Author Archives: paulbilic2003

August 16: the off-limit zone

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Last night’s dream involved me going, accompanied by a young boy, to a railway station to pick up the painter David Hockney. David Hockney was staying in my flat in Paris, though it did not look like Paris. It looked like a kind of bleak warehouse area. Once inside the flat there was a sliding partition, which may have also been in a public corridor, which let through into a more secret off-limit area of the flat, which may or may not have belonged to me. I wasn’t sure. This is a recurring motif in my dreams. The flat with the off-limit area which may or may not belong to me.

What am I to make of this? David Hockney died a couple of weeks ago, so he may have been in my consciousness somewhere. Though I am not a particulat fan of David Hockney. The boy I went with to the station could have been someone I once taught and with whom I had a semi-pastoral relationship. My first little flat in Paris was a chambre de bonne (maid’s room) on the top floor of 10 rue du chateau d’eau. There was no hot water, a thin drip of cold water, and no toilet or bathroom facility. There was a Turkish toilet in the corridor. All the other maid’s rooms on the floor were used for storage by the inhabitants of the flats below. I did not know who owned the maid’s room I lived in. I had been contacted by a Dutch woman, Hanake, who said she could offer me this room for 400 francs a month (£40), but she wasn’t the proprietor, so there was always anxiety about living in the room, like the off-limit zone of the dream. But I suspect there is a more symbolic, Jungian interpretation to the off-limit zone.

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August 12: less appropriate thoughts about the alban berg concert

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The Prom concert with the Alban Berg violin concerto gave rise to other less high-minded thoughts than those in my previous post. The orcheatra was a composite of top students from the Royal College of Music in London and the Julliard school in New York under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, a world-renowned specialist in the modern repertoire. As I watched the concert I could not help wondering which members of the orchestra came from which conservatory. Were they comparing their respective competences? How were the top virtuosi of the Royal College looking next to the virtuosi of the Julliard? Musical prodigees are highly obsessive, highly competitive, I’m sure.

And then the soloist comes out to play the Berg wearing a beautiful diaphanous dress. a young player like all the members of the orchestra. She is where they would like to be, playing the starring role. She gets to wear the gorgeous outfit, while they are all dressed in black and white like so many foot soldiers. How the orchestra applauded her at the end of the piece, especially the female violinists! How she smiled graciously and munificently towards them! I wonder. Is it just my evil mind? Or is the dumpy first violinst looking at her thinking she could do a better job?

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August 12: different conceptions of what music is

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I went to the Proms the other day and heard a selection of modernist pieces: Stravinsky; Berg; Bartok. The Alban Berg was the least popular with both my neighbours on either side of me. with whom I had separate conversations in the interval. The Berg piece, his violin concerto ‘To the memory of an Angel’ was written in 1932 and is dedicated to the first performer of the piece and an 18-year-old girl who had just died, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, the girl being the angel of the dedication. It is a fairly difficult atonal piece compared to the rhythmic delights of Stravinsky and Bartok. I said to my neighbour that when I heard the Berg piece it evoked for me the Vienna of the early century, the Vienna of Freud, the sudden massive presence of the unconscious and the deep repressiveness of the culture, especially for women. Berg’s concerto evokes all of this in a shimmering nightmare world. My neighbour said he was frustrated that he couldn’t hear the violin clearly enough, it being drowned out by the orchestra. He blamed the conductor. I said that was the point maybe. The orchestra was suffocating the individual (in concertos the orchestra often seems to represent society and the solo instrument the individual). Consciously or unconsciously, Berg would be referring to the girl or to himself, who had harboured a secret lover and secret illegitimate daughter for years.

I had a similar different understanding of a piece of music another time after a concert of Mahler’s 6th symphony. In the toilets at the end of the concert I heard a man speaking to his friend saying it was a frustrating piece of music because a good tune starts but then keeps getting interrupted and sidetracked. We were in the urinals at the Royal Festival Hall at the time and, despite the inappropriateness of the location, could not help piping up. That was the point, I said. It’s a disjointed, fragmented new world that Mahler is in. The old romatic world is dead. Mahler is evoking the altered sensibility.

I suppose it is what you want from music. A purely musical experience or a formulation of psychological or cultural material.

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August 6: the count of monte christo

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I am a high-brow reader. Not very high-brow in many other aspects of my life, as you may have gathered. But I rarely read a piece of popular fiction. Maybe for reasons of snobbery or maybe because I don’t like to be drawn through the sensibility gutter. Too much of that, which is unavoidable, happens in everyday life. However, I find myself reading Le conte de Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas pere. It is 1500 pages and I’ve got 150 left. It can’t be bad to have pulled me through. The plot is terrific. A man unjustifiably put in a prison on a deserted island off the coast of Marseille and left to rot. Another prisoner connects with him, having scratched his way through the dirt for years. This remarkable man teaches Edmond (our hero) everything he knows: languages; style; learning of all sorts. He dies and Edmond substitutes himself for the corpse and is thrown into the sea from which he escapes. A hoard of treasure on the island of Monte Christo had been revealed to him by his former prison-mate. Edmond finds it and becomes inestimably rich. He spends years on the sea, honing his life skills and then heads for Paris to revenge the four men who betrayed him. He kills them off one by one.

The problem is that the character of Edmond Dantes is an absolute; totally inhuman. He is so clever and refined and rich; he is a kind of superhero. His revenge is thoughtless. It ruins the family and children of all the betrayers; people who are innocent. Dumas does not see that his character is a problem. He could have examined the nature of absolute revenge in this long book, but that doesn’t interest him. Unfortunately the novel remains on the level of a teenage fantasy. Still, it’s a good yarn and has been adapted for the cinema many times, each time taking out scenes where Edmond is particulaly unpleasant, as well as skirting round moments where the ethics of 1842 do not match ours (less of an issue for me; sometimes they show up the sham of some of our ethics).

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July 31: eating asparagus incorrectly

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A scene from many decades ago was called to mind yesterday. I was a young man living in Paris and invited to dinner or maybe Sunday lunch by a middle-aged woman I worked with. I was introduced to her family: two teen-aged daughters and the husband. Asparagus was served. I had never eaten asparagus before and didn’t know which ends to eat. After a minute ot two I heard the husband say about me ‘he is eating the asparagus in an incorrect way’ (‘il mange mal les asperges’) refering to me in the the third person as if I wasn’t there. He would have known that I spoke French. This was rather humiliating for me and very unpleasant behaviour on his part. When I recalled the incident yesterday I was furious at his behaviour even though the incident went back almost four decades. In my mind I have been trying to find responses to his unpleasantness that I should have produced at the time. I would say ‘Et vous , Monsieur, vous utilisez mal la troisieme personne’ (And you, sir, are using the third person in an incorrect way’). That would tell him. And then, having thrown my napkin down on the tablecloth, I would storm out.

There is such a lot of etiquette and protocol involved with the A vegetables (aubergine, asparagus and artichoke), so the rebuke cuts deep. It is like saying, you are an uncivilised barbarian. Brought up on Mancunian vegetables, and all being relative, my table manners with carrots and turnips are, of course, unimpeachable.

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July 16: punishment for austerity

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I don’t drink much wine these days. There was a time I used to buy pretty good bottles from a fancy wine dealer and put them in a couple of wine racks in my living room. Gradually, I have drunk less wine. Nowadays, I may have a glass or two of wine four or five times a year. On holiday, when friends offer me a glass or two, or when I’ve bought some nice cheese from the expensive cheese shop. In France, wine still figures. If you don’t order wine in a restaurant the waiters whip away all your nicely laid out glasses as if to punish you for the austerity of your tastes. There is an implicit irritation that you are not doing what you are supposed to. Part of this is that it is in the drinks that their margins lie and if you aren’t partaking, they aren’t making a profit out of you. I remember a few years ago the story of an Air France flight where an American passenger wanted milk with his steak and the stewards refused. . I don’t know if that would happen today. Still, the atmosphere of seething resentment remains when you don’t order a bottle of bourgogne with your meal. If they really want you to drink the wine, they should look at their mark-ups.

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May 1: a game at tennis

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When you are an aficianado of tennis style and you take pride in the elegant lines you make as you reach for a distant forehand, displaying the gleaming white and crisp cut of your Lacoste shirt, when you lovingly caress the topspin on your whipped crosscourt forehand and mop your brow with a tailored wrist cuff, when you are this kind of person, it is with some distaste that you play an opponent who doesn’t really consider his outfit, who pats his service over the net, instead of winging it across in a fierce trajectory. You have seen how the champions bounce the ball three times before commiting to a first serve, how they tap the sand from their tennis shoe, how they scoop the ball up to their open palm with one deft trick of the racket, whereas your opponent just waits there on the other side of the net, flat-footed and impassive, as though waiting for a bus, and just prods it back in an ignominious and shapeless arc, though, when he gets the chance, he wallops it.. And then you get home after the match and have to admit to your fiancee, who has already lovingly prepared your dry martini, that you humiliatingly lost to you lacklustre opponent. Your fiancee can hardly believe it. She is confused. She is livid. She sees you in a new light. But, she almost says, he was wearing denim shorts. You are not the man she thought you were, and maybe, this is not the world she thought it was. Now she even eyes her martini with distrust.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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