It’s summer. It’s London. Why not taste the treats on offer? When you look at the entertainments out there you may well not want to participate. Tina Turner, The Musical; The Jersey Boys: We will Rock You. You would have to tie me down with washing line to make me watch any of these musical extravaganza. All that high decibel warbling and audience hysteria. Get me outta there already! Even Shakespearean theatre is to be eschewed these days with its ideologically driven takes on the classics. Henry V as a study in immigration. Titus Andronicus a feminist reading. You can pay hundreds of pounds for this nonsense. Here’s what I did last night. I put my feet in a bucket of hot water. Then I lay down on the settee with headphones on and listened to the first four movements of Mahler 7. Not the last movement, obviously. This relaxed me sufficiently to sit down and read German for two hours (Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March , followed by Heinrich Boell’s Katerina Blum). Both in their own ways exemplary. I have never slept so well.
Author Archives: paulbilic2003
July 10: not the dosage i’m used to
It doesn’t take much to put me off my stride. I have never really had a proper full-time job of the 9-5 variety but I still need structure. This time of year always has me on edge. The change in rhythm. No people or too many people. Not the dosage I’m used to. A couple of weeks ago I supervised a trip to New York. That was too much people for my introvert sensibility. Now not enough. Plus people from my past popping up randomly. Ghosts of earlier times. How are you to relate to them? Do you read them as they were? In which case you must also be as you were. First, you decipher the physique. A pair of glasses here where once there were none. A voice that has shifted. A point of view that has softened The truth is that you can’t know. These are just wisps of people that float in from the past and they cannot really be deciphered. Take no position on them because you cannot know. Plus the fact that my days are empty. It’s probably good for me. I have to go to places I don’t usually have the chance to get to. You have to lose your volition when you are in an unaccustomed place. It entails more suffering than the routine. But I suppose it does you good despite yourself. You don’t think you’re doing much exploring by sitting at home with a cup of tea but you are.
July 9: case one has died
Today I read the news that autism case one has died. Don was eighty six and died recently. He was the first officially designated case of autism in the 1930s/40s before the condition had been defined. The young boy called people by numbers, blamed the needle when he was pricked by someone, got people’s attention by pinging them with an elastic band. He was labelled a dullard and a simpleton before Leo Kanner examined him, articulated the features of this condition and coined the word autism as ‘an inability to relate to others in the ordinary way’. When I teach Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, officially published in 1942, I am quick to note that if the book were written today the main character Meursault would probably be seen as on the autism spectrum rather than the heroic existentialist band-width.
A worrying feature is that autism has recently attained a kind of cool status, an extension of nerd cool. The binary certainties of their world view are refreshing to many. The same tendancy runs through some modern vernacular usage. It is seen as a good thing to be obsessed with something. The BBC encourages us to binge watch their box sets on iPlayer. Obsession is never a good thing. Nerd techno evangelists with their binary simplicities are our new messiahs, whilst what we need are people with a more nuanced approach to life. The terrible dictators and tyrants of the 2oth Century were also absolutists. Compromise was a dirty word, but if you cannot balance your positions you can easily fall into obsessive, absolutist and dangerous states of mind. Being autistic is not cool, not especially creative. Like much mental illness, it is a prison.
Don lived a good life and found meaningful roles in society. He hald down a job and was a respected member of the community, but he would have probably been happier relating to others in a less extraordinary way.
July 5: the austro-hungarian mode
There is a moment in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March where the grandson of the great hero of Solferino who had saved the life of the emperor and had consequently received honours that raised the class of the family into minor aristocracy explains his hatred of cards. He is a lieutenant in the army during peace time and spends his time in minor nineteenth century official acts and at the casino. He has a collection of stiff Austro-Hungarian principles, one of which is his hatred of cards and espousal of dominoes. Gentlemen, I recommend to you the game of dominoes, he proclaims. It is upstanding and teaches moderation. This type of principle rules his increasingly empty life in the shadow of his renowned forebear whose presence he forever feels like an icy wind on the nape of his neck.
I find that I too have a number of these principles that I can summon forth when required. Gentlemen, I might say to the virtual casino, you have before you a man who has never seen a Star Wars film. The hush runs through the assembly. Or else. I cannot accept your kind offer of a plate of asparagas for, as you may have heard, out of principle I never eat a vegetable starting with the letter a. I am single-handedly keeping alive the Austro-Hungarian mode.
July 3: it breaks open my entire routine, this misplacement
I can’t find my gym pants. I can’t understand where there can be. I go to the gym in my gym pants. Then I come back in them. Then I either put them in the dirty wash or back into my gym bag. There is nowhere else they can go. And now I can’t find them anywherw. How does one explain these missing things? When I was twelve I remember coming back from a school football match wearing two pairs of underpants. As my mum said at the time, that was an aberration but what of the other boy who came home with no underpants at all. Had he not noticed? At twelve you might not, but at my age? Where are those gym pants? It has ruined my regime. I can’t find an alteranative. My gym shorts are too brief for weather that has turned a bit chilly. It breaks open my entire routine, this misplacement. And then one things leads to another. If you can’t find the pants you can’t do the exercise and if you can’t do the exercise you go about your business with guilt and the guilt contaminates. I am going to spend ten minutes now having a proper root around to resolve this issue once and for all. What usually happens in these cases is that you resolve in yourself the conclusion that life is a a random contingent material, only for many years later for the transgressive article to turn up in some odd corner of the flat. What you must do then is accept that the world is not so contingent, but rather that you are just plain rubbish. A banal but necessary admission, as we have come to accept.
June 29: visceral repulsion
I am an indifferent kind of person mostly. My reactions are not visceral. I am pretty old, so I wait for evidence before concluding. And then my conclusions are always inconclusive, amendable at all times. Education and enlightenment have taught me so much and I am grateful to them. And yet, there are people who evince from me a visceral repulsion. It does not happen often but I can think of two or three occasions where it has happened. The question I ask myself is whether this is a kind of reaction based on specific but sub-conscious material or whether it is purely pheremonal, an animal phenomenon. If I break down the information about a specific person: brusque; bad-mannered; a shambling walker; talks too much. Is this enough for me to turn away when they speak, to glaze over with distaste. After all, I know and like lots of people who display more unlikeable traits than this fairly harmless selection. Am I responding to some occult racism or sectarianism in myself? Or is it just some secret odour that seeps out of the person that my body cannot tolerate. Who knows? Just can’t bear their presence. Will keep out of their way as best I can.
May 31: in the cracks between the slabs
Attending theatre and browsing the shelves of bookshops I find depressing these days. All the products on offer are marketed through their capacity to hit a buzzword or an issue of the day. When I saw a production of Henry V they seemed to want to convince me that colonialism and climate were the two main themes of this play. No, colonialism and climate are two of the main themes of our day. You will only have a book read by an agent or a publisher if it hits contemporary issues right in the bull’s eye.. Everything aims to comfort you in your certainty. Of course, an important point about literature is that it reaches into the cracks between the slabs of conviction; those ill-defined places that (if this is an interesting product) even the author cannot explain any other way than her or his ambiguous, uncertain text. Fiction is a fumbling investigation; a turning over of soil, not the laying of a foundation. That is why it is a novel and not a treatise.
May 24: non respondants
It being spring and the weather getting better you find yourself going out a bit more to others (the French call this the other, as though all contacts were emblematic and of the same type) . In this spirit I realise that in the last couple of weeks I have sent emails to people I have not seen for many years. They were prompted by chance moments; re-reading a poem I associated with someone; seeing the job title of someone I used to know randomly somewhere. From the three emails I have winged out (modern people call this reached out, don’t they?) I have received no response. I reached out and they were non-respondants. It could be that they simply want nothing to do with me. I am a poor memory. It could be that they are unhappy with themselves. What have I become? they think when my face pops up from nowhere as a cookie in their mind. I don’t really want to parade my older self to this person from the past. Fair do’s to all concerned, I suppose. I am a notorious getter-in-toucher. I am liable to just pop up on your doorstep; stick my nose into a complicated family situation. I actively cultivate being blithely oblivious. Hats off to me.
May 21: such thing as a free lunch
Last week was a week studded with free events. On Saturday I was invited to the Chelsea v Nottingham Forest match at Samford Bridge. On Wednesday morning I was invited to see the final rehersal of the Budapest Festival Orchestra before their Mahler 9 concert in the evening and at lunch time on the same day I was invited to a meal at the soft opening of a new restaurant in Mayfair. All these outings were free. They all suit me. Football; Mahler; food. Three of my favourite activities. I ask myself whether I should think that these invites are merited in some way. Have I put myself in the way of them? Do they reflect on me or are they just random? Do you get gratuities by frequenting the right sort of people, or perhaps by coming across in the right way? In which case, I have worked for my supper. There is no such thing as a free lunch, they say. But this would imply that I have done something to deserve these events. It would be presumptious to say that I have. They are just chance. A ticket going spare; an event offered as a marketing bait; a chance neighbourly encounter. They are random felicities which have come about through no work or competence on my part. But don’t worry. There will be occasions where I will have to do painful stuff for nothing. On such occasions I will remember the Mahler and bite my lip.
May 7: some consolation
I felt I wanted to watch the Coronation of Charles III on the telly. I was interested in the music and the spectacle. I’m not sure where I stand on the monarchy. I’m kind of for it, though I shrink in horror when I’m supposed to call someone Lady Suchabody or Lord Suchaface instead of Mrs and Mr like the rest of us. If ever they gave me a knighthood or an OBE I’d probably turn it down. I don’t mind Charles though. He was caught between generations and has done his best to try and find a way. I find I resent rich kids with VIP tickets to Glastonbury more than I resent royalists queueing 12 hours to glimpse the royal carriage for two seconds. What an ordeal for Charles, balancing a crown, an orb and a sceptre, as he tries to remember the right response from 800 years ago. It felt a bit like that for me conducting A level orals last week, juggling with timing, the regulations and the responses. Still, there’s some consolation. At least, they’re not making me listen to Take That tonight. I just switched on the telly and there was poor Charlie waving a little union flag and trying to keep interested. He’ll sleep well tonight, poor lamb.
peoplearerubbish 