Office Pondering, and Making The Daredevil-Move in the London Underground.
‘To write stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.’ — David Foster Wallace.
Sometimes I look in the windows of offices late at night. I get right up close and stare down into these strange little capsules of coffee mugs and varnished desks and monitors, notepads and pens.
Ominous patches of deep black that indifferentially envelop the walls and floors and the solemn patches of light that illuminate a little fragment of someone’s lonely, solemn life; filing tax reports and ruminating over files and deadlines and other made up things.
There’s a kind of poetry to these scenes — something thats strikes me cerebrally but without words and entices my fascination, something that envelops my heart with a soft melancholia that impels me to stand there under streetlights and peer into the still sadness of it all; into the darkness — those velvet blankets of blissful nothingness, and from them to ponder upon those little spotlights that shine so nobly onto a mundane scene that makes up the background for an infinitude of even more mundane lives.
What interests me so viscerally about this I do not know; it gives off a fading scent of absurd banality. A scent that tickles me.
And yet, these little pockets of the humdrum do equally emanate a kind of warm nostalgic fuzz in my being that is so rarely touched upon; like an old colour movie with grainy bits and a subtle charm to it — the kind you see in an old man who has done much, seen much, been much, and yet still remembers his fathers humble humour and his mothers apricot crumble.
Perhaps I will save cultural criticism, then, for another piece — another time.
It may simply be enough to ponder that complex feeling I get when I stand under street-lamps late in the night and stare longingly into these lonely spaces; these spaces that equally comfort me as they do deepen that rare and beautiful, woeful solitude of the wandering heart.
Such it is, that we find little fragments of poetic depth, joy, and melancholia in the most alien and yet ordinary spaces and times — one simply has to pay attention to those faint beckoning’s of the heart from deep below; little whale calls from miles deep that occasionally glimmer up and touch the soft effervescent surfaces of our mundane lives, even if just for a moment.
And so it is that I often get a similar kind of feeling bubble up from somewhere deep in the pit of the stomach, as I sit in a nondescript carriage of the fine underground tube lines that circuit about all over the city.
Except that this feeling, although of the same family, is of an altogether different flavour; it is a kind of mild grey, like the sparse combovers of the old men that seem the disproportionate populators down under except less shique and well-together — a pastey marsh that settles somewhere below the asophagus and spreads up the spine towards the cranium in a crude oozing motion that expands the more you pay attention to the absurdity of the unfolding situation.
You sit down like a limp fish, just as the doors slam shut. 35 degrees on your right sits opposite a 58 year-old lard with red waxy cheeks that seems to like sniveling profusely everytime he notices the screeching noise of the carriage get a bit softer — just to fill the gaps, YES sir!
Of-course, since broadsheets have gone out of fashion as the predominant people-shield, it seems the general public have downscaled to the sleeker, pocketable mobile devices that serve two primary purposes down under — first being their feasibility as the perfect device for avoiding any kind of eye-contact related guilt; second being the ability to plug up the second vital sense —hearing— all the time! What could be better! And as such, one may find, if one does happen to be a human being who lives on planet earth and has castrated oneself from the predominant life-sucking addictions; in other words, if one is sane — one may well experience this scene so set-up as the first necessary stimuli for the onset of insanity.
But, well, there is still hope. One can always, if upset by the herd of screen-lards placed around in unavoidable proximity; one can always, as a substitute for human interaction, gaze upwards and allow the sweet bombardment of crude commercial imagery to stroke and caress one’s cerebal functions most tenderly.
Personally, I just read a fucking book.
However, not to go all grey on you; I do occasionally see moments of connection among strangers down under, and although ever so rare, these moments bring me joy — though they are often self-instigated… all the more rewarding for it, I suppose.
So then, I suggest you may try this for yourself:
Next time you graciously slam your bunions down on the bakerloo, do consider whom around you may be one of the brave little onions who may dare to look beyond their smartphone screens; if just for a brief moment, and consider of whom perhaps might even have the profound propensity of the sacred acknowledgement of other life! Of you, perhaps… wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Don’t get ahead of yourself, chap.
The endeavour is, then, to attempt to make the first divine contact with the intuitively-chosen-being of whom, I hope, is sitting somewhat nearby — extra points for an attractive girl/dude! — now, this is a task which requires a monumental amount of initial effort; and, I can’t stress this enough, YOU MUST HOLD on first contact, remember, first contact IS DIVINE.
The first rule for a successful first divine contact is to be gentle, to fan the flame ever so smoothly; not to stare, as this will blow out your little flame, and not to do anything too rash at first — just sit on your bunions, as such, wait for the moment at which the subject seems-in-your-gut most likely to release attention towards the general scene infront of the subject, as when one finishes reading an article and looks up glassy-eyed ahead at not-one-particular-thing.
This, brother, is your chance.
Don’t hesitate. Make a dashing move straight for the iris-on-iris; keep the brows soft and the mind at east, but gently assert your primal gaze thus yonder — and as the subject may well feel the heat within moments, you can semi-expect, if well executed, the smooth and heart warming hand of Michelangelo to stretch out and make the interception that your divine will catalysed… and behold! Iris’s locked for the first precious time like hemingways old man hooking the great unknown fish of the deep; like Queequeg as his slips down the greasy spout, you being to feel a strange tingling human feeling that has been so alien for so long; exactly because it is so forbidden! So cherish that little moment; and hold the gaze warmly until they almost inevitably look down at their feet with a sheepish charm that suggests you may well have either creeped the living shits out of them or given them a warm-fuzzy-pleasant-surptrise… OH! One last thing: smile, but… ONLY if you feel it somewhere wiggling inside. There’s enough damn fakeness in this world.
From here, you have a few options, you little daredevil you.
But I’ll let you figure them out.
