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If you’re looking for subtlety, if you’re looking for sophistication, wit, intelligence and a stirring of fine feelings among fellow human beings sharing a belief in how the world should be ordered if only life could more closely imitate art and reason, then my recommendation is that you avoid pantomime and conservative party conferences.

Pantomime, for those who didn’t grow up in a pre-internet Britain, is a very British form of theatre entertainment conceptually not a million miles from the mystery play. That is to say, pantomime is red nose entertainment with a message of social conformity, that comes around once a year during the winter. The message is moralistic and simple, the presentation is lurid and loud. Extravagant, ridiculous, easy to digest. Pantomime is participatory. The actors address the audience directly, egging them on, prompting them with asides. The audience, thus egged and prompted, jeers and boos, bellows and howls from the shadows of the auditorium. We all have a generous helping of belly laughs and go home rosy-cheeked and ready to put our shoulders to the wheel once again, feeling slightly more superior now we’ve condemned the wicked witch and the abusive lord to ridicule, oblivion, prison etc. Pantomime has a rich history in Britain – a small, confined nation that needs its scapegoats.

Today, I found that I could no longer hold my breath. I’ve been sitting in the back row since July, my arms tightly folded, repulsed yet attentive, unable to look or walk away and trying not to externalise the building horror I felt inside: the leadership contest, the hustings, the staged interviews, and now, my god, the newly crowned crooked-hatted queen tee and her loyal, creepy entourage of crumpled ne’er-do-wells. THIS IS PANTOMIME I thought. There, on the stage this week in Birmingham, was the ludicrous grinning red queen squinting fiercely from the stage in her hook-collared garment, annunciating boldly from a stilted script, breaking the third wall with diabolic hyperbole. ‘Get…them…re-moved!’ (ed: unscripted) The audience, her audience, duly acknowledged, leaping up to purge their fantasy world of undesirable elements, vocalising with an abandon they could never otherwise permit in their monogrammed cufflink lobbydom. The scene lacked only diminutive party members jabbing holographic depictions of Kier Starmer with plastic swords while cabinet ministers pranced around her queenship’s skirts in pantomime horse costume, shackled and squeezing their sphincters to avoid materially undeniable public embarassment, hoping upon hope their spouses aren’t watching. Only ,we were the audience, not those in the auditorium. They were the braying crowd, and we were here for what? To self-instruct? To jeer the jeerers, they in their turn being the cast of hyperboles and we the moralistic stone-throwers? So 21st C: multilayered moralism.

And yet, meanwhile, in the meagre sunlight outside this theater of the absurd multiplied, ordinary joes and joannas are wondering how to repair the actual, financial distress suddenly wrought upon their household budget – their actual lives – by Queen Tee and her cast of bell-hatted jugglers.

This is not pantomime after all. It is real life, made pantomimic.

I’m not entirely happy with the ways things have turned out. None of us are, surely. But if I sit, quiet and still, as I do now, and push aside the distractions, the moments spill — of particular joy, or serenity, or both, all. Of sharpness of feeling such that the imprint remains, vivid in a way only memories can be. So many of them, abundant as stars in the sky. Each shimmers at the edges as it emerges, as a page of an illustrated book crossing the afternoon’s sun’s rays pouring through a window adjacent; a happy dream, a dream of a long restful night. So, so many moments. Warm welsh sand in summer, the blue estuary emerging through an avenue of trees. Pan pipes and cheese plants one summer on campus. Millie chasing her playmate, tipping over, her tongue hanging out. Suna, dear Suna, applying lip balm to her lips, again. Chilled white linen bedding against the skin after a humid August night in the Deep South. The Pacific waves softly smashing the moonlit rocks on Stinson Beach. Green-blue specks of Greenland’s endless white inching by on the slow approach to New York and a new life. They seem endless these caches of joy (for is not high emotion all joy of a kind, perversely?)- an abundance of pinpoint riches in circulation, pouring from the artery of memory opened by a momentary choice only to reflect. All this consciousness, this vast library of sensation, of complexity, of vulnerability, of irreversible time – an inexplicably entangled compendium of sensual treasures, enduring yet destined to pass, to disappear for eternity with the carrier.

One kind of joy is the arrival or emergence of a new, hopeful life force. Romance, say. A story on page one. In a book I read again recently*: ‘what’s the point in being young if you’re not loved?’

It was half two, Friday night-Saturday morning, just past the time when a departure – coat, shoes, gloves, gathered in a sequence of moves, just a little too hesitantly from their places of earlier, casual abandonment – would have otherwise signalled to him (an introverted novitiate of romance, or so he wished to acknowledge) either a reluctance to move too fast or – No, no don’t. – a midnight flood approaching its ebb, a sotto voce change of heart. She was an unknown. His guesses at what he hoped she might be were rapid and exhilarating, like fireworks in a cloudless night sky — dizzying psychedelic visions — so much so that he could not resist wondering if the trajectory of this night might redirect the course of his entire life.  She took a sip from a wine glass on the nearby kitchen table.  The song playing in the background reached a noisy, guitar crescendo.  She knelt down alongside him then shifted herself across his recumbent, cruciform body, tentative but deliberate, as he lay staring at the living room ceiling. Now he found himself gazing directly into her eyes, her dark hair curtaining the two of them so completely that it felt to him as if the rest of the world no longer mattered. Not. At. All.  He smelled the cigarette smoke and remnant perfume in her hair. Oh yes, this was a beginning alright. Terrifying. But electric.   

Another kind of joy is liberation from the heaviness of the life you had, or that surrounds you — a kind of spiritual levitation (or separation)— either for a moment, in your imagination, or for good, or forever. 
Pan Am Flight 102 from Heathrow to New York was making its southward turn across Greenland toward the Saint Lawrence, then on past New England toward JFK.  Below him, inching away as he stared down through the porthole, was an expanse of ice that would be featureless, seemingly without end, were it not for the scattered dots of sharp, diamond-blue pools that his gaze scanned for intently, keening for a way to relate this empty, devastatingly beautiful canvas seen from thirty-seven thousand feet with the cluttered grey city world he had left behind only a few hours before, but that now seemed gone and far away in a past life. This was limbo, still – an eight-hour interlude of nothingness, nowhereness in which he was suspended.  The skin of the aircraft was his skin.  The body of the plane was his spiritual body – floating far above the worlds both that he had left and towards which he was moving. Despite the adventure that he knew lay ahead there was still something, he felt — long-forgotten, deeply-buried still but energised with rising, irrepressible … what to call it: joy, love? — that wanted this — THIS — to last forever. 

* Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes

How difficult, impossible even, it would be to record even one day’s worth of sensations, sights, experiences, recollections and all the other mental ephemera that make up even a single day in life/consciousness.  For even if one could note each mental impression – the scent of jasmine, the taste of seawater, the gait of your parent, a pierced earlobe – one could never really convey in words the fullness of meaning (to you) within each, between each, and collectively.  The quality of experience is to be found only in recollection and yet that recollection is imperfect.  We recreate – both with intent and by instinct – and in that recreation introduce all the flaws of our personality and habits of mind.   Our experiences are not really our own until we make them so, and we must report on them to ourselves just as a reporter on the scene takes notes and later compiles a report, embellishes, draws out, artfully, necessarily, a merchantable narrative, to sort and make sense of the congelation of memories of sensory impressions.  But is that ‘real’? No, of course not.  To create ourselves we must convert the random and the quotidian into a continuum – a personal mythology (or meaning, on a small s spiritual level) and it is this product of conversion that encapsulates what it is to be human, to be me, you, us: the imprint of consciousness. 

There’s a hole in the middle where I should be,
I’m held against the sides, spinning in a vortex, 
It’s where I should be, swimmin' 'gainst the tide, 
Spinning in a vortex, wondering 
Is that me  Is that me?

Come and save me, will you please?
For I’m sure it’s not real; it cannot be.
Is that me? Is that me?

There’s a whorl inside, and I cannot see me,
I’m flung against the sides, sky is flexed,
I’m feeling kinda sick, inundated vexed,
Slow butterfly wings, inverted, 
Is that me? Is that me?

Can you save me, will you please?
For I’m sure it’s not the way that it should be.
Is that me? Is that me?

Man, I’m sure this wasn’t what it was supposed to be,
I’m sure this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
The sky’s about to break apart, the rain,
The square rain is falling, and I’m sure it’s not meant to be.

There’s a hole in the middle where I should be,
I’m pushed off the edge, and constantly perplexed, 
It’s not where I should be, flattened out by time, 
Spinning in a vortex, wondering 
Is that me  Is that me?

is it yours or mine 
that fine incision 
that look that lingers
divulging everything and nothing,
a prompting to act and leave behind
sweet uncertainty?