Nick Cave wrote his very sad “Skeleton Tree” in the context of his teenaged son’s death. It includes the haunting image of “a jittery TV, glowing white like fire.” For me this conjures up a vivid picture of someone staring hopelessly at a TV after it’s gone off the air, leaving just a “no signal” screen displaying visual white noise. (For some reason this was always called “static”. Why?)
I realized a few days ago that, to a contemporary audience, this phrase is probably meaningless: they live with post-CRT TVs and may never have seen the “jittery TV, glowing white like fire.” I thought of how many poetic images may have become inaccessible over the centuries and millennia because they describe worlds that have disappeared.
Stephen Spielberg’s 1982 Poltergeist opens with a clever use of the image: When the TV goes off the air, the flickering white screen becomes a portal for demons to enter the house and possess a little girl. This was long before we all started worrying about “screen time” and its effects on children. Prescient.