Where is the sun when I arise? I want some bird to sing To dream her song in sleep’s demise Each dawn is a birth For a moment’s ease, ceased burden The night’s release, unwelcome I love the sun, the beckoning glow That enriches everything It enjoins everything below Like swallow’s spiralled wing A motion magical, in flight, A glimpse and then, a parting light.
Garbo
Among the personal effects of Bert Spalding, Joan his estranged widow found in his papers the following brief account that took her somewhat by surprise after their ten years of marriage. While not a widely acknowledged fabulist, Bert, sadly no longer with us, undoubtedly had a rich inner life. Upon brief enquiry we found his story unfortunately without merit.
Reproduced with the permission of Joan Neesden (nee Piper):
Before I came along, my wife Gertie (or Greta as you may perhaps be more familiar) was working at what used to be the local Odeon behind the counter. I spotted her a mile off, with that unmistakeable gaze and the way she flapped her eyelashes. I always knew this moment would arrive.
It was a Thursday afternoon and I was looking forward with great relish to another sojourn to Gone with the Wind. A small Tizer, I announced, summoning the courage and giving her a knowing wink. Something in my expression caught her eye, and her lavishly mascara’ed lashes droopped ever so slightly. I felt hot all of a sudden and wanted to remove my coat and scarf.
When the picture had run its course I emerged into the foyer but Gertie had clocked off. Fighting my disappointment but girded by the possibilities of the silver screen, I left a cheeky but polite note for her with an usher. Ten weeks to the day later Gertie and me were married in Elmsley Wood town hall. Best four bob I ever spent.
Dear S.,
Dear S,
=====
It’s been a while. Thirty-two years actually. When I see that number, and the encrusted life I now own, it seems unnatural – perversely multiplied. It can’t be true that I still feel this way – a third of a century later – about someone I knew for barely two months. What a strange thing the memory is. What odd curators we are – shelving and cataloguing some moments but not others, of visceral longing too much unacknowledged at the time – irresistible, real and deeply strange, but now so divorced from the blood blind compulsions of our youthful senses.
I do know, of course, you are no longer here. I know that, of course. I heard the news from a friend of a friend – a text, some months ago. Almost offhandedly she told me: how odd I thought until I realised how much of what I’d stored inside was entirely unknown to anyone except myself. When she mentioned your death in passing, along with the odd lurching sensation of a silent fall from a tall building I saw you – in an instant – before me, in your black leather bomber jacket, your ever so slightly reddened by the cold March air ice blue eyes and your tight ponytailed dirty blond hair – perched for the first and last time on the edge of the bed in my flat on Redcliffe Gardens, applying lip balm habitually with your long fingers. It was your dry skin but so too an under-managed manifestation of your vulnerability, and so a flash of hope that you weren’t en-tirely lovely and perhaps not en-tirely beyond my reach, after all. You didn’t stay long, perhaps half an hour – but your visit meant something I suppose neither of us could bring ourselves to acknowledge, then or afterward. Time had run out before I realised the clock was running. I loved your silly travel letters from Tokyo and Adelaide, hashed out on flimsy blue paper in terminals and hostels.
Aren’t we just animal spirits? First, predominant, hormones bursting, bloody and startled, resplendent and chattering without the time, need or inclination to reflect? Then spirits more, reflecting on what we did, what we felt, our animal selves dutifully contained or compromised by an embarrassment of later riches and failures? I don’t have answers S-. I only know that I think I can recreate what made you you, that even now I want to recreate what made you you, without ever having had the chance to discover it then. I’m our last remaining record-keeper. Without me we cease to exist. I suppose, after all those months since I heard, this is what seeped into my consciousness, that I feel the need to speak to you, to make up for lost time and lost chances: chances not taken when I knew there was some spark between us that only required one of us to ignite, with some trivial act of courage. For whatever reason, neither of us embraced the courage we might have had. Perhaps we felt it was inevitable and thus unnecessary to hurry along. We’ll never know. It’s too late. But what do I do otherwise with all these evergreen thoughts? Do I pile them high, at last, on the bonfire at the bottom of the garden and stand, contemplative, alone, as the particles of a life unlived dissemble themselves in the intense heat and float way into the winter night as I stand shivering in my borrowed winter boots? Do I preserve them in jars, for occasional inspection? Or should I reanimate them, bring to them new life, that we might not cease to exist after all?
Forgive me now if I choose the last. I feel it is something I should do – that I want to do – as selfish as it sounds. I’ll treat you fairly, I promise. Only I want you to come alive again, in some way that only I could bring about. I know you wouldn’t mind, entirely too much.
“People who call themselves ‘writers’ are deserving of our time if only to better understand what part of their personality caused this aberration.”
Fragment
…
It is not so hard to imagine these papers, in some few years from now, consigned to some drawer, mingled with other artifacts of a time in your life which, when you weren’t paying attention, finally lost their resonance, their energy, as a candle burns down or a stem sags slowly in its vase. Then, the words written here will have been pressed finally dry and flat, beneath the weight of consequent events.
It is selfish and naive of me to believe that it should be otherwise.
Acknowledging that the impression of our lives upon each other will and must fade (for how else are we to go on?), the need to leave you with something of myself persists still. I don’t wish, however great the temptation, to be sentimental. If anything, the thin strands of sentimentality will surely cause what I write here to lose its potency as if somehow writing were itself the agent of devitalisation. Sentiment floats, like motes of dust in sunlight, when love, fallen from the tree and not finding the substance to nourish its potential, endures its slow annihilation.
Jimmy and the Dangerous Woman
Dear P_,
I’m going to make an appointment with the doctor here to see if there’s a medical reason why I feel so low all the time. It’s winter now. We barely get five hours of full daylight — that’s if the clouds part. My starting point is social awkwardness. I’m in a foreign country. I’m at — a disadvantage. Perhaps it’s a lingering symptom of my fixation on the recent past — the divorce etc — but that is years ago now. Can grief and self-pity hang around that long? I tell myself not, most days anyway.
Yes, I read the short story we discussed last week in our session. It’s odd; even though I found it in my collection and shared an image of the header page with you, I still somehow managed to fix the title in my memory as Jimmy and the Dangerous Woman.
When I got your WhatsApp message yesterday asking me what I thought about the story, naturally then my thoughts sprouted from the seed that I thought Lawrence had planted. He wanted us to take it as given that poor downtrodden Mrs. Emilia (Emily) Pinnegar was ‘dangerous’. Dangerous to whom exactly (other than Jimmy)? Well I can see it clear enough, I thought. He tells us so; she has slow, cat’s eyes…smoldering, like a predator weighing up her next meal, coiled and languid in equal measure. When she washes her coalminer husband’s dust-caked back before the fire, she does it as if she were prepping a turkey for the table: industriously, dispassionately. She can switch off — up there. Or perhaps she has long ago switched off, and the recession of life’s spirit has left behind an imprint, a cold shadowy place where joy, kindness, happiness once used to jostle energetically. Does that make her dangerous though? That she might appear sinister and derisive while fulfilling the unpleasant daily duty of washing her husband’s back without prospect of reward by way of a kind look, a smile, a recognition that she was anything more than a household appliance? Did that make her dangerous — the vacuum, the absence where emotion should be?
Well of course, as I went back to thinking about the story again I realised the mistake I’d made, and I couldn’t then help thinking how telling it was, that I’d transposed that adjective with that one. Desperate. Dangerous. A cornered creature. But then more fertile ground came into view. Why would Lawrence want to mark Emily as ‘desperate’ anyway? Surely it’s Jimmy who’s desperate? Really. He’s the pathetic, middle-aged divorcee of no obvious allure. Poor little Jimmy. But he’s still the ‘man’ — with the instincts of his sex intact (and this is Lawrence’s work after all.) What is not desperate about determining in an instant to plunge yourself into an open-ended commitment — to a wo-man, a hu-man about whom and about whose living situation you know nothing — and to which you’ve applied little if any practical aforethought? What is not desperate about defining one’s desirable future self by alliance with an inferior? Imaginative self reconstruction…with magic mirrors.
Is it salvation that Jimmy the beta, shambling man wants to sell to this stranger of a woman who sends him poetry for publication? Desperate Emily? Is that the lure and the power he wishes to dangle in front of her? Can he (does he) really become the Solomon in the eyes [and heart] of this lowly, chosen novitiate? I wonder, knowing just a little about myself (and by extension perhaps about the nature of things for others (one hopes to not be alone)) that there’s first the declared propositions we make to ourselves: the justifications, the ‘reasons’, the product of our admirable, shiny cogitations. And then there’s the animus — the primal — within us. It thinks too, wordlessly, and more quickly than ‘I’ can. It decides, before I can, why a certain thing should really be done — to soothe the storm inside perhaps, to settle scores or balance the books, to refloat the sinking boat. Sharp, unscrupulous Id motions in our heads that our conscious selves mostly have to sheath in acceptably safe justification: countering moderations. What Jimmy really wants is revenge. Revenge for being rejected goods, the cuckold. He even admits it (on Page 584 in my copy). Desperate and adventurous he feels he’s been — to enter another husband’s house and boldly steal his wife away. Poor, desperate Emily, who cannot make up her mind for so long whether she wants to leave even this grey existence she has, who puts him off and delays her departure as long as possible. To her, it’s a viable business proposition I would think — an exchange of known misery for something different; at least not so oppressive, she thinks. Clarissa the former and Emily the future might not be so different after all. And Jimmy will realise this — too late of course. The story ends and I think he realises it, too late of course. The worm has indeed turned: back on itself. Poor Jimmy.
The World’s Oldest Children
Separate, for a moment (bear with me), the speaker and their position of influence upon the world, from those who find themselves, either intentionally or accidentally, subject to the direct and indirect repercussions of decisions made by the said speaker.
There are those (increasingly, more so) who welcome those repercussions from that speaker, whatever those repercussions might be, and even if they will (inevitably) make their lives worse in ways that they can, or are not willing to admit or imagine. This is, is it not, the old pie-in-the face gag?
In the pie-in-the-face gag there is an implicit understanding – between the pie-er and the pie-ee – that the pie-ee will imminently be publicly ridiculed (or worse) by getting a pie in the face. Yet, they are both the victim and the coronated fool. The audience (essentially) watches on. We know what will happen (it will happen, just like it always has) and yet we participate gleefully in the impending ridicule, our anticipation actually – and curiously – heightened by that same inevitability. We can’t help responding as if the pie in the face is a shocking surprise. And that, in essence, is what makes the pie-in-the face gag so enduring. We humans never cease to be entertained by affecting surprise in the face of the dully inevitable in a way that celebrates some weird human vulnerability . It is (isn’t it?) a powerful, willful resistance to seeing and admitting the obvious so that we may feel – individually and collectively – normal and unified.
Perhaps I should, at this point, provide one or two concrete examples of what I’m describing. Yes, perhaps I should. Vladimir Putin is now also turning living loving, human beings into meat piles, remotely – in Kiev and elsewhere. Putin acts from a position of influence that he has spent many years building. He is a monstrous pie-er but still, a pie-er all the same. He’s taken it upon himself to be the epauletted, mole-eyed field marshal of launching life-extinguishing pies into the faces of people living in the Ukraine.
Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, in the (dis)United Kingdom were also pie-ers until recently. They were very enthusiastic about putting a few pies in the face of the majority of people in that country. Ms. Truss said she wanted to grow the pie, but what she really wanted was to throw the pie – a bigger pie, that is – into the face of people who had the temerity not be millionaires.
We know where these misadventures lead. We know where they always lead. We are the all-hearing, all-knowing audience. The pie will smash into the face of the intended victim and we will respond, likewise, again and again, even though we know the routine inside out, beginning to end. And yet the irresistible and recurring illusion of novelty teases us to imagine, over again, that each instance deserves independent, balanced and rational inquiry. What motivated the pie-er?; what arguments had they for holding up the pie and launching it?; could we have acted to prevent it?; did the pie-ee perhaps deserve it in some way?
After all, we know the answer. The pie-er represents that one element in our human world that we think we cannot control because it comes dressed in power, and so choose (conveniently) not to control. It is the child who lacks love, or control over or understanding of their own self; who spends their life trying to deflect pain upon the rest of us, in a desperate, attempted compensation for some perceived injustice inflicted upon them long ago. And yet, we, the audience, choose, determinedly, not to ask why they are really throwing the pie. We offer all manner of sophisticated explanations based on their status, real politik, policy, or rational interest and response. How cleverly – and stupidly – we weave an empathetic alter-narrative fabric from the wooly strands of their (otherwise) obvious human frailty. Their being president or prime minister does not preclude the argument that these are disturbed individuals acting from some livid residue of some unresolved developmental injustice. An expensive suit should be allowed to hide that. But here we are, trying – reasonably, disingenuously, erroneously -to justify why the world’s oldest children are still throwing deadly pies at the rest of us.
Pantomime Party
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.
Flood (Fragment)
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.
Action, and reaction.
Today, like yesterday, the sky in this part of The Netherlands is a cloudless, pure blue. It is…cerulean. After weeks of high winds, grey skies and freezing rain, and after years of shared constraint — including, for many, great suffering and loss — there is the merest glimmer of the approach of spring (daffodils have bloomed in recent days on the canal banks) and our spirits are prompted to lift again, to think thoughts of new experiences, embracing friends and relatives, journeys and events to plan and attend. Simple but profound and necessary pleasures to contemplate. Finally there is a chance to think of something other than how our governments are, or are not, making life and the future for the rest of us more or less awful.
To the east of here, though, something different is happening.
For some people, hopes are begin crushed, plans made suddenly to seem like yesterday’s foolish dreams. Lives are being wiped away like so much dust and brute force is being asserted as if it were the only conceivable power of persuasion. This shouldn’t be news. It’s been happening around us for years now, decades. We’ve become inured to the sight of Syrian people, of Yemeni people, many others, bloodied and stunned, their ordinary peaceful lives as parents, accountants, shopkeepers, bus drivers, doctors and nurses, brought to ruin by a few individuals — men, mostly –wielding the power they so desperately need and hunger for.
We are all qualified now to chime in, to assert our opinions and give our assessments of the situation — its causes, its likely trajectory, and the best solution for all concerned; after all, we’ve spent more than fifteen minutes researching our social media feeds and a few uploads on YouTube. I do it (I’m doing it now). You do it. We all do it. We can all expound usefully on all the world’s problems. How democratic our world has become! Our voices are finally heard.
I hear Boris Johnson expounding a lot. He enjoys, I’m sure, the fizzy sensation it gives him of worldly importance — all puffed up and then out, with booming, robust words bouncing off the walls into eternity and the ‘history’ books he will no doubt write for the benefit of mankind.
But Johnson, and the various other often-cited craven little men that I need not catalogue here (but including Putin, of course) are the problem, not the solution. Bloated with ambition and testosterone, encouraged by political and electoral systems that reward their useful sociopathy, they view the world and the human societies we exist within as something to control and exploit, rather than the fragile, complex interdependencies that they actually are.
None of this is new, of course. Only, it’s becoming so exhausting. How much more greed, incompetence, violence and cruelty can we afford, can we endure? Yuval Harari recognises that human life, our survival is faced with existential crises – advancing rapidly toward us if not already here – that can only be ameliorated by effective joint action. At this moment in our history, when we urgently need such collaboration, we have world leaders who create and promote division either to bolster their undernourished egos or by such inaction and incompetence that it might as well be intentional. The well-intended ones paint pretty pictures with words, but there’s no follow through. They know our attention, as feeble as it is, reacts badly to nuance. Nowadays, when I see obvious courage and selflessness — in the Ukrainian people and Zelenskiy, for example — I am, (as I imagine, too, are all humans exhausted by the extent of malfeasance in political and public life) filled briefly with a hope I know instinctively is exaggerated by how little of it we have in our daily diet: the hope that we will live through these storms of reactionary violence and emerge as a human society that no longer vaunts sociopathic machismo as the ultimate virtue of our species. It’s the hope of daffodils and blue skies.
