Author Archives: paulbilic2003

April 25: stuck at bow street

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After a bit, conversations with my olde dad, who had some form of dementia, were always the same conversation which we trotted through. It was more a form of ritual than a conversation. But then most conversations rehearse the same subjects. When I meet up again with a friend after a couple of months it will be the same stuff, though with some advance in the storyline. In this they are more like soap operas. The same themes and characters reaffirmed to lock you in but with a new segment of evolution. For example: United have had a couple of victories since last time; maybe they’ve turned the corner. Or else, how did it go in the 11+ exam for young Sammy? There are new entries. The three or four conversations all move on by a square in the board game of life: United; kids; work. Who knows? Maybe a new plot line will surface. With my dad we were stuck on the same square.  In the board game it would be where you have to miss a go, or, as far as conversations with my dad were concerned, miss all your go’s. We would be forever stuck on  Bow Street and the Chance card would have said you have neglected to pay your income tax, stay here in Bow Street forever and never throw another dice. That’s tragic, of course, but also comic. We are made to spend our lives at Bow Street. You cannot advance from there, so you have to improvise an elaborate and courtly dance within the perimeter, a weird gavotte. At least you get to explore a new trope. With people who don’t have dementia there are no explorations. It is the same leaden-footed hoofing. People don’t like taking too many risks in their conversation. If you’re lucky you might get on to Vine Street, but there’s not much passing go.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

 

April 23: hammer horror

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On the tip of your tongue is not the right expression for a memory that just won’t materialise, I find. When I am trying to remember something and strain the brain to get the word to emerge, I don’t sense anything on the tip of my tongue. I sense it in my brain, slowly but inexorably pushing towards my consciousness. I imagine a grey or light brown brain and this smudge pushing itself painfrully out. It’s a little like a particularly recalcitant turd that won’t be rushed. You just have to wait for it to come. Some coffee might coax it out. The obtuse word will materialise the next day when you’re not even looking for it. I wonder if there are acts you can accomplish to hurry a word out. Straining to think hard about it doesn’t help. You start making fruitless leaps of the imagination. You imagine it starts with a certain letter and go cavorting up a barren path.

Today I was trying to remember a French translation I once found for the idea of Hammer horror, that is to say the gruesome world of gothic melodrama. I knew I had once found a nice equivalent for it. Gradually it came to the surface, revealing more and more facettes as it emerged. It was a word somehow connected with marionettes and theatre. I kept worrying at it and it came to me. Grand guignol. That was it. I felt I had willed the word out of the brain. There was no tip of the tongue about it.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

April 22: messages from beyond the grave

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Some time ago I received an email from an old friend thanking me for some minor thing I had once done. It was a spare email of just one sentence. I was pleased he was getting in touch with me and emailed him back, asking about his news and giving some of mine. He did not reply. I have thought about this. I think it is the equivalent of what alcoholics do when they apologise to everyone as part of their treatment. This must be what you do when you know you are dying; you thank everyone you knew for what they contributed to your life. It may be that there is also a list of people you have to apologise to. A ledger, then: positive and negative. This kind of act would have you dying at ease with your past. I am making all this up but I think it is quite possible. If so, when you draw up your ledger, who would you include and what acts would you judge generous and what pernicious? It could well have been that the little act that I accomplished came across to him as an act of generosity but was, if he had known, in fact motivated by egotism or part of some more complex plot on my part.

Another old friend, meeting up with me after a long period, said: how will I know if you die? I’m not sure about the answer to this one. I suppose, thinking about it now, I could make sure I give someone close to me access to my email account and they could send out a group email. I am not on social media, so that would have to do. I might even write the message myself.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

April 18: paragons of virtue

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We had to cancel the Mindfulness walk on Hampstead Heath this morning. I must say I wasn’t too fussed. Or rather, I was pretty fussed…about not going. It seems to me once you start doing things in categories you’re getting things wrong. Once you start using the word spirituality, you can be pretty sure you’re going about things in the wrong way. If you are making a separate category for things spiritual, you are probably seeing the rest of your life wrong. I saw a woman with a coat daubed with many virtue words when we were in Tooting and Balham, which was where we ended going. They said things like Just Be Real and Be Kind, exhortations to virtue. Pretty unbearable too, I find. You would expect modern people to be paragons of niceness these days, wouldn’t you? I assure you, they are not.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

March 22: capricorn but venus in scorpio

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Many years ago I was giving an English Language class to adults in Paris and a woman who had been in the class came up to me at the end of the class and asked my date and time and location of birth. I thought nothing of it. The next week she was back in the class and gave me a cassette. It was my astrological theme analysis. I am Capricorn with Venus in Scorpio. I listened to it at home and, although I obviously did not believe in the objective truth of astrological claims, I found it revealing. The mere fact of having interpretations of my character offered to me caused me to think again. It said I was a difficult character. Was I a difficult character? It had never occurred to me. I thought about it. I looked at my recent experiences. Well, maybe I was.

It is so hard to look at yourself. We tend to do it through the filters of fiction where you follow another character and judge him or her and so, in an oblique kind of way, see yourself. What would I do in those circumstances? Art, of all varieties, is this medium to circumnavigate the self. It also happens when you take stock of material in which you figure; old photos; old letters. When I look at all the pieces I have written in peoplearerubbish, it reacquaints me with my full self, not just the partial synchronic version I am lugging around in the workaday world. Anything that gives you a lens to look at the self is useful, even if the actual material it might offer you is nonsense. As so often, it is the process that you use that creates the illumination; the conclusion they offer you is mostly drivel.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

February 7: penis

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I popped my nose into the study room/library in the school where I work the other day. It was empty. As I looked around the bookshelves I noticed a sheet of A4 propped up in front of some of the books on a top shelf. I approached it and saw that the word Penis was written large in red biro. I grinned and went up the spiral library ladder to take it down. This was a school for 17 an 18 year-olds, not 13 and 14 year-olds. I would have thought these obsessions would be out of their system by now. I went downstairs into the office to have a little laugh about it. Kerim said yes I saw that. and I said Oh. did you not think to take it down? He said oh well I thought why not? where’s the harm? It is a liberal place.

It got me thinking. Yes, where’s the harm? It’s not obscene. It’s just a bit silly. But it certainly corresponds to an instinct in the teenage boy. Why not? So I started to regret taking the sheet down and throwing it in the bin. The next day I decided to put it back up. I took a similar A4 sheet, wrote the word penis on it in big letters and when the library was empty climbed up the spiral library ladder to put the page back on the topmost shelf. I was just doing this when a little group of 17-year-old girls came into the library and saw me up the ladder putting the word penis up on the top shelf. They did not bat an eyelid.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

January 31: I have become too complicated to him

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I am a misrecogoniser of people, I realise. I misrecognised a woman in the park today and only recognised her because of her dog. I misrecognised an old friend in the supermarket the other week because he was wearing glasses. A couple of years ago I misrecognised someone I hadn’t seen for thirty years because she too was wearing glasses. She hadn’t changed but my focus was again on the glasses. Glasses clearly fox me. I am fooled like the audience of some primitive play when a baddie puts on a different hat and becomes, in a convention upheld by the audience, unrecognisable, or when a Shakespearean Viola or Rosalind ties her hair up and immediately becomes a boy. But, like these theatrical conventions, am I willingly suspending my disbelief about people? Because these were people, in every case, that I might not want to see, people where my conception of them has become too complicated. My unconscious is telling me that I don’t want to recognise them. I don’t know what I think of them.

Last week I saw my brother on an underground train. We were in the same packed train and I saw him across a crowded carriage, his face constricted within a hood. I pointed at him and he seemed to look at me, but he made no sign of recognition. I picked my way through the carriage, still pointing at him. When I got up to him his face remained inexpressive. He looked at me puzzled, not knowing who I was. It was like in a dream. It was only when I smiled slightly that he saw who I was. What are you doing on this train? he said. As though I had no right to be there. I’m on my way home from work, I said. It was a banal enough explanation. Along with thousands of other people, I could have added. But he seemed unconvinced and was still looking at me with that air of an aggrieved viewer of some disreputable sleight of hand. He is looking at me like I did with those glasses people. He has got to that stage where he does not know what to think of me.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

January 10: when the manager calls you off the bench

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I lost another scarf yesterday. It was my big colourful winter scarf. I had lost my smaller but still colourful and still quite big scarf about a month ago. I used to lose umbrellas, but now I have become increasingly wary of where I am putting them down. I have started putting my favourite umbrella standing uptight in wastepaper bins. My mind has now clocked this and checks the bin before I leave any room. Now it’s scarfs that are disappearing from my life. I had the big colourful winter scarf when I left the tube station at Sloane Square. After twenty minutes trekking round Chelsea it was no longer about me. I had taken it off, as the weather had become momentarily milder. I had too many objects about me. A heavy bag, a coat and a jacket. It was too much for my mind to manage. The scarf went awol. I thought; shall I retrace my steps? It would have been too complicated and scarves come and go. Accept it. It had had a good run. The upshot being I have now dug out a blue and black striped scarf one of my sisters once bought me at Christmas. I remember thinking when I unwrapped it from the Christmas wrapping paper, I’ll never wear that. It is another look. Sober, scholarly. Not bad, actually, though less warm and less fun. I’ll give it a chance. Neither I nor it ever suspected it would be called into action. Which just goes to show. When the manager calls you off the bench, you must be ready to show your paces.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

December 28: a biblical Christmas

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The Bible is such a pickle. There are accounts of the nativity in Matthew and Luke only. Matthew has the Wise Men, Luke has the Shepherds. Neither has both. It looks like Luke didn’t like Magi; he has a go at them in Acts, which he may well have also written. They are not kings, of course, but magician people, maybe astrologers, which would explain the star. And there is no mention of there being three of them. We get Gold, Frankincense and Myrhh, three gifts, so we extrapolate this to three magi. In some traditions there are ten of them. Herod commands the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew. Herod died in 6 BCE, so it’s not clear why he would have been around when Jesus was born. There is no documenatry evidence of the massacre of the innocents, not even in Josephus who writes at some length about Herod, including his misdeeds, and does not mention it. In Mark, the original of the gospels, there is no Nativity scene. It starts with the grown-up Jesus of Nazareth. So, all in all, as usual in the gospels it’s a bit of a copy and paste job.

When you think Mark was written 70 years after the event, Matthew and Luke maybe 80 or 85 years after and John even later than that, it is not surprising that these are contradictory accounts. They were not eye-witnesses, they didn’t know anyone who was. They were written in Greek. Jesus spoke Aramaic. We know that Peter couldn’t write. Jesus may have been illiterate too. There is no reason to suppose that these accounts are much more than a set of superstitions. You get the idea. A man was surprised at a big gathering of people that there were enough loaves for quite a few of them. He told that to his mate who wasn’t there. It soon becomes a word-of-mouth miracle. Even today, with our better means of verifying information and post-Enlightenment mentalities, conspiracy theories abound. Merry Christmas.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

December 18: my sister, embodiment of our social history

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My sister failed her 11+ and went to a secondary modern school. When she was fifteen they had a careers class where they gave out questionnaires. What did they want to be? Air hostess; teacher; doctor; lawyer. The teacher took the sheets in and ripped them up in front of the class. Then she handed out the real questionnaires. What did they want to be? Street cleaner; laundry packer; cleaning lady. These were the real options. My sister did all right. She went to college and got A levels, then a degree. She travelled. she taught English in Greece. She met her husband. They raised a family there. After some years, when the kids were older, they came back to the UK. My sister trained as a primary school teacher. She’s been working for years teaching 7-year-olds. This year the management said: Don’t bother marking the children’s homework. AI can do that for you. My sister said: But I won’t get to know the children. No big deal, they said. It’ll free up time for some other bullshit stuff we want you to do (Bullshit being my word). She is quitting.

Here’s a perfect index to our social history. The class-ridden assumptions of the 70s and 80s; the brave new world of cheap travel and European opportunity; today’s cowardly bowing and scraping to tech and all the stupidity that comes with it. And a life as a perfect index to our blundering progress.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com