Time will always defeat you, but...

Could a slogan escape the bounds of tawdry mundanity, the dull repetitiveness of advertising hoardings, resentful tweets , suburban grimaces and the like ,and become a mantra? In optimistic mode - if optimism can be defined in terms of a interminably fruitless pursuit of value - this sometimes seems to her the story of her life - there's a 'rector's daughter' tenderness here, a flickering self-compassion within a lifetime of such self-imposed emotional hardship... Hope against the absence of hope, she glances in the mirror and sees, or just about convinces herself that she believes she sees, on underside of effortlessness and cheap glamour, a vindication, or a compensation of sorts (not the right words, she remains pinioned by the argot of envy, but 'you have to start somewhere', she thinks)... a breakthrough at last - the holy words escape her, yet that won't this time be allowed to get in her way.

Angela Meyer's novella 'Joan Smokes' is a microscopically crafted story of impossibly possible redemption, beautifully frayed by the waiting-in-the-wings prospect of nuclear devastation that puts our petty incompleteness into perspective, A meeting of those quotidian opposites - unrelenting failure and energetic reinvention Time at once is, and, is not abolished. This is not the depressing mimetic play of ressentiment and fraternity envisaged by Tomaselli, it is at once more and less - although mimesis is there (the artificial cheap glamour of 1960s Vegas provides the perfect setting for the limited (un)imaginativeness of Joan's re-invention: one is convinced that Joan's damage is primal, it happened long before Jack, it is why she fell for Jack in the first place). The 'less' is sweated out via the pores of the novella's plot constraints and mise-en-scène. The 'more is a gamble - that for me (always for me!) comes off. The quixotic banal. The mantra hammering through like a rhythm on a long run... or do you remember in your twenties, when you sat there and said to yourself I can do just one more...? Just one more of these, and then then thirty, forty years. The strange, faintly wager-like habit of obsessive (and to the world, self-destructive, malingering 'bad' habit) and the 'good' that tastes of shock and valour, always tentative and uncertain...

There are dreams like this, where the 'breakthrough' retains the daytime resonance of pain and distaste, yet remains nevertheless a breakthrough. The sense of surprise registers and lingers. Liberated - although barely - from the tyranny of the mundane, the dream, which knew no time, emerges into time, asserts its right to be memorialised (occasionally it gets its way).

Is the 'now' (the pettiness, yet also seductiveness of mindfulness - as if there was anything else...) always doomed to present itself as the only alternative... pitched as it is against the remorseless dissipative character of succession - its one-damn-thing-after-another naive realism, not to mention the conventional dreadfulness of decay and death? Another way of seeing things: is there a hole in neo-Buddhism, and if there is, is it an escape hatch or simply a portal to an abyss? Nobody came for Joan, and it is doubtful, that her fleeting scheme to become a redoubt for fellow-sufferers will be more than an accommodation, a way of indulging the remaining years of her life in an illusion of redemption, not the real thing, whatever that is And yet the novella bestows the faint echo at least of a hopeful kiss.