"Macho Man" Randy Savage died yesterday.
He pretended to punch people for a living,
For a short while his picture was just above Mark E Smith's on the Guardian homepage, but seems to have been replaced by a woman in a blanket or some delicious-looking honey and treacle cake.
Randy Savage was a strange fellow - perhaps the epitome of professional wrestling: intense, flamboyant, ridiculous, athletic, coked-up and utterly enthralling.
Thinking about him got me thinking about some other things. Which is dangerous. I'm not very disciplined in my thoughts (you may have noticed that from reading my blog before).
I don't like to follow sign-posts down a well-trodden woodland track. I get distracted by a blackbird in the distance and barrel off through the trees like a hopped-up Robert Frost: muddy footed, weary legged, my face whipped by branches. I lose not only the path, but the very concept of paths.
But I've thought about what I'm going to write about. This is a rarity for me.
So I'll try to stick to the diffuse points I'm trying to make.
(Hey, isn't it strange that defuse (as in "defuse the bomb") and diffuse (as in "diffuse the situation") come from different etymological roots, but both amount to a quelling of danger? What's that? Oh, right. I'm supposed to be on the path. Sorry.)
Some signposts on the way to my destination are 'the last day at the Dell', 'performance art', childhood imagination, comic books, and the time I was engulfed by a corduroy octopus.
Except the last one isn't true.
Let's get cracking.
[Hold the Cracking. I just want to offer a disclaimer: I've probably covered some of this before. If you're a fanatical Headscissors fan, you may find this frustrating, like a Simpsons nerd enduring a clip-show. Sorry. I'll be back with a new take on cormorants next week.]
Children like stories.
These stories can come from books or television, or they can be invented. But children like the idea of grand, alternate worlds.
The real world is full of rules and barriers. As you grow-up, you're constantly testing your limits, finding out what's possible, and being forced to conform to the reasonable standards of the world.
You don't get the full world of possibility opened up to you until you get older.
If you're reading about a strange fantastical world - the world of Harry Potter, for example - you get the fun of these rules and barriers being broken. The limits of possibility are different. People can fly, monsters exist, and - crucially - children have power.
In fact this power can be realised in a genuine way when children create their own fantastical worlds. If you have an imaginary friend, or a teddy bear, or a doll, or a pliant younger sibling, you can make them do whatever you want.
Maybe not everyone does this to the same extent, but I did it a lot. I created scenarios, characters, extensions of existing books (where I was usually the star, of course).
You create stories, and these stories are interwoven with the real world. They are important to you. Really, genuinely important.
When a child loses their favourite teddy bear isn't just the loss of a toy, it's the loss of a friend, and it's felt totally genuinely. The grief caused by the loss of this toy (whilst it probably won't last as long) is just as keenly felt as the loss of a real person.
And I'm just tickling the edges of the point here - Randy Savage can probably see me in the corner of his ridiculous glasses. But I'm not ready for him yet.
You see, the thing about these stories - and the vivid role that they have in our lives is... we grow up.
Well, we're supposed to.
As you get older and are dealing with real people on a more complex level, it's expected that the invisible friends will disappear for good and the teddy bears will go away into the toy chest.
You've got more important things to deal with. Like SATs. And friends. And motorbikes. And University. And spouses (spice). And mortgages. And The Archers. And then Death.
You don't have time for the world in which you're the world's richest robot musketeer. It's not practical when you're getting your car MOT'd.
But I was never very good at growing up (as I've discussed before). And whilst I have achieved some things that adults do (I have a job, I've built a shelf, I've bought a tie, I've bandaged my own head wounds from falling shelves [with a tie]), I've held on to some of these old worlds. Possibly to an unhealthy extent.
Of course, the joy of the internet is in finding thousands of people who are just like you. And thousands that are much more pathetic.
There are three key worlds that I'm most interested in, and have been (off-and-on) since I was a child. They are comic books, football and professional wrestling.
I think they key similarity between these three worlds is the scope of the narrative. I love big, long, epic stories. I love callbacks and references to earlier events. I love a sequel that refers to an event in the original film, or a last episode of a TV show that mimics the pilot.
I think I like this narrative because it provides a poetry and neatness that real life lacks. There's a justice and a romance to it. It rewards people who have been following the narrative all the way (perhaps because they don't have a girlfriend - who can say?).
And I think comic books, football and pro wrestling are all part of a longer narrative. They have all been continuous from my childhood to now, and started before I was born. They all stitch fictional or semi-fictional events to the real world, or (like a lost teddy bear) allow us to ascribe deep and genuine emotion to stuff that, in real terms, doesn't really matter.
Comic books, and specifically superhero comics, and even more specifically Marvel superhero comics, have been telling stories from the same universe for over seventy years. You can trace the histories of these characters through all that time, through world events, fashion, slang, thousands of writers and artists, various interpretations in different media, all the way up to today.
The Captain America I read about in a comic book each week is the same character that a child was reading about in 1941.
On a personal level, the characters I'm reading about now are the same as the ones I read about when I was seven. Whilst I didn't appreciate the sophistication of (some of) those stories then, I was still in the same narrative world.
So these characters mean something to me. They've been with me when I was in school, when I was a grumpy teenager, when I was a bamboozled university student, and when I'm a bearded blogger.
That continuity, that magic, that romance, that justice, is a constant companion. (Except for those ten years when I stopped reading them, but that ruins my point). These fictional characters and their fictional universe are to entwined with my real life, that they become real to me. And whilst I don't think I've ever had a hugely emotional response to events in comic books, it would be legitimate for me to do that.
Because I have had emotional responses to football. Sports are the more acceptable face of weird fanaticism for the silly things. It's a mainstream passion. People get angry and distraught and elated by football, and it's accepted. Even if it's just a bunch of whiny, overpaid prima donnas kicking a ball around a field.
Football is different of course, in that it isn't written. Its justice and beauty is temperamental and unreliable. It's manufactured by the framework of the game, rather than the determination of the events themselves.
But it has the same nostalgic bond to life. You might see an elderly fan seeing his club win a trophy for the first time ever and he'll have tears in his eyes.
And those tears won't just be happiness and the presentation of a silver cup. It will be tears for his middle-aged self who sat in the same stand with his kids, getting his hopes thwarted. It will be tears for his teenage self, who listened to the game in a French brothel before the war broke out.
It will be tears for the childhood him, who watched the same club take part in the same story - a story you can trace from now, to then, to 1880 - and wanted to see his heroes win the same meaningless trophy.
That's why the emotion is genuine. Comic books are a story. Football is a story. And we've been following it all our lives.
One of my favourite football memories was an example of the game seeming like it was written.
You always get people talking about 'fairytale moments' in sport, which usually just means a rubbish team beating a good team.
But there are times when it seems like it's been written, and your investment in such a frivolous thing is rewarded. It might be an player returning to his old club to score a last minute winner, or someone making amends for a costly mistake.
For me, it was the last game at The Dell.
The Dell was Southampton FCs stadium - the smallest in the Premiership by far - and was a bit of a tiny, cramped, shithole. There were awful trough urinals, our initial seats afforded an almost 5% visibility look at the pitch, and it was great.
We left for a our new (larger, brighter, friendlier, more boring) new ground in 2001. Anyway, in the last game of the season, we were drawing 2-2 with Arsenal and Matthew Le Tissier (idol and waning superstar) came on and scored a great last minute goal. He was the hero and scored the last (competitive) goal in the ground.
Here it is (you can skip to 4:12 to see the goal):
Everyone wanted him to do it. It made sense in terms of the narrative. Our greatest star, giving our home the appropriate send-off. So when it actually happened, it was incredible. It was like living - for just one afternoon - in a film. Even if it was a rubbish Sean Bean film, it was still a film!
It's always good when real life feels like fiction. As long as it's good fiction. I don't want my life to feel like Birds of a Feather.
(I'm wondering if I should go back and put some more jokes in this entry)
So, that's comic books and football. Which brings us to professional wrestling, which is where we started all those many words ago.
Pro wrestling is a weird combination of comic books and football. It has the form of sport, but the predetermined nature of fiction.
If an interest in comic books is about the characters seeming real through lengthy proximity, and football is about ascribing the conventions and attributes of characters to real people, what it wrestling?
It's both of those things and neither of them.
Wrestling has been in my life, more or less, since I was seven years old. It's also part of a story. In this fictional world, these people are really fighting for real championships; they're genuinely hating each other. And this fictional narrative isn't just followed by one company (like comic books), it's adhered to by companies from all over the world, with all their regional variations. It's been going since the early twentieth century, and will probably keep going in one form or another for a long time.
It's as though there's a global agreement to accept the validity of our imaginary friends, place them in the same universe, and totally accept them as real and important and worthy of attention.
Wrestling is a strange thing for me to like. I can see how 70% seems awful and hokey and its morality is hugely dubious. But when it's done right, it's the ideal combination of fiction and reality, preposterousness and real emotion.
I'm sad Randy Savage is dead. There are other wrestling deaths that have affected me more.
I think the reason they seem particularly difficult to take is that the line between the character and the performer is so blurred. My imaginary friend is the same as a real person in the real world with the same name and facial hair.
If we love a particular band, is it the musician or the music that we love? It probably varies. But even if you love the musician, you're not seeing them every week. Wrestlers wrestle all the time (which is why so many of them die young, I suppose). They become a part of my life.
The person playing the wrestler and the character/product he creates are inseparable. Where does Randall Poffo end and Randy Savage begin?
In wrestling, the artist IS the art.
This is probably true of things like ballet and other performance artists too - the human body becomes the canvass on which beautiful images are painted.
So when Randy Savage dies, I'm thinking of the seven-year-old me watching him hit someone with a sceptre, the ten-year-old me watching his gloriously emotional soap-opera reunion with his wife, the teenage me being thrilled by his insanity, or the current-day me watching him on Youtube shouting and emphasising seemingly RANDOM words.
Now that's very selfish. That's the child in me, being sad that his teddy bear was lost.
But there's the not insignificant fact that he was a real man with a real family, who will miss him in a very real way.
Here's a nice little tribute video:
As I said, I wasn't particularly upset about his death, it just sent me down this train of thought, and so I decided to write it down.
I'm quite pleased that I've managed to stick to this path and haven't staggered off the dusty trail to wallow with some hippopotamuses. I'm also glad I didn't abandon the trail as too long, even though it plainly is. And there are probably very few of my readers who are interested enough in comic books, football and wrestling to make this a worthy read.
Oh well. Rest In Peace Mr Savage.
As a tribute, I'll talk like you ALL day, yeah.
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