November 2015

It's embarrassing to document the happening of nothing. It's like discovering that washing up liquid is not necessary to clean dishes. It's like the smell of toast without the presence of bread. Unlike the Windup-Bird man I do not feel the need to sit at the bottom of a well to discover the nub of the nothingness but maybe being on an island in the Mediterranean is not so dissimilar. An island in a sea that doesn't need to mention it's a sea, as if the islands were part of a mainland, which they inextricably are, tied to the continent by the tides of history and the flow of people, some of whom knew why they were coming here, some who made their way deliberately, but equally, plenty who drifted up against its shores by accident or were forced there by the pressure of others. Even refugees have standards. They complain about their conditions in the camps here set up by the British army. Perhaps, by definition, everyone who ever made landfall on an island, is a refugee, from the danger of the sea at least. We were not made to float on waves though we were created in water. Once our essence is fleshly we are too heavy and we desire earth under our feet, a solid place to walk but, more than that, earth to which we belong. Today I'm going to look at more apartments. It's what I did yesterday and the day before and most of the days going back a while now. Sometimes I've seen inside the apartments accompanied professionally by an estate agent who has driven me to a location and told me about the neighbourhood and accurate information like pricing. Though accuracy has become a creative construct with absolutely no benchmarks or rules that guide or define. Sometimes I've been invited in off the street by owners of places wanting a rental client. Sometimes I've made appointments and waited in front of buildings learning their facade and gradually falling out of love with the street where I'm standing. More than often I've noted the phone number on a fence or balcony or telegraph post and ridden on, intending to phone but probably not doing so because that same sense of not wanting to live just there has haunted me. Knowing exactly where to live is an art. And the moment of knowing is a mysterious meeting of mental leylines. Or an accident of sunlight. Sunlight at the bottom of a well. A momentary vision of the life that could be lived there. Whatever comes to pass in that place will make no reference to that moment. No genie will arise in the future to say: " Well, you shouldn't really have moved in here because now look what you've done, this and that would never have happened, so you've only got yourself to blame for this mess." It's something about the nature of choice. Place is only one aspect, the other elements follow or precede depending on how you come to remember it. I moved into the bedsit on St Marks Rise in Hackney because an afterthought made me go to one of two red telephone boxes. The thought was plaguing me that the room I had just looked at was, at least, an improvement on the dump I was living in, and I could make it liveable. At the time I was barely thrilled to be living in London, arriving at the wrong time in my life to make it an adventure. But those two phone boxes were responsible for a lot. I met a husband and had two children. Moving into a place becomes a marker. It becomes the beginning of a story. Places where things happen in our lives are often the chapters of those lives. The time framed within them is relative so the length of time is variable and defined by circumstance. One can live for a long time in a place and little might occur, yet a few weeks or days in another location can be intense and full of occasion that will become large in memory popping like corn or candyfloss to fill the vacancy of a story. Sometimes time stops entirely. Travelling has that effect. Time and space are linked. When they become separated, each in its own sphere ceases to have meaning. Looking for somewhere to live has that effect. Looking for somewhere to live is like travelling. It means being temporarily (paradoxically an adjective of time) anchored to a place to which one has no adhesion, with the purpose of finding another place. The traveller looks at a map maybe on a piece of paper, increasingly in a three-dimensional format, able to see the world virtually and in its proper dimensions. When one has found the other place one will have the desired experience. Looking for a place to live is not identical to travelling because the desired outcome is to stop moving from place to place, it is finding a location from which one will not need to keep moving on. How deep are roots? As deep as they need to be for the living thing above ground to draw nourishment. Below the earth to give breath above the earth. Living things are, for the most part on the earth, not in the earth and not on the sea. And human beings need to find their place on that earth. We are strongly attached to it. The nature of the universe has made it so. When we become detached and displaced it can be difficult to find the attachment again, like a cosmonaut floating without a lifeline we might drift away. It makes one crazy. In the short term it takes the form of home sickness. A random impulse triggers in the brain and says: " I'd love to wander down Islington High Street this afternoon. Oh but hey, I can't. I'd have to see if there's a flight today and it takes five hours, and really, I just want to go there now. Oh shit, I'm sad." That sort of homesickness eventually makes one get on the plane and go home. But the solution is glib. Feeling that one doesn't have a home regardless of having somewhere to live is more profound. The German word Heimweh better defines that condition: a pain for a lost homeland even when one is at home. That's my condition. It's probably the condition of humanity. it is the myth of being dispelled from the Garden of Eden. Except that Christian mythology wants to make it our fault, like we chose to be guilty of our own homelessness. We were children once and the apple was tasty. Unpacking different types of homelessness and homesickness is not even so easy it seems. Trying to get at the condition is like trying to prise a fine hair from one's mouth. It's there to annoy one but grabbing at it with fingers doesn't solve the problem. Looking for somewhere to live when one already feels fundamentally without roots is almost an impossibility. Eventually, at the moment of the final reckoning, one will be able to tally incidents and their places and it will amount to a life but deep down, under the ground, something was missing. So this is why nothing is happening. Time is at a standstill. The days have acquired the dragging bass vibration of a slowed sound tape. Or life is carrying on at the usual speed around me but I am watching it from the capsule of my personal time travel. Someone asked me the other day: "Are you waiting for a sign?" I've always been waiting for a sign. It will be the signal that I have ceased to be a sleepwalker. These are things I have slept through: study, relationships, children, work. I think I was awake when I was a child. It is why I remember childhood intensely; I think I could recall every day of my childhood if I abandoned the present and devoted my hours to reliving the years before age fourteen, fifteen? Unconsciously from about that age my mind resigned itself to sleeping, to let my body be bounced from situation to situation without them being of my choosing. Of course, in my childhood I had no choice at all but I was consciously aware of what was happening. I even understood the subtleties of adult life around me, after all it was what shaped the texture of my days. But slowly I stopped understanding the bigger picture and accepted incidents as they came at me. The last conscious choice I made was to accept homelessness. I felt homeless. My fantasies at fifteen centred on having a home of my own. They were quite intense and included even the furniture I would choose; actually they were never very grand places I lived in but rather dimly lit bedsits based on the limited experience I had of other people's dimly lit bedsits. Imagination failed me on this count, I denied myself the right to sunshine. At the time I lived in a perfectly nice house but the home I grew up in, the nest, was sparsely feathered by my parents. Had they been gannets, their egg would have fallen off the cliff. Human beings have the capacity to fail quite spectacularly before life becomes untenable. I suppose life is like that, it is a tough cookie. It is part of the nature of life itself that life is difficult to extinguish. Seeing the determination of a starving street cat on this Mediterranean island is evidence of the principle. My third coffee of the morning works on my physical body: it makes me want to defecate and simultaneously awakens in me hunger for breakfast. The real asserts precedence over the surreal. The Windup-Birdman can not be left to die at the bottom of the well or there is no story. Today I will look at some apartments. Knowing if one of them is the right one is entirely dependent on understanding why I have come here. And I'm still not quite sure. The apartment needs to capture a lot of sunshine, it cannot be dingy or look out upon a wall. It needs to be like the plastic carrier bag on the table: bright yellow and orange with the recommendation to hold the island in my heart. And the first phonecall of the day has summoned me to explain myself: "Yes, the list you sent me was fine, I would be interested to view all of those. My initial budget limit was 100000 euros but if I saw something really nice I would consider paying more than that, I've seen a few houses that are more expensive; well, I'd really like to live in the centre but it seems that's almost impossible, so no, I don't mind if it's in outlying districts, I'm willing to look further afield, though actually I really want to live in the centre; yes, I'm willing to look really far away for a nice house but what I actually want to do is live right in the middle; once again I'm perfectly happy to compromise on what I really want to do, please just bounce me somewhere and I'll sort of deflate and come to rest any old where that I don't want to live." The sun isn't shining today. The cloud cover is sort of complete, it will probably evaporate and there will be sun later. I am going to look at an apartment that costs 250 euros per month to rent. Economically, even in the long term, this makes sense: no maintenance, no commitment, no fees to authorities, not even a huge outlay over time. But as an overall picture it bears no resemblance to the dream of a sunlit house where I can come and go and please myself and have sheds that can be turned into art studios and butterflies rest on the fence. Because, to some extent, the dream needs to shape the reality, otherwise it is a really pointless exercise. The rebuilding has started upstairs. It begins just after nine. It involves knocking down walls. If I wanted a symbol for my present condition then this is it: living in a hotel that is being rebuilt around me. I couldn't fantasize it. Eventually only my room will still exist, they can't knock it down while I'm renting it, they will have to leave it and so it will still be here on the second floor on a pedestal with rubble lying all around and the traffic on the street blowing the dust through the windows. Having to confront one's own aimlessness is a challenge. "What do you do?" is the first question that people ask. Thoughtlessly. Like the answer they hear is a clue to the person they are meeting. This isn't an original observation but it deserves some thought. At heart it is a crude question. Its answer is usually located in the sphere of work and derivable income which leads to a spontaneous value judgement on likely level of education and affordable lifestyle and hence to an estimate of whether one wants to expend any further energy on befriending. To answer: "Nothing" is a conversation killer. Offering a vague substitute for "nothing" is preferable; of course, it can't immediately take the form of: "I have two Batchelor's degrees and a Masters and I speak six languages but I can't get my act together to have a profession but I have spent quite a long time finding myself and thinking about stuff." Also a conversation killer. "Which of the languages would you like to continue in?" "None, thanks." A new formality is needed: "What is your position vis a vis the kissing of frogs?" Now that would make people think, they would have to adopt an attitude that was not lamely taken care of by their employment of the moment. I cannot yet decide if aimlessness is a good condition. It is a jellyfish. On the one hand it drifts according to no discernible currents. On the other hand it gets tangled within nets of purpose and apparent direction and goes counter the advice and training that are the stuff of education. It's impossible not to feel guilty, which is further complicated by not knowing what to be guilty about. Guilt is a hard case and comes with cause. Aimlessness has attached itself to homelessness, a case of less is more. Somehow finding a home will cure the A-disease. It will involve brooms and brushes and washing up liquid and the smell of toast and hey presto, on the seventh day there was purpose. A friend was laid up with an injured limb and filled out the time with beginning a romantic novel. It was an autobiographical essay, without purpose, of her own relationship with her husband. Of course, it was badly written but touching, pleasant witness to love that has endured. Is there an anti-romantic novel? Not one of drama or episodes of unforgivable behaviour? But a dreary concatenation of nothingness, the aimless state of marriage which dissolves into something loveless. It is a state which is not even related to the natures of the couple involved, it exists in its own right, independently. I learnt the word "concatenation" in a hotel. It was a hotel in Moscow in 1978. Andrew explained that the etymology was from the Latin "catena" for chain. I shared the room with Jill who was from Shiremoor. My friend who tried to write the novel about her married life also lived in Shiremoor. Other than that I have no connection to the place. And I would not like to live there. My dream is not to live on a housing estate in the North East of England but on a sun soaked Mediterranean island. I used to live in the North East of England and, for a while I was happy there. I was content to live there while the pageant of my life variously thrilled to the cacophony of an orchestra striking up or the melody of nightingales. I may never have heard nightingales. I don't actually know what they sound like and I don't know if they are melodious. I enjoyed the presence of the mucky Tyne and the life that clung to its banks. The building which is now a world class art gallery used to be a nesting cliff for gannets. It was protected as their home. The building had been a flour mill at which coasters docked and loaded up with flour. Then the flour trade ceased and the coasters no longer came and the building fell into disrepair though it was sturdy and didn't fall down. It was much loved by the gannets. They covered it in guano and flew round it raucously and fed their babies on every narrow ledge. I left Newcastle in 1989. Sometime in the following decade it became possible to unhouse the gannets, to send them packing, they were only gannets after all. The world isn't short of gannets but it needs more art.