Last week in a children’s playground I saw a little girl turn a cartwheel. It was such a light easy charming revolution that I thought it can’t be that hard. So I thought my summer’s task could be to learn to do a cartwheel.
That was about ten day’s ago. I haven’t given it a go yet. In the park yesterday I felt the urge to step out onto the grass and follow my instincts but I didn’t. The problems crowded in upon me. I don’t want to bang my head. |I don’t like banging my head. And imagine the momentum required to push my 82kg over. And imagine the ugliness of a grotesque flailing cartwheel. I’ve come unstuck on stuff like this before. Once, leaping over a fence, confusing how spry I used to be with how less spry I now am, and my foot snagging on the top of the wire. Which me will emerge when I attempt that cartwheel? Maybe I’ll see over the next few days…

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In Bristol there is a city-wide exhibition of, I think, 79 statues of Gromit the dog from the Wallace and Gromit animation films. These are scattered throughout the city in various public areas, squares, gardens. One is even inside the cathedral as though catering for a new type of worshipper.
I am wandering round the city with my friend Chris and his three-year old daughter Clara and each time we come across a Gromit she wants to touch it, kiss it, be with it for a couple of minutes. Other city visitors, Gromit tourists, are more systematic. I think there is some kind of ‘be photographed with every Gromit in Bristol’ challenge going on. I do not know whether the rules of this challenge specify that a three-year old girl cannot also be in the photo near the Gromit or on the other side of its six-foot body. In any case, we witness considerable impatience with the three-year old. Why doesn’t she understand that modern people, not just kids but adults too, need to be photographed alone with these plastic effigies? We are confused by this desire to document an exclusive relationship with the imaginary dog. Last week I came across a similar compulsion when a grown man told me he had come all the way from Israel to be photographed alone repeat alone in front of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens. Again children had to be cleared away from the background, this time a five year old as well as a three-year old, before I took the picture of him ALONE in front of the Peter Pan statue. His committment to Peter Pan was such that he could not bear having any children sharing the frame with him.

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Proust writes a lot about what psychologists have termed the ‘misattribution of arousal’. The way in which you think you are aroused or excited by someone when, in fact, it is the context or a peripheral detail in the meeting that excites you but you pin the arousal onto the person. Note: if you are stuck in a lift with a glamorous stranger for three hours it might be the lift you are falling in love with and not the stranger. So in Proust’s novel Marcel the narrator is often fascinated by material marginalia that surround Albertine (her hat or her golf club or the mystery that is where she keeps popping up from). Marcel is like an anthropologist analysing the cultural material around her. He is particularly struck by her obsessive use of the word ‘parfaitement’. I myself remember thrilling to a prospective mate’s use of the word ‘absolument’. There must be an erotic perfume that comes off a French adverb somehow.

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Our personal behaviour with and towards others tends to the Venn Diagram Principle. If two people are trying to decide what to do they tend to do what is in the shaded intersection area, what both will accept. This will be the least extreme or risky of the activities. When there are more than two people involved the shaded area gets smaller, less risky. We can see how this can make coalition governments unable to take radical action and why large groups of Italian tourists will always stand around blocking the exits to shops and tube stations. In government, consensus makes sense but in our private lives where we are looking for thrills one can see why things get boring pretty quickly and the attractions (perhaps only temporary) of someone who imposes him or herself and overrides the consensual position. Someone who acts from the unshaded zone. I suppose the solution should be for each member of a couple to take it in turns to dictate from what lies in their unshaded area, though this is tricky. Firstly, do I dare to tell you about my unshaded area, and secondly, if I do, it might put you off me forever. Thirdly, you might be so dull that you don’t have an unshaded area.

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We can all fight against the fetichisation produced by unthinking Capitalism. The inane mantra that ‘time is money’ can be inverted to ‘money is time’, through which you put greater value on your life than on your Halifax cash Isa. Equally, I like to say that for people with well paid, time consuming jobs money has ceased to be a currency that has any value. If you do not have time or energy to consume, the money in itself has no function. It is a mere fetish. On the same theme, I read about the money shredding alarm clock this week. This clever device will tear up your bank notes if you do not get up and out of bed prompto. Your early morning will play out the debate between Time and Money in high dramaturgical form. Of course, we are so rubbish. I dare say you have to put notes into the alarm clock the night before, a requirement many will not respect.

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Most books now are self-help books. Other books just don’t cut it anymore. They don’t have the sufficient amount of gobbets or bullet points or lists. They don’t mould to your bite. I can’t read self-help books because I don’t need any help. Also I am averse to being taught anything. BY ANYONE.
Self-help seekers want 1. short cuts. 2. mentors. They are part of the wave of belief in accountability. We can account for story telling; we can account for positive thinking; we can account for happiness. Formulaic procedures can lead us in the right direction. Hollywood uses these.Jennifer Anniston is cooky; Ryan Gosling is hunky; Harrison Ford is statesmanlike; Cameron Diaz is ditzy (she can also do ballsy).This is all useful to know when you start watching a film. That way you can have a kip in the middle. Or, better still, not watch it in the first place. Familiarity is key (see familiarity Jan 18). When writing stories self-help books tell us to follow an arc. I know the arc of bio-pics. They start with a key scene in, say, Enid Blyton’s life, an emblematic scene. Then it goes back to childhood and follows her life from there. It crosses the emblematic scene about two thirds of the way through and then completes the life. The last scene is a flashback, normally guaranteed to produce a wistful tear in the eye of the spectator. Arcs, like Valentine’s Day and jokes are for amateurs. Arcs are rubbish.

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For the first time in many years I heard the expression used without irony that someone had ‘sold out’. In this case, by becoming a lawyer. The contemporary equivalent would be ‘he’s a loser’. Each expression is working at different ends of the spectrum. ‘Selling out’ imples a position on the margins with a counter culture point of view. ‘He’s a loser’ works from the centre looking out. The shift imples much about our cultural drift in recent years. Or else it imples much about the drift in my cultural entourage in recent years.
I don’t understand either point of view. Any slightly complex version of the world involves us all in compromise. And that line we will not cross will shift from day to day, from mood swing to mood swing. See Montaigne again (January 2013).

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A day in Baden Baden at the Baths there. No embarrassments this time. Last time I went there a few years back we went to the totally nude section (men, women, children, Germans don’t care).We bumped into some of Sophie’s work colleagues and I was introduced to them. Though starkers, we shook hands formally as though we were wearing suits and ties and engaged in the usual conversation about weather and holidays. I refrained from looking at anybody’s penis. To Sophie, who is half German, this is all ‘ganz normal’. To me, if there is an errant penis or ambulant bazookahs, it is ‘absolut nicht ganz normal’.

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My habit of pitching up in Paris for little meetings with old friends is disquieting for some of them, I suppose. They may have not seen me for two or three years and I come out of the blue, arriving at what may be an awkward moment for them. And then there is the intellectual challenge of finding a way to summarise in a few minutes the chaos that has been going on in the last couple of years, a chaos that might resemble a Jackson Pollock, all action and dripping. In their accounts some people are precise, controlled and abstract (Mondrian); others anecdotal (Spencer); some unable to produce order (Dubuffet) or only interested in partial accounts (Sickert); or else impenetrable (Rothko); others too afraid to show up (Munch The Scream).

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