sartre's waiter (variation)

Some people are so in love with the concept of what they are trying to achieve that they forget what it is they are actually trying to achieve.

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dealing with the inevitable

If you try too hard to achieve something, you are liable to fail at it.

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(And success is nothing more than another trick of the mind.)

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cautionary notice

Sentences, phrases and words: all of these things combine to over-simplify the world.

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Behind every sentence lurks a galaxy of meaning which can only be revealed through the use of further sentences.

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Never believe a word anyone says. Not because they lie, but because the truth is unspeakable.

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hemingway

If you've lived life to the full, the older you get the harder it becomes to find reasons to keep going.

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south west london tales 2

It's gone midnight and we're sitting outside the theatre in the car park after the last show drinking rum and beer. The pretty girl who I've barely spoken to in three months is sitting next to me. She apologises for not really being present during the run. She says it's because her personal life has been getting in the way. She can't help it. It's in her blood. I ask about her parents. She tells me her mother lives in Eritrea and her father's in Paris. He's an actor and a writer and a spoilt child who stamps his feet down the phone. The mother works for the Red Cross. She's a different kettle of fish, but she's in Eritrea. I ask her how old they are. Just making conversation. She doesn't know. She thinks about it. She says her father was born in. She thinks about it. The same year as her mother. Sixty six. On the bus home this information will sink in as some kind of a crossroads, an unforseen detour into the desert just off Marble Arch.

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west london tales 7

It's half past two in the morning. I'm walking across the iron bridge to the Harrow Road. I'm drunk. Someone's walking behind me. There are people on the streets. Then the someone is walking beside me. I'm listening to music. The someone crosses my path under the flyover. I try to move away from her, increasing my speed. I look round. She's still there. She's talking to me. I take one headphone out. She asks me if she can come and stay at my place. I'm befuddled and bemused. I keep walking. She sticks to me. I tell her I have a wife and three children. She doesn't budge. We've reached the library and she's still there. She says she knows she can't stay at mine because of my wife but she still wants to stay at mine. I ask her where she's from. She says she's from Birmingham. She says they sent her away. I take her to the hostel. Ring the buzzer and a man lets us in. He comes down the stairwell. He says there aren't any beds. He says she should go to the police station. We have to leave. I give the woman the money left in my pocket and tell her to go to Euston. It's just down the road. Wait and get on a train to Birmingham. She says she doesn't have enough money for the train. She says she's going to go back into town. See what's happening there. She says goodbye and walks away.

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self consciousness

The most interesting aspect of an Achilles heel is not that it exists and that it has the capability to bring its owner down.

It is that the owner of the Achilles heel is unaware of its existence, and its ability to bring him or her down.

The Achilles redemption lies in our capacity to discover our unavoidable flaw, and prepare for the day when an unleashed arrow will strike.

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dos anos

No son tanto,
Pero son bastante.

(Assuming my understanding of the last word is better than the italian director who irked his Uruguayan actors according to la Panella)

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near-identical formulas

Time recedes in volume with age.

or

Time's volume recedes with age.

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still

I wake up early, Saturday, peaceful in the absence of scaffolders. In a dream you visited, treating me with your now habitual brand of self-centred disinterest. Which nevertheless I welcomed; for it had been good to see you; after so long. By day I walked the canal, reflecting, in dirty water, that my real mistake was not the one you would like me to think it should be.

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the foundations of shifting sands

Unless one is secure in one's own attractiveness, whatsoever that might be based on, it becomes hard to accept the attractiveness of your partner; preferable to see them as loveable but resistable to the opposite sex.

At which point the other is liable to assume the role delegated to them, in order to play the part the partner desires, in order to please them.

They might play that part so well they come to forget what anyone ever saw in them, (including their partner).

Until someone else comes along and reminds them.

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nature, nurture, and chinese meat-eating habits

A localised sense of decline can affect every corner of it's people's psyche. Likewise a sense of optimism.

This has been one of the reasons the USA has been, and has been seen to be, so successful in my lifetime. And might turn out to be the most significant ramification of the events of September 2001.

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around the city's edges

Relationships demarcate a hinterland of our psyches, souls, or sensibilities that we forget exists when we are not in them.

Those long conversations about marginalia that don’t need to occur for any other reason than they help us to understand who we might be; have been; or might become.

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blurred vision

Last night I got home after two glasses of wine, one game of football, one late-night trip to Euston station, a shakespeare workshop and about twelve thousand scripts, and switched on the laptop.

Everything was fuzzy. The words has furry edges. My head spun trying to read them.

I tried to find a way to correct the problem. I turned the computer on and off. I searched the control panel for screen adjusters. I searched the yellow pages. I thought of which friends I could call for advice after midnight. I gave up. I went to bed.

In the morning I woke and read a script and contemplated the calamity of the fuzzy screen.

I switched the machine on.

Its world was no longer fuzzy.

But then again, neither was my brain.

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montevideo notes 1 - ciudad pequeña

The smaller the city the greater the possibility of co-incidence.

Montevideo may not be the smallest of cities, but it’s small enough. Ana’s neighbour, on the landing across the way from her flat, is a man called Leo Masliah. A couple of years ago, in London, John Rattagan put on a playful CD of his favourite Uruguayan musician. Whose name was Leo Masliah. From behind whose front door I occasionally now hear a piano playing, and who hurries past me on the stairs.

The part of the city I’m staying in is not somewhere I used to know all that well. It’s a street called Jackson, on the edge of Pocitos, the barrio where Helena lived. Her first home was in Luis Franzini, where I spent a year sending hundreds of blue aerogrammes. That’s a fifteen minute walk away, and I inadvertently ended up there on my first morning, whilst looking for the feria at Villa Biaritz. (I bought a Uruguayan hat.) Her parents then moved to Cardona, (next to the Jewish school where I will later go to give a class on The Boat People), about twenty minutes away. That’s where I used to stay when I visited. Now I’m informed they’ve moved again, and are nearby. It was only last night, when Anibal pointed out their house, that I realised how near. They’re two blocks up from here, on the same street, a minute’s walk away. I recognised their cars and now the street is rendered by this co-incidence into a different street altogether.

Today I called my friend Jorge and he asked me where I’m staying. It turns out that he’s working on the same street. About a minute and a half away.

Living in London, reading books from another time or place, you feel as though more than one co-incidence in a day or a text is excessive. When the truth is that in most places, people are haunted by the insistence of co-incidence. Our big-city lives are the exception, not the rule.

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montevideo notes 2 - the bookseller

Jorge’s friend, W, returned from living in Europe around the time I first lived here, 15 years ago. I met him a couple of times, but never really got to know him. W opened a bookshop on Tristan Narvaja. It’s a rambling kind of place, but has survived for over a decade, so is presumably successful enough. Uruguayans love books. This morning I visited the local market, dozens of which are peppered around the city on a daily basis. Beyond the fruit and veg stalls, people laid out odds and sods for sale on blankets on the street. About half of these contained second hand books of one form or another.

Jorge told me that lately, things haven’t been going well for W. He’s a cocaine addict, perhaps a crack addict as well, and he’s got AIDS. He’s in constant need of petty cash to finance his habits and he’s losing contact with many of his friends.

I expressed surprise that the bookshop has survived in spite of all this. Jorge pointed out that if W sold the enterprise, as he could, he’d get an influx of cash, but thereafter he’d be left with no ongoing means of support. He then described the remarkable ecology of the bookshop, explaining its ongoing solvency.

The bookshop has two employees. In theory they work for W, but in practice they make the bookshop work for all three. The two employees run the place. They keep the accounts, do all the ordering, sell books, keep the place clean. Everything. W appears on the shop floor now and again, mostly just to get in the way. His primary connection with the place is the small living it affords him to sustain his habit. However, it is never enough, and when in need of urgent intoxication, and short on cash, W will think nothing of taking from the till. It is, after all, ‘his’ money. Fortunately the two employees have learnt over the time how to manage W’s stealing from himself. Every night they remove most of the cash from the till, but leave just enough for W to be able to afford a small purchase. Jorge believes that this has saved W. It has allowed him to maintain his habit, but in moderation. More spare cash would lead to a greater intake of drugs, which would kill him, sooner rather than later. As it is he never feels entirely deprived, but is never in a position to partake in excess. The ecology has saved him, and it also keeps the business running, ensuring the employees continue to have jobs which they obviously enjoy.

Nevertheless, there are some times when W isn’t satisfied with what’s been left in the till. For some reason or another he decides that on this occasion he has to have more – cash and drugs. When this happens, there’s a solution to hand. The bookseller steals his own books. He takes them to a neighbouring bookseller and sells them on at a reduced rate, second-hand.

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montevideo notes 3 - foreigners

Montevideo isn’t on the way to anywhere. To get here you have to make a detour from Buenos Aires or Punta or Southern Brazil. The financial incentive to get here is minimal. And few would come here out of ambition. Anyone who did would soon enough realise that, no matter how cultured the society, it seems destined to always remain a backwater, a footnote in the works of Borges, Pauls or Cortazar.

As a result of this the foreigners who end up here tend to be a strange bunch. When I lived here I knew a couple of people in the language year of their university courses, a Norwegian whose Uruguayan wife was in Norway, a British school contingent who inhabited an affluent, xenophobic ghetto, some US evangelists and a pair of English roses who’d come to the city to create horse sculptures out of bamboo.

The other night Anibal invited me for supper. The other guest was Marcelo, who Anibal said was a Uruguayan who’d lived in New York but turned out to be a New Yorker who’d somehow found himself in Montevideo, via Miami. His mother owns a house some way out of the centre. He lives there alone, practising his martial arts. He’s enrolled in Montevideo university, studying philosophy, the ancient greeks being his sphere of specialisation. The conversation flitted from Plato to Derrida to the inhumane conditions under which students study at the university, four hour sessions in high ceilinged rooms lit by distant florescent tubing.

Marcelo doesn’t appear to have any profound reason to be here. Despite that, and the fact that he claims not to like the place or the people and their conservative ways, he’s stayed here three years already. Every Thursday he goes to tango classes, because it’s the best way, he claims, to get to know people. His ex-girlfriend, a Uruguayan, told him that should they ever have a child together, she would permit Marcelo to live next door. He is cultured, intelligent, touched by a hint of sadness and the sense of being lost within a world which promised something it stubbornly refuses to deliver. He also drinks copiously, socialises as much as possible, and knows when the very last buses run to Carrasco. He clearly loves the climate, the food, and the vida.

With all his contradictions, Marcelo struck me as, in many ways, a quintessential Montevidean.

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montevideo notes 4 - day trip

A relatively recent development in Montevideo is the regular arrival of cruise ships. (To my mind any development since I lived here will always I suspect seem recent.) They dock in the port in the morning and thousands of moneyed tourists stream out, flooding the Ciudad Vieja, before returning to the ship in the afternoon and heading on to their next port of call.

Not so long ago an English friend of Jorge told him that an American friend was going to be arriving on one of these ships, and asked him if he’d mind showing the tourist and his partner around for the day. Jorge, who lives in Ciudad Vieja, said he’d be happy to.

The two tourists caught a cab the short distance to Jorge’s flat in Bartolome Mitre. The friend’s partner turned out to be male, which delighted Jorge. He showed the Americans around the old town. Passing through Plaza Matriz, Jorge pointed out the cathedral, noting that it had little architectural interest, but the Americans expressed a desire to look in anyway. On their way out, Jorge noticed one of the men crossing himself, and asked if he was Catholic, which the man said he was. From Plaza Matriz they ambled down to Mercado del Puerto, Jorge taking great pleasure in pointing out phallic symbols concealed within the cityscape. At the Mercado the three did what any self respecting non vegetarian does, and consumed considerable quantities of red meat. Jorge learnt that the two men came from Wisconsin and Seattle respectively. They exchanged stories of how they came out to their families, and by all accounts everyone was having a suitably high spirited time of it.

After they meal they continued to wander. Only now did Jorge begin to observe that, in spite of all the common ground, there was a great deal that neither man had talked about. Such as what jobs they did, how they sustained their relationship in spite of the distance, even how they actually met.

With the afternoon getting on, Jorge suggested the three get in a cab and go for a drive along the Rambla, as far as Punta Gorda and back. This is the best way to get a handle on the city as it stretches away from the old town, up the coast, rolling around the vast lip of the River Plate. Jorge continued to act as guide, but the reluctance of the Americans to open up began to seem strange, even rude.

On the return journey back to the port, Jorge finally decided he had to ask. Montevideo cabs are a tight squeeze, and from his description the two men were muscular. Jorge was crunched in between them. Summoning up courage he turned to the older of the two Americans, his friend’s friend, and said, in his most impeccably polite Anglo Saxon English : ‘So, if you don’t mind me asking – what is it that you actually do?’

The man sighed and looked away, out over the perhaps sparkling River Plate, named for a promise of silver, and replied: ‘I’m a priest.’ Jorge let this sink in. The man didn’t offer anymore information. Seeing it was all he was going to get, Jorge turned to the younger man, and asked: ‘And you?’ The second man half-smiled, like a kid, then he followed suit, looking out of the window. He said, without looking at Jorge: ‘I’m a priest too’.

A few minutes later, the three men were at the port. Jorge bid them adieu and the two priests re-embarked on their covert cruise ship voyage. A couple of weeks later Jorge received a card from the older of the two priests, thanking him for his hospitality during their brief stay in Montevideo.

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montevideo notes 5 - state within a state

In 1997 Anibal took Helena and I to the piece of land he owns at Caracol, which is just across the lagoon from José Ignacio. On our way we took a short detour, into a pine forest by a lake. Driving off the main road onto a sandy track, Anibal’s white Volkswagen got bogged down. The more the engine revved and the wheel span, the more intractable it became. We ended up camping in a clearing, even though we were no more than a few kilometres from Caracol. We got there the next morning after some locals lent us some planks which gave the car sufficient traction to escape.

On this trip, I returned to Caracol for the first time in eleven years. The last time there was just a plot of land. We found a space in between the trees to pitch tents, and attempted not to walk into the fearsome cacti after dark. Both Anibal and Helena were bitten by horseflies, which lay their eggs under human skin. Weeks later tiny beasts were still emerging. Now, much of the land is cleared. Anibal has built a skeleton house with a beautiful thatched roof and a chimney. Running water is on its way, as well as poles for electricity. The house is still some way from completion – Anibal pitched camp inside it, I slept on the concrete floor – but nevertheless the transformation is remarkable.

However, this is nothing compared to the development of the land on the other side of the lagoon. Not so long ago, José Ignacio was still a fishing village. Now it’s a chic resort. It’s where Martin Amis lived during his Uruguayan sojourn. The road from the lagoon to José Ignacio is no more than a few miles, fronting the ocean. In the decade since I was last there, palatial houses have sprung up across the road from the beach, each on their own generously sized plot of land. These houses are, without exception, built with inordinate good taste. Most seem to owe a debt to Frank Lloyd Wright, with their flat roofs, organic, asymmetric design, and use of (presumably) local stone. They are light, spacious and attractive.

After José Ignacio the highway leads to Punta Del Este. For several decades Punta has enjoyed a reputation as the most sophisticated resort in Latin America. It was a rich person’s playpen as long ago as 1961, when Ernesto Guevara addressed a meeting of regional leaders at a summit there. Wealthy Argentines, Brazilians and North Americans have built vast houses here. It’s a far cry from the development in Spain or Mexico. Only on the periphery of the city do the tower blocks start to spring up, but even these holiday apartments are well designed, without a hint of the tackiness of European hotspots.

The scale of the building and the development over the last decade, in spite of the economic crisis which heralded a new century, is surprising. However, even more remarkable is the fact that, on this beautiful stretch of the Atlantic in the third world, we didn’t pass a single house which looked affordable to anyone who wasn’t at least a dollar millionaire. The transformation of the small villages on the road into Punta reflected this prosperity. Rather than almacens and fly ridden boliches, they contained sushi bars and designer furniture stores.

What has been created around Punta and Jose Ignacio is, in effect, a country within a country. A state with little financial or cultural connection to the capital, even though it’s barely a hundred miles up the coast. This state feels like an aesthetically cultivated paradise, inhabited by a class of people who have nothing in common with the vast majority of Latin Americans.

As we drove back, Anibal pointed out the area we had camped in ten years ago when the car got bogged down. Back then it had been pine forest with a few shacks where some locals lived. Now the land has been cleared. It’s occupied by half a dozen vast houses, their glass frontages flooded with coastal light; their outdoor wooden decking adorned with pot plants and barbeques. The pine trees have vanished, annexed by the state within a state.

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montevideo notes 6 - departure

Sometimes when I visit Montevideo, the last few days before departure are obscured by an almost pestilential sadness. The disease corners me as I shuffle through sun-dappled streets in a daze.

This sadness is, of course, a testament to the happiness my time here, always too brief, bestows on me. I could be Adam pacing his garden just before the helicopters arrive and the evacuation takes place.

Having said which, I realise that Montevideo is no paradise. The harshness of life is more evident here than it is back in London. Last night I took a walk by the riverside at sunset. In a nook between Playa Ramirez and Pocitos I came across a small beach, scattered with a litter of weather-worn concrete blocks. Two white waders plucked at the water’s edge. Deciding to explore I took a couple of steps across a piece of concrete and then stopped, and immediately turned back. A dead dog, small, brown, it’s spine curved round on itself, teeth grinning, stomach bloated, lay foetal in amongst the rubble, abandoned.

My Montevideo could never be a paradise. Rather, it belongs to a parallel universe, evolving alongside my own. In this universe I rediscover the unpredictable, the beautiful and the tragic. When I arrive here it is with the elation of a homecoming. When the final days of my trip are upon me, the reality of reality, the separation of reality, hits; everything begins to seize up, a mechanism grinding to a slow, barely noticeable halt.

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The fact that my marriage to Helena is now over heightens these feelings. This is the first time I have been back since. Our marriage was the product of a delirious year, working and playing here. I discovered her city; she rediscovered it through my eyes, as well as opening her eyes to the possibility of escape from its confines. (For in this regard a city is like family as opposed to friends: the latter you chose yourself, the former chosen for you.)

We never lived here again. Never put the delirium of that year to the test of something more measured, along the lines of the lives ordinary Montevideans live. All of that living, the prosaic, was done within the jurisdiction of London, my antithesis to Montevideo, a place of work and stress and deberes.

In my fortnight here now, with my former in-laws up the road, the pale ghost of my marriage and its abrupt conclusion has haunted me. Any reader worth their salt might conclude that the love I feel for the city has a connection with the love I felt for Helena; just as the love she felt for the idea of escaping the city had a connection with the love she once felt for me. When our marriage ended, I often felt I would never return here, that this city would also be lost to me.

As one day, indeed, it might be. (As I write Ana interrupts to say that the theatre she had in mind for the play next year now seems to be booked for the time we wanted, throwing everything up in the air again.)

However, a marriage has nothing to do with place or time - the things which alter in the course of a marriage’s natural lifespan. It has to do with how the two people themselves connect, above and beyond circumstances, crises, failures, changes. Whether those two people still retain any kind of imperative to continue in the face of alteration.

We, evidently, did not. It’s only upon returning to Montevideo, after the event, that it’s possible to see how little our respective cities had to do with anything. Montevideo and London, it transpires, have as much significance as a favourite flavour of ice-cream.

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montevideo notes 7 - light

Almost every evening this week I’ve walked down the road to Playa Ramirez to take in the sunset.

At this time of year the sun disappears somewhere over the Cerro, sliding out of the sky over the sea before hibernating under the continental lip. The beauty of a setting sun is a ubiquitous, democratic pleasure, so to eulogise the near phosphorent armageddon that occurs on a regular basis on Playa Ramirez is perhaps unnecessary.

However, the one thing I have observed and savoured anew on this trip has been the nature of the late evening light that arrives with the departing sun.

This light has a textural quality, a density. Aquatic and enveloping, it cocoons the passenger. It possesses similar qualities to a warm bath, or a soft hand stroking skin. The light’s shades heighten and obscure the city’s colours, but above and beyond its visible traits, it acts in the role of shadower or guide, holding the citizens’ hands as they venture into a new night, a darkness containing the eternal uncertainty of what the dawn might bring.

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montevideo notes 8 - history

The dictatorship did not end in Uruguay until 1985. The first time I came here, less than a decade later, there was still a discernible reluctance to talk about it. At the time I was giving Shakespeare workshops. I remember, working through one of the history plays, making a crude but feasible comparison between the reign of one of the kings and the dictatorship. No one took me up on it, no one seemed to keen to seek out comparisons.

Why should they? The older people in my class had lived through years of grim repression, and no matter how keen I was, there was no way that a curious young foreigner could really appreciate what it had meant to them. When I asked Jorge, my flatmate, landlord and friend, he just answered that it had been a ‘terrible, terrible’ time. It was still so recent that most, it seemed to me, were still going through the act of forgetting, something they needed to do before they could begin a process of remembering, and evaluation.

Fifteen years later the situation has changed. Several of the dictatorship’s architects are in prison. A spate of films dealing with the dictatorship is appearing, one of which Matar A Todos, I saw at the weekend. The fear – that they will return – as articulated to me on a few occasions in 1994, has gone. The election of 2004, which saw the socialist coalition elected to power without the drastic consequences that many on both the right and left had anticipated, has helped to establish a more relaxed, contemplative attitude towards the recent past.

Last night I asked Ana, who lived through the latter stages of the dictatorship as a student, about her experiences. She had two stories to tell me.

The first concerned an experience which happened when she was about seventeen, at drama school. She told me how the group she hung out with became accustomed to classmates being absent from one day to the next, either in hiding or under arrest. She talked about how they tried to live as normal a life as possible, remembering one time someone who had just been abused in police cells came out dancing with them, his legs so swollen that all he could do was sit in a corner and get as drunk as possible.

Ana decided she wanted to become more involved. A friend of hers set up a meeting with a radical in an obscure barrio. She arrived at the bar and the man she met there looked so like her friend that she realised straight away they had to be brothers, though this was never mentioned. The man was jumpy and watchful. They talked in vague terms about what she could do. At the end of the meeting he paid for the beer, saying she owed him the next one. She didn’t see the man for several years. The next time they met was on the day the dictatorship ended, as people celebrated in the streets. She ran into him amidst the flags and festivities and he remembered her instantly, telling her she still owed him a beer.

A year or two later, Ana was living in Ciudad Vieja with Horacio, a theatre director, radio host and activist. She became involved with a small group which met once a week in another, distant barrio, an hour’s bus ride from the city centre. Upon arrival at the house where they met they had to check a tree to see whether there was a piece of paper attached. If it was there, it meant they were safe to go in; if it wasn’t they knew they should head back immediately. Once inside they spent all night creating leaflets, going out to paint slogans on walls, drinking mate and discussing politics.

One day she got a message from one of the group, simply saying that the ‘upstairs neighbour’ had been arrested. This seemed like catastrophic news. The whole group might have been given away, and they were all in jeopardy. Ana and her fellow activist decided they had to go to the house where they met and see if they could destroy the evidence. She packed a bag, fearing she’d have to go into hiding or else be arrested, then went to find Horacio and told him the bad news, leaving him without knowing when they would see one another again.

The piece of paper was not attached to the tree when she and her fellow activist arrived at the house. They waited outside, anxiously. When it seemed clear that there was no sign of activity inside, they decided to enter anyway, and set about destroying leaflets and papers that had been stored there. All of a sudden someone walked in. They froze.

It was the upstairs neighbour. Who was not under arrest. Who furthermore was furious when he saw that Ana and her companion had destroyed so much hard work. The upstairs neighbour, who was a part of their group, insisted that the police hadn’t been anywhere near. Amidst all the confusion, Ana realised that she needed to go and tell Horacio she was alright. She took the bus back into town and found him at the theatre. They hid away in a corner as she explained everything was fine, both weeping with relief.

Ana later learnt that her fellow activist had got it all wrong. The upstairs neighbour who’d been arrested existed, but was a completely different upstairs neighbour to the one who lived in the house they used. The words ‘vecino de arriba’ had entered his brain and he’d leapt to the worst possible conclusion. When she finally got back to the home she shared with Horacio, she discovered that he’d stuck up stickers leading from the front door to the bedroom of their tiny apartment. The stickers all had one word written on them, a word which doesn’t really need translation: BOBA!

Ana’s political activism continued through the early years of democracy. She had allegiances with the Communists, without ever feeling as though she belonged to their cause – it was more a case of siding with the opposition. (An example of how the Communist ‘threat’ came to be exaggerated in the cold war.) Nowadays she says she’s less ‘militista’. The blacks and whites of the old days have gone, to be replaced by the more confused shades of democracy; and now the socialists are finally in office, it’s they who are contending with the complexities and disappointments of power.

Nevertheless, the difference between Ana’s political engagement in her lifetime and that of almost anyone I know from a similar generation in the UK is evident. For Ana, and everyone who lived through that time, politics was something real, its implications tangible. To take a political standpoint was non-negotiable, even if that standpoint manifested itself as a refusal to get involved. The shadow of the struggle she lived through, despite its lengthening, is still there, shaping her attitude towards the society she inhabits in a way that our political convictions barely seem to.

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montevideo notes 9 - education

Everyone I know is Montevideo is involved in teaching, in one way or another. In part this reflects the fact that most of my closest friends speak English, and if your English is good you can either make or supplement your living by teaching it. However, it also reflects another aspect of Uruguayan culture, which is a near pathological appetite for studying.

This studying never seems to stop. It is driven by the conviction that in order to improve one’s chances of success in a world where the gradations between rich and poor are extreme, the acquisition knowledge (of something, anything) is the most valuable tool available.

There is a downside to this attitude. It doesn’t lend itself to a particularly entrepreneurial culture. Being a student is a status of reduced responsibility: a process of preparation rather than action. I had an long discussion with Fernando, one of the actors in my play, about the seductiveness of thinking of oneself as an eternal student, when he talked about how much he still felt he had to learn.

However, Fernando’s story is instructive. He was raised in Libertad, a two-horse kind of town with a high street, a town square and little more. His parents run the oldest store in town, Los Buenos Amigos, and for a while he followed in the family footsteps, running his own shop, as do his brothers. Meanwhile, he participated in the local drama society, which has been running in Libertad for over thirty years. When I asked him what kind of thing they did, he said a bit of everything. This year the group, of which he is no longer a part, is working their way through the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays.

One day, Fernando decided he’d had enough of Libertad. He shut up his shop for good and left for Montevideo. He enrolled in a drama school there. Now he earns at least part of his living from acting. In his eyes, the desire to progress as an actor is ineluctably connected to a desire to train, and to learn.

Besides her acting and working on the radio, Ana also teaches literature in high school. I asked her about her 5th form syllabus, which is she preparing now. Over the course of a year she will give classes based around five key texts. Apart from reading and working on the texts themselves, they will also explore the historical context within which the texts were formed. The five texts she’s doing this year are – a Greek tragedy, looking at the origins of theatre in the process; the Bible; The Divine Comedy; Don Quixote; and a Shakespeare. In the course of the year Ana will cover everything from the Romance of the Rose to Marlowe to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan bible. Next year, they move onto the moderns.

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mortgaged to the hilt

You can work for years to pay a debt you´re not even aware of. It´s only when the debt is paid you realise what´s been happening. Then you stand back and discover how much you once owed.

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permutations

Some people spend so much of their time trying to please other people they forget to please themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to be other people they forget to be themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to please other people they forget to be themselves.

+++

Some people spend so much of their time trying to be someone else they forget who they are.

+++

drunken jotting

My foolishness is a part of me I would never repudiate.

+++

It makes me human.

+++

betrayal

Betrayal is both an absolute and a relative art form.

+++

It can take many forms. Some less obvious than others. Sometimes the most obvious betrayals are the most minimal. And the worst betrayals are never even noticed.

+++

For betrayal does not take place in the outside world. In the boardrooms, bedrooms or corridors of power.

+++

Betrayal always takes place in the heart.

+++

cruel to be kind

People carry round a fictional notion of their selves which becomes more real than their 'real' self.

+++

They seek to protect their fictional self with more vigour than their 'real' self.

+++

The cruellest thing anyone can do to these people is shatter this notion of a fictional self.

+++

For a 'real' self can never be shattered.

+++

a line discovered written in pencil on the inside flysheet of alan pauls' the past

Love is like a lens
Which filters out all
Those things the lover
Does not wish to see.

+++

bucket and spade

Almost inevitably those who feel themselves to have the least control over their lives are liable to be the biggest control freaks.

+++

on reading

Reading is a process of curiosity. One turns the pages in order to have something revealed that wasn't known before opening them. Whether that be the end of the plot or the shape of the universe.

+++

Every time we open a book we do so in the hope that we shall meet someone with something to say, something we have never heard before.

+++

west london tales 6

Wild parrots at play in Hyde Park. Screeching and diving like they've lived there for generations. Except that, on an admittedly grey day, in contrast to the parrots of the tropics, singeing the sky with a vivid dart, these creatures have no colour at all. They've flown straight out of a black and white movie.

+++

the lover's discourse

There is nothing as attractive as someone else finding you attractive.

+++

People think seduction is about dazzling. Fortunately for some and less so for others it ususally has more to do with listening.

+++

Tickle someone's vanity and you can steal their soul.

+++

'the past is another country'

The man was right.

+++

But... the past is still somewhere whose streets are walked in the mind, whose hills are climbed, whose water is drunk. In the mind.

+++

The past may be another country; but it can never become a foreign land.

+++

the un-randomness of it all

Barring acts of god; (unless one is of a religious disposition):

+++

Events have a way of happening to us as a result of our susceptibility to those events.

+++

Even though they might seem like the most unlikely of occurrences.

+++

by and large:

The desire to talk about oneself is in proportion to the importance someone has been lead (or lead themselves) to believe they possess.

+++

spot the difference

Some feel themselves to be significant and feel no need not to inform the world of this fact.

+++

Some feel themselves to be significant and feel no need to inform the world of this fact.

+++

human touch

The capacity for extraordinariness is unavoidably linked with the capacity to be ordinary.

+++

opposite extremes

Extravagant shyness is the flip side of a powerful desire to be the centre of attention.

+++

in black and white

In the same way that a writer's will to write is connected to his or her ego...

The weaknesses in our writing reflect the weaknesses in our souls.

+++

from the cradle to the grave

The older you get, the more life becomes about the acceptance of loss;
Learning to live with the accumulation of loss, which cannot but increase with every gain you make;
Learning to live with loss without resentment;
Or undue regret.

+++

the halcyon days of flight

Everyone knows how much fun flying is these days. The sense of adventure, the exhilaration of the open skies…The queues, the endless waiting around, the stress, the cattle market vibe. Once upon a time, so we are told, flying was glamorous. Now it’s about as glamorous as catching the tube.

Unless you fly to Caen or Deauville from Brighton Airport, with Sky South, a tiny airline whose website does not hint at the joys that are in store.

Brighton airport is a one hour train journey from Victoria station, followed by a five minute taxi ride through the backroads of Shoreham-by-Sea. When the cab driver in this sleepy town undercharges you, something suggests this will be no normal flight and that feeling escalates at the airport, a cream coloured art deco masterpiece, complete with swinging mahogany doors. Beyond which is the information desk staffed by two women with neither uniforms nor any sense of urgency. Tentatively I asked about check-in. You’re a bit early, one of them said. Why don’t you go and get a cup of tea and come back in an hour?

The website had claimed you only needed to check-in half an hour before the flight . A seasoned traveller in a world of security and terrorist scares, I knew this couldn’t possibly be right. I’d arrived with a conservative hour and three quarters to spare.

Plenty of time to savour a Panini and a pot of tea from the art deco restaurant, whose windows are embossed with frosted bi-planes. A pilot and his co-pilot were sitting on the table next to me. One of them said, with a chortle: ‘Even with the lever pulled back?’. I wasn’t sure if this was reassuring or terrifying. They were about to fly to Chester. Surely only trains go to Chester?

Confirming that this really was an airport, dozens of tiny two-seater airplanes were tootlling along the runway in the shadow of green fields and Lancing College. Occasionally a brightly coloured helicopter had a go at taking off. It looked like the insect room of London zoo.

After an hour of observing the wildlife, I went to discover if my flight really existed. I was allowed to check in, at the grandly named Terminal 3 (I have no idea where the other Terminals are hidden), all of a minute’s walk away. My bag was taken and I was told to go and have another cup of tea, and someone would come and get me just before the flight.

As good as their word I was summoned five minutes before departure and ushered through security along with the four other passengers. The plane looked small on the outside and even smaller on the inside. The other four got on first and I took seat number 5 out of 8.

In normal flying terms, there are the big planes that skip oceans and the smaller, low-budget variety which are cramped and uncomfortable. The plane to Deauville was of another order altogether. It had one seat to an aisle and four aisles. Though to call them aisles is an exaggeration. More a gap to allow the pilot to get to his seat. The machine was a tin can with wings attached, its flimsiness compounded by the safety talk when the pilot explained how, as the last man at the rear of the plane, I’d have to push a black button and then pull a lever in event of emergency, but my best bet would be to push the window in and climb onto the wing. Having said which he ducked down and clambered into his seat.

Minor celebrities sometimes boast of how they’re invited into the cockpit to spend the flight with the pilot. On the Brighton-Deauville run, everyone’s a minor celebrity. As the plane gathered speed on the runway, progress was visibly un-straightforward. It veered in a wobbly line, before hopping into the air, and, somewhat surprisingly, climbing in a vertical direction. Hair raising, natch, but also, as opposed to the mundanity of regular flying, exhilarating.

The plane banked over Brighton and its piers, before heading over the Channel. Half way across we were enveloped by clouds, moving from panoramic vista to pea souper in seconds. The instruments in the cockpit gleamed reassuringly, though I had no idea what any of them meant. The mighty sky beyond roared all around us.

The clouds cleared and we flew down the French coast for ten minutes, over Le Havre and the mouth of the Seine, landing in the desolate solitude of Deauville airport. It doesn’t seem right to call an airport picturesque, but Deauville, hewn from brooding forest, is. Save for a metallic Lear jet that vamooshed the moment we arrived, there were no other planes in sight. Clearing customs took all of two minutes. I was out of the airport within five minutes of landing.

On the return journey I arrived with forty five minutes to spare. Five members of staff catered for two passengers. The airport’s framed autograph book showed compliments from Harrison Ford, Mick Jagger, George Bush snr and Henry Kissinger. The return journey was in a more luxurious plane, with plush leather seats. My fellow passenger knew all about flying (claiming to possess an old German bomber that used twelve tons of fuel per minute parked at Bournemouth) and said we were ok as long as the de-icers worked. As the plane descended towards Brighton, the whole of the South Coast from the Isle of White to the Cliffs of Dover rose out of the earth to greet us, resplendent in morning sunshine.

If you own a private jet you can get this kind of experience whenever you fly. But for those of us who’ve heard tales of the glamour of aviation but never witnessed it, a trip to Deauville summons up an era when the skies were still a wonder to be explored, not a mere means to an end.

+++

out of interest...

How can we know what we do want to happen if we don't know what we don't want to happen?

+++

cultural conditioning

Growing up in Thatcher's Britain, as it was known, it seemed like the only alternatives were to become an entrepreneur or go on the dole. Or, as in my case, do both.

+++

the three classes of wo/man

One person wouldn't offer the hungry soul a crumb even if they were starving.

+++

Another person in their generosity will think nothing of offering half the lunch on their plate to a hungry soul.

+++

Another will think nothing of giving it all away. Not even knowing if the soul is all that hungry.

+++

Which is more likely to be wealthy and which more likely to be poor? Which successful, and which one a loser?

+++

one coin with many sides

Just because someone comes across as a saint under given circumstances, it does not mean to say that under other circumstances they might not find themselves playing the devil.

+++

thin ice

It is when we are at our most generous that we are at our most vulnerable.

+++

The more generous you are, the more vulnerable you become.

+++

Unless you can claim to be a saint.

+++

west london tales 5

Conversation in the lift, between ground and tenth floors

- We've been here 41 years. We were one of the first six families to move in. Things were different then.
- What was it like then.
- Oh it was very different.
- What was it like?
- Oh it was like... paradise in the sky.
- Paradise in the sky?
- That's right.
- And it's not like that now -
- Oh no. Not like that at all.

+++

progress

In the old days you couldn't spend money unless you left the house.

+++

These days you can blow your fortune from the comfort of your living room.

+++

message found on the inside cover of mario vargas llosa's the war at the end of the world

To A -
may all your wars be little ones
Love
N
oct' 87

+++

after it ends

You feel like crying every day.

+++

You do cry every day.

+++

Then one day you stop crying.

+++

You don't feel like crying anymore.

+++

You feel something else.

+++

the mistake

One day it was announced that the war was now imminent.

The announcement was made on television. Thereafter only two television stations were available, both rolling 24 hour news channels which looked at the way the state was responding to the news and what people should do to prepare.

After 48 hours both of these channels went dead.

At the same time mobile phones ceased working, as did the internet, and twelve hours later land lines stopped working. All petrol stations were closed.

There was nothing for people to do except go back to their homes and wait for the war to happen.

During the whole of this time no-one had informed anyone exactly what the war was. Who the enemy was. People thought it might be the climate war, or a nuclear war, or a biological war, or a chemical war, or an ideological war, or a state-sponsored war, or perhaps a vestige of the class war, or even the gender war.

However, whilst there had been much discussion on this point on the television before it closed down, and whilst people had initially debated it amongst themselves, in the end they realised it didn't matter. They had all been expecting the war, in some way, sub-consciously or semi-consciously or just innately. There had been so much peace for so long that people realised in their guts it just couldn't last, and when the war came they were not surprised. In fact many, although they didn't express it, in spite of their fear, were quietly relieved that the war they'd been anticipating and warned about all their lives was finally arriving. 'Good', they thought to themselves. 'Let's get it over with.'

Tanks made sweeps down wide roads. Soldiers could be heard talking outside on radios. People sat in their silent homes, waiting. Some went through phases of hysteria and then depression, and then realised there was no point in even these emotions. Others left their homes, against their family wishes, and walked the street. Some of these were shot at, and then tried to return home.

After two weeks, the electricity was cut off.

An hour later it came back on again.

When it came back on, all the televisions and radios and computers came back to life.

The television was running as normal.

So was the radio.

The internet was back.

People charged their mobile phones and found they were working.

Buses started appearing on the streets.

Over the following week, people returned to their former lives. They stocked up at the supermarkets and went back to work. They cleaned their houses and started jogging.

For a week or two there was much discussion over what had really happened, and the government offered its apologies and one or two people resigned, but at the same time the population was praised for the way it had handled the crisis and the armed forces were praised for the way they had handled the crisis, and everyone had to acknowledge the state had done better than anticipated and people felt good about this in a quiet and understated way.

In two months the season had changed and life was normal. People went about their day to day existence as if nothing had happened.

+++

isolation

Every seeker of solitude ends up discovering they were looking for one of two things:

Company (in the most roundabout of ways); or the peace of death.

+++

platonic love

When you discover a writer you need to read more of it's like making a new friend.

+++

Only the writer will be a friend who cannot betray you; who will always be there for you; who will be never be too busy to keep you company. And they will not object if you neglect them for year after year, but be grateful for the part of your heart you've already granted them.

+++

Then again you cannot make love with a book.

+++

west london tales 4

Bolaño.

This is how it happened. The whole Christmas period had been a wash-out. The misery of a relationship ending. The absence of family. A nagging dwindling of funds. The near-mortal collapse of the computer. And then flu, which arrived as though recognising a body it was more than welcome to take possession of, as that body had nothing better to do than retch and shrivel and hack and gaze out at the Westway or curl up in bed.

The one consequence of all this was that he rediscovered something that had gone missing for he couldn't remember how long. This was reading. Which can become an almost perverse pleasure. Perverse because it is a process that requires no assistance from the world. Perverse in so far as the ardent reader can walk through a bookshop and sense the pleasure that lurks within the walls.

That feeling came back to him one evening as he walked back from the computer repair man and decided to stop off in Whiteleys on his way home. He walked into a clothes shop selling shirts for £5, but the label said made in Cambodia and something inside balked at whatever deal this transaction might represent, even though in another year, at another Christmas, it would not have bothered him. He went next door into the bookshop which was still open after eight and the perverse charms of literature came back to haunt him.

The books he chose were The Strange Death of David Kelly, by Norman Baker, another New Orleans thriller by James Lee Burke, following on from the Tin Roof Blowdown he'd been given for Christmas, and a book called The Nubian Prince by a Spanish writer called Juan Bonilla. There was a clear rationale behind each purchase. However, it should be noted that as he contemplated the Bonilla, a reasonably slim paperback with hints of Sudan, he'd also looked at a large hardback, out of his price range, which sat next to it, called The Savage Detectives, published by an apparently Mexican author he'd never heard of.

Five days later he'd read all the books and as much as he could manage of David Peace's GB84. In between the time spent sitting in bed coughing, sweating, reading, he'd been to Hereford and back. Before going away for New Year, he'd collected his computer which now seemed to be working.

Only it wasn't. As he realised on the morning of his return. The computer was stuck in L. Which meant the keyboard dementedly spewed out the letter L, even as it allowed the typist to try other letters. He took the laptop back late on the third evening of the new year to the Queensway computer market and as he walked homewards, he once again stopped off in the bookshop in Whiteleys.

This time he bought The Savage Detectives. He wasn't sure why the book exerted such a pull. The Nubian Prince had been something of a disappointment, and he knew he was succumbing to his Iberomania once more, but this book summoned him, demanding to be bought, and there was nothing he could do about it. The first week of the new year was another wash-out anyway. So why not spend it with a 500 page Mexican road movie epic by an author he'd never heard of.

And this is how Roberto Bolaño secured his latest victim, nailing him to the Aztec altar and nibbling at his heart over the course of four days. Saying (lying, of course) - you see, I wrote this just for you. I've painted the life you should have been leading. The one you dipped your toes in. I was out there, in Spain, the whole time, writing this stuff, whilst you were - what were you doing? Get on with it, Bolaño was saying to him. That's why you wandered into the bookshop. So that I could remind you of your responsibilities.

He googled Bolaño and learnt that this was the great dead hope of Hispanic literature. Someone he should have known about, only he lived on an island in the middle of nowhere where information seemed to be plentiful but of course it wasn't. The writer of lost poets heading towards desperate ends, or if not desperate, then forgotten, unexalted ends, barely a memory left of all the words they had spent so much care piecing together.

+++

the fidelity of pets

A crafty person might learn a way to place all their demons in someone else's pocket.

+++

When that person has left the room, or the house, or their life, they might allow themselves to believe that the demons have gone with them.

+++

But you can't keep a good demon in a pocket for very long. A good demon knows how to find its way back to its owner.

+++

look carefully before you cross the road

A highly developed instinct towards kindness is one that almost always leaves the bearer subject to disadvantage and open to abuse.

+++

It is tantamount to placing oneself on the back foot; or offering something for nothing.

+++

No wonder it has come to be considered a foolhardy instinct, one a wise individual should refrain from indulging.

+++

as wordsworth and others observed

We all of us possess a child within us.

+++

Which needs to be both indulged and resisted.

+++

Without the child, we lose our sense of wonder. We cease to grow.

+++

Ruled by the child, we forget the value of all we have learnt. We become stunted.

+++

the warrior

Generosity of spirit is a by-product of courage.

+++

When one acquires the capacity to place one's strength at risk; one also acquires the capacity to give that strength away.

+++

how do we know unless we are gay

Are there fundamental differences between the sexes?

+++

Of character and temperament, for example.

+++

Or are we lead to these conclusions because we are never made to look into the mirror of our own sex.

We rationalise differences in personality by ascribing them to the most physically discernible difference; because this is easier than confronting our beauty or our flaws.

+++

Have you never known a man who was winsome or a woman who was cocksure?

+++

sparkle

Being fascinated with someone and being enamoured of them are two seperate things which are frequently confused.

+++

in the library

Through the simple act of sitting in near-silence for a while, with a task to be done and no distractions, a state of serenity can be achieved.

+++

the nietzschean hippy

People tend to believe that if someone's incapable of hating, or even disliking, their enemy, or someone who crosses them, then this is a sign of weakness.

They are wrong. It may not look like it, but it is a sign of strength.

+++

note to parents

If you grow up accustomed to unhappiness, it becomes a hard habit to shake off.

+++

madonna's sagacity

Wisdom is treated with suspicion by the materialistic society.

+++

Wisdom attempts to look beneath the surface of things.

+++

In so doing it senses the transitory nature of things.

+++

The more a society constructs itself upon a tide of things, the more wary it becomes of wisdom.

+++

In a society that has no place for wisdom, the wise man looks like a fool.

+++

ends and means

Thoughtlessness is more likely to emerge from weakness than malice.

+++

The perpetrator lacks the energy to think of/for someone else.

+++

It could be they desperately wish to do so. But they cannot find the way.

+++

There is a pathos to this scenario. And yet it does not diminish the effect.

+++

the sunken italian garden in priors barton

In my dream I looked out of the window and the sunken garden was being dug up. It was being excavated from the edges into the middle. An old chapel or chamber, with filigree lead glass windows had been discovered underneath the garden. My mother and I ran downstairs. By the time we got out to the garden, the area around the excavation had flooded. The chamber could be seen through the clear water, but what lay inside the chamber could not be discerned.

+++

south west london tales 769002

On the Eastern corner of Vauxhall Bridge is a large Farrellian building with green plate glass windows and a hint of ziggurat. This is the MI5 building. Beside it there's a slipway, where the duckboat and its tourist crew emerge from the Thames.

They needed to capture some footage of the riverbank. G had hoped to film in the mud where the tide recedes, but the tide was in. All that was available was the slipway. The three of them carried camera and tripod down, the walls of the MI5 building looming. Three lion's heads are sculpted into the embankment. The shoreline is a mass of bottles, rope, wood, junk, stone. The river laps at the shore. On the opposite bank is the Tate, Milbank, and beyond that, the Houses of Parliament.

They got the camera out and captured all of this, looking over their shoulders. No one tried to prevent them. They finished off as quickly as they could, and then walked away.

As they turned the corner onto the street, the camerwoman's eye was taken by the setting sun glinting on the stainless steel of the bus station. She stood on the pavement and filmed, then stopped and moved forward to find a better shot, the camera on her shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, G noticed the flak jacketed, shaven headed, military man heading towards them.

G took the camerawoman by the arm and dragged her forward. Mr C lurked behind. There was about a hundred metres between G and the camerawoman and the security man. The camerawoman tried to stop again but G grabbed her arm and pulled her forward.

Mr C heard the security man shout into his radio: Are they filming? Mr C lurked behind. G and the camerawoman made it to the corner of the road and turned right, onto Vauxhall Bridge. Mr C came up behind. The three of them hared across the road, dodging traffic, and jumped on a 436 bus. The security man had given up the chase. They had their footage.

+++

the long haul

Whenever a deep-rooted attachment comes to an end - a love affair, a friendship, a home, a place or a task - we learn a little more of what it will mean to die.

+++

a 'runter'

Is a technical term applied to someone on a film set who occupies the twin job descriptions of 'writer' and 'runner'.

+++

provisions

There is no way that someone can explain to someone else how much they love them.

+++

The object of these affections will either feel loved; or they will not.

+++

Love is not an elemental quality, like nitrogen or zinc.

+++

It has shades and degrees and differing levels of flavour or intensity. Like tomatoes, or coffee.

+++

The love that proclaims itself the loudest could be but an insipid imitation of the love that barely whispers.

+++

in order to break the pattern

We have to learn how to say the words which describe the things that cannot be said.

+++

And when they have been said, we have to learn how not to have to say them ever again.

+++

For a while at least.

+++

One day we'll get lucky. And forget them altogether.

+++

protection

Is it possible that failure could become a talisman?

The aleph which clings to your heart; which guides you on your way; which will one day lead you to safety?

+++

attributes

Your perfume is cleaner than soap, your fingers sharper than
Sunshine. Your touch more deadly than television, your toes
More agile than a teenage Soviet gymnast. Your smile’s
Prettier than Van Gogh’s dream of flowers; your neck as
Fragile as a galaxy which was spied once, one single night,
On the edge of a night sky, collapsing like a punctured
Accordion; its music too sweet for the universe to
Bear. Your mind’s an anaconda and a string quartet.
Your mind’s an undiscovered chamber in the pyramid of
Cheops. Your mind floats like a butterfly and stings like a
Nightingale. Your mind’s as pure as driven wine and as
Wicked as an angel’s. Your mind is rivalled only by your
Flesh in its un-transparent beauty and its transparent
Beauty to boot. Your beauty’s like a bubble, blown by a child.
It shimmers, defies the odds, sustains itself on the point of
Vanishing: should I try to catch it I’ll fear to lose it. Every
Colour wrapped in none, it reflects my world and floats
Within it: a philosophical challenge. Put down the ramp,
Drop the door, let’s travel the bubble together. Visit
Planets beyond the sensory range. Cross untameable
Seas, radical beaches, sulky jungles, runaway cities.
When the bubble’s energy’s spent, ready to pause,
Let her settle on my tongue, a safe haven. Rest there.
Sustain the perfect. Don’t ever burst. Don’t ever burst.

+++

your paranoia

Is all of your own making.

+++

Probably.

+++

thinking ahead to beyond midnight, a half hour before it dawns

Today, I shall be divorced. The word itself begs the question:
From what? My wife and I separated a long time ago now.
We are already divorced in all but name. Without ever going
Through the stages. One minute we were drinking and laughing.
The next we were done. I shall be divorced from my wife,
But I fear I shall be divorced from more than that which has
Already come to pass. Divorced from the land of dreams?
Some would say I did this then, the moment I betrayed a
Marriage vow I never took. I don’t believe so. Which in itself
Was enough to precipitate divorce. Whatever it might prove
To be, and as the unmade bed of words suggests, 'it' has
Slipped my neat parameters, I know that 'it', the it from which
I shall be divorced today, has left me lacking, has left me
Sadder than I wanted to have been left, has left me more
Stupid and more wise than I had hoped I should need to be,
Come this point in my waking, my thinking, my bed-making.

23.39 GMT

+++

ships in the night

People who feel themselves to be in some way 'difficult' will search for someone they believe is strong enough to help them negotiate a world they are unsuited for.

+++

In the belief and/or hope that that person will become their anchor.

+++

That person's strength may well have been born out of their ability to manage their own difficulties. For who is truly suited to this world?

+++

They in turn will be searching for their anchor.

+++

Who, unfortunately, is as likely as not to not be the one that they themselves anchor.

+++

Which is why, even in the most apparently stable of relationships, one or the other or even both partners can appear listless. Unsure if they are drifting or not. Unsure if their anchor is fixed to the seabed, ready for the storm, or just tangled up in weeds.

+++

west london tales 3

The concierge is a short silver haired dapper Spaniard called José. In his booth there are pictures of Muhammad Ali, other boxers, and José in Spain cradling a small child. José’s hours are something like 2 to 11, five days a week.

José’s always worried. When G moved in, he thought they might have relaxed Hispanic conversations. But José wants none of it. He nods, rather than greets. His eyes bore in on the visitor. No one gets past him. All to the good in a concierge.

At ten o’clock on a chilly November night, José was out on the street, wearing his blazer, looking agitated. Across the street, at the head of the path across the tracks, was a group of half a dozen hooded figures, poised on bikes. They were lined up on one side of the road, José, brandishing his mobile phone, on the other.

The kids didn’t do much. They didn’t have to. They intimidated through mere presence. G observed them from his window. People coming past them up the path walked at double speed.

One of the hooded walked ten metres down the path and crouched. A few moments later a small bonfire was ablaze.

Seconds later the first police car arrived. The kids, like a herd of bison scenting a lion, peered from the pedals of their bikes, then turned and dashed down the path, past the bonfire.

The police car slid to a halt. José was there, in the road, mobile in his hand, gesticulating. A shirt sleeved policeman climbed out of the car. He strolled down the path, in no hurry. José buzzed around the scene. A second policeman stamped the bonfire out.

The fire engine arrived moments later.

The kids had gone.

Within ten minutes, the officials had left the scene. Calm was restored to the night.

Another shift was almost over.

+++

nostalgia

La memoria es un parte detalle, y otra parte sensacion. Ser preciso no es lo mas importante. Lo mas importante es ser justo.

+++

too much information

Anyone who feels the need to inform you of the fact that they're a free spirit.

Probably isn't.

+++

west london tales 2

He looked out of the window and saw a van driving too slowly down the road, which came to a dead end beneath the Westway. It was a nondescript white van. It got to the end of the road and turned around, still moving at a crawl. As he’d half-expected, the phone rang.

The driver said he was on the street. G answered that he knew. He could see him. There are only two residential addresses on the street, both blocks of flats. He told him to come to the first, and went down to collect him.

There was a kid sitting in the passenger seat of the van. The driver said:

Do you know how heavy it is?

G said he didn’t.

It’s 75 kilos, the kid said, holding a clipboard.

G said he didn’t know how heavy that was.

Put it this way, the driver said, I never carry anything more than twenty kilos on my own.

They went to the back of the van, the kid staying in his seat. There were about half a dozen boxed mattresses there. The driver started pulling one out. It was heavy.

That’s a good mattress you’ve got there, the driver said. You can tell by the weight.

The mattress was boxed. The driver said the best thing to do was take the box off, so they could fit it in the lift. They carried it round and squeezed it in, before dragging it down from the twelfth to the eleventh floor, the mezzanine floor.

Once they’d got it there, G told the driver he was OK, he’d get it in and onto the bed on his own. The driver had already come from Barking and had a whole load more drops to make.

G dragged the mattress in to the hallway, before stripping the bed and removing the old futon mattress, which had lain so heavily on the bed, nine years of ownership baring into his back. The new mattress was bigger and heavier than he’d imagined it would be. He’d been hoping for a low bed to go with the low ceiling. With this one you could see out of the window, all the way to Wembley stadium, lying down.

He made the bed up and tested it out, remembering what the man had said. It was a good mattress. He got used to it, felt the way it supported his weight. It was surprisingly good. He turned and looked out of the window. He could see right over West London. Just lying there on the bed.

G got up and collected the post together that needed sending and readied himself to go out.

The phone rang.

It was the driver.

I suppose you’ve already taken the mattress out of the plastic and everything, the driver said.

G told him he had.

It’s just – I’ve only gone and given you the wrong mattress, haven’t I?

Fifteen minutes later the driver buzzed on his door. He’d brought up the cardboard cover which had been lying where he’d left it. Together, he and G did a makeshift job of replacing the plastic sheeting and assembling the cardboard over the mattress.

They dragged it down a flight of stairs to the tenth floor and squeezed it into the lift. It hadn’t got any lighter. In the lift the driver told him this had set him back half an hour. He was having a hell of a day. His wife had unexpectedly had to go to work, which was why their son was sitting in the van.

They lugged the mattress back to the van. The driver’s son stayed in the van. The driver dragged G’s actual mattress out of the back and stripped the clean cardboard from it and took his time putting it over the heavy mattress, so it looked nearly as good as new.

They carried G’s new mattress over to the lift, and squeezed it in. G told the driver he’d be alright with it on the stairs. It wasn’t very big. And it wasn’t very heavy. It wasn’t very heavy at all.


+++

west london tales 1

The door is heavy on the hinges. Since the weather turned, it hasn’t wanted to shut. The other day he noticed the hinges had become loose. On his way out to get some bread, he remembered to pick up a screwdriver to tighten the screws. The door closed shut and he still had the screwdriver in his hand. For a moment he thought about posting it through the letter box, then decided to stick it in the back pocket of his jeans.

The scaffolding was going up in earnest now. Men with hard hats were calling for things he’d never heard of. He walked round the corner onto the Harrow Road. The traffic was still being held up by the temporary traffic light. He nipped across the road, in between the stationary cars.

As he did so he felt something fall from his pocket. He stopped, looking up to see if the traffic was still moving, then darted to pick up the screwdriver. Looking up as he turned towards the pavement, he saw a police van directly in front of him.

He went to one of the two Arabic grocers and tried to choose some tomatoes. As he stood making up his mind, a policeman approached him.

Would you mind stepping this way please.

He stepped away from the shop. The policeman was young, with specs and tawny hair. A policewoman stood beside him.

What’s the screwdriver for? The policeman asked.

The explanation was profound. He pointed at his block of flats and talked at length about hinges.

It’s just you looked a bit suspicious, that’s all. You don’t look like a car thief, but you looked suspicious.

He acknowledged he probably did look suspicious.

Can I just have your name please, sir, just to say I spoke to you.

He gave the young policeman his name.

The policeman and woman got into the police van and headed off.

He turned back to the grocer’s. A group of Arabic men were gathered outside, looking at him with curiosity. He chose some tomatoes.

What did they want, the shop owner asked. The others were listening in.

Nothing really, he said.

They are all crazy, the shop owner told him.

Yes, he said, they probably are.

He chose some fruit juice then went over to pay.

Be careful out there, the Arabic shop owner said with a benevolent smile.

+++

on flattery

The compliments someone chooses to give you are a reflection of the way in which they would like to be perceived themselves.

+++

social engineering

The teacher sells himself as cynically as any charlatan.

Both have similar things to pedal:

Ointments for the betterment of the soul; Techniques for self-improvement; Learning of the ages.

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age shall wither us...

What happens to writers as they get older is that they become more and more removed from their material. They have already been through two journeys. The journey into life, which has generated their material; and the journey out, which has given them the perspective from which they have created their work. To embark on another journey appears to be to run the risk of abandoning that hard-won perspective.

Not to do so, however, provokes the onset of atrophy; the gradual recession from the material which inspired in the first place. The writer doesn't tire so much as lose touch. In the end, all that remains is the schemata of the world the writer once knew. All that is left to write are the bones of the body.

This might suit some: those who always aspired to an other-wordly purity.

+++

an apology for idleness

For years people measured their worth and their self-worth according to their labour.

+++

The idle man or woman was an unproductive drain on society. Creating nothing, generating no wealth.

+++

Now, we might be on the cusp of a world where the idle man or woman is the most worthwhile member of society.

+++

The one who has consumed least, polluted least, destroyed least, been the least precipitate in the rush towards the annihilation of the world as we know it.

+++

If the whole of Western society had been blessed with idleness, the air might still be clean, the seas full of fish, the jungles green worlds of their own.

+++

on your marx, get set, go

Who is the arbiter of your time?

Who is the one who decrees its value?

Who says an hour at a desk or a coal face is of more value than an hour on the beach or with your nose in a book?

For both yourself and humanity as a whole.

Count the hours.

Someone else is.

Working out what to do with them.

+++

the price of honour

Wisdom has it that those most inclined to err will be those most likely to forgive.

+++

This depends on whether they resist the inclination or succumb.

+++

If they succeed in resisting the inclination to err, they will be hard pressed to forgive.

+++

For they will have become exhausted by their constant striving for perfection.

+++

Their patience eroded on the rocky shore of their good behaviour.

+++

priors barton adieu

A picture in the paper of birds in flock, which takes me back
To those days I’d walk across the fields, primed to vault the
Gate and scale the wall and break into my home, and as
I crossed the green lawn, dusk beckoning, the trees turning,
A swarm of swallows or swifts or some other species would
Pirouette in unison through three degrees, gathered
For one last hurrah before the voyage out, or home,
Depending on their point of view. I’d stand and stare and
Envy their departure to lands enchanted, dusky summer
Nights, tirelessly rolling out like the great green sward
I strolled across, on the way to my home, which now stands
This morning, on the very tip of dispossession, as we
Fly the roost for the final time, leaving the curved bay
Behind, setting forth on our voyage out, or home,
Depending on the perspective we choose to take.


7th November 2007 09.30am

+++

two stockwell poems

The Foot On The Stair

Just outside my door is an iron balcony.
Which you reach by a spiral staircase.
When a visitor arrives, you hear the clank
Of boot on metal, long before you see their face.

Sometimes you hear people who never arrive. You
Wonder who they might have been, which long-lost
Friend whose spirit hesitated then turned,
Rather than take up the tangle of our untied strings.

Billy Parham rode South three times across the border. The last
Time was the only one he got what he was after,
Though it wasn’t what he wanted. He learnt the dead
Have more power than the living, even before they know they’re dead.

He visited me just now. Creeping in silently through a
Back door we haven’t got. Like an old testament
Prophet, singing songs of the past to remind us
Of the future. He dug up their bones and brought the ghosts to life.

They never rest. He’s been teaching me. They’re but a footstep
Away, out on the ironwork, peering through the
Door, threatening to come in. I hear their step and turn.
Then they disappear. Never far away. But never very close,

Neither.


+++


Untitled


Someone leaves offerings at our front gate almost
Every morning. They must come between the hours of
Three and seven. The nightjay serves up all kinds of
Dishes: frozen burgers, potato peelings, sliced
Bread. We don’t know their name or motive. We don’t know
If they watch from afar, waiting for the moment
The door is opened. Perhaps they don’t care: the door
Has been selected as a random point in a
Universe, leading to a god long forgotten.
It reminds me of the Playa by the gasworks,
Where I was told not to disturb the candles or
The food left to Jemanja, the sea god. To touch
Would be to conjure a curse, for only the sea
Should claim what is left for it. I kick our leavings
Aside, or skip daintily over the latest
Prayer of red cabbage, garlanded with carrot peel.

27.03.97

+++

the artabatirae

"towards the west [of the Aithiopian kingdom of Meroe] are . . . the Artabatirae, who have four legs and rove about like wild animals" Pliny the Elder, Natural History

+++


It should never be forgotten that the power of the image is far greater than the word.

+++

The creation of moving, reproducible images might have changed the world more than any other invention.

+++

The image is seductive. It beseeches covetousness. The eyes swallow images like candy.

+++

Nothing is more likely to make an individual want to change their life than the sight of an image.

+++

Even though, no matter how authentic the image appears, it is never anything more than a rumour.

+++

from an old notebook

Sometimes people become lost through spending too much time on their own; sometimes by spending too little.

+++

inscription on a san francisco monastery sundial

Every hour that passes wounds thee and the last will kill thee.

+++

Quoted by Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire

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4 uruguayan poems

Images

A red chair lying next to a black one
At the foot of the sea wall. If it had eyes,
Would have seen a longtime companion,
One of its conical black legs. Drifting erratically
Away. It would also have seen a bloated fish,
The size of a frying pan, coming to rest
Beside it. Before being toyed with by the macabre tide,
Dragging it away in an imitation of life for a moment or two,
Before deploying it oncemore on the strand,
Within spitting distance of a wreath, white-flowered,
Trailing a black ribbon, meandering between
Rocks, sea and shore. Joining this idiosyncratic
Latin dance of listless objects with nothing
Better to do of a sun-scoured afternoon.


+++


Image

Sometime in a night so warm that it might as well be day
We drove along the Rambla to Carrasco,
A retreat for vacuous moneyed youth, deluding
Itself the world over that the impulse to escape
Significance is not a misguided quest to find it.

Between the town and Pocitos, in the dazzling shadow
Of a blackened sea, threaded with the pinhole lights
Of civilisation, we passed an open truck. Bearing
A pair of passionately entwined stowaways, young
Americans revelling in modernity; enwrapping nature
With the sensual speed of fuel-injected travel,
Allowing this in turn to charge their lust or love,
Blossoming in a private public display of narcissistic
Passion, flowering in the summer of our headlights.
We overtook and they were gone as we in turn were
Overtaken by the sensuality of night, heat and dawn.


+++


Hit And Run on Calle Uruguay

On a bright busy morning
A dead body lies covered
In a newly-washed sheet
People chat in doorways
Some stop to stare at the
White token of transience
Guarded by a cohort of sun-
Specced police who look important
But quite clearly are not.


+++


Cabo Polonio

The smell corrupts the wind which tears into my features
Distorting my face into a beaten mask. Behind which I
Cannot hide. It is the smell of rotten seal. Washed up
On the beach of Cabo Polonio, a pragmatic paradise
With room for litter, revulsion and hardship; refusing
To cocoon its visitors in a vacuum-packed ambience of
Pleasure; forcing them to seize it, greedily and guilt-
Lessly, as a right, a due of land and nature. Like death:
The skeleton debris of the world’s wasted garbage
Claims its place beside the brilliant moon, the flawless sea,
The ragged music resonating morning noon and night.



march/april 1994

+++

a dream

I'm in Montevideo. I go to the bus station to catch a bus to Valizas. There are other English backpackers there, who don't really know what they're doing or where they're going. I ask in Spanish, and the sales assistant smiles at me. My Spanish is just about good enough.

I arrive in Valizas and make my way to Polonio. I find a spot beside one of the little ranchos. There's a lot of people there. It's busy. Evening arrives and I head off for a walk. I walk down towards the sea and put my foot in a marshy spot (which would not exist) and a baby crocodile snaps at me but misses.

I head off along the coast. It starts to become built up. I run into Raquel. She's been there a few days. I tell her there's a good bit further down the coast. But as we walk it becomes more and more built up. There are cars on roads. I tell her when I was there last, there were no cars. There's a fancy hotel. The place looks more like Punta, or Brighton. I say we should go and see the sea lions. The sea lions have had a special sea lion run created for them. It's concrete, and shallow, so they can bask there. A building crosses overhead. They seem happy enough, but it's all one great big tourist trap. Raquel holds out something for a sea lion to eat. I tell her that they're dangerous, she shouldn't, but the sea lion just lifts it out of her hand, a trick it's perfected.

There are hundreds of tourists. TP arrives. At one point, I spot a little crevice full of broken up crates, rubbish from the sea. I tell them - look there, that's what Polonio used to look like.

+++

achievement

The mark against which one should be measured might not be one's ability to succeed, but one's ability to fail, to continue to fail, to fail better, and to continue to fail better.

+++

the old bailey

The visitors gallery is entered via a white tiled passage.
After primitive security, they are herded like schoolkids
On the stairwell, waiting for permission to enter. The court
Rises for the judge. Yellow masking tape covers a bank of
Seats. In the gallery, a row is cordoned off by police tape,
As though a crime had been committed. The jury’s a scruffy
Multi racial mix. In for the long haul. Bewigged courtiers tap at
Laptops. Four members of the police defence council scrutinise
The gallery, copper genes kicking in. Unaccounted guests
Include a Brazilian, some students and a young man in a brash
Captain America T-shirt. The barristers know their Dickens.
For the police, a heronian brief, beaky, boxing clever.
His adversary appears as twitchy as a sparrow, then proceeds
To cross-examine like a mongoose, circling, darting, retreating.
She sips from her water, refills the glass from a jug, hovers, moves
On, quips with deadpan wit, runs her witness ragged. Implies a kill
She has no need to make. The witnesses are upstanding police-
Men, steeped in caution. The judge queries one officer. Surely, he
Suggests, were a suicide bomber known to be at large, would that
That not indeed represent an immediate, actionable threat
To the safety of the public? - Indeed it would. So – why was
Jean Charles de Menenzes allowed to board the bus unchallenged? Why
The four hour wait for a briefing? What really caused a man’s death, in
The darkness of the underground, on a Summer’s Day at Stockwell Tube?

031007

+++

Wordsworth, Letter to Mary Wordsworth, May 1812

The life which is lead by the fashionable world in this great city is miserable: there is neither dignity nor content nor love nor quiet to be found in it.

+++

my new home

Upon this day the headline announces:
Banking Crisis: The Fear Spreads. Three blue
Chairs and an ugly bed left behind declare
The ghostery of those who came before. Along
With unpaid bills and electriclessness. The
View across Notting Hill, Battersea and the M40
Begins its job of luring me in, revealing first
Secrets. A musty stench mutters of not-being-
Lived in. Months and months of neglect
Lend a forlorn air to the kindliest of souls.
The flyover, redolent of a megalopolis
Intrudes with its automated burble, but
Its unthreatening; the reliable riverine
Flow. Cars, vans and bikes skedaddle
Along, each one different, full of purpose,
A counterpoint to the writers vacuity. Who
Sits, writing his way into his new home,
Waiting for the light and the glow to take hold.

180907

+++

the blue society

A depressed person can help no-one save themselves.

+++

Making depression and selfishness unhappy bedfellows.

+++

Depression represents the asocial apex of a society.

+++

Capitalism feeds off dissatisfaction.

+++

If you have everything you need you won't need to purchase anything else.

+++

The greater your dissatisfaction the closer you come to depression.

+++

The mechanics of capitalism thrive on an underlying drift to depression.

+++

vices and virtues

Vanity and self-criticism are two peas from the same pod.

+++

People love their faults just as much as their virtues.

+++

People would readily jettison their virtues if needs be, whilst defending their faults to the hilt.

++

A fault may be described as a weakness, when it is actually treasured by the bearer as a badge of honour.

+++

You know where are you are with a fault. Virtues are more perpelexing.

+++

shannon airport

Rich US golfers express concerns
At being overcharged. Their golf
Bags are large enough to hide a
Body. In the departure terminal
Young men and women, white, black or
Latino amble, chat, sup a last
Guiness. Wearing desert boots and
Khaki fatigues. Without a hint of
Aggression, bearing fluffy toys in
Plastic bags. The golfers don't mix with
The unassuming soldiers whose quiet
Eyes protest they wouldn't harm a fly.

+++