I was in a second-hand shop in Southwold, Suffolk last week and found a pale green shirt that looked as if it might fit. Second-hand clothes are mostly in better condition than my normal clothes waiting for me at home. They’ve certainly been ironed more recently. I took it to the till to buy it and the young man there said , it’s the same colour as what you’re wearing already. I said, yes, I’m very predictable. Pale green is the colour I have learnt to buy. Different times of life dictate different colours. I can’t really wear red anymore like I used to, being high in colour as it is. I look like some Dickensian pie-eater if I’ve got a red shirt on. I have to have colours that compliment my high colour. By high colour I mean that as the day progresses I gradually move into the zone of spntaneous combustion. I start the day pale as an underfed vampire but as I move forward past midday the blood starts to flow. There is another batch of colours, I find. Favourite colours that I would like to wear but have learnt to eschew, whereby I am obliged to fight against my self. Brown is the big one here. I probably like brown so much as it was the colour my mum used to dress me in as opposed to the blue she gave my big brother. It must be that deep emotional pull that drags me into the magntic field of brown. Fashion, of course, is irrelevant, working on the assumption that we can all wear any colour for the benefit of their season’s profits. In recent years I have come round to the opinion that blue is about right for me, which, of course, goes massively against my deep-set identity, blue being my brother’s colour. My mind doesn’t know how to deal with this. It is just one of those things that keeps my sense of my own identity fluid, or, rather, dragged around a bit. I am not any of those things I once thought I was. Imagine that.
Author Archives: paulbilic2003
July 5: opinion, ambition, aim, aversion, appetite
The Stoics deal with only those things that are within our control. You might characterise them as opinion, ambition, aim, aversion, appetite. All the other stuff is beyond us, so there is no point wrrying about them. Body, property, reputation, office. We cannot much control what our body will do to us; belongings may be swept away; nobody can control their own reputation, in our hierarchised work we cannot control how we fare. Of course, we need to look at the things we can control too. Opinion, ambition, aim, aversion, appetite all see to be within our control, but they mostly come from the pressures of our culture, our background and the kinks our brain has given us. All this is, of course, the self, but not perhaps the self the Stoics had in mind. Our dreams are set for us by these little traitors within.
June 28: the protocol of deceit
There is no protocol for deceit. Not many of us get to inhabit the Hollywood of everyday life. We do not participate in high speed car chases through Paris by night; do not foil a plot to kill the President or escape the grasp of some shadowy foreign agent. But we do, practically all of us, play a leading role in the high drama of romantic betrayal. A mobile phone left charging on the coffee table; a receipt for a restaurant found in a jacket pocket; unexplained absences; a lightness of step that might reveal another significant other. So many clues you might pick up on, and so many of us may have lived these scenarios, either as the perpetrator or victim of deceit. Often both. Sometimes multiple times.
But we are allowed to change partner, are we not? It is not immoral to leave someone, but how are we to legitimately enact the transition? There will be phases in the decision to leave someone. Dissatisfaction; boredom; the encounter with another; the excitement of the new; the first transgressive act; the routine of transgression; the decision to want the change; the pact of the new couple; the practicalities fixed; the decision on how to break the news to the injured party. These are the stations of the cross on the road to betrayal. But on this spectrum, when does the poor behaviour start? There is no protocol of decit. no concensus on when an nascent affair becomes morally inadmissible. A gap in the market for some enterprising chronicler of the contemporary zeitgeist.
June 22: your banner in the field will not suffice
Authority needs to be erased, once you no longer have the authentic right to it. Teachers or professors can find that difficult. You can’t assume the right to authority, once you no longer have the role, even if you might still have claims to greater knowledge. You can find it difficult to assume the position of equal. It is only on the level ground of conversation that you might authentically assume authority again, but you must prove it in joust. Your banner in the field will not suffice. It cannot be taken as given.
Equally, signaling your identity cannot be acceptable either. We do not want to know what gender you are, what age you are, your greater experience or youth which might imply a greater skill or competence. Nothing must be assumed. As with authority, identitiy must be proven on the level ground of conversation.
I will judge you based on man to man combat.
April 19: the outer shell
In the Japanese cafe in Soho we heard a couple talking at an adjoining table. A young woman (we think she was Chinese) and a young man (we think he was Japanese) talking in English. We think it was a first date to judge by the types of question and answer. They explained their jobs to each other. Maybe they had come via a dating app. In a first date you are in the outer shell, still quite far from any core. The electrons have space to orbit. The other person is still a long way off. There were long expositions taking place. Polite nods. Good listening. Open faces. There was a moment when she looked away, having heard his introductory material. Her eyes drifted. Unimpressed.
If there is a second meeting they will look to move into the next orbit, closer to the nucleus. Suddenly, the listening will be less respectful. The swarms of electrons spinning round will be more chaotic. Interruptions in the dialogue will ensue. Collision may take place. If they make it to the next shell, there is more at stake. The nucleus beckoning. There will be gambits, provocations, pronouncements, revelations. There may then be strategic withdrawals. realizations. Or else, infatuation, bewitchment. And so on into the inner shell. Will the centre hold? Will the nucleus receive them both intact? We left before there was clear resolution. But that drift of her eyes seemed telling.
21 march : hiders
People do a lot of hiding these days. Behind their screens or slipping past you in the street without acknowledgement. It happens more and more, I find. I had a leak into my kitchen from upstairs a few weeks ago. I got the plumber to come and stop it. I called the landlord from upstairs. I said I’d send him the invoice. It was his dish-washer that disrupted. I’m getting my kitchen ceiling redecorated. It was ruined. That’s another invoice for upstairs. No response to my email; no response to my Whatsapp. I think the term is ghosted, or is that just for romance. I got the firm that looks after the building onto him. Still no peek from him. He’s a hider. He’s hiding the £700 he owes me.
I am a hider too every couple of weeks when my cleaner comes and I go next door to Tom’s for half an hour when I come home too early. Obviously, I don’t want her cleaning round my feet while I’m sitting around drinking tea. When my cleaner leaves my flat I hide behind Tom’s window. There is an angle she can see into Tom’s kitchen where I am also drinking tea. I don’t want her seeing me avoiding her. I’m a hider too. But my hiding isn’t costing anyone £700.
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March 8: my little room of things
Everybody must know the kind of people who talk a lot about their lives but never ask you a question about your own. When you are politely listening to them rambling on about their preoccupations, you are nodding along, varying the quality of your light smile, adjusting your limbs. You ask them all the right questions at all the right times. From time to time you attempt to nudge the exchange into a more general zone where some neutral material might be considered. From there perhaps you might be able to lightly push the conversation off into a a different direction, but no, they come marauding into the space and drag you back into the them-zone. They will not accept the air of that abstract space which is the intermediate place where civilized conversation goes to find another subject.
It’s not that I want to talk about my life. I have nothing much I want to talk about. I’m not pushing anything in particular. If the narrow side-door that leads out from that big barn were to be slid open and I were to be escorted through into my little room of things, I would probably want to just point out my scant possessions and then usher my interlocutor out again. But after two hours of relentless clobbering I am ready to leave my little room where it is and just slip away into the night.
1 march: funny jobs
My friend Chris got a job a few weeks ago. He’d been sniffing around for one for a time. Freelance work wasn’t reliable enough. I remember I realised the same thing years ago. He explained his new job to me but I didn’t quite understand it. I thought I’ll get the gist as we go along. It’s an engineering/architectural firm that works with older buldings, sometimes of historical interest, repairing and renovating. Chris, as I understood it, as an art historian, was to be a kind of consultant on art and historical matters. He says he manages the gallery where they don’t really do any exhibitions. I think he said he makes the other workers fill in documents about the work they’re doing. Is he a kind of documentalist? I don’t know. One, not unconsiderable, thing he is doing is adding to the culture in the workplace.
People have funny jobs sometimes. There are jobs where you are the resident storyteller, which doesn’t mean you tell everyone nice stories as they get on with their day’s work. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I suspect the main function is to break the uniformity of the culture.. Of course, many years ago when I worked in France, I had probably the strangest job. Three of us would go into companies around France and work with a group from the company, (say, the director. the head of sales, the director’s secretary, a couple of people off the shop floor, someone from marketing). We’d make them sit on a rug while wearing a variety of masks and go through an exercise based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Moreno’s psychodrama and Grotowski’s ideas on spontaneous expression every morning for a week. There was a lot of theory we went over back at the Paris headquarters of CESDEL (Centre d’Expression Spontanee Dramaturgique et Linguistique). What we did was a method based on a methodology, not a mere procedure. The word procedure was only uttered with disdain. Dramaturgy was the investment of time and space, whch we tried to bring into the method, especially in the the triangle of space and time elements. We got into a lather about all this stuff. Of course, there was a lot of money in in-house training in France in those days and some companies were up for the latest methods. And, to tell you the truth, it taught me a lot. In the years of teaching that have followed, I have never worried about preparing lessons. If you are not working material through with students spontaneously, it’s dead meat. It’s not a method!
24 february: the space between the two
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.
21 february: embrace the flux
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.
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