These days we live in close proximity, also often in open-plan spaces and we use machinery that makes noise. This means it is hard to have the single-focus required for difficult activities. When my partner is trying to read The Golden Bowl by Henry James (his last and most notoriously difficult novel) I am listening to 5Live with a discussion of last night’s Bayern Munich Man City match. Fair do’s, I was only getting my own back on the day before when I had been trying to concentrate on reading a 19th Century German novella in German while she was half-watching Gossip Girl on the Iplayer. What happens when I try to do this is that I get the skeleton of the text but it is pretty meatless. All this is the modern phenomenon of being stretched on the rack from one concentrational pole to another. Some things work nicely together, of course. Ironing and watching the News. Writing school reports and watching a Hammer horror film. This taxing of our concentrational capacities should be a modern Olympic sport. It is certainly true that doing just one thing at a time is a luxury we should be encouraging.
Monthly Archives: April 2023
April 9: occular evidence had to be supplied
They were arguing in the cafe this Easter Sunday morning. A man with a red face was sitting along when I saw his eyes brighten up. It had to be his son or his dog. It was his son, a three year old from his estranged wife. She was maybe Korean or Chinese. He, I realised when I heard him speak, was Italian. It was soon clear the boy shuttled between the two, especially when I heard her say Why didn’t you send me the video of him playing? Clearly, the boy had been round the dad’s but the dad hadn’t sent the ex-wife the video of the playing boy. We need our proofs, our bits of documentation to look at when we are on our own. This child she spends probably all her time with except the odd weekend, she needs to have the ghostly image on her phone when he is not there too. The dad was nonplussed. Did he not realise that occular evidence had to be supplied? Did he think that occular evidence would de-intensify the experience of him alone with the child? After the terrible disputes at the break-up, now there are the terrible disputes over the scraps of video material. The child was happily running around the cafe creating havoc. Now that he was present to both of them, they ignored him.
peoplearerubbish 