On the radio a man was talking about being a magician and he said that what he liked most about what he did was the look on peoples’ faces when he bamboozled them with a trick. He said it was a mixture of hope and confusion. It is rare these days that we get two feelings going in opposite dirctions, or even tangential lines, that are actually owned up to. The brain immediately wants to kick it all into a direction that can result in action or attitude. I was always bemused by the pity and fear we were supposed to feel at the end of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. The pity of the catharsis I got, but the fear I wasn’t so happy about. Awe might have been a better word. It is always nice when articulate people can place two concepts together in a description of someone. It shows that there is spontaneous analysis going on and not just a desire to emprison someone in a definition. Politician A is careful and emphatic. Politician B is thoughtful and distracted. The two ideas almost kick against each other, but not quite. They just remind us that people are not so easily situated.

One of the delights of fictional writing is that you don’t have to plump for a particular truth. A text can be open-ended. At the end of the perennial Christmas cartoon favourite The Snowman, the little boy wakes up and the snowman has melted and the implication is that the night’s fun had been a dream. But then he sees that he actually has the scarf that the snowman had given to him. Does that prove it hadn’t been a dream? It doesn’t prove anything; that the scarf had actually been given to him the day before by his dad and in his dream he’s mixed that up or that a snowman coming to life was true. The story stops there. We live in the space between the two. It’s an honest space because, even though in the real world a truth is mainly one thing or another, gaining access to that one thing is often fraught with peril.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

Je ne me trouve pas ou je cherche – et me trouve plus par rencontre que par l’inquisition de mon jugement, says Montaigne, writing in the 16th Century. I do not find myself when I look for myself, but rather through engagement with others than through self analysis. He means that you reveal your nature most when you are involved in random and spontaneous activity rather than when you meditate or look into your heart. The word he often uses for the fact that life reveals itself more when you are in flux and off your guard, which is the natural state of man, is branle, mostly meaning something else these days but in 16th century meaning wiggle or constant movement. He also defines our nature as the act of dessiner rather than graver, sketch rather than engrave. We are unfixed, impermanent, modifible at any moment.

Embrace the flux, I say. This morning in the cafe I bumped into an old friend from years back, with whom there is some distrust. To his question how are you? I replied with an anecdote from my present life about the water leaking into my kitchen from the flat upstairs. Lesson one: be in the moment of your life (dessiner not graver; no earnest conclusion; keep the other on his toes). Then, looking at my book, he said what are you reading? I said, showing the Montaigne: you wouldn’t understand. It was in French, so he wouldn’t, so only a semi tease. But then I added, it’s philosophical. More of a tease, as he sees himself as philosophical. This is all to destabilise. It’s how I function on conversation. It’s my true nature. En branle.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com