“I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.” — P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves
'kate moss: an icon of willpower and strength' -
Here witness Giles Coren battling against ‘the disastrous collapse of journalistic standards…bloggorrhoea, the web generally, and the Cowellisation of our culture’ by producing truly revelatory statements like ‘“Fat and happy” is a myth, a monstrous lie.’
Actually, he’s right to criticise the hypocrisy of a media which hysterically condemned Kate Moss’ comment (‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’) while banging on and on about weight loss all the time. But with an astounding lack of self-consciousness, what Coren’s completely failed to realise is that this ugly, meretricious thing he’s written is part of the very culture he claims to so despise. It’s worse even than his ‘instant-gratification, bling-bling, X Factor, fizzy pop, white-bread world’ because — well, call me old-fashioned, but I would have thought that getting a half-page in a national newspaper means you have a duty to do better than that shit rather than leaping into it and rolling around like an over-eager labrador.
Also, nobody likes you as much as Victoria Coren.
Moving house is regularly ranked amongst births, marriages and deaths as one of the most stressful experiences in life. Oddly, I had expected it to be more affecting than it’s been for me. I don’t feel wholly unmoved, but already part removed.
A little context: my family recently sold the house we’ve lived in for over twenty years (i.e. ever since I was born) in order to move into a smaller one not far away in Chiswick. The old place is just too big for our needs — it has five floors, including a loft conversion and a basement flat. For a long time now we’ve been trying slowly to give or throw away two decades’ worth of accumulated junk, but the house still feels full of stuff, even though the rooms are once again growing larger without bookshelves and pictures on the walls. This weekend, the removal men are coming to take away all the bulkiest non-essential furniture and put it in storage, leaving us with just the basics before the actual day of exchange next monday.
All this seems like a distant, impossible prospect to me, perhaps because I’ve never lived anywhere else for a substantial period of time — nowhere for more than a month or two, and never in any arrangement that was anything other than temporary. There was always here, the room from which I write this, waiting for me. But I realised just the other day that I’d be at work next monday, when the last of the furniture is carted out and the keys handed over, and that I won’t get to walk around the empty rooms, won’t get to say goodbye to the place. Despite the fact that I’ve been packing and preparing for weeks, that was the first moment where I really understood that I could never, never come back here again.
‘One can never go home,’ said somebody whose name I forget. Variations on that saying are common, the meaning roughly equivalent to the notion that you can never step in the same river twice: Kierkegaard’s frustration with the impossibility of true repetition. ‘Home’ as more of a idealistic construct than an actuality. And I agree — in a sense, I left the ‘home’ of my childhood many, many years ago. The house has never felt quite the same since I returned from university, and indeed its features and furnishings have migrated from room to room so many times that it seems to have existed in countless different variants over the years.
But the fact is that there is and must be such a thing as home; certain places impress themselves so strongly on our minds that we can never forget them. They will always be the hallways we feel our way through in the dark, the stairs our feet find by instinct, the rooms we visit in our dreams. It might even be more correct to say that ‘one can never leave home’.
My own favourite work of literature on this subject is a short story by Henry James called The Jolly Corner. The lightness of the title is misleading; next to The Turn of the Screw it’s arguably his finest and most disturbing ghost story. In it, a wealthy, successful middle-aged man visits his childhood home first out of curiosity, then as a matter of obsession, frequently wandering its empty rooms at night. He is hunting something — or is that something hunting him? What he seeks is himself, or rather his alternate self, not quite his id but a vision of what might have been, of youthful possibilities long since departed. The implication is not only that the most haunting of all ghosts are those which come from within the mind, but that the most frightening thing we might encounter on a dark night of the soul is ourselves:
‘He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto felt them—before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.’
Some names I have for my dog that are not my dog’s name:
‘Finally, this summer, the two-storey house in Pfäffikon was bought for around €1m (£880,000) – much of it raised by donations from members. A newsletter sent out this month to members has pictures of the site, holiday-brochure style, with alluring captions: “Beside lies a tiny lake; a little waterfall dabbles.” After the Heidi-esque scenery we have driven through, the location of the modern, blue-metal construction is rather a surprise. The house is in an industrial zone, in the shadows of a vast grey machine-components factory; to the left there are factories, to the right there are factories, in front there is a football pitch. It’s not that the place is exactly charmless, it is just a bit peculiar. To enter, guests make their way across wooden decking over a large goldfish pond (which does have a tinkling water feature), and then they arrive in a light, open-plan room, with a hospital bed (which reclines electronically) in one corner, and a large white sofa in another. There is another room with a second bed to die in across the hallway. By the bed there is a CD player and a few CDs – Offenbach’s Gaîté Parisienne and Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza – left by former clients. There are open boxes of tissues ready on the tables. The former owner had the constellation of Orion picked out in halogen lights in the ceiling. On the shelves there is a kitsch stone statue of a cherub, and a few slightly wilting orchids. There is nothing funereal about the place; instead the space is sunny, clean and neutral, not unlike a holiday rental apartment.’
A fascinating glimpse inside the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Blackly comic (’“We have had good weather for the last few weeks, so people don’t call us so much,”’) and thought-provoking, apart from this unsettling comment from the founder:
‘“In the second world war they closed the borders to Jews and those Jews who wanted to come here were repelled, and were murdered in concentration camps. And now we have people looking to end their lives in Switzerland and they are sent back and forced to live on. What is the difference? What is more cruel?”’
I call Godwin’s Law.
I was going to draw your attention to this article on the ‘outing’ of Belle de Jour and the problems of anonymous blogging but I can’t get the ‘people talking with-oooout speaking’ bit from The Sound of Silence out of my head. And now, I hope, neither can you. It must be a sign of something. Something silent but with sunny harmonies and an overdubbed electric backing that was recorded and released without the consent of the songwriters. Everything is connected, you guys.
Often I wish I were one of those people who actively despises sleep: the kind of person who regards it as an immense waste of time, who goes to bed well before midnight and is awake at dawn, who switches off their alarm clock and immediately sets about making the best of the day. As it is, I’m greedy. If I have to get up, I’ll get up (and I’m rarely late for whatever it is I get up for) but if I have no particular appointment to keep I’ll gladly doze for hours, ideally while listening to Radio 4. When I do get up I inevitably feel bad about it, even though I’ve found that if I am forced out of bed for any reason on such a lazy day, I’m unlikely to do anything useful with the time I would’ve spent in bed anyway.
Marcus Aurelius was particularly hard on those over-fond of their beds:
‘In he morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?…Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?…[Sleep] is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will.’
But is oversleeping always a symptom of low self-esteem? True, while in bed I can momentarily forget anything worrying me; I can feel safe, turn my back on my own nature, my own allotted place in the world, and succumb to oblivion — except it is not quite ‘oblivion’ because whether I’m asleep or drifting in and out of consciousness, the sleepy supine state brings not a complete insensibility but a turning of the mind inward. We can never cease to be ourselves. One could equally say that the tendency towards idleness comes from a kind of luxuriating self-love — choosing to follow an ideal of one’s self buried in the mind rather than the public persona we make each day in what we do, in what we must necessarily call the real world.
Conrad’s famous dictum that ‘We live as we dream — alone…’ ought, I think, to be taken entirely seriously. It may be that we are never more ourselves and never more alone than we are when we are asleep. From time to time it may even take great courage to face the inner self which is both composer and resident of our dreams. I wonder if there isn’t something of an answer to the reductions of Aurelius in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, where the poet’s craving for oblivion only serves to turn his mind in on itself in a fantastical reverie of ‘embalmèd darkness’, finally settling on the realisation that ‘fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do’. Reality always seems lacking after we have sailed through the infinite worlds of sleep, but after the dreaming, we must wake in the wake of the dream. ‘Tomorrow was another day,’ as the old song goes.
From The Beginning of the Story by Lee Harwood.
Read the whole thing here (PDF - scroll down a bit).
whatever happened to 'the two remaining heads on temple bar'? -
In case you wondered what all that was (partly) about, here is the PDF of an old New York Times article far too weird to be effectively summarised here.