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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Sleepless 6

In order for us to understand the decisions that Dr X famously made following his ‘awakening’ we must look back.

Before he became a Doctor, X had been a child and later an adolescent. Throughout these stages of development he had walked along tree lined paths, through fields of brittle sunlit corn or cold ploughed earth. If you’d seen him back then, he’d have been singing hymns, talking animatedly to himself and laughing out loud, investigating the bramble thickets with a stick or more often than not - swinging from a rope swing. X loved to swing. It wasn’t the carefree swing of youth though. It was practice.

He had become obsessed with Spiderman on one of the family’s annual holidays to the ‘Witterings’; a coastal village of thatched cottages, sand dunes and the aged. His usual want was to walk along the beach breakers and probe for crabs amongst the small tidal pools that gathered around their wooden bases, but that summer the wind had blown in from a different direction, the pools were empty and the seas rough. The family huddled in their beach hut, drank tea and read books and there he discovered Spiderman.

Spiderman was hope. Peter Parker the bespectacled scientist and photographer was real because his father looked just like him: glasses, tank top, and a job at a chemicals plant. Until reading the comic books, he had always wanted to be his father, now he could be both: a scientist and a hero. The initial appeal had been the costume and the muscles. Later it had become the swinging.

The swing he created, hung from one of the long limbed beech trees that lined the boundaries of a neighbouring field. Always it had a loop for his ankle, a loop for his foot, but over the years it would vary in length. One year it was long and he practiced swooping, just inches above the ground, shifting his weight to dodge invisible enemies or sometimes the local dogs. Another year, he swung high. 4 or 5 meters above the ground and controlled his fear of falling, by falling.

The young X never stopped practicing, but after a while he forgot why he needed to.

TBC

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