“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Rot. Utter unadulterated rot. [1]

Any footprints I’m leaving behind are more likely to be on the carpets of time, and chances are I’ll catch hell for not wiping my feet when I came in and will have to go haul out the vacuum and clean up the mess. So much for making my life sublime.

Are there really people out there who find the lives of great men [2] inspiring? How does that work exactly? Do you really find it comforting to think: Yes, that’s right, I could be just like him, if only I’d been born in the right century, had half his talent / intelligence / hair, and then got really, really lucky?

Personally, I find that lives of great men always end up depressing me, only serving to bring home my own inadequacy. What we need, I think, is more lives of little men. Yes, that’s right, biographies of confirmed losers – the guys who stand in line for tickets to the Star Wars opening night, the guys who take five attempts to parallel park and then end up getting a ticket, the guys who are still delivering pizzas for a living at 56. Those are the men I want to be comparing myself to. Not Wolfgang bloody Mozart. [3]

Take this new life of William Empson by John Haffenden. Or rather the article about it in the last issue of the New York Review of Books (okay, okay, so I’m a little behind on my NYRB reading; it’s all these outlet malls) [4]. Apparently one evening Empson is casually hanging about with Eliot’s friend John Hayward (groan!) and ends up getting horribly drunk. So what does he do to apologise? He rummages about in his papers, pulls out a poem at random and sends it over. This poem:

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month’s desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

GAH! Such an incredible poem – one of the finest villanelles of the century and the man just dashes it off to make up for one evening when he had too many! The way normal people like you and I [5] would send a crappy Hallmark card. That’s it! That is absolutely it! I’m ending it now! Elisa, where the devil is my razor?

Notes

[1] I am NOT a big fan of Longfellow. He’s a nice enough sort but I’ve just never taken a fancy to him. I think the trouble is that the poor man never managed to outlive his own name. I mean call a chap Longfellow and what choice does he have but to ramble on incoherently for stanza upon stanza? Plus there’s that awful middle name – is it Wordsworth (of all people!) or isn’t it? The poor guy probably woke up in the middle of the night with an inexplicable urge to write poems about a girl named Lucie (or, equivalently, stuff like this). No wonder he had to come up with all this Gitchie Gummee stuff to keep sane.

[2] Yes, yes, alright and great women too.

[3] Tom Lehrer says: “It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.”

[4] I love the reviews of biographies in the NYRB, btw. My logic is, with a well written review, you’ll pretty much get all the important themes and interesting anecdotes about the person’s life anyway. That way you don’t actually have to read the book.

[5] Notice a) the magnanimity with which I include you in this category; b) I effortlessly slip in the word ‘normal’ as a description of me, hoping you won’t notice.

Categories: Poetry, Life

Don’t you just love the flavour of fine Darjeeling? That lilting, fragile taste, that exquisite fragrance. Like sipping sunlight. A flavour that demands the compliment of delicate old china, the luxury of long, tranquil afternoons spent dreaming in your chair, the accompaniment of some witty but light-weight conversation.

One of the things I hate about my office is the tea. I still remember the first day I landed up, all bright-eyed and eager (those of you who know me: I know this is hard to imagine, but try. No? Try again. You there at the back. Yes, you. Shut your eyes and try goddammit!), firmly resolved on drinking less coffee, staring at the dozens of different flavours of tea that I had seen arranged in the pantry. Raspberry Royale, I read. And Vanilla Caramel. And Lemon Lift. And Cinammon Apple. And Orange Spice. And Mint Medley. You’re kidding me, right? Whatever happened to normal tea – to good old Assam and reliable Nilgiri? If you hate the taste of tea so much that you have to drown it out with peppermint or caramel why the hell do you drink it at all? Memories of being made to drink Rasna as a kid came back to me. I searched around till I found the last remaining tea bag of Earl Grey (apparently overlooked since the times of Ben Franklin) and stumbled out of the pantry a broken man.

Since then, of course, I always carry a couple of tea bags of Darjeeling with me. The way other people carry condoms. After all, you never know when you may need one [1].

My hands down worst tea experience, though, belongs to an earlier US trip. I was visiting a friend at OSU and got dragged out for a dinner she’d been invited to. Our host that evening was a young christian missionary [2] who’d spent the previous summer working in a school / orphanage somewhere in Tamil Nadu and returned with that precise mix of enthusiasm and cluelessness about India that makes you appreciate the unintended benefits of travel advisories. As she rambled on about temples and elephants and devaa-da-sis (who, according to her, were EXACTLY like nuns. No comment), one tried, out of mere politeness, to pay as little attention as possible, but when she mentioned bringing back large quantities of what she redundantly called Nil-gee-ree Chai Tea my ears pricked up. Did she still have some of it left? I wanted to know, blatant desperation in my voice. Of course, she said, why didn’t I think of that earlier (yes, why didn’t you?), I’ll make some now, shall I?

So enthusiastic was she about this idea, that my offers to help / make it myself were summarily brushed aside (for once they were entirely in earnest, btw – the control freak in me wanted to make sure she didn’t screw this up) – she had her own special way of making it – with cardamom (wow! was this woman single?) – it was no trouble; she’d been saving it for precisely this sort of thing, hoping that someone would come along who would know and love tea enough to appreciate it. She vanished into the kitchen. I sat back and savoured both the the gentle irony of having flown half way across the world to drink Niligiri chai in Columbus, Ohio and the eventual aroma of the tea itself, wafting through the room.

When the tea finally arrived though, it consisted of a thick dark liquid at the bottom of a small cup, into which our host poured liberal doses of milk. I was puzzled. But where’s the tea, I wanted to ask. Then realised that this was it. What had she done to it? It took me two sips of the vile, bitter tasting liquid in my cup to figure it out. (Warning: If you are a tea-lover or generally sensitive to violence against beverages, stop reading now). She had taken the perfectly good Nilgiri tea she had (it was the kind that comes in packets too, none of this random tea bag shit), ground the leaves in a coffee grinder (along with the cardamom), then put the resulting powder into her espresso machine!! AARGGHHHH!!!! Only the presence of her 6′4” football jock boyfriend kept me from feeding her, very slowly, into the garbage disposal. As it is, I simply sat there, entirely dumbstruck, mechanically assuring her that no, I had never, ever tasted tea quite like this before. Really. I wasn’t just saying that.

As for the tears in my eyes, she probably imagined they were from homesickness.

Notes

[1] And please, no ‘dip, dip, dip’ jokes. As it is I have this very disturbing vision of a condom ad that involves the lines “Wah, Ustad! Wah!” “Arre huzoor, wah Taj boliye”.

[2] a. Well technically, a young christian missionary and her flatmate, who informed me very seriously, when asked, that she was looking to pursue a career in hair-styling, because cutting hair was what stimulated and excited her. This statement was met with an ambivalent ‘ah’, followed by a long, long pause.

[2] b. Note to self: Never, ever make jokes about the missionary position to an actual honest-to-god missionary. Also, avoid the phrase honest-to-god anything. Or jokes about God in general. ESPECIALLY that one about the monkey, the python and the flying nun.

Categories: Personal

36 degrees.

This is the kind of weather that makes optimists of us, that sends us out into the cold in our T-shirts and spring jackets, woefully underdressed, and proud of it. As though the Winter were nothing more than a failure of our collective will. As though the day’s coldness was the result of our lack of imagination.

There is something heroic about this, even though, like all heroic acts, it is also naive. It is, after all, this instinct for resistance, for defiance, for risking ourselves without concern for the odds or thought for consequences that, above all, makes us human. The instinct for self-preservation may help us survive, but it is this innate willingness to test the limits that makes us live.

Ah, the vanity of complaining about the weather. As though the Universe would ever consent to such dialogue, as though the wind truly cared whether or not we were comfortable. It is ridiculous, if you think about it, that we still believe in fairness, when the truth is that justice is nothing more than a thought experiment, a dramatic contrivance run amok, a conspiracy that Nature will take no part in. We cannot fight Nature with non-violence, with the purity of our suffering in protest, because she does not care. ‘She’ is not even a person, not even a mind.

This is an idea that we cannot stand for long. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality. John Donne writes: “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” and four centuries later we still share in his sense of outrage. Better that we should suffer more and the suffering have meaning, than that we keep ourselves safe, but to no purpose. This is why we need to believe in the gods – not to trust in, but to defy.

Coming in from the coffee shop, my hands are raw with the cold. I should have worn gloves, I know. I should have worn a scarf and a hat and woolen socks and a sweater. But a part of me is proud that I resisted. A part of me feels that I have struck a blow for the coming season, that in some small, unnoticed way I have helped bring the world closer to Spring. That when the warmth finally comes, I shall somehow have deserved it.

I stare at my reddened hands. What was it Faiz said? “Yehi daag the jo saja ke hum, sar-e-bazm-e-yaar chale gaye”[1]

Exactly.

[1] Translation: These are the stains that I wore proudly, all the way to my beloved’s house.

Categories: Whimsy, Universe

The cigarettes were the last thing of his she had left.

It hadn’t been easy for her, this past week, getting rid of his stuff. She hadn’t realized there was so much of it. The clothes were the first to go – she piled them into cardboard boxes the very evening she came home and found his note, took them down to the Salvation Army counter on her way to work the next morning. There was something very attractive in the idea that if he did come back (not that she allowed herself to think about this, not even for a moment) he would find his wardrobe empty. As though he were that disposable, that easy to get rid off. She dwelt on this image as she shoved his sweaters, his shirts, his socks and underwear into their separate cartons, so that the act of giving away his clothes became, for her, an exorcism of his very shape from her life.

The toiletries were easy – she simply threw them away in the trash – and she gave his shoes (all seven pairs of them) to a grateful but bewildered bum she met on a street corner, telling him, cryptically, that he was the right man to fill her husband’s shoes. She kept the books of his that she wanted, carefully cutting out the title pages with his name on them, and gave all the others to the local library. The CDs were mostly ones they had bought together, so she let them be as they were and trained herself to think of them as her own.

The papers took a long time though. She sat up all of Saturday night going through them, finishing just a little before dawn. The love letters and other personal stuff she put aside without a second glance, but the financial papers had to be gone through carefully, and all the other official looking documents that he’d always be the one to keep track of. Women aren’t methodical enough, he used to say, you can’t trust them with important papers. She put all the papers that she thought she might need in a single file, and tossed all the others into a big plastic garbage bag. By the time she finished she was exhausted, but when she woke up late in the afternoon on Sunday there was the bag waiting for her in the living room, and she drove with it out the nearest camping site and started a bonfire and cast all the papers onto it, feeling the warmth spread through her skin as she watched them burn, taking his handwriting with them. And that, she thought, was that.

Then, first thing the next morning, she found them. Three cigarettes. Three cartridges waiting to be fired. Laid out on the table in the shape of a fan, the last claw mark of a flown bird. She sat at the kitchen table in her nightdress and stared at them. Finding them had been a surprise. She had run out of coffee and had reached back into the kitchen cupboard and her hand had come away clutching a half-empty carton of cigarettes. She had had no idea that he kept cigarettes in her kitchen, even now she couldn’t understand why. She had never even thought to look in the kitchen when she was trying to weed out his stuff – it was the one room in the house he had never shown any interest in. And yet there they were, the cigarettes. Undeniably his, of course; agents of a presence that she thought she had finally rid herself of, spies planted in the sanctity of her kitchen to betray her on this Monday morning. In a fit of rage she had taken them out of their packet and placed them, naked and exposed, on the dining table. The act was an accusation, and lying there before her, the three thin cylinders seemed to accept their guilt. But what was she to do with them now?

Trying to decide, she fingered them absently, picking one up and holding it between her fingers, testing the weight of it, its surprising lightness. Thinking to herself how thin, how hollow, a few moment’s pleasure could be. How slow a death.

On an impulse, she went over to the stove and brought back a box of matches. Clumsily she struck one, and bringing it gingerly up to the cigarette she held in her hand, she proceeded to light it. The tip of it winked at her at first, then glowed red, like a warning. She stared at the lighted cigarette in her hand, amazed at how easily it seemed to fit between her fingers, how naturally she held it, with a poise that felt remembered, almost practiced, but could not be because she’d never smoked in her life. She noticed that her hand was trembling slightly.

Why had she done this? Why had she lighted the hideous thing? Why was she still holding it? Surely she didn’t intend to smoke it. That was ridiculous. She’d always been against smoking – all her life – she didn’t even like the smell of cigarette smoke. It was one of the things they’d always argued about. And now here she was lighting a cigarette herself when he wasn’t even here. She was losing it. She had to stop.

Very cautiously, she brought the cigarette up to her lips and breathed in. Instantly the smoke suffocated her, stung her. It felt like she had swallowed a spoonful of ash. She had expected the burning sensation, but was unprepared for the thickness of it, the roughness of its texture – she had always thought of smoke as something ethereal, waif-like – yet here it was filling her mouth with a presence as grainy as sawdust. She felt her throat constricting with it, she was choking, she coughed and coughed until her eyes filled with tears, and still she could not get its presence out of her system. She gulped down great mouthfuls of air, hoping to drive the smell out, but breathing only seemed to drive the malice deeper into her, so that the burnt flavour of it became a part of her being, as though her lungs themselves had turned to smoke and floated inside her like a stagnant spume. She felt a queasiness take hold of her, float to the surface. She felt sick.

By the time she stopped coughing and her eyes finally cleared, the cigarette in her hand was more than half burned through, and a trail of ash lay on her tabletop, like the spoor of some malignant animal. She went over to the sink (careful not to drop any ashes on the floor) stubbed the cigarette out and flushed it away in the garbage disposal. Then she rummaged in the back of a drawer till she found the ashtray that she had shoved in there a week ago (figuring there would be no need for it anymore) and carefully dusted the ash from the table top into it. She fetched a damp cloth and wiped the table clean. Then she opened a new packet of coffee and set it to brew.

By the time she had done all this, she was starting to feel better. Well enough, in fact, to turn her attention to the two remaining cigarettes. Her jaw tightened as she looked at them. Sitting there on the table they seemed to leer at her, their presence condescending, almost macho. She pulled the ashtray towards her, took up the matchbox again, lit the second cigarette. There was no way she was going to let this beat her. Not after all that she’d been through.

The second cigarette proved easier than the first. It still tasted terrible, of course, and the choking sensation returned and she couldn’t keep from coughing. But there was something familiar about the flavour now, like an argument she had already had, and the fact that the vileness of it was no longer unexpected meant that she could recover more quickly. She managed to get about five puffs out of this one, the gaps between them growing smaller as her reaction to the smoke grew milder. The nausea was there again, but it felt more manageable. By the time she stubbed this one out (having smoked it all the way through) she had abandoned any thoughts of breakfast, but couldn’t keep herself from feeling a little proud.

It was only when she got up to fix herself a cup of coffee that she realized that the tears filling her eyes was no longer just a reaction to the smoke. She was crying. The realization appalled her. (It was Monday morning. She was due at work in two hours. She had sworn she would not do this). She tried to resist it at first, tried to blink her way out of it. Desperate for distraction, she searched the room for something to focus on. That’s when it struck her. This was not just the smell of cigarette smoke, it was his smell, the smell of his clothes when she buried her face in his chest, the taste of his mouth when he kissed her, the very fragrance of his words as they whispered together in bed. A wave of nostalgia swept through her. It was useless to resist the burnt sweetness of this feeling, its lingering presence like a film of ash in her heart. She let herself cry.

When the worst of it was over, she consoled herself with slow sips of coffee, easing herself back into the clarity of this kitchen, to the rows of spoons, so neatly arranged, gleaming in the October sun. She went to the bathroom and washed her face, then stared at her eyes in the mirror. They were bloodshot, but steady. Good.

One cigarette left now. She lingered over it for a while, not because she was afraid she would not be able to handle it (she was feeling better now, it felt as though the tears had washed the evil out of her body) but because it was, after all, the last one, and it looked so forlorn lying there., After this, there would be nothing left. She sat for five minutes just staring at it, then remembered what time it was, and lit it and put it to her mouth.

Again the familiar evil flooding her, again her gorge rising to fight it. This time she did not give in, though. She forced herself not to cough, forced herself to go on breathing as if the smoke did not exist. She felt a thin trickle of water in her eyes and she blinked it back. For a second she thought she would not be able to hold out, that she would simply have to cough, but then the worst was over and a strange emptiness settled into her lungs, a sense of comfort sinking into her, the relief like an aftertaste. She smiled. It would be okay now.

She took another puff, a longer one this time, testing herself to see if she could keep this up. Yes, there it was again, that sense of crossing the top and coming down on the other side, the feeling as the constriction in her throat slowly unknotted, the strings of the smoke pulled open by some invisible hand. She took one last puff to savour this triumph of hers, then, with precise determination, stubbed the last cigarette out. It was over.

She emptied the contents of the ashtray into the garbage, rinsed it clean in the kitchen sink and left it on the slab to dry. She put the matchbox back in its place, tore the cigarette carton into two and threw that into the trash as well. Then, satisfied that everything was back in its proper place, she ran to the bathroom to get ready, reminding herself to use extra mouthwash.

On her way out to work she left the kitchen window open. By the time she got back in the evening, she hoped, the smell of smoke would be gone.

Note: Remember the Oxford Book Store contest I was writing for. Well, this was one of the three stories I wrote for it, and since I only needed to send two, this is the one I left out (can’t share the other ones yet – sorry – will put them on the blog once the Oxford guys reject them).

Categories: Fiction

So much for being bio-degradable. Veena informs me that the soul, far from melting back into the Supreme Unconsciousness (or at least the Supreme Sedentariness) when you die, keeps coming back again and again, like a piece of cheap plastic or a Canadian coin inserted into a Quarters Only laundromat. She has this, apparently, on good authority.

Right then. In order to restrict this post to manageable lengths, let’s skip the standard could-I-end-up-dating-my-mother-as-a-teenager type stuff out of Oedipus Rex (or Back to the Future – whichever you prefer), as well as the political ramifications of such foresight (would you still vote for Dubya if you knew you were being reborn in Baghdad? [2]) and cut to the two things we really need to figure out about this whole phenomenon:

a) Does your credit history transfer across lives? (aka ’so you can’t take it with you, but do you have to pay it back’?) and
b) If you know you’re going to be a waiter in your next life, should you give more generous tips now?

Personally, I think this reincarnation business is just an excuse for extended procrastination. I mean, forget about putting things off till tomorrow or next month or next year. You can now put them off till your next incarnation! I could go through some four avatars before I find a topic for my dissertation. What more could a guy ask out of life? (Or lives?)

The thing that’s always worried me about this reincarnation / karma thing, though, is whether it’s not subject to a kind of Matthew Effect. Think about it. Say you really screw up your current life. Presumably this means that you come back as more of a loser, so that it’s even less likely that you’re going to do well this time around. So essentially, once the downslide starts it’s pretty much a vicious cycle all the way- you just keep moving further and further away from Nirvana. After a point it’s not even worth making the effort to rescue your soul – you might as well be hanged as a sheep as a lamb. Plus, once you slip out of the human race you’re truly done for. I mean, let’s face it, once you’re a cockroach the only way you’re going to get back to the human form is by agreeing to vote Republican in your next life. And even an eternity of being squished messily to death as your karma is better than that. Personally, I’d be happier with the one-time only Christian deal. Sure, you end up in Hell, but at least it’s the same Hell for all eternity, it’s not like you get points taken off for thinking bad thoughts about the guy who’s shoving brimstone up your ass. So that next time you could end up being the brimstone that gets shoved up someone else’s ass.

The other thing with foreseeing your next life, of course, is the question of reliability. How sure can you be that the powers that be will get this right? Do you get a Fed-Ex tracking number so you can figure out exactly where your soul is at any point of time? Is it like Pizza Delivery, where if they don’t reincarnate you in half an hour you get to keep your old life for free [3]? Is the whole process Six Sigma? Can you trust it? Say you figure out who you’re going to be in your next life and leave all your money to yourself, except the storks get the houses mixed up and next thing you know you’re living next to Upchuck Smarmypants who is getting fat on your millions? It’s a worrying thought, isn’t it?

Also, do crime statutes apply across lives? Could you murder all your irritating grand-aunts in advance and get away with it? If you die and come back to life in the same city, do you still have to pay your old parking tickets?

The only good thing about this whole foreseeing your next life business, as far as I can tell, is the opportunity it gives you to buy an appropriate wardrobe. I mean let’s face it – the last thing you want is that you die and it turns out there’s an afterlife and you have nothing to wear.

Then again, who ever heard of a well-dressed bowl of petunias?

P.S. Veena, about the skirt – you don’t think I’m pretty enough already?

P.P.S. Quote of the day: “Reincarnation? Over my dead body!”

Notes:

[1] If you didn’t get the title of this post, I’m not going to bother to explain. Some of us are flowers. The rest are whale blubber.

[2] Q: If you come back as a suicide bomber, does that count as missing a turn?

[3] And if that’s true, does this mean the next life almost always comes with the wrong toppings?

Categories: Humour

If only Death were truly like this.

Swan-like, imperious, graceful as a ballerina dressed in the purest of white, lithe as a fawn, light as a leaping ghost who scorns the bonds of the earth’s gravity.

Poised. Balanced on the tips of her toes, in the quivering of moments. Exact as a compass, as the point of a needle pinning beauty to the ground. One leg rising slowly into the air like the hand of some infinitely delicate clock. The tension of her fluidity, the violence of her stillness.

If only Death were this pirrouetting angel, this blessed dervish, spinning the room with her frenzy. If only Death were this desperate, fluttering bird, dancing us all into extinction.

Went to a performance by the Russian National Ballet tonight – a ballet called Giselle. Good stuff, even though the music was somewhat trite, and the story was the usual romantic grotesque [1]. Much of the dancing, especially in the second half, was exquisite though, and all in all it was a sublime evening.

But the story. Giselle is this young and very beautiful country maid who falls in love with this young villager who is actually a Duke (or Prince or something) in disguise [2]. When her other lover, a forester, unmasks this Prince and his true fiancee comes forward to claim him, the jilted Giselle grows distraught and kills herself. So far so good.

It’s in the second act that things start to get really bizarre. The scene is now the grave of Giselle in the forest. Giselle’s two lovers come to visit her grave and are confronted by spirits of jilted women called the Wilis, who basically surround any man they meet and dance him to death. The forester – the guy who unmasked the lying Prince and has been faithful to Giselle all along is killed, but the Prince survives, helped by the still loving Giselle to last out till dawn when the Wilis let him go. Giselle then returns to her grave (freed from the power of the Wilis, apparently) and the Prince is left sorrowing and alone.

Two things about the story struck me as really interesting. First, the way in which this story (and others like it – remember Rigoletto) punishes all the good, innocent people and save the one guy in the whole scenario who was a two-timing scoundrel – suggesting that salvation, in the end, is not about whether you’re good or bad, but only about whether you have the blood of nobility in you. Neat. The second thing, of course, is the sheer genius of having a flock of ballerinas dance a man to his death. What a way to go. Hitchcock would have been proud.

Notes

[1] This is why, on the whole, I like abstract dance more – at least that way you don’t get the feeling that someone is bending a story over backwards just so they can come up with a bunch of things the characters can dance to.

[2] What’s the deal with all these princes chasing after fair country maids anyway? It’s such a cliche.

Categories: Arts,

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

- William Shakespeare, Sonnet XXXIV

Outside temperature 9 am yesterday: 70 degrees Fahrenheit
Outside temperature 9 pm yesterday: 36 degrees Fahrenheit (not counting windchill)

Gah!

Categories: Poetry, Miscellaneous

He is standing at the bus stop when his heart starts to ring.

He panics. Who can it be, he wonders? Everyone is turning to stare at him. He can feel a blush creeping across his face. Why does it always have to be so public, so embarassing?

The vibration grows stronger, the sound of the ringing like some desperate claw, scratching away at the silence. He fumbles wildly at his breast, his only thought now to reach this disturbance, make it stop.

It’s only when he finally has his hands around the feeling that caution returns. Before he answers he must see who it is. Naturally. He opens his heart up, glances at the name flashing back at him. Her? Why her? What could she possibly want from him? For a split second he stands there, staring at the screen, considering. Then, reluctantly, he pushes the button that says ‘dismiss’. No. Not this time. Not now.

As he slips his heart back into his pocket he wonders if there’s any chance that she’ll call back.

Categories: Fiction, Whimsy

Isn’t poetry wonderful?

Friday evening. M and I are at this upmarket, ‘happening’ sushi restaurant. We have a reservation, but there’s still a fifteen minute wait before our table will be ready. We slip down to the bar / lounge to wait.

The trouble is, I can’t STAND lounges. My reaction to them is immediate and visceral – it’s the sensation of something clenching up inside me, like every inch of my being were trying desperately to withdraw into the cocoon of itself. It makes me wish I really were a turtle and had a shell to be safe under.

It’s the noise mostly. The mindlessness of the music thumping away in the background, the shrill cacophony of high-pitched female voices squealing and laughing all around me, the endless inanity of conversations that seem to consist entirely of exclamation marks. The ridiculous idea that being in a room where the noise levels are so high that you have to shout to be heard by the person next to you could be construed as being ’social’, as though all that civilisation came down to was this herd instinct, this incapacity to deal with any idea not immediately accessible to the meanest intelligence.

Plus there’s the claustrophobia of course. The dense, dark space, the haze of smoke, the constant jostling as people push past you. It’s always amazed me that a group of people who are so protective of their private space on mass transit systems that they sometimes prefer standing to taking an empty middle seat, would willingly choose to pack themselves into this intensely uncomfortable environment like sardines, and actually seem to enjoy it.

At any rate, as M sidles off to the bar to get herself a drink (by this point I’m incapable of swallowing at all, so that a drink is clearly impossible) I can feel the nausea rising within me, I feel choked, my hands are clenched into fists, every muscle in my body has grown taut with tension. I shut my eyes and try taking deep breaths. That helps.

Then, just to take my mind off my surroundings, I try reciting poetry to myself. Eliot first. The first part of Ash Wednesday. Because I cannot drink / There where trees flower and springs flow, for there is nothing again. And then, more fittingly, Browning.

“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop

‘Dust and Ashes’! So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold
Dear dead women, with such hair to, what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old”.

There I am, in the middle of a floor crowded with beautiful people, in my scruffy raincoat and day old stubble, my eyes tightly shut, murmuring poetry to myself as though it were an incantation. Slowly, everything else around me fades out. The noise recedes, the individual voices bleached to a white static. I exist in a bubble of my own making. I am a spectre, I am a ghost. I am a planet of quiet but desperate gravity among these busy, unheeding constellations.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. I open my eyes and it’s the security guard. He wants to know if I’m feeling okay. I cannot find the words to say to him. I want to tell him how utterly I reject him and these surroundings that he works in. I want to assure him that he needn’t give me this half-amused half-pitying look that he reserves for those who don’t fit in, because fitting in is never something that I’ve cared to do, and here, in this place, it’s the last thing on my mind. But it’s no use. No speech of mine could possibly reach him. From where I stand he seems too remote, too distant, as though he were a million miles away. I nod, then turn away, hoping he’ll leave me alone, hoping he’ll let me go back to my hard won peace. As I watch him drift away out of the corner of my eye, it occurs to me again how glorious poetry is, how life affirming, how necessary.

Auden writes: “Nights of insult let you pass / Watched by every human love”. Without poetry to console us, lend us its gift of silence, could we survive the mindless hubbub of our everyday lives? I know I couldn’t.

P.S. The title of this post comes from Ginsberg’s amazing Mugging – a poem I’ll always treasure, partly for the shock of discovering, at seventeen, that petty crime too, could be the subject of a poem and partly for the sweet irony of that final line – “my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor” – the truth of that line both a triumph and a cause for despair – the world cannot steal our poetry from us, because the world will never know what it’s really worth.

Categories: Poetry, Personal

It was a glorious day yesterday. One of those early Spring days, beautiful as first love, overwhelming as hope. Hounds of Spring on Winter’s traces and all that sort of stuff. The sun was shining, the lake had turned an electric cobalt, it was 65 degrees outside and pleasant enough that you could walk around in shirtsleeves. It was the kind of day that only Emily Dickinson could do justice to.

M celebrated this unexpectedly brilliant weather by wearing a skirt. I celebrated it by getting her to take me to a nice little cafe and gorging myself on Ceasar salad, espresso ice cream with hot fudge and the most sublime espresso tarts I’ve ever tasted, laced with liberal doses of actual espresso. So far, so good.

M then suggests that we go for a drive, seeing as it’s so wonderful outside. I acquiesce happily. Where should we go? she asks. I shrug my shoulders, consider pointing out that we don’t actually need a destination to drive to, then say, ‘Wherever’, visions of leafy lakeside walks or pleasant out of the way arboretum’s in my head. “I know!”, M says, “we could go to an outlet mall! I need to shop for clothes for my new job anyway!” HUH? Apparently M’s idea of relishing the great outdoors is to go into designer stores and check out the Spring collection. I protest. I don’t want to be stuck inside some stupid mall on a day like this. And there is NO WAY I am going shopping for women’s clothes. Not happening. Nada.

So of course we end up going to the outlet mall. M assures me that she a) just wants to pick up a couple of things b) already knows pretty much what she wants c) is amazingly efficient at buying clothes. This trip isn’t about shopping, I’m promised (would she do that to me? her guest?) it’s really about the drive – the outlet mall is just an aside, like a really convenient spot to make a U-turn in. We’ll spend two hours driving about in this amazing sunshine, M tells me, and maybe an hour, at most, at the mall. Come on, that’s not going to kill you.

I should have known better. The fact that M knows exactly what she’s looking for and manages to pick it out in some fifteen minutes in the first store we walk into, does not, apparently mean that she does not have to visit every other store and pay due homage, like a devotee making a tour of the minor shrines. Besides, by this point the weather gods have turned against us, and it’s all overcast and depressing out, so she might as well shop properly now that we’ve come all the way. Aarghh!!

Shopping with women is like the Holocaust. Every survivor has a story of his own to tell, and though most of these stories sound very alike, we still go on telling them, writing them down, publishing books about them because of the sheer untrammeled horror that they represent, the extent of one human being’s cruelty to another. What moves us, in these stories, is first and foremost the plight of the narrator, his inalienable status as victim. This is writing as catharsis, memory as reconciliation, by putting our worst moments down on a page we cauterize them, distance ourselves from them.

So, shopping for clothes with women. The thing that always puzzles me about these expeditions is the way women want your opinion, but don’t value it. Shrug your shoulders and maintain a careful neutrality over everything she picks out / tries on, and you’re told that you’re no help at all, and she knows she should have come with someone who would have been interested enough to give an opinion. Try giving an opinion (being careful, of course, not be too honest – it’s always those pants are too tight, or that jacket isn’t cut right – never you’re too fat to be wearing something like that) and you’ll get the ‘what planet are you from / don’t you know stuff like this went out of fashion, like three HOURS ago’ look. M told me she wanted something simple and classy that she could wear to office and that would make her look professional. But every time I suggested something sober / conservative I got a look that was the equivalent of a rap on the knuckles and was told it was too plain. Go figure.

The second problem shopping for clothes with women is what I call the “I know what the debutante needs, but even she doesn’t know what she wants” problem. Spend five minutes explaining to a woman why the purse / shoes / raincoat / suit she’s trying on is absolutely impractical / overpriced / inappropriate for anything but dancing about in Geri Halliwell videos and she’ll admit the truth of everything you’re saying and then say “But I really like it.” This, apparently, is an argument. M, unlike other women I’ve shopped with in the past, is reasonable enough not to actually buy the damn things, but her process for vetoing something that catches her fancy, consists of trying it on and then sashaying in front of the mirror until she’s managed to convince herself that she doesn’t look good in it (not that this takes long, of course). This works, but it has all the efficiency of sitting under a tree and waiting for the apples to grow rotten and fall to the ground instead of just plucking them.

Then, of course, there’s the sheepish husbands club. This is the group of men you’ll find standing at the entrance of the changing room in any woman’s store, anxiously clutching purses / babies / dresses and trying desperately (but without any real hope) to make themselves invisible. If there is a hell, and the feminists have anything to do with it, this is what it will be like.

The trouble is that there’s absolutely nothing to do in this situation. You don’t want to look at the clothes because you’re a MAN and can’t possibly be seen browsing through flimsy pink dresses, fingering the fabric to see what it feels like. You don’t want to look at the other women who are coming out of the dressing room and modelling the clothes they’ve tried on in front of their husband / the mirror because it’s rude and you’re not a pervert and they’re bound to get the wrong idea. You can’t look the other men waiting with you in the eye because the last thing you want is for other men to know that you would do this, it would be like chatting about your viagra prescription, you’re embarassed enough as it is. So what you have is basically a ten minute period (fifteen, if the person you’re shopping with didn’t bother to wear a top that she could try on formal jackets with, so now has to pick out a shirt in each store and change into that just to see what the suit looks like) where all you’re doing is looking away.

Plus there’s the imminent sense of doom hanging over you. It’s like waiting for an interview. Or a sheep shearing. Any minute now she’s going to walk out of that door and you’re going to have to make up something to say about the outfit and what if she looks really hideous in it, what do you say then? and what happened to all that stuff about not objectifying women, how am I supposed to judge how a woman looks if I don’t objectify her, and what would Betty Friedan do if she were in this position, and why is it taking so long, could she have fainted in there trying to wrestle herself into that tight top and what do I do if she never comes out of there at all, if it’s like some Hitchcock movie where she simply vanishes, do I call 911, do they have a special fashion victims unit, is that her, no, but I wish it was, I’m hungry, oh crap, is that the time, what the hell is she doing in there anyway?

The other frustrating thing, especially if, like me, you’re not married to / dating the person you’re shopping with, is other women. It’s one of nature’s great Catch-22s. Here are all these women, who usually wouldn’t give me the time of day if I laid down my cloak to help them cross a patch of mud on the street, who are suddenly smiling sweetly at me, simply because, by dint of actually agreeing to help a woman shop, I have magically transformed into Super-supportive Sensitive Man. All this warmth and approval is edifying, until you remember that it’s all based on the assumption that you’re not single. It dawns on you that the only women you’re ever going to be attractive to are the ones who think you’re not available, that you are, in fact, ’safe’. You wonder how long it would take to swim to Geneva.

The worst part is that after a while you can’t help getting involved. I mean you’re in the damn stores, putting in the time anyway and it’s clothing for god’s sake, not rocket science, you’re analytical enough to handle something that basic. Stockholm syndrome takes over. Next thing you know you’re getting a full update on her entire wardrobe and helping her think through which pieces in it would help accentuate the understated tone of the suit she currently has on. You’re talking blithely about the cut of the suit, the fall of the fabric and how this or that silheoutte isn’t appropriate for her. You find she’s hanging on to your every word, doing exactly what you tell her. The salesgirls in the store bring up outfit after outfit, offering it to you hesitatingly, in awe of your judgement. Other women are turning around to listen to what you’re saying, and wondering whether it would, technically, be infidelity if they came over and took your advice over their husband’s. You listen to yourself talking about the inappropriateness of the stitch, and realise you’re actually good at this. You also realise how entirely gay you sound. You might as well move to Wyoming and tend cattle.

At any rate, four hours later and clutching enough polythene bags to destroy the groundwater balance of a small planet, we were done. All I felt at the time was relief, of course, but thinking about it later, over dinner with Veena and BM at a snazzy indian fusion place (tamarind shrimp, tandoori portobello and some heavenly lamb) it began to occur to me that I might actually be on to a good thing here. Okay, so it was an excruciatingly painful way to spend an afternoon, but if I’d bargained properly, just how many delicious meals could I have got M to pay for in exchange for it? Do I really need to be doing a PhD? Could I make enough just taking women shopping on the weekends, to spend the rest of the week writing and relaxing at home?

The reason the male prostitution / gigolo industry has never quite taken off, it seems to me, is because they’re providing the wrong service. Women don’t need to pay men to sleep with them, they can get men to do that anyway. The fundamental principle of prostitution is that you pay for something you really want but can’t get otherwise. How many women would love to have a guy to go shopping with? How many of them can actually get a guy to do this? Is there a huge untapped market here?

I have a vision of myself dressed in luridly coloured tight pants, waiting outside a outlet mall, peering into the windows of the cars at all the single women driving in, saying “hey there! big spender! you feeling lonely this afternoon? You lookin’ to do some shopping?” I could have my regular rate for a one hour quickie and a special price if you wanted me for the whole day. Plus additional charges if you wanted something extra – like if you wanted help choosing lingerie, for instance, or you wanted me to wait outside the salon and comment on your hairstyle when you came out. What? You want to bring your husband along? Sure, why not, I’m cool with threesomes. I’ll even help him pick out ties while you’re in the ladies room. No extra charge. Hell, for a little extra dough I’ll bring a friend of mine along and you can listen to us argue over whether mauve is right or wrong for your complexion.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, some day a super-rich, over-achieving CEO type woman will pick me up off the streets and take me to back to her hotel room and we’ll spend the whole night in the novelty shops in the hotel basement and one week later she’ll show up at the door of my run-down little apartment in a white limousine clutching a bouquet of new credit cards in her hand, and I’ll discover I’m really Julia Roberts and we’ll all live happily ever after.

I just hope she doesn’t look like Richard Gere.

P.S. For those of you who are wondering what happened to the erudite, cultured Falstaff you know and errr…vaguely like, though you wouldn’t admit to as much in public – not to worry. I’m just getting over my fashion hangover (you know, the feeling you get when you open your eyes in the morning and see orange spots and an elephant dressed in a pink Ann Taylor dress?) and will be back to my regular self asap. Forthcoming attractions include: A long, long post about the Chicago Art Institute, and a discussion of how poetry can actually help you deal with being stuck in noisy, smoke filled lounges filled with the beautiful people.

UPDATE: Just a quick clarification. The elephant in a pink Ann Taylor dress referred to in the post script above is an entirely fictional being and bears no resemblance whatsoever to any persons living or wearing clothes from Walmart. Specifically, it does NOT refer to M (honey, will you please put that knife down now). No, not even if the dress fits….

Categories: Personal, Humour