for one another through the acceptable female element of the triangle. Unlike Pwyll, whose honour is reinforced in his commitment to chastity, Gawain’s honour is determined by his willingness to confess and surrender his favours. However, rather than a courtly kiss, in The Green Knight, Gawain receives a sordid handjob. In another palimpsestuous doubling, Lowery has Alicia Vikander play both Essel and the Lady de Hautdesert, reinforcing and yet destabilising heteronormativity. In the chivalric, it is unspoken, but more acceptable that Gawain should have sexual relations with the common Essel than he should defile the noble lady Hautdesert. However, that both characters are in some symbolic way, the same woman, simultaneously reinforces monogamy and yet highlights the hypocrisy of Gawain’s treatment of Essel, who eventually bears his son, who is forcibly taken from her and raised at court. Gawain displays more shame at his extra marital affair with Lady Hautdesert than in his upheaval of Essel’s life and prospects. How crippled he is by the virtues of masculinity.
To remember that Gawain is not, at this moment, mired in the rigid moral conventions of the chivalric, but adrift in the topsy-turvy landscape of the Otherworld is to free the exchanges for a spectrum of interpretations. To aid this exploration, Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place provides us with the tools to analyse the queer potential of this Otherworld. To look at Camelot through Halberstam’s lens: Camelot’s function is as a heteronormative geography and temporality, which is to say that the experience of dwelling within its walls is to experience time and space as ordered by the expectations of normativity. For Gawain, as Arthur’s heir, this means the span of his life is dictated by marriage, reproduction, reputation and reign, over which govern the Church. However, in Bertilak’s domain, beyond the moral boundaries of human civilisation, Gawain is freed of these demands, all he must do is reciprocate the generosity of his hosts. Bertilak acts a queering agent, not condemning the sexual act itself as a transgression, but inviting a redoubling of it. In the classic tale, the gift which Gawain keeps secret from his host is the magical girdle which will save him from the Green Knight’s blow. In The Green Knight, it is the masturbatory act which Patel’s Gawain conceals. However, in making this choice, Gawain is not given a chance to make an alternate one. Having climaxed, Gawain flees in shame from Hautdesert and the Lady of the house. On horseback, Bertilak catches him as he leaves, and with a knowing, yet unreadable expression, takes a kiss from Gawain’s lips. Off Gawain runs to his sticky end. In his revisioning of the exchanges, Lowery fails, as does his Gawain. While ambiguity has so far been Lowery’s weird weapon of storytelling ingenuity, as Gawain flees the kiss in horror, it is unsatisfyingly challenging to attempt to decipher if it is Gawain’s relentless preoccupation with the trappings of masculinity and virtue that he flees towards, or a gay-panic revulsion that propels him away. Of all of Gawain’s choices, this is one of the poorest. What freedom he could know, if only he wasn’t so set on chopping off the Green Knight’s head.
Rewriting:
The principle of honour has never seemed enough to me, so how is it enough for Gawain- does he really believe in such a better Britain? 2021’s Gawain is content in his pacifist whoring and drinking until his uncle Arthur offers him the promise of position. But why? Is it that crown that draws him, the halo, the golden aureola that sets Arthur and Guinevere apart as living sexless, sainted icons? How can it be, as Arthur’s teeth are aching, and Gawain is confronted with the reality of these old men -all old men- set to endlessly regurgitating tales of their glory days. Gawain wants to accomplish great deeds of his own, to be remembered alongside Lancelot and Bedevere, Bors and Percival, but when he is faced with the reality of such great deeds in his quest, stumbling across fields strewn with the noble, nameless corpses being looted for their valuables, he balks.
So just give me Gawain the sissy. He can’t escape it, so he might as well embrace it.
A perverse impulse in me demands a knock-kneed knight, cringing in fear at the door to his lady’s bedchamber: Gawain minus the machismo. I don’t want a Gawain who pulls off his magical girdle to bravely face his doom, I want a tricky Gawain who stubbornly wears it to survive. Gawain the unicorn, who stays in the Otherworld with Bertilak and the Lady de Hautdesert, because Camelot is full of bullying boys and simpering nuns. Re-make Gawain and the Green Knight and, okay, it doesn’t have to be too camp, but it has to be weird. Camelot must be made of swaying, painted backdrops- not a reassuringly solid, stone clad fortress- but so gauzily intangible that the audience feels they could reach out and topple the lot. I want Monty Python hobby horses and Pellinore slaying a stop-motion dragon, Kevin Sorbo-style. We could have Tilda Swinton delivering a rousing horseback speech to the audience, knighting Gawain as he stands in vigil over a comically overlarge axe. He tries to lift it and fails. Playing Morgan: a corseted Tura Satana in the shadows, out of retirement to sneer and preside over it all.
Scrap that, I think I want a Punch and Judy show.
No style, no substance, but a cast made of those little dolls, the trapeze ones where you flip them upside down and when their clothes fall inside out, they are a different character. Arthur chases Morgan, who is also Guinevere, who turns and chases him back as Morgan and Guinevere in turns, both beating him about the head with a policeman’s truncheon. It’s just a game! Arthur wails. Merlin is there, floating around the rafters, and poking out from underneath his robe is Uther Pendragon, wearing a Medieval MAGA hat. Gawain, of course, is a little Guignol paired with the Green Knight, spinning in the centre of the stage. Both of their heads are on a connecting string and the string is of such a length that both cannot wear their head at the same time. Occasionally, blindly, they put on the wrong head and swipe wildly across the little stage with an axe made of lollipop sticks. The curtain never falls.
It’s all the same.
KIZZY BARROW | northdaughter 