GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS
All My Precious Madness, by Mark Bowles
ONE NIGHT I HAD LAID DOWN IN BED, ready to go to sleep. I’d put on the music, as I always did. But as I lay there in darkness, it struck me that the lights were still on in the bookshop. I had not switched them off. It was midnight. I wanted to check the lights. I didn’t want him, the owner, the corduroy waistcoat, the fuckweasel, to come in in the morning with the lights still on. Only the week before, there was a note on the desk saying I had left the place in a mess, a charge that was quite unjust, if not an outright lie. But I had been upset by this note. It had taken the wind out of my sails. So, I put on my slippers and went out into that cool September night. I remember that it was in fact unusually cool for September. For some reason I wore my slippers to go out. I’m not sure why I wore my slippers rather than my shoes but I did. As if Oxford were only a series of rooms, as if Oxford wasn’t quite a real city but only a grand house through which one could walk at leisure beneath a remote and sparkling ceiling. And I walked out in my slippers to the bookshop to check the lights.
In fact, they were off. I hadn’t left them on at all. I’d misremembered or imagined leaving them on, as I lay in bed, in the dark, on the border of sleep with the soft notes falling and rising. And now, only half an hour later, I was stood outside the shop, in the cool air, wearing my slippers, looking in through the window. I decided to enter. It was a simple mortice lock and there was no alarm. Imagine. You find it improbable but it’s true anyhow. I went inside and turned on the lights, and I sat at the desk by the window. I took down a number of first editions from the Foreign Literature section, including the tragic Schulz, whose drawings are dug from the corners of our dreams, and also a 1972 translation of Paul Celan: Inside the house, the drifting snow, of what was left unspoken. Yes, inside the house, exactly. I had never read this book before, but each word glowed with meaning as it never would again. In fact, I have never since been able to fully access these poems, as if a gate had been placed in front of them. But that night the gate was open and I simply received them like gift, a libation that irrigated my body and mind. Only later did I discover that Celan killed himself by jumping from the Point Mirabeau into the Seine. But this is of no importance. I sat there reading the book, at what was well after midnight. Occasionally some drunk students would walk past and point or call out, but I did not listen. I sat there illuminated by my book. I sat there for three hours, at the desk in the bookshop. They were hours stolen from sleep and as luminous and vivid as a dream. It was not that three hours passed quickly but that no hours passed. Time was excluded. It had to wait, in the alleyway across the street, like a beggar, for me to come out of the shop.
I can honestly say that this moment, or rather this whole divagation, from leaving the house in my slippers, to sitting in the bookshop reading, to returning to the house: this was one of most enigmatic and mysterious experiences I have ever enjoyed. As if directed by an occult hand. As if interpolated from another life. An experience like this, that burns only once, unexpectedly, therefore burns forever: the light in the window still there and me at the table even now, exempt from time and harm.
*
But all this of this, which occurred over twenty years ago, is only by way of introduction, a kind of obscure and looping prelude, to the man in the café, the small Italian place on Berwick Street. And the man in the café is, in turn, only a necessary detour on route to my walk by the river.
I used to go to that cafe every morning, up until maybe a month ago now. A pungent espresso in a thick white cup with navy piping. Espresso as it should be, as thick and as dark as arterial blood. I remember the first time I saw him, the slender man with the tanned long face. He reminded me of Claude Cahun, a sculpted androgyne from an era long gone. His movements were delicate and precise, his eyelashes long and dark; a beige moleskin jacket and open necked shirt completed the portrait. In the early morning light, and viewed in his marmoreal isolation at the corner table, he would be thought beautiful. But then he answered his phone. He began speaking in a vaguely posh accent about his travels. He’d travelled to Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet, South Africa. And this had of course been an “amazing experience”, the “experience of a lifetime” and other such phrases. That was pretty much all he had to communicate. "The landscape, the culture.." he stuttered, too amazed to complete the sentence. He’d had a tattoo, he said, “this awesome guy in Tibet. Practically a midget. What’s that? No, not an actual midget. Didn’t have the big head. Just really small. Really interesting guy. Mandarin? Why would he speak Mandarin? They have their own language. It’s Indic script. Then a Tibetan knot on the ankle. Are you on Facetime? Hang on I’ll show you…”
Some people, far too many these days, need to make a 3000-mile trip to have an experience. Their bodies and minds are presumably so anesthetised that it requires the galvanising jolt of a trip to Thailand, being thrown out of a plane on a sky dive, or pushed off a bridge in the back of beyond on the end of a rubber rope. Just to have an experience. There was one thick necked cretin back in the office, that zone of perdition where I wasted years of my life, where I poured hours and days of my life down time’s omnivorous toilet, a thick necked cretin called Liam, one among many, who told me that he’d travelled extensively in his twenties to “get some experience”. As if experience were a kind of stock or pension fund you put in the bank for the subsequent stretch of ordinary years. He saw ladyboys in doorways, insects cooked in roadside stalls, the usual stuff predicted by guidebooks, surface perceptions that tickled his fancy. He wandered through distant streets or designated pathways, clocking the merely “different”. He returned home, of course, unerringly, to the stubborn province of his own stupidity, to a life of money grubbing and onanism, having “seen the world”, but blindly, lacking, in fact, the perceptual and sensory equipment to see or feel anything. People fail to understand, I complained to Carvell, that you do not have to travel to meet with amazement. We might wake on a winter’s morning in a stranger’s house by the fields, the mist covering completely the earthly floor, and the trees like charcoal under tissue-paper. A sunken world, the old barn like a wreck underwater, the bleak beauty arranged by nature for the wandering spirits. But you don’t have to open a bookshop at midnight, you don’t have to rise to the sleeping mist. You can sit in a café, raise an espresso to your lips, watch as the sun takes the floating dust and turns it into a column of tiny golden insects, and this moment, not noticed, not snatched by the camera as soon as it’s born, is an experience of great depth and distance. But it requires stillness, it requires slowness. You need to stop. It’s not about crossing the earth so fast that the boo! of novelty knocks you down. The endless bungee jumpers, the skydivers, those who’ve had their ankle tattooed by a Tibetan midget on the side of the Kunlun volcano.. all they needed to do was sit at the table by the window and the world would unravel itself in front of their eyes. Carvell concurred.
Carvell was one of my few remaining friends from Oxford. Carvell, despite being a close friend, by male standards, was a compulsive liar. Every time we met, he said things that were obviously made up. He told me his uncle had been “sewn up the wrong way” after a bowel operation so that shit came out of his mouth. I remember this example because, metaphorically, it was also true of Carvell, who – when he wasn’t talking about philosophy or literature – talked a load of shit. None of his stories, judged individually, were obviously untrue, for Carvell was perhaps careful to locate them within the radius of the possible, but cumulatively they added up to a pile of garbage, or a wall of bullshit wherein each story was an individual brick. He told me that he had attended a Noam Chomsky lecture where Chomsky had replied in Hebrew to a hostile question about Israel. However, I wrote subsequently to the chair of the meeting, Professor Honderich, who verified that no such exchange had taken place. Carvell told me that he’d seen the Unionist leader David Trimble in Waterstones Charing Cross Road buying a copy of Mein Kampf. But he’d clearly forgotten this when, years later, he said he’d spotted Yoko Ono buying Mein Kampf in Waterstones Piccadilly. Ono had in fact been in London at the time, but the antecedent Trimble tale removed any plausibility, as did the fact that Waterstones did and do not stock Mein Kampf. Sometime before that, Carvell claimed that his grandfather was the man who banged the gong at the beginning of the Rank films, but by a truly bizarre coincidence, I’d gone to school with the actual grandson of the Rank man, a bow-legged boy named Burns. He told me that he had a friend connected to the IRA, a one-armed priest, who we could call on should we ever need “a favour”. Other lies were pointless and banal, and by that token invited credence, at least from those unfamiliar with this tactic. So, for example, he reported that he’d been sat in an ‘all you can eat’ pizzeria in Covent Garden when Seamus Heaney walked in, unaccompanied. Carvell sat and watched Heaney eat a total of nine slices of spicy sausage pizza, one after the other, washed down with a pint of Coca-Cola. “And was he just staring into space, was he reading a book?” I asked hoping to trip him up. “Yes, reading a book” “Oh really, what book was it?” – at which point Carvell’s eyes widened with suspense... “It was a biography of Mussolini!” But there is of course nothing in the Idea of Seamus Heaney that includes eating the equivalent of two large pizzas, alone, washed down with Coca-Cola, in a threadbare pizza chain in Covent Garden, whilst reading a Mussolini book. Each person’s proper name is also a kind of Idea demarcating what they might do and say, a range of action and possible statements. I explained my theory to Carvell, who rebutted it by claiming that Heaney is well known in Belfast for his love of junk food, particularly kebabs and pizza. He added that there is always, with anyone, such an anomaly, a detail which does not fit the person’s Idea and which not only makes them more endearing but is actually the back door to their soul. He cited also Picasso’s love of wrestling, as a further example, and, as I already knew, a well-documented one. But Heaney’s love of pizza and kebabs is nowhere documented, and no such documentation will emerge, for the very good reason that it is pure fucking bullshit.
Nonetheless, I did not challenge him on these falsehoods, which never bothered me very much, for I am respectful of the fragile fictions people spin around themselves to make their lives tolerable, and it is not for me to unravel these intricate structures in the name of ‘honesty’. In ‘telling the truth’, there is typically a motive which is questionable, which we fail to acknowledge and which we disown by saying, simply, “but it’s the truth”. The motive is exposure and humiliation. So, I had no wish to expose, to catch out or humiliate Carvell; I had no particular wish to unravel my friend any more than I might destroy the web of a spider or a tortoise’s shell. We are all creatures actually, with our webs, our territories, our nests and secretions, even though these are disguised as words and beliefs and habits. Many of our ways of speaking are in fact ways of crying, of scratching, of nuzzling or hissing. Hence my tolerance for Carvell’s lies which were in fact spun by some inner necessity as the silkworm spins its silk.
Anyway, as far is travel is concerned, it is true that I travel to Paris, to Rome, every year, with a view to living in one of those great cities, to escaping England, just as the estimable Berger escaped due to people finding him “too intense”, as he said, which is a code word for simply being alive, being merely awake and properly sentient, states which are too ‘intense’ for the English. The English prefer to look at the world through the filter of irony and resignation. In the end it will be necessary to live in exile from the English, which would not be exile but homecoming. Berger, who is certainly an emeritus at the Academy of the Underrated, was compelled to move elsewhere, rather than have his mind stop… and the same is true of all writers. The English hate anything which doesn’t return them to the prosaic and the everyday. Grand passions and intellectuals are automatically suspect. They live under the sign of necessity: “What can you do?” they burble, “It’s a funny old world”. They permit themselves the sole freedom of mockery. To a script written and edited by others, they make ironic additions in the margins. The English may have a ‘good sense of humour’ and a historic litany of many comedians, satirists, ironists of the best mettle. Fine. But the forfeit they pay is intellectual castration. The critical impulse, the philosophical force of the negative, which might once have fomented revolution or toppled the King, is instead turned on themselves, shrivelled to mere carping and grumbling. The regime’s faults are inevitable; such is the way of the world. Whereas the Gallic shrug says “Who can tell?”, the English shrug says “What can you do?” The former shrugs off the world to win a yard of freedom, the latter is an act of surrender. The laughter of the English is their measly consolation for a world beyond change. It is not the laughter of joy, of surplus vitality, like a baby’s laughter when it discovers a new trick, but the laughter of deficit, life’s perpetual deficit and defeat, life’s perpetual falling short.
My American students, of course, are always hungry for insights into ‘Englishness’ and so forth. Let me first say parenthetically that I like my American students, and that I love America and, as importantly, the Idea of it, which it typically fails to live up to. This very failure is in turn part of its tragic mythology. ‘The failure of the American dream’ and all the consequent blather. Many Europeans who love America are precisely those accused of hating it, or are assumed to hate it. This is because they love the ‘wrong’ America: the America of Jazz, Blues, of Beat poetry, of the Black Panthers. Movements which, in their time, have of course been labelled as anti-American, even as they are quintessentially American. As far as English and Englishness are concerned, I tell them that I have little interest in the subject, and can speak only anecdotally and in a personal capacity. And this I delivered to the students only as a prelude to speaking of my father. “Why is it”, my father once asked me, “that in order to get anything done in this country, it is first necessary to make yourself an absolute pain in the arse?” He was right of course, that one must turn oneself into a real haemorrhoidal discomfiture up the clenched arsehole of the official or operative to whom one is speaking, with whom one is dealing, and, thereafter, to insert oneself as far up the hierarchy of said organisation or company as possible. I remember very clearly and fondly his battle with some tin pot orthopaedic sofa company, after I had advised him of course to buy from a major retailer. But no, he had identified a bargain and had been assured that their sofas were ‘bespoke’ and medically endorsed. This firm was confined to a single shop on the high street in Weatherby. The sofa, cheap and badly designed, placed him in excruciating pain. My father, of course, in complaining about this sofa, first of all met with the brick wall of ‘company policy’, the blank intransigence of ‘company policy’, which is almost psychopathically indifferent to particular circumstances and to bodily pain, so that those functionaries who identify with company policy effectively turn into psychopaths, their sentient interiors having been scooped out by this impersonal law. ‘Company policy’ allied with ‘the system’ presents the customer with a seemingly impregnable wall of inertia. And doubtless most pensioners would have simply capitulated to ‘company policy’, as to some final court of arbitration, as to some law of nature, as if ‘company policy’ preceded all individual wills and decisions. But my father merely viewed this as a challenge and a spur to his ingenuity. He stood outside their premises with a home-made placard advising people not to purchase anything from Southfield Orthopaedic Furniture and informing passers-by of the appalling customer service and administrative uselessness of this ostensible furniture emporium. And it was soon apparent, after my father effectively picketed their premises, whilst holding his placard, that ‘company policy’ was no more than a gossamer sheet of legal jargon, for within perhaps half an hour of him setting up his stall, the sofa operatives scuttled out of their office with a cheque for a full refund and arranged to pick up the sofa later that afternoon. “Like rats out of a trap,” said my father with evident jubilation after he returned home and danced a delicious victory dance and sang of his triumph whilst punching the air, repeating the words “rats out of a trap,” whereupon anyone hearing and seeing him could not help but join in and laugh, and trample on the now discoloured name of Westfield Orthopaedic Furniture following their humiliating climbdown. All this I relayed to the students, who appreciated this digression, and I too enjoyed narrating this anecdote of my father, for pedagogical purposes of course, to grant texture and colour to the general drift, but to invoke also my father’s ghost, to bring him briefly back to life, and to see him, as I spoke, walk slowly in front of the lectern in his green corduroy trousers and mustard coloured pipe and take his seat at the front on the left. My father, who was happy to sit in his solitude, whereas many people are never able to do so, and can only stand, awkwardly, in the telephone box of their solitude, knocking on the window and shouting “excuse me” in a strangled angry voice. This eccentricity of my father, I told the students, is perhaps something I share, this eccentricity which is neither his nor mine, but something we have both carried, and which does not have a nation or a gender or a religion, for it is a singular thing, and ‘identity’, if it has any meaning at all, which is doubtful, consists of such singularities.
So, I have a plan to live in either Rome or Paris. As yet not actual planning has taken place. It is enough for the time being to call it a plan. This is always the first step. The preliminary statement of intent. To say “This is a plan”. Calling it a plan rather than a “day dream” for example. Once you have the name, the name “plan”, the clock starts ticking, you have certain obligations. But no, the actual planning has not yet occurred. I joke that I divide my time between London, Paris and Rome, spending fifty weeks in the former and two in the latter. For it is certain that one day I will live in Paris or in Rome. For only in those two cities can I be happy. And one day I will also die in either Rome or Paris, or I will move finally to Icaria where, at the age of seventy, I will bloom again and live another thirty years, learning Greek in delicious increments.
In Paris I stay in a place near Montmartre, a tiny place on the Rue Lepic, above the city. From my window I see the whole city turn to gold and fall asleep. I walk down the hill, each morning to that same café in the Rue des Martyrs. I ask for “un café”, the bitter ‘medicine’, as the French call it. I sit and write. The memoir about my father, which is now – finally – almost finished, or the monograph on Beckett and the summary refutation of everything written about Beckett by the philosopher of the moment, Badiou, who has understood nothing. My pen bleeds quickly on those café tables, round as planets, counterfeiting the sun with their own golden circles. Later I meander down to Saint Germain, and to the Café de Flore for a second coffee. It’s a cliché of course, but I am listening to the spirits. It’s a visit to the museum. The hubbub in the Flore is only the echo of another hubbub, another world whose promise has ebbed away even if its material shell remains. In Paris, as in all the best places, the dead are still present. Pressing your ear to the pavement you can still hear Giacometti’s footsteps. It’s raining and he’s covering his head with a summer coat. Elsewhere, your ear to the flaking wall, there’s a burst of Jean Genet’s laughter, his beady stare slingshots your small talk. In Paris, as in Rome or Budapest or Prague, the fabric of the Old City shines forth and is the cause of civic and national pride. But in London it is under constant and sustained attack from wrecking balls and bulldozers, and it is impossible to turn a corner without seeing buildings covered in scaffolding and plastic sheets, underneath which the stonework or brickwork is being assaulted and corroded, destroyed and replaced by a predictable façade. Or else, where one expected a familiar sight, one instead bends one’s eye on absence and can no longer recall what was there before, afflicted with the quick and useful amnesia that plagues all of us. Many old and revered institutions, such as the old Italian on Bateman Street with the 1930’s espresso machine, are becoming extinct, driven out by the madcap rents of absentee landlords and replaced by whatever, indifferently, yields most profit. Had Café de Flore been in London it would now be a Nando’s or an apartment block. All the great European cities, in fact, still have cafes that have been, for a hundred years or more, the engine rooms of intellectual and artistic activity. Prague has the Imperial, Budapest the Centrál, Florence the Giubbe Rosse, Venice the Florian – little more than a well-preserved museum, granted... All except England. The Gherkin, so-called, The Cheesegrater, so-called, Walkie Talkie, so-called, and other laughable grabs at iconicity. Money rips through the irregular fabric, indifferent to history, neighbourhood, culture, to the very idea of the City in fact. Where there are old buildings there is melancholy; with the new blank buildings, melancholy has been wiped out and the ghosts and spirits made homeless. They won’t let this happen in Paris.
I took my mother there last year, to Paris, for her 70th birthday. We stayed in a small apartment in the Marais, a former atelier, a beautiful little place on a cobbled square behind the street. It had a thin tin roof on which the rain drummed crazily, a cacophony which eventually stopped to disclose a warm and glorious dawn. It was so hot that morning and we walked with slow steps, for her back was bad, along the Rue de Turbigo to the Louvre. My mother never thought she’d see Paris, she told me, such a beautiful city, and said how my father never wanted to go there, just as she had never wanted to visit Egypt, compelling him to go alone. She’d never actually been overseas until her late thirties when my father took her to Yugoslavia, as it then was, just before the war, to see the golden glories of Zagreb. At the Louvre, in the Mona Lisa room, I noticed an idiot taking photos of himself next to each painting with a so-called “selfie stick”, a term I refuse to use. There are certain terms one should always refuse to use, like the idiotic ‘her majesty’, which should also never be capitalised, referring to the nominal head of the Windsor clan. And likewise, though for very different reasons of course, “selfie” should never be used in so far as it is too comfortable with the thing it describes, it makes it seem familiar and obvious when in fact it is quintessentially moronic, and this very term ‘selfie stick’ ought properly to induce feelings of anger and depression. Therefore, for this anecdote I will call it a ‘narcisstick’, for these people who take ‘selfies’ are people who always have to be in the picture. The idea that the Mona Lisa or Big Ben or manifold other stereotypical ‘attractions’ might rest untagged by their gurning face is unthinkable. The image must be counter-signed by their grinning and vacant head. And these images, in turn, are destined for their various ‘social media’ pages, which display not the variety of their travels but the unerring and moronic repetition of their head with various backdrops – the Florence backdrop, the Paris backdrop, the Taj Mahal backdrop and so on. This flattening of the world to wallpaper for the grinning head is the essence of narcissism, so that the term ‘narcisstick’ has no bias whatever but is purely and economically descriptive, whereas the term ‘selfie stick’ drags with it a whole culture, and winks indulgently at this culture, helping to legitimise what really should be ridiculed and destroyed. And so, as I was guiding my mother through the swarm of people, the swarm of idiots clutching their narcissticks, to see the Mona Lisa, it so happened that he, the gormless idiot, visibly giddy and rigid, pushed his way past my mother, elbowed her of the way, so forcibly she scowled and released a muted “Ow!”, equivalent to a scream of agony in more expressive people, which he didn't hear of course, scrambling for his photo opportunity. And because this kind of rudeness cannot go unchecked, the reciprocating elbow he received from me in the small of his back was considerably harder, and, accompanied by a swift back kick, it meant that he went down and stayed down, narcisstick clattering to the floor, head swivelling around angrily, confused and undone. I couldn’t decide whether it was amusing or annoying that he had no idea, no clue, why he’d been flattened. Anyway, inconspicuously, and arm in arm with my mother, I strolled into the next room discussing art in the usual whispers.
Of course, Paris is overwhelmed with tourists. They are happy to see the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame: things that are only signatures of Paris, things that are signs of “having been to Paris” that just happen to be located in the city of that name. Similarly, they photograph St Mark’s Square because it signifies Venice, the Colosseum because it signifies Rome, just as Big Ben is the sign of London. Nothing is photographed because it is that something but only because it signifies that something. Of course, there might be a photo of them at a small local cafe down a side street they somehow stumbled upon. But this is no exception, for it signifies and is there to signify only ‘authentic Paris’ and is on the same plain as everything else. They have only the signs of their own experience but not the thing itself. In fact, before any experiences can happen, they are intercepted by their own image. Drinking in a bar, a plate of food, travelling on a train, are snatched by robots before they can happen, and drained of life. These images are always abstractions, for the simple reason that actual experience is distributed through all the senses, not just the sense of sight. The espresso sipped in Rome passes through the smell of the coffee, the noise of the machine, the morning light pausing golden by the door, the hubbub of voice and vehicles outside. It is perfectly sensible to say that the coffee tastes of these things, and whoever says anything different is wrong. My students are constantly presenting images of themselves, stories about themselves on so-called social media for others to scroll through. I tell them that people who scroll through Facebook and Twitter are in fact ontologically bored. Facebook and Twitter are in fact methods for organising their boredom and lending it structure. Nor are they bored, these Facebook and Twitter users, in the sense of being temporarily without something to do, or in a state of waiting, as one waits for the dentist leafing through a soiled copy of GQ or Woman’s Weekly. No, they are bored in their very being, they are made of boredom, as a house is made of bricks. Beneath the shining plaster of their ‘feed’ is a grey vacuum of boredom. I remember from my last visit to Paris, a small street off the Rue Bizerte. There were two old men, two golden codgers, sat on a bench, talking about politics. They weren’t tweeting about it, they weren’t ‘Facebooking’ it. They were just living, as people used to do, unconcerned that their conversation will burn brightly and leave no trace, as with all beautiful things that are not art. An intensity, purely here and now, unconcerned with leaving some evidence or how things might look to that congregation of digital shadows we call our ‘friends’.
As for Rome, they could never understand, those office cretins, why I repeatedly went to Rome. “Haven’t you been to Rome already,” they’d ask, “Haven’t you done everything?” As if one could. I’ve done some things, I said, and I’ll do them again, and again. I’ll eat the rich salty carbonara at Da Enzo’s. I’ll stand at the bar at the Bar San Calisto and knock back a brief espresso, or sit outside in the sun and write, whilst the old men play cards around that small copper table, angry and disputatious as if deciding the fate of mortals, whilst the tame sparrows of Trastevere bob and flutter and wait for crumbs. I’ll walk once more along the Via Giulia with its burnished cobbles, long and straight as one of the shining rails of eternity. I’ll stand at the fountain in the Piazza Santa Maria and throw a coin and wish for my deliverance. There is a type of repetition born of joy and allied to joy, and a type of repetition which is the creature of habit, allied only to death, and they are exact opposites. Rome, which I visit in October, surely the best month to be there, is for me inseparable from Julia, and our brief tryst in the Via Guilia, near the banks of the Tiber. I confine myself (except “confine” is exactly wrong) to a kind of circle with the Bar San Calisto at its centre. The Bar San Calisto is of all places the place where I feel entirely at home, and my only sense of patriotism is to this small area, where, were I exiled, and put under district arrest, I would be entirely happy and count myself, like Hamlet, a king of infinite space. It was with Julia, just after starting my Doctorate and shortly before the onset of my father’s breakdown and my own illness, we went to Rome, and to the Via Giulia in particular, to excavate her origins and to stay in the hotel where she was herself conceived, or so she had been told. The hotel where we had sex.
The librarian and academician of the obscene George Bataille once said that in sex the spine is dissolved, by which he meant, I can only assume, that the whole body becomes as sensitive and as central as the spine; as the spine does when some slow angelic finger runs down it as if reading poetry in braille. So it was with Julia. Having said that, nothing more can be said about sex with Julia, nothing. This is because the description of actual sex, as opposed to imagined or fictional sex, always fails. Any attempt to remember and describe is doomed. And sex words, or more accurately the words that are part of sex, likewise do not survive the scene of their enunciation. They cannot be repeated, cited, transferred or otherwise represented. They will always – like a jellyfish – be seen as ridiculous outside the water in which briefly they live. This is in part because sex is always, among other things, a crucible in which language is melted down and recast, words become caresses, and it happens also that the ‘obscenest’ of words, such as “cunt” or “fuck”, are turned tender, the most innocent deliberately grubbed and soiled. In any case, they are ephemera. They are part of an arc that ends or begins in the body. Proper erotic literature, purely fictional and without an original, is never a description of something that has really happened but a form of arousal in its own right. It is a stimulant, a vial of language poured in the ear.
Julia called me by my nickname, “Antaeus”. A couple of women, in fact, have identified me with the ‘earthy’ in some way, such as the fay upper-middle-class Emer, who regarded me as “Heathcliff” figure. “Watch out I don’t hang your dog,” I replied, but she hadn’t in fact read Wuthering Heights in sufficient detail to get the allusion and looked merely apprehensive. In any case, all of this was probably only because of my Northern accent and the round vowels which convention has marked as coarse and robust, certain words like “pub” and “bath” and “us”, which sound, to a Southern or American ear, like the thwack of a spade. All of which of course is nonsense. Never lose touch with the earth, Julia said, by which she meant the North, or you’ll lose your strength, your taut ligament of violence. But I have always wanted to jettison the North, except for certain rivers, such as the Nidd and the Ure and the Ouse and the Aire of course, the magical Aire, the Aire which is in a category of its own – elusive, haunted by woodland spirits, by lights and breezes that play on its banks, the Aire whose name I wanted as mine, and which, despite being polluted lower down, and at one stretch canalised, despite running through some of the direst and dirtiest towns in Yorkshire, eludes them and finds the Ouse at Airmyn. Yes, I once thought of changing my surname to “Aire”, a word that has an uncertain etymology but that I choose to associate with the element air, “aire” being the spelling we see in the likes of Spenser or Chaucer of course: “the aire ys twyst with violence”. But other than the Aire, and certain landscapes, such as Malham Cove, which is in any case the Aire’s source, I have never thought of myself as a Northerner, or only in the most trivial sense.
I have always believed that the accidents of birth are to be discarded, and in retrospect, it seems to me that Julia’s desire to have sex at that hotel in the Via Giulia could and can be read as an attempt to rewrite her own origins; to revisit the scene of her conception and to replace it with a different scene, to reinscribe it with a new origin. “Ingenious but fatuous” was her verdict when I suggested this recently, when she visited England with her child, William. But we all attempt to erase our origins, to revisit and to scrub out our past, to turn it into the mere pale tablet on which we write our own indelible destiny. This trip occurred shortly before her return to the US, where she had a fiancé, and within a year of our unannullable tryst she was married to a stockbroker. I invariably, on revisiting Rome, go first of all to the Via Guilia, and walk down its cobbled surface to Trastevere, for the Via Guilia is the strait gate through which one re-enters life as it should be lived. It was in that square near the Bar San Calisto, Julia and I stood by the fountain, and I felt, throughout the day, the ripening of happiness in its pure state; for happiness in its pure state is always something that ripens or blossoms without ever reaching full bloom or becoming overripe.
Julia was, and is, one of a dwindling number of Americans of European ancestry whose mind bends heliotropically towards the sun setting in Western and Central Europe as much as it inhabits the smooth plains of the New World, their prognosis of limitless freedom. For certainly, the American idea of freedom is best signified by the open plain and the great sky above it – not by the word ‘freedom’ or indeed the words ‘open plain’ but by the plain itself or its cinematic or painterly equivalents. We spoke about this too, Julia and I, the plain and its place in the American imagination, the plain depopulated and unscored, save for the ghostly demarcations of the Indian dead. In such territory, Julia said, more or less said, you carry the origin in your knapsack, any place you pitch down might be a beginning. This is the landscape of Westerns, where the one-track towns are always only temporary constructions, interruptions merely of the plain, just as the main drag is only a limb of the plain, dusty and uncovered. They give the impressions, these towns, of being on wheels. And everyone is a drifter, a nomad, no matter how long they stay. But Julia’s dreams are in Europe. They saunter through the Old Town, or sit at a café terrace, scanning the papers and reading the crowd. Her thoughts plunge into the maze of cobbled streets, and open the heavy escutcheoned door that guards the apartment building. She ascends the winding stair that goes up to the library, where books like dozing birds are perched, and the gentle and delicate panels of light fall through the tall and dusty sash window. And beneath all this, the cellar full of secrets; above all this the attic full of memories. And these dreams are mine as well.
It may now be dying, Old Europe, sinking like Venice itself. But whatever is dying is not on that account of less value than what is living, and may be of more value, or its value may become newly visible nearing the point of extinction. There is every reason to live in Old Europe at the point of its demise and disappearance, rather than sniffing after the Zeitgeist, which is made of cables and clouds, brands and fragile exoskeletons amalgamated from images. There is every reason to garner everything that Europe possesses, before the eclipse, for things before they die often experience a kind of refulgence, as my father did, and swim back to brilliance. Perhaps the best thing would be to bathe in the refulgence and scribble down what we see as the sun still shines. I am not including, by the way, under the name Europe, the United Kingdom which, nominally and legally a part of the whole, is actually a shithole on the outer edge, spiritually and culturally removed. In any case, it was entirely appropriate that it was Julia who guided me through the old world, shortly before her return to the USA. With Julia I went to Paris and Prague, to Rome and then South to Naples, Amalfi, and finally then to Thira. And through these places was my soul enlarged, exactly as the grip of England loosened.
In most of the places we stayed in Europe, Julia and I slept in the same room. Mostly in twin beds, but in Rome we slept together in a great Queen-sized bed next to the window, warm with morning light. Anyway, Julia told me that every night, just before I fell asleep, or just after falling, presumably, I would cry “Fuck off” in a tone both exasperated and triumphant. “Fuck off, then fast asleep,” she said, clicking her fingers, “and with such finality. As if consigning some vexatious object to oblivion. As if,” she said, “the vexatious object had just that moment fucked off and you were slamming the door with your words.” It was news to me, this final “fuck off”, this triumphant exasperated sign off. “It’s a shame you can’t record it”, I said, as of course it would be easy to do today, where everything is recorded and made available. Today we would record it, and listen together to this voice directly from the subconscious, or from the soul, to use an older language. Although why would the soul say “fuck off”. It’s not, stereotypically, what a soul does, certainly. Anyway, I always wondered what it meant, this violent exclamation, or exhalation. Julia and I thought that it was it was a fuck off to waking life before disappearing back into the snug oblivious body, a “fuck off” and freefall into the dark. When I was ill, I took a different view, I took it to be a fuck off to life itself. There was life, a face at the carriage window, and me on the platform, pale, saluting its departure, even then. As if already, when I was happiest, in Europe with Julia, I was secretly sick, the illness working underground. This is how one thinks when you are ill of course, rewriting every episode as a portent of the catastrophe. But now I am inclined to think of it quite differently. Bearing in mind that this happened in Europe, continental Europe, I am inclined to think of it, although there is no evidence, but it suits me to imagine nonetheless, that I was saying fuck off - on an ongoing nightly basis - to England, to the English, and to Englishness. For when I move to Rome or to Paris, this is what I will surely say as the Eurostar or the plane pulls away or takes off. Fuck off England, fuck off you old vexatious object, finally now, fuck off.
London of course is the least English part of England, and the only city with a majority of denizens born elsewhere, a majority of denizens who at least had the drive to flee their intolerable provincial origins, and therefore to flee England itself, effectively. And what London is to England, Soho is to London, a place where disparate realities collide and collude and form a new world. That old pot-bellied Greek with eyes like Sartre, the homeless man in the square playing ping-pong – punctuated by swigs of vodka – with the man who does the bins, the polyamorous dandy with his polecat on a string, media types like Cahun, the market traders on Berwick Street, putting together their stalls, as if, under the watchful sun, assembling the whole world again from scratch. It is only here that I can live, in the whole of England, in this small square that will no doubt soon be eliminated like all the rest.