In my time I have on numerous occasions built up a library of books and then facilitated their escape. As an undergraduate I accumulated a modest collection  but when I finished my time I went into the quadrangle of the college and broached half-strangers, asking them if they wanted to pop into my room and choose some books for free. That way I could go and live in Paris with just a travel bag.

I reaccumulated in Paris. At one stage I moved apartment and a colleague saw my boxes of books and said Can I borrow some? I said yes and she drove off with a couple of boxes. After six months I said Can I get those books back? She said Only if you come round for dinner?  That was a demand I was unwilling to comply with. Those books escaped.

When I moved from Paris to London after thirteen years I left my books in boxes in someone’s apartment. My friend Max ferried them back for me in his boot and dumped them in my flat in Bethnal Green Road. One or two of the boxes remained behind in Paris. Those books escaped.

Recently my flat in London has become overstocked with books and I had the idea to gradually transfer some of them to the library at work. I had shifted about fifty in the last couple of weeks and planned to move more. On Friday I noticed that the books I had moved to the library had been taken. Stolen is the word. At present there is an investigation as to who might have taken them, which will be futile. More books have escaped.

They are bits of you. They flake off like bits of you over the years. I suppose it’s all in the way of things.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

Memory is a big story in my life. If you work with language, you juggle with language, your own and any others you might have picked up, you are constantly scouring for words and expressions from the past, all drenched with the lived life of the time.. I no longer keep a diary of any sort, electronic or physical, with the intention of keeping my memory active. Is my memory less good because I am older and have more in the box to sort through when I look for something? Some words I block on. When I look for them I must panic internally and they just don’t come. They tend to be abstract words. For example: autistic; empiricism; casuistry; placebo. I have been trying to remember these words for years. When I look for them I suddenly get lost in an little internal labyrinth. I tend to remember the rhythms of words or quotes without recalling the words themselves. I have what you might call a musical memory. My partner has a photographic memory. She sees something and retains the picture in her mind’s eye However, she will forget something I say from one moment to the next. This could be because I am am easily forgotten Leave the door open, I say. All right, she says. Three seconds later she will slam it. She also has a poor emotional memory. She cannot recall how bad her stomach acid was after an argument. Her brain eradicates all memory of a difficult experience. You are what you remember, which means that you are forever being eroded and chipped at. In the end all your angles are ground down and you resemble a smooth stone like all the other smooth stones on the landscape.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

I am re-reading Great Expectations and the wonderful scene where Pip as a gentleman in London is visited by Joe Gargary the blacksmith, his brother-in-law and erstatz father figure from his lowly childhood on the Kent marshes. Pip has become a snob, or at least a young man having difficulties integrating his lowly past and grand present frequentations. He can see himself as a kind of monster but is unable to manage the situation to help Joe feel at ease. Pip is comfortable with Herbert Pocket meeting Joe, a friend he likes but does not fear, but wants to keep Joe away from Bentley Drummle, a contemporary he dislikes but fears. It is a marvellous evocation of our complex relationship with the past and our inability to put into practice what we know to be the right behaviour. There is even a secret allusion to Dickens’ own hidden past where Joe tells Pip and Herbert of the London sight he has seen, the blacking factory, where they make shoe polish from, amongst other ingredients, human excrement. Dickens himself had been forced to work there are as child but never in his life revealed this humiliating fact about his past. The shameful past is again alluded to in that Joe is a blacksmith and Pip had been his apprentice, blacksmith and blacking being the secret code of this hidden past. It is a remarkable piece of writing, comic and dreadful, walking that fine line of high control and yet also material that is mysteriously beyond the writer’s control because it is his own chaotic life. Once artistic material is totally controlled it becomes dead meat. Here is the reason why modern creative writing courses or manuals produce awful content, writing by numbers.

We are all constantly confronted by our past and our present colliding, moments where we need to manage what we think we once were and what we think we are now, moments where our personality is stretched like india rubber. If, like Pip, you come from one place and end up in a completely different place, you need to have a personality large enough to contain both. This is something Pip learns over the course of the novel (I don’t know if Dickens ever learnt it) and is a competence we all need to face over the course of a life.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

I went to a little concert alone this evening between 6 and 7. It was Schubert’s Quintet in C Major with two cellos. It is a well known piece; many people’s favourite. I used to listen to this piece many years ago very often, so it brought back memories of that time. The yearning strains of the second movement. How I would have affixed my desires and melancholies of a young man onto this music. The piece this evening acted to reacquaint myself with my younger self. These days there are yearnings, I suppose, but not so much. I don’t function the same way The melancholy now is about the passage of time and the people I used to spend time with, now mostly distant, out of my ambit, for whatever reason. As I was leaving my seat with the rest of the crowd there was an argument going on between two men. As I understood it, one of the men had tapped someone, perhaps the other man, on the shoulder during the music to stop them making a noise of some sort and the other man had taken umbrage at it. For him too, perhaps both of them, this music was some special resonance of their past that must not be interfered with. The music was a vessel that contained the normally unreachable past. The man tapping on the other man’s shoulder had broken the vessel.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

I was at a concert last night in the Royal Festival Hall. It was Messaien’s Turangalila symphony, one of the longest and loudest symphonies you could come across, a piece that is ecstatic, rhythmically-driven, very loud, relentless, with an enormous percussion and brass section, a piano, a celesta, various glockespiels and xylophones and an ondes martenot, a weird electronic instrument which gives out sounds as if from a1950s sci-fi film and lasting about an hour and a half. I was sitting on the side but close enough to the massive orchestra and also with a side view of the main bulk of the stalls. Halfway through one of the loudest movements I heard this tormented death rattle come form the centre of the audience. When I looked across I saw a man of a certain age with his head thrown back letting out what seemed to be his last gasp. Over the next ten minutes concert hall assistants, security men and finally paramedics arrived and he was eventually taken away, fortunately still alive, in a wheelchair. Throughout all of this the relentless concert went on.

Before the incident I had been thinking about the music. Did it represent our reality? Or would a more domestic modest texture best reproduce the everyday? The soundtrack to the life and death moment was rather effective, though. Some moments are pretty ecstatic and life-affirming or life-destroying. It’s just that they are few and far between or that we don’t face them. Still, he did not die, so we can all get back to the domestic now.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

In the cafe it’s large or medium for the coffee. I say small. That’ll be medium then, they say. I shrug the shoulders. Do you get my point? Large and small are not indicators of absolute size; they are indicators of relative size. Medium has no place in that binary scale. They are asking me to participate in their hype. In some places it’s large or super large, which warrants a guffaw. These days you are drawn into the nonsense, whether you like it or not. It’s hard to get a tee-shirt without a brand blaring out your unwilling adherence. My adherences are scant. They’re mostly to myself. Even the things I do adhere to are not for blaring out to the world. I like Mahler; I like Proust; I like Man Utd (in theory). But why would I want to sell myself through connection with them. They can do without me. And I must do without them. I know their glory won’t stick to me. What would stick would only be desperation. I probably have enough of that about me as it is.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

It’s a bleeder, said Gareth, my dentist, as he applied another swab to the gap out of which he had just extracted a recalcitrant molar. He was rather excited. Look at that, he’d said, holding up a bloody tooth with some straggles hanging off it. It’s all come out in one go. Normally you have to spend ten minutes scraping and drilling out all the bits. Not with this one. Everything in one yank. That’s very rare. I didn’t know whether to be proud or humbled. £240 later I crossed the road and dropped into the clothes shop Massimo Duti to kill a few minutes. The salesman was I really like your jacket. It was an old corduroy I had bought second hand over twenty years ago. Yes I said. It’s comfortable. He was still admiring. Saville Row? he said. I told him I thought not.

Still. From a bleeder to a leader in ten minutes.

We were in Paris last week and looking for a bench to sit on on the canal. They were all taken but there was just one man on one of them so we squeezed on with him. After a few minutes another man came over. Both men were black. The man who came over said it was good to see that we were not afraid to sit on a bench with a ‘negro’ (his word) and that he noticed that my friend had some Chinese elements in her look and that he liked to eat ‘nems’ (Vietnamese products) from time to time. In brief, we should all live together in harmony. I nodded along. The man on the bench said nothing. When we were about to leave I said ‘bonne continuation’ to the man on the bench who grinned back. He’s right. He just wants to get on with his life without every act being a political one. Sometimes just sharing bench is the best political act you can do.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

After the football last night I started watching a serial killer film. You know the plot already. They have been identical since Silence of the Lambs came out. There is a serial killer out there. He captures young women and puts them in his cellar. They are chained up in various cells. It’s quite a fancy cellar. A cop, an unconventional cop, is obsessed with the serial killer. He has a seventeen year old daughter. She is a difficult girl. One Thanksgiving she has a strop and goes out into the dangerous night. She is captured by the serial killer. Now it’s personal! At this key moment in the story the director or writer chooses to place the emblematic scene where the hero, the cop, smashes up his own office in macho fury or a fit of pique, as we might call it in English English. This is a common scene in American lore. It shows the cop is a proper man. It also shows that he has feelings, which is not a given. We are probably not meant to pity him, rather admire him for ruining the decor in his police station office. You know, the one, with the mood board with snapshots of the girls and little quotes from ancient wisdoms, often the Book of Revelations, because the serial killer is mainly a learned fellow with a great interest in the ancient texts. The serial killer thing is just a side interest.

Well, I watched about 45 minutes of the movie. I kind of got the gist.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

As we age, our attachments on all sides are loosening and drifting away. With the younger generation we look with irritation on the constant use of air pods and screens, let alone opinions. With ones own older generation it becomes more and more difficult to retain connections. In the natural way of things people drift away. they move geographically and they move into different social circles. They may have no reason to remain in contact. The past may be a barrier; they may not wish to show themselves in their altered state (physical or psychological); they may not deign to have you as an attachment any more. The healthy human wants to maintain his or her links with young and old alike. But everything frustrates this. Your circle diminishes. In the end it will be a mere single point. Then that goes out. Still, let’s keep pushing out to the circumferences.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com