Permissions for Andy K: A Prologue

Individuals from time immemorial have always wondered about their place in the world, whether it is necessarily one that is provided for, to be discovered; or if it is constant, waiting to be discovered, else it may evolve over time and take forms previously unprecedented. Purpose is what we seek, this bedrock of motivation, the single caveat of destiny that we must answer to, the through-line of our all actions to which all our actions and thoughts will align and correlate to.

Andy K here, our man who is sitting on a park bench musing at the sky which is slowly shifting from the glorious cyan backdrop to a grey-washed canvas of rain, is seeking a simple, single answer to our existence in a world where questions are shouted into valleys, gasps of “why”s under the cover at night and whispers of confusion to God — perhaps the single, most handicapping concept of a question to both inspire and paralyse man is really “What am I here for?” The birds overhead do not seem to bother, they dart in erratic flight towards an unseen nest, where presumably they do not brood over why they have been born into a nest in Coventry, supposing they even heard of Coventry.

But it is not long before Andy K realises he is not interested in answering this question for others, nor is he keen on securing an answer for himself, but what he is keen on questioning the question. A return to first principles, peeling the layers of thought we take for granted, take as given, which other times and epochs would look at us with furrowed brows and awkward frowns for. The cars cruise along the road in front of him, a cedar tree nearby swerves to avoid the wind.

Andy K scribbles the question onto a yellow wad of post-it pads, and he catches the arabesque stroke of the “I” and gives it a heavy-handed flourish. It looks like a cursive “J” now. He tears away the piece, scribbles again, taking care to ensure the “I” tilts to the right, like the cedar tree bending to the wind, which is beginning to grow colder than expected. The sun is receding behind the clouds, its shine relentless still, only behind the cyclorama of clouds.

A quick cursory glance at the question not reveals a questioning of purpose, but more importantly it prefigures the individual as the key subject, and here Andy K pauses and dwells for a moment. “I” am the centre of the question, and consciousness appears to itself as the single most important figure in existence. “I”, Andy K, need to be validated, my existence, my being here, needs a reason. He wonders if his anxiety of needing a reason perhaps stems from the residues of the great dramas and stories of our times. Reflecting on the protagonists, he recalls how often they carry with them the burden of a destiny, embark on a search for a fate, or encounter with stark (and often tragic/fatal) realisations of their fate so much so that he has undoubtedly felt compelled to play out his own private dramas in the world. Without requiring Shakespeare’s qualification of “All the world’s a stage”, he conjectures an alternative reading: instead he considers that “All the world are stages upon stages”, planes of lives extending out and clashing against one another, not just piled and stacked, but in perfect Brownian Motion, completely random and thumping the particles of selves against one another from moment to moment. He marvels at this little sleight-of-hand, rewriting Shakespeare, the old bard was close, but not accurate enough.

There is a jam lining up at the road in front of him. Peak hour is coming on. He wonders if the heads in the cars have turned to notice this quaint, tranquil tableau of him perched on a wooden (but not mouldy) park bench, oh look how nice would it be to sit on a bench now and watch the world go by, here we are, stuck in traffic and it is about to pour soon — he imagines the conversations to take on a new significance as they dribble past. It is almost like a peep-show, and Andy K is centre-stage in the peep-show.

And why should it be key that he is centre-stage? If “I”, Andy K am the main subject, surely he intends to play the part that speaks its monologue centre-stage, and oh how he wishes there would be a filled theatre of eager-listening audiences lined up to listen to his silent arias of existential confusion. There would be lemonade and Kettle chips, it would be like Shakespeare in the Park. His theatre exists, he projects his free theatre into the world — him, the actor, the passengers and drivers the passing audience, and the grass in between them, the cedar trees mark out the wings of this green, gentle, unannounced stage. Across the road a touring circus has set up shop, the box office just opened earlier this morning. He wonders if there will be monkeys juggling bananas.

But he does not have a box office. How will he gain an audience? It does not matter, finally. He will create an audience for himself, he will keep looking over his shoulder, listening for footsteps, peering past the trees — should any dog-owner on the daily stroll enter his line of sight, he wishes to say to them, look at me, I am sitting here, think about your lives and how mine seems to be better than yours because I am young, but only more birds. It does not matter, finally. His very search for an audience is in fact, the conjecture of a ready audience, the absence of the audience is the audience. He plays to the cold, Coventry air, knows someone will be watching.

But it is difficult to sustain an interested audience for it is often said that the human mind has the attention span of a housefly. Andy K knows that everyone else is busy show-hopping, show-shopping too, for sometimes they pay to sit in front of rectangle boxes to watch a procession of people playing other people. As it stands, no eyes are on him. He must have eyes on him, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. As he hesitates to return home to begin cooking his pork rib soup (for it is growing chilly and soup is always welcome), he must see someone, otherwise he cannot move, this afternoon siesta would have passed into oblivion, without being heralded as one of the simple moments where the eyes close into philosophy, the limbs recede into literature. So Andy K insists in his hard heart now that someone is watching, here someone is reading his story, he knows it, but he does not know from what angle, with what lenses, which precise moment they have seen him, if he can walk up to them to strike conversation, interview them, vox-pop them for their thoughts on his performance art. Yet it is known someone watches, will watch, has watched, for that is his permission to carry on. He needs to know, needs to introduce himself — his life depends on it.