Meditations In An Emergency

Featured in Mad Men as the reading matter of Greenwich Village (and, apparently stepping outside its target market, Don Draper), Frank O'Hara's 1957 collection is the confident work of one who seems to have found his geographical place to settle.

New York is home and the city stands as a singular beacon for life in all it's glories.  By the end of the collection, I found that I needed no further prompts - the 'dreary music / on Saturday afternoons', the departure airport of the plane in 'Sleeping on the Wing' - where else could they be, but the city which is life itself, in all it's forms?

And as city-centered as he is, O'Hara situates the antithesis of this 'life in all its forms' in hisonly alternative to vibrant city life-  the countryside:

... I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures.  No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes - I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.  It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass.  Do they know what they're missing?  Uh huh. ('Meditations in an Emergency' l.13-22)

If only O'Hara had lived in a suburb, he could've found material enough to let the clouds well alone.

But I can't agree that 'it is more important to affirm the least sincere' - O'Hara's love for the record store is only degrees away from the suburban love for a Matalan - both seem to lie along a spectrum. If blades of grass are to feature at all, then clouds cannot surely be discounted.  And the argument that our white fluffy (or today: grey, omnipresent, raining) sky-companions don't miss the attention is a tricky path to walk.  If receipients of our attention require a fear of it's absence,we may never attend anything again unless Katie Price is constituent.  'Uh huh' indeed.

But the poem moves on:

It's not that I'm not curious.  On the contrary, I am bored, but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep. ('Meditations in an Emergency' l.30-34)

Maybe Forsterian 'only connect' only works to a certain degree.  During this extract, I can feel a tension from an eye being drawn upward to the sky followed by confusion and discomfort at having to reconsider who they are on the ground.  Maybe clouds have it after all - after all they are the essence of constant motion, which is drawn as a final solution:

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans.  I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.  It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead.  There won't be any mail downstairs.  Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns. ('Meditations in an Emergency' l.59-64)

'There's a lot ahead' - what a perfect phrase to sum up that feeling of mental confusion mixed with optimism.  I know that feeling - but don't think the solution is the same.

I think the clouds get less than the attention they need. And I think it's probably good for sleep, precisely because they don't miss it.

A Single Man

Cinema releases are a bittersweet delight when you're marooned in suburbia.  Although utterly immersive when sitting in the cinema, the experience is a holiday from reality, which must inevitably lead with a return home through the double doors at the back into an identikit multiplex lobby leading out onto a street ornamented with the salmon-pink stone of the newly built supermarket.


Although A Single Man (and along with it, most releases screened in Venice, Cannes or Munich) isn't showing at our local identikit multiplex - a place where Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 was afforded a three month run due to high demand.  And so I hiked up to the identikit multiplex in the Docklands.  A place where ol' Alvin never even got a week, but Up In The Air has been on for two months now.

Strangely, the cinema experience was the same - the same wave of uninspiration walking out on the same brand-issue carpet, despite the architecture, the historic wharf-front, the proximity to places of interest and possibility.  Maybe I'm carrying my 'life of the mind' around me in my bubble... Jeanette, you and Atlas'd be proud; I'm examining the boundaries of my own existence...

Whether it's drawing people in to us to resist orbit or merely to help examine the edges of our bubble, the idea to 'only connect' has got to be key - certainly Tom Ford thinks so.  From Isherwood's novel with its undercurrent of rage against the author's lover left, Ford can see from a clearer vantage point, and uses the film to explore far more deeply the love between  George and Jim, making the idea of new connections compounded with more feeling than in the original book. Floating weightless and in danger of drowning we see the symbol of so many of our daily lives, and this blissful self-annihilation we see in the film in drugs, drunkenness - even interior design - all temporary salves to quell a darker force.

And yet, when connections are made between human beings, real connection, the design fades away from our consciousness - when George is connecting with another, we don't notice the beautiful architecture, the walls, the elegant cut of the clothes.  How did Ford do that?  Or is us?

I'm saying us, but maybe that should be 'is it me?'  I guess the message to connect has bested the curse of the exit into the double doors and indentikit carpet and the inevitable retreat into the bubble.

A masterpiece in every respect.  I'm off to do a little connecting right now...

Sputnik Sweetheart

Wikipedia described the themes of Murakami's 1999 work:

'...the effects of prolonged loneliness and alienation, growing up emotionally stunted in a densely populated and overwhelmingly conformist society, and the conflict between following one's dreams and clamping down on them in order to assimilate into society. The book's major themes include loneliness and people's inability to truly know themselves or the people they love.'

You can see why it fit my train of thought.

But choosing this novel was little more than a random grab in the same library trip as Weight, and yet reading it brought that curiously narrative-like feeling to sequential events that comes from time to time.  As in Weight the idea of boundaries to our existence is dealt with again - with the fantastical rather than the mythical the prevailing mode.

Our protagonist is unusually withdrawn for Murakami.  As he says himself,

'...I'd like to take a rain check on the topic of me.  What I'd like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself.  How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it.  That's how I'd grasp a clearer sense of who I am.

...

The upshot of all this is that when I was young I began to draw and invisible boundary between myself and other people.  No matter who I was dealing with, I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person's attitude so that they wouldn't get any closer.' (p.60)

And the idea of one's own boundaries is central to the novel - and quickly we realise that the placement of the boundaries of self-creation do not merely have to circumnavigate the self - in some case they can run through, rather than around their creator.

Like an architect's blueprint for life, Murakami sketches in for us the lines of object and self and they are drawn throughout the work - in phone lines, flight path and ferry routes.  These lines form the scaffolds for the encounters of boundary-bubbled-selves at their vertices - with the potential for the merging of spirits, but too often characters, encased as they are, simply can't get that close.

As our protagonist recognises at the end of the novel, reaching that intersection with another individual is possible only in this realm, and our ability should be born out of gratitude:

'We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world.  We're connected to reality by the same line.  All I have to do is draw it towards me.' (p.229)

Like a threat hangs Sputnik in the sky - trapped in an orbit, with no hope of 'only connecting' in this way, just as Miu is trapped on her ferris wheel.

What happens when we are removed to this extent?

'It made her think of Laika, the dog.  The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outher space.  The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window.  In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?' (p.8)

With the eerie incidence of a brief temporal narrative, Weight answers for Laika, just as Sputnik Sweetheart answers for Miu, trapped looking out of her ferris wheel into the night in the same way.  The linear progression of the character is impossible for a character trapped in circular isolation. Like a multiverse theory, the potential of the character begins to break apart, never to be seen again.

Laika has stuck in my mind for a few days now, and I'd love to know more about her incidence in literature since Sputnik II was launched.  Her story is increasingly feeling like the stuff of new mythology, part of a canon which meets a global need by a newly global society.

With communications and travel bringing the world closer, there is a powerful lesson to all those, like me, marooned in suburbia (with endless rows of identical semis and terraces and high streets, certainly a 'densely populated and overwhelmingly conformist society'). We are connected to reality.  All we have to do is draw it towards us.

I love this idea - where attracting movement in  is more powerful than moving in our bubbles towards people and things.

Time to invite people to stay... :)

Weight

Another great library find from the same trip. Who knew Bexleyheath Central Library had so much good fiction in it? The defendants of suburbia are massing indeed...

151 pages and two day's commuting, and I remember all the reasons why I love Jeanette Winterson, even if her Saturday columns in the times can be a bit sniffy sometimes.  This is the kind of commission she was made for.

The myth of Atlas and Heracles wrapped around philosophy, modernity and autobiography - I'm not sure whether I'm more impressed that Jeanette Winterson claims that she can lift her own weight, or that a slim tome can do justice to such a wide vision. 

There are so many signs and symbols (of which more next time, with Mr Murakami) that it felt like the kind of book that prompts thoughts unbidden for days afterwards, and the key idea is one that really struck me:

'I keep telling the story again and thought I find different exits, the walls never fall.  My life is paced out - here and here and here - I can alter its shape but I can't get beyond it.  I tunnel through, seem to find a way out, but the exits lead nowhere.  I'm back inside, leaning on the limits of myself' (p.14)

Until after reading this, I'd never considered just how often repeated in classical mythology this idea is: the acknowledgement of our powerlessness over the boundaries that form the limits of our existence.  Atlas' relationship with his globe, particularly as he comes to let go of it at the end of the reimagining reiterates this again - what we see as the limits of freedom are symbolically the innate essence of our being.  When Atlas lets go, the burden ceases to exist - 'there was only the diamond-blue earth gardened in a wilderness of space'.  And yet there Atlas leaves us, his story over.  Without the boundaries that define us, we cannot continue.

Laika, the dog sent terrified on Sputnik II, before being automatically being lethally injected a week later, features too, with Atlas to sympathise with the boundaries of her metallic prison.  Both mythically released from that which binds them, however, they simply have to walk away.  Elsewhere in the mythologies past and present, being tied to your fate typically guarantees the repetition of your stories - even in the case of deaths at the hands of fate or prophecy (Hercules here the perfect example) the stories continue to swirl and recoil down the ages like the ghostly spirit itself.  Not so for Atlas and Laika.  Released from their burdens the repetition of 'I want to tell the story again' is no more. They walk away from us, and from life-giving narrative.

The dream of freedom is a dream of control over our boundaries - a dream of escaping the essence of who we are.  The idea of reinvention works for literature only whilst the boundaries remain, and so it is for us too. To escape our own boundaries completely is to lose ourselves.  Far better then to examine the boundaries of self-creation, and keep the sense of our own narrative.  Escape from DA8 isn't the issue - my story wouldn't exist outside the limits of geography, and so the search to refute them is futile.

Plus, the coral of the A206 is now drawn in perspective against Prometheus chained to a rock having his liver torn out daily.  Drive through KFC anyone?

A Single Man

There are times when being marooned in suburbia pays. Less than a week until the release of Oscar-tipped A Single Man, other London boroughs with a little more cultural awareness will have found every single one of the library copies of Isherwood's 1964 novel has been checked out in full.

In Bexley, there was only A Single Copy of A Single Man - stored off shelf in the 'Reserve Stock'. Presumably reserved in case the signal for ITV went down, and all books, even those not by Catherine Cookson, were needed to distribute to twitchy masses missing The Bill.

A single copy - in any other borough?  Them wouldn't be good odds. Thankfully, in Bexley not one other library user had the remotest interest...

At only 158 pages, a single copy of A Single Man has been digested in a single evening - with some truly singular ideas about life marooned too. After hearing a dinner guest bemoaning the difference between American motels and Mexican hotels - 'after all those marvellous old hotels in Mexico - each one of them is really a place - but this was just utterly unreal', George, our protagonist, and a thinly veiled author, launches forth in defence of the souless environment. Suburbia has found it's first defendant:

'...an American motel-room isn't a room in an hotel, it's the Room, definitively, period. There is only one; The Room. And it's a symbol - an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like - for our way of life. And what's our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you've got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death....The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We've reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that's the essential first step. until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can't ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. the stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. but the Europeans call us inhuman - or they prefer to say immature, which sounds ruder - because we've renounced their world of individual differences, and romantic inefficiency, and objects-for-the-sake-of-objects. All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines.
...
The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisments, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained - and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out 'these people are zombies!'. They've got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they're a far far more advanced culture - five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter. Essentially we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That's why we're completely at home with symbols like the American Motel-Room. Whereas the European has a horror of symbols because he's such a grovelling little materialist - ' (pp.76-77)

This is honestly the first time that I've ever considered the merits of an environment so bland as to give the opportunity to strip away materialism and deliver a wholly cognitive life. (I'm thinking that it may not have occurred to the clientele of the drive-through McDonalds either).

Hope arises from zombie-land! Although fairly heavily dependant on the ability to 'contemplate' as we retire inside the cave of our advertisements - it does absolve the material environment completely - the soil of DA8 (buried deep under tarmac) rejoices!

My need for cathedrals, first editions, all things Parisien and enophile is genuinely abating. A creature of spirit. A life all in the mind. I can do that. Although instead of the Pacific waves crashing gently nearby as I discuss literature with my college students and muse over the demise of my gay lover, I can see a landfill from my window. Ah well.  It's symbolic.

Life in DA8

I live in a postcode which contains:

• No bars that host live music
• No cinemas that screen subtitled films
• No restaurants that source local food
• No fields that produce local food
• No cafes that lend newspapers
• And no museums, galleries, open mic nights or historical sites of any kind.

What we do have is:

• One large Morrisons (cultural highlight)
• One drive-through McDonalds
• One drive-through KFC (next door)
• One large Matalan
• Endless terraced and semi-detached homes built on the remains of orchards and drained marshland
• Two commuter train stations in dark areas, with infrequent bus services
  
• A council rec centre leased out to a private leisure operator running contract-charges
  
• Lots of primary schools
• One secondary school
• NO tertiary education
• No adult education
• Two cemeteries

Unfortunately it also happens to contain:

• A lovely boyfriend
• Lovely boyfriends' work
• My lovely family
• My lovely mum's work
• My lovely boyfriends' lovely family
• My lovely boyfriends' lovely family's work

So I find myself marooned in the sea of uninspiration which is DA8.

But I have a plan... I will read a LOT of books. And I will watch a LOT of films. Whilst reporting on the situation at hand here in ol' DA8. Considering that the level of excitement and energy in DA8 is roughly equivalent to the level of excitement and energy 40 minutes after dinner in a home for the terminally depressed, it'll probably mainly be the reviews.

But you never know...