
These hours are for the id
These conversations always start out respectable.
Seven, eight o’clock under electric lights or some dinner table on some night, somewhere. Polite discussions of work and the day-to-day. Where did you spend your weekend. Allow me to share some small logistical life trivia.
It can be boring.
It’s the 2am conversations in kitchens and balconies or wandering streets where people let loose the real things that run like molten rock under all of our mantles.
Enough time, enough slow comfort and alcohol chipping away at the inhibitions and we start to show each other who we are.
So a Monday then. We are sitting outside so people can smoke.
It’s cold in a way that is complimentary to the night and that doesn’t overwhelm the conversation.
This sort of cold lends a little bit of the profound to everything. How can these sentences fail to be true when they are uttered into this darkness from this light in this cold that forces you to feel your skin and makes you aware of the borders of yourself and the world.
The six of us sit around small tables, drink beers quickly and start chipping.
“So I came home and there was a full on roving orgy happening in my house.”
“Lucky you.”
She laughs.
“One of our roommates organised it, he thought it would be all over by the time we got home but we said to him ‘it’s 11 o’clock and things are still pumping’.”
Ok, she might not have said pumping. But that’s a missed opportunity I won’t let pass by twice.
We keep chipping.
All of us have these games.
Who are you?
First answer. A couple of hours go by.
Who are you now?
Second answer. Sometimes you are shown a polished piece of concern, conceit, or tragedy. These pieces are real but they are real like petrified wood is real. Stone now, no closer to the tree it began as than you are.
And so it goes. Until we get to the bottom of it all.
Final time — who are you?
The answer is always that you don’t know.
But it’s in the specific way of not knowing where people show you who they are.
I’m terrified of certainty — mostly it’s harmless. But when it isn’t it’s the most terrible kind of not knowing.
What do you care about deeply. What specifically drives you.
Are you holding back?
Of course you are. We all are.
What are the things that you want to hold back until they rush out of you? What are the things that you hold back until you show?
What are the things that you will always keep hidden.
Around and around we go.
I’m 22 and at a party in Kingston. I’m talking to a man in the kitchen of someone’s flat. It’s 3am but he still seems quick and clever. He’s wearing flannel and he has thick forearms and rough hands that I think he works with. He’s dressed well though. Clean shaven. Nice hair. Probably about 32.
I don’t know him, or the flat’s owner, I don’t actually know where we are. Kingston was like that in my early 20s.
“Something is wrong all around,” he says to me.
“When did you start to think like that.”
“I think it’s always been in my head. But it’s only recently that I started thinking about it in detail.”
“What happened then.”
“What do you mean,” he asks me.
“What happened when you started thinking about it.”
“Nothing.”
This one word comes out harder and flatter than the rest. He’s looking around and angling this conversation in the direction of another group in the way that people do when they want to stop talking to you, or at least to incorporate other people into the conversation. But the other group are three young women, it’s 3am, and I can’t say there isn’t a part of me that doesn’t share his sentiments.
“What do you think things would be like if they weren’t wrong.”
“They’d be right.”
Next time you’re around someone try this experiment. Throw out some broad question about life and purpose.
Watch who jumps on it and who looks confused.
That stuff runs like a metronome in the background for a certain sort of person. My friend with the flannel shirt is not that type. I mostly am. So we probably won’t have a lot to say.
I make some joke, turn and walk away. In the reflection from the window his face looks glad. I’m drunk but I can feel that my face does too.
Where do you go when you start with orgies?
Getting to know each other.
“I can imagine you doing that.”
“I can’t imagine you doing that.”
“Well I was in my 20s.”
“How many languages do you speak?”
“I’m certain he speaks Chinese.”
“He’s wonderful.”
“He’s a dick.” (Or maybe I said fuckwit)
Starting out with orgies, sex, and seeming confession — we start where most finish — kitchen and balcony conversations.
We end where most begin.
Movements, progress, the mission, rights and changes, where are we, what does the battleground look like. What do we have to do to change things. How far do we have to go?
If people wait and hang back to show you who they are what are these people saying?
After the personal comes all of our focus — the thing that preoccupies us all — and there we are.
So I guess I am finally out of the wrong kitchens and into the right ones.
But.
In the moment, for a moment, I think about the conversations like this I have had on the other side. The people we are talking about taking on or changing things to disadvantage. Sure, their disadvantage is a loss of power and advantage that is grotesque and disproportionate.
But it’s a loss for them nonetheless.
Gamblers chase losses rather than be content with winnings. Why should these people be any different.
I think that’s the part we forget so often in all this. The people and the humanity. The complete and total lack of difference.
Imagine with me.
It’s morning in Milan. The light falls on the red bricks of the Santa Maria delle Grazie. The convent is quiet. The morning is warm and still.
Leonardo da Vinci gets up. Blinks, swings his legs over the edge of the bed and smashes his ankle into a stool.
Swears.
“Madonna santa! EVERY SINGLE TIME.”
He limps out of the room. Gets on with creating a work of art that will last for hundreds of years and a name that will ring out for longer.
It’s not becoming to hit your ankle every time you get out of bed, and swearing in a Dominican convent isn’t great either.
But he was a human.
Another experiment.
Joseph Priestley walking though the market square of Cheshire in England talking to a friend.
He sees a pigeon, tries to steer the conversation away from it but his friend notices.
“STILL Joseph?” the friend asks.
“Yes yes.”
“The bird? Surely by now…”
“Yes I said. We shall not talk of it.”
They continue on, path deviated, just a little.
I do not know for sure that da Vinci was clumsy and I doubt that Priestley ever feared pigeons.
But I do know that they were human beings and were therefore streaked through with the same frailty, inconsistency, and foolishness as the rest of us.
This should not diminish them, nor elevate us, more than we deserve.
Ordinary people have greatness inside of them. There is so much greatness in the everyday.
The giants. They are ordinary. They have the ordinary and small inside of them.
It has always been this way and it will always be this way. No matter how much of the world insists that we are one or the other.
This is incredibly important to remember.
If you do not allow yourself to reach for greatness around or from your smallness, if you do not let yourself see smallness in people in a way that does not diminish you will constantly be pushed into unreality.
This specific unreality will deny you of even your own comfort and will leave you more lonely than even those who are absolutely alone.
This is not easy. When I look I see the world gently pushing us to lie every day in this way. Unreal greatness and self conscious diminishment sit side by side because the reality is nobody is immaculate, nobody is total.
I wonder about this. I wonder if there isn’t some tremendous weakness in all of that to be exploited.
I wonder if it isn’t already.
If all this sounds like that terrible brand of certainty, it is. If it sounds inconsistent and hypocritical, I am.
Chipping away.
One of us is thumping the table now. A lot. I love the table thumpers.
“We have to do more,” she says. “If you look at what’s happening, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be enough.”
She makes a gesture I can’t make sense of, not resignation, not rallying, not unsure.
“If you look at history you will see this. Look at how change is won … or made.”
I don’t have a lot to add in this conversation.
Sometimes I think what I do and know is nothing but icing. Sometimes I think it’s the whole cake.
Tonight I think it’s the whole cake but I can’t be bothered explaining. I can feel myself slowing down and looking at the road with longing.
If I would talk I would talk about the whole cake — communication and stories, all of it — from billboards to memes, from newspapers to radio plays, books, text messages, instant notifications and alerts, sky writing, advertising.
At times this is society talking to itself about itself, at times it is society being lectured, educated, frightened, comforted, held to account, distracted, delighted, dismembered.
For so many of us this is how we help ourselves make up meaning.
For those of us who are cognitive misers — many — or cognitively overloaded — more still — meaning is taken and transposed.
Reheated and served to others who trust you and take it too.
I’ve been seeing arms dealers for thought since I started in this. But I see it more and more and more and more. I would talk about the growing confusion of modern life for those who live it. The growing deliberateness of those who sculpt it.
The whole cake.
The air is still cold when I ride home. But it’s starting to crowd me.
I think about India. I think about how little I know about it.
I think about the man with the flannel shirt and the thick forearms.
I wonder why I remember strangers so well while the people who enchant me sometimes force me so far into my own head that I may as well only be there.
I keep cycling and thinking.
Chipping away.
