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Vaughan Robertson |
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Tangential Man Tangential Man is alive and well. Always has been, always will be as long as the Earth remains round. And if it isn’t round, Tangential Man will do his/her very best to explode the myth that it is, before anyone else learns of the fiction. Tangential Man cannot keep still. Restless inviolate, always on the move, searching for new vistas, new stimuli, new essences, new rushes/buzzes/highs. Restlessness is the sine qua non of the bona fide Tangential Man. Fie to mortgages, hire purchase agreements, inveterate ‘nine-to-fiveism’. Boredom is a spur. Studied domesticity an illusive pall. Responsibility rests only in self-avowal. Onwards and upwards forever. But this is not mere momentum in a vacuum. Tangential Man is always moving out on the fringes/against the grain/ away from the mass salmon rush. The one lemming that doesn’t jump is Tangential Man. While the world sleeps, Tangential Man is out there somewhere, possibly getting into arm-wrestling competitions with the local champion, in some all-night bar. Tangential Man arrives at the moment of least expectation, departs at the time he/she is most required. Wears clothes oblivious to the rest. Makes up new languages. Invents new games and proselytizes them, luring naïf novices into the web of intrigue and sometimes ripping them off as the rules change whilst the game progresses. Takes bizarre substances that no one has imbibed previously. A whole new time frame, a whole new ball game. A parallel universe still somehow peopled by all of us, but with a whole new web of interconnections, where Tangential Man is the Spider King . Is this deliberate? A studied oppositional bravado to shove two fingers in the air and say ‘Fuck You’ to all and sundry? I believe not. Tangential Man is too self-involved in his/her own inner helter-skelter to consciously pattern such conspicuous behaviour, to put his or her life so manifestly at risk in some of these weird peripheral rites. Tangential Man is of necessity an Outsider but not all Outsiders are tangential. Tangential Man has to – perhaps via some accident of birth/genetic implosion/upbringing/environment (who really knows?) – remain at the cusp of everything all the time: cannot be anything but an outcast, an antonym. Fitting in is not an option, for there is no niche for such a being, never can be, never will be, except in this roving role. The boundary rider who is the Tangential Man is off on his/her own gambit: not riding to check fence lines or wandering stock, but merely because the horse is there and it gallops fast beyond the margins and everyone else is lazing inside the perimeter, rarely even looking out. As the Great Wallenda (a supreme high wire-walker) once said: ‘The wire is life, the rest is merely waiting’. The words of a Tangential Man par excellence. Such a being is articulating and obeying his/her own inner compulsion to seek more freedom at all times. ‘Of superficial relevance, if any’, is a standard definition of ‘tangential’. This is arrant crap, for Tangential Man makes the Mass Man what he or she is. Without Tangential Man, there is no opposite, only a void. The World garners its existence from tangency. The slight touch, the faint essence of this divergent hero/heroine, is enough to fuel/activate/spur the remnant, the vast rump of humanity from its collective arse, into a more vital state, even if this obese backside is largely ignorant of the kick. Tangential Man is the sometimes latent lodestar, the avatar of upward evolution. His or her honesty should be an epiphany for those mulched into the morass of collective denial. I have known some such individuals – not many, it is true, because they are a rare breed. I have been woken in the dead hours of a dormant night by their noiselessly playing at flying jet planes on my suburban back lawn. It was no dream at three in the morning: I saw them, before they spilt into the dark. I have been amazed to receive spider-writing postcards from far-off places from them, when we were taught at a young age to ‘get a good job and save money for the future’. I have seen them in Mental Asylums, glorifying in the vicissitudes of post-electro-shock treatment. They are counterpoint men and women, skimming the surface of ‘reality’ with a vibrant shaft of their own such. Like any spinning top, the World needs the nudge, the brush, the prod into Momentum that the Tangential Man provides. Tangential Man are chasing something they will likely never attain because such ‘success’ is tentatively tantamount to spiritual defeat: they are doomed to roam and explore and chase and twist and turn like a corkscrew while other people sleep. They cannot keep still and don’t ever want to, for if they do they will die. It is this Disavowal of Death that energizes the Tangential Man: an impelled rush into more Life that is the true mark of Mankind. In this diurnal duel with demise, it is Tangential Man who best stands a chance of survival, growth, metamorphosis, transmogrification into another beast. Long live Tangential Man. A momentous proclamation, for without him/her we all are not. |
Articles
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