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24.8.05
All By Yourself
The first note out of the ellipsis throat
is a warble that sounds like maybe
but means more than anyone knows.
Body language has its translators
and its detractors.
An erection means...
dialated pupils mean...
touching your hair says...
So to be mysterious,
you must be a statue.
And when you are a statue,
people can only judge you
on what they thought you did,
not on your hair, your tone of voice,
what food you eat, whether or not
you'd rather or not.
And being elliptical is being
more than what you care to reveal.
And when you dance are you dancing
to the music or to yourself?
What can we say of you?
At least he went up and did it?
In the quest for privacy we seek
solitude in the form of anonymity.
We can't deny there are too many around us,
we are reminded too much
how many people and how small the place.
Trouble brews when we forget
silence
and ellipsis.
Keep it
Cool and indifferent.
5:11 PM
22.8.05
"People are born old, like maps.
And like maps, their parametres and borders
were drawn by circumstances
and fools who were unfortunately,
beyond their control."
From the Diaries of Witold Kyzmirsky
As for Bratislava, didn't do much really. I hadn't been back there
since the early 90s and was curious how it all sorted out for them after
their break with the Czechs. It's like Prague Lite in a way. Nowhere
near the same volume of tourists, which was heartening, but by that same
token, not as much beautiful architecture either. Even the old castle
was rather unimpressive. But the longer I spent there the more it grew
on me. As for Hungary, no didn't go back to Budapest. Decided I'd
rather see the countryside and a little smaller place so went to a town
called Györ. Destroyed by WWII and pissing down rain when I arrived, it
was a virtual ghost town. Saturday afternoon, all the shops closed, no
such thing as proper "pubs" - ended up in a wine bar sampling the local
wine - an odd experience. You walk down into a cellar where there's a
bunch of pensioners hanging around and a positively ancient, fat lady
behind the bar. Not speaking Hungary but reasonably close to the
Slovakian border, I ordered in Czech for wine and she points out three
pails: red, white and rose. I go for the red and she takes a ladle and
spoons it out into a cup. Voila. Wine. It was a bit acrid and I kept
imagining the old lady herself had been stomping on the grapes in the
back room with her shriveled, fat feet, but after a few, they went down
pretty easy. Some Roumanian gypsy kid came up to me with the offer of a
very sharp military knife for sale. Not interested. He kept pestering
me anyway, sat down at the table with me and tried the desperate,
pressure sale. Still not interested. How about some infrared
binoculars, he asks. I have a look at them out of curiosity. A few
no's later and the price drops to like 3 quid. What I really wanted was
some semtex or machine guns, I wanted to see what else he and his mate
had in this duffel bag. AK47? I asked. They laugh, no. Not the big
time. They are small time grifters. When it finally becomes obvious
I'm not interested in buying anything he has, he starts simply begging
instead. Takes out his passport to show me he's Roumanian, tells me how
hungry he is, how he has no money, etc. I give him some tobacco to get
rid of him. Living out here, I'd almost forgotten what it's like having
people coming up to you begging. A sharp reminder of the suffering in
the world.
*****
Suffice it to say that we traversed a great majority of France in 10
days - more than the average, I reckon, a roadtrip worthy of reflexions,
some 4000 miles of it in all. Probably moreso than anything, if I would
imagine an unintentional theme, was death and war. After all, how often
does one run the gamut of WWI to WWII and their immaculate cemetaries of
little white crosses signifying what was once life?
We didn't spend much time in any one place, likely owed to there not
being any one place in particular that seemed worth staying for. There
were indeed, little gems in retrospect, that had their own peculiar draw
- but soaking up culture on the run is really less a way of soaking
culture than it is a remedy for restlessness and dissatisfaction. Is it
particularly significant to see war memorials of entire chunks of land
once destroyed and now turned into a carnival of an homage to the dead,
the liberators? What to think about seeing a well-preserved Caen, left
by the Nazis as they discovered it, simply for its affluence? What to
think about a tourism trade conceived in the blood of millions?
For that matter, the little idiosyncratic self-love of those prideful
peasants in Bretagne, to unmask their timber framed jewels in Dinan
(looking so much like England over and over again) or to wallow in the
touristic nothingness of a place like Concarneau filled with its
sickening hordes and trinketeers? Or worse still, the faux-artistic
hordes worshipping rubbish in a place like Port Aven? Ugh. It was
debilitating, everywhere the tourists, everywhere the heat, everywhere
the utter meaninglessness of humanity gourging themselves on their own
stupidity and urgent quest for similar experience of beach and sun and
ramparts, walled cities and postcards...
We left after several days and just flat out drove - straight across
France from that point through the Loire valley, fuck the castles, fuck
the history of human piggishness, fuck the plain, ugly vallies and the
vain, ugly idiots stopping on and off their fucking tour buses and
snapping their little photos. Christ, even Beune was leaking with these
cunts, and there, worse still, they were Americans and their horrific
ignorances, wine everywhere and not one iota of knowledge -- what does
any of it mean to have to hear these hideous voices of my past
screeching like fingernails across a blackboard, trilling their
collective stupidities like cattle to a slaughterhouse?
The only reprieve, brief as it was, in Alsace, to free ourselves even
from the French and their hideous, rodent ways of apathy and twitching,
christ, how much the French seemed to repulse me at times, so much so
that I welcomed the German history leaking through this misfired
culture, to get away from the petty snobberies and auld death lingering
everywhere in what seems to be nothing but a decaying pensioner's
society. How do you bear it in France?
But the Ballon D'Alsace was a welcomed respite, as were towns like
Munster and tiny little medievil villages that cropped up unexpectedly,
even some untouched it seemed much, by the busloads, and back through
the winding mountain roads into the Val de Meuse, then back up through
the Belgian flatness towards Verdun when I could have sworn I'd been
there before in another life somewhere in someone else's army because
the landscape seemed so familiar -- stopping when suddenly coming across
an American cemetary of WWI dead I'd never heard of before, some 4000 of
them and wondering why each cemetary has to have it's own nationality
when they all died for equally futile purposes, as pawns, under any
flag.
Christ, I wonder what it was about France that made me interested to
begin with? To have the language slip off my tongue again and wonder,
considering the people I was forced to converse with, why exactly, I
learned the language to begin with?
It was all I could do but burst once we shot past Lille and headed
towards Belgium because by then I was fucking dying for the Flemish
language, something I relished, something tangible, a culture where the
radio stations aren't blaring inane pop music at every frequency, a
place where people were civilised instead of preparing customs which
attempt to make savages appear civilised...
******
After you left, I went back to Teddy's and drank more. Met more people
-- the gist was in finding people who aren't rural - you know, living
here, as much as I love it, I need that unpredictability of urban social
warfare to juxtapose to my current rural banality. In the end I met a
lovely Spaniard skirt on the steps of Pantheon, we talked for hours and
then I walked home, head desultory, thoughts almost dead with
infatuation. Didn't even really walk. Floated, I reckon. Did catch
that train to Amsterdam (pity we missed each other) and proceeded to
blot out reality in a series of drug and alchohol related moments.
After a fat meal, fell asleep in the hotel in Leidseplein, woke up at 2
in the morning and walked to the red light district to find the
appropriately business-like whore with the incandescent body and
professional expertise.
Back in Warwickshire, I am awarded by a long walk down the road to
Newbold, sniffing the air redolent with the almost-autumn smells, the
burning -- just as I'd arrived almost a year ago now. I'm glad I spent
so little time here this summer for as much as I anticipated it, the
only redeeming quality it had here was the ability to leave it. Now I
re-embrace (had I been writing a NYer article I'd have used umlauts,
haha) the smells that enamoured me to this to begin with. Christ, I
love this place and Christ how I love A'dam and Christ how much I miss
Paris like a lover.
*****
Stratford-Upon-Avon.
At the high end of the spectrum, the beginning of experience, it is
walking. You are overwhelmed that the RSC is here, that his birth home
is here, that he is buried here, that he was born and died here in the
same town on the same day (23rd april), you go to see Shakespearean
plays, you wonder at timbered houses, thatch roof pubs, etc.
As the months go by, you begin riding a bike. Oh, you listen to someone
in your local pub whinge about Shakespeare's legacy being whored for
tourists, you read a book or two about Shakespeare conspiracy theories,
you grow bored by timbered houses and thatch roof'd pubs realising that
what is important is the interior not the exterior, you see the same
people over and over again on the streets because it is after all, still
just a small town.
Months more, you walk. And when you walk, you are in a hurry and in
front of you are tourists everywhere, like gnats in a forest pathway or
cockroaches in the kitchens of Section 8 housing. And when you walk,
those who aren't tourists stopping and starting and generally getting in
the way, are REALLY old English people who creep along slower than the
tourists. And then you start thinking about if they'd only go through
with their threat to pedestrianise the main roads of Stratford, all
these people would have alot more space to meander instead of getting in
everyone else's way on the sidewalk as though this were Manhattan (and
believe me, they move just as slow, as you know, in Manhattan as in
Stratford)
Perspective are those Diminishing Returns. The closer one gets to
reality, away from the ideals of novelty, the closer one gets to
futility. No longer walking at the pace of a tourist.
Without melody nor harmony.
*****
6:54 PM
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