I have nothing to say, but a great urge to say it and it is that nothing inside my guts that is the sole reason I have no idea what to write, but from which everything spews, like an impossible imbalance in the void from which the whole universe is born. I write with fear, you see I don’t know who I am and finding out seems like the worst thing I can imagine, you might think me an idiot, even though, in a way, I already know myself to be one, but do I want this confirmed, handed to me in its brute inescapable presence, shoved down my throat like some glass filled pill? Maybe.
The hard reality to facing up to who you are is, in the end, because you always find out you are no one and behind the façade of words and voices and clothes and hobbies there is a hole, a sucking vacuous aperture where nothing ever was but where everything resides. So you can see my problem; to know this whilst also knowing you don’t know and don’t want to know, but to live none the less and to live like you know you don’t know, an endeavour that involves quite a lot of laughter let me tell you.
Yes, that was purposefully obscure, I apologise, but sometimes that’s the only way to be clear about things and I also wanted to weed out those who are less committed and may not understand what I’m trying to do here.
I’m Georges, but ‘that’s not my real name’, neither is it Bernard. I’m not really sure what a blog is or how its structured or who would want to read it, but I’m writing one because of something a friend said to me a while ago. He looked at me, tilted his head thoughtfully, furrowed his brow and said:
The thing with the internet is, people have nothing to say, but can’t stop saying it.
Interesting, no? I guess the reason I’m writing is that I don’t know if what I have to say is ‘nothing’ or something and whether it is possible to say anything anyway. So I take my gamble, throw those dice of chance into the ring and leave it up to you to decide my fate. We’ll see what happens.
I live in London, the place where everything is happening, but mostly to other people who don’t exist. The main purpose of the city is manufacture then conceal its loneliness, a noble cause; one, I’m sure we can all relate to. I moved here in July 2006 and was immediately infected with the city’s tragic allure, the sagging mucus membranes on the tube, the slow wounded stagger of the businessman’s walk to work, the refusal of the night time stars to penetrate the city’s fug of illumination, the ambiguous flowers at every road junction, the yellow police signs announcing murders and rape, customers under the trains. I knew I was home; nowhere else is it so easy to make torment a way of life.
I moved from Norwich onto a boat moored along the Regents Canal with my long term girlfriend J. We were living her dream of becoming an actress, she got a place at drama school and I followed obediently like a hollow vessel, with the mistaken, but necessary, belief that I could fill and complete her being, raising her above every one of her many bi-polar torments and we would live happily ever after. That was me then, before London got hold of me and savaged my fragile ego, threw it out on the streets like some soiled tissue and stamped it into the filthy pavements till I was sinews of soggy pap, a sputum of fragmentary papery flesh. And I said yes.
But I’m bored of my past for now, the problem I have is I want to be honest, brutally honest, but words get in the way. I’m not angry or pretentious, nor do I have any clue what I’m talking about. I’m simple, a purity of consciousness, but how to communicate this fails me, but I will continue trying until one day I fall asleep and don’t ever get up.
I’m shy and scared.
Let me see if I can tell you about something that happened to me this week and maybe salvage the nauseous image I have given you of myself thus far. It was a single event that occurred on Thursday, I was in Uxbridge, a short way from the head office of Coca Cola, I had been staying with my sister at Brunel University and was on my way to the tube station to return home to Camberwell. I was strolling along the pathways listening to my MP3 player, not sure which song, when I heard a cry. It was a hybrid sound of both pain and annoyance, a grunt and a fairly effeminate scream. Looking up a I saw a female behind a wheel chair with her hands to her mouth, and in front of her a blue flannel tracksuit flailing and rolling on the pavement, like some aqueous native that had just dropped from the sky.
The woman was the obvious guilty party, there was no doubt she had been the (inadvertent?) innovator of ejecting the poor male inhabitant of the chair a good two feet from his seated position onto the concrete pavement. I guess my first reaction was laughter, you don’t yet know this about me but laughter is always my first reaction, that’s my tragedy. The second was a primal attraction to the scene, revelling in the forbidden voyeuristic pleasure of another’s pain, knowing I shouldn‘t look but being able to do nothing else. Then as I passed - doing my best to pretend a rather dishevelled and blubbering humanoid with tiny legs waving his arms angrily and ranting and panting was nothing out of the ordinary - he looked up at me and said with a latent aggression, ‘excuse me, sorry, could you help me please’. The words came as a bit of a shock, piercing through the film of distance I had draped over the scene to protect myself from the feelings of love and compassion that threatened to well up inside of me. I stopped, hesitantly, I mean I could hardly run away could I?
‘Where are your glasses’, the woman asked the man, as if this were some great revelation that gripped her soul with horror. ‘Oh I don’t know they fell off over there somewhere’. It seemed to bother him little, but I retrieved his very lightly brown tinted glasses and stood over him uncomfortably, half trying to hand them to him and half waiting for further instructions. He was just shifting around on the concrete looking down in shame now, not wanting to catch my eye as if doing so would confess the true humiliation of the situation, I felt like a dignity officer grilling him during an interview, saying things like: ‘you look a bit silly don’t you’, or ‘you’re such a helpless lump of flesh you can’t even get back in your chair by yourself’; I didn’t actually say these things, this wasn’t how I felt, but what was implied by my very presence in the scene, slightly awkward I can tell you.
A suited Asian man walked past and was also recruited to the cause, from his face I could see the same conflict between pity, wanting to help this unfortunate character and wanting to run away laughing as fast as possible; the result was an uncomfortable shuffling of our feet and a mood of indecision. I felt a little like the child left at nursery for the first time thrust into an unknown world, small, vulnerable and crying, wanting his maternal security to return and fill his lost certainty.
Eventually we were given reluctant instructions, I was to take his legs and Suit man had to lift him from under his arms, our instructor had obviously done this before, but his countenance gave neither of us the confidence we required, we got uneasily into position. As I grabbed his tiny little legs, I just wanted to laugh, a jaw snapping roar, that gauged the skin in my throat, not because I didn’t feel sympathy and even love for this man, but because I felt absurd, I was stuck between the two, there was a comedic frisson to this heartbreaking tragedy. Aesthetically, it contained all the qualities of a comedic sketch, and I have to admit I did look around once for a camera; I can’t work out whether this, makes me paranoid, narcissistic or a victim of too much TV. But the reality was that there was a poor embarrassed man, however ugly and funny looking that needed some help.
I can’t remember exactly who initiated the first attempt, but it was a huge failure, I just recall the man’s flaccid face and shoulders being thrust together as he was lifted, accentuating his flabby jowls and giving his voice a camp verve as his neck was crushed under the weight. In the air there was a shaky moment of intense presence as the Asian man realised firstly he wasn’t able to lift the man high enough, and secondly in not doing so he had raised the humiliation levels by up to five times. We carefully placed the man back on the pavement, there was several moments of uncomfortable acrobatics as we all tried to cope with the horror of a second try and the Asian man looked visibly shaken as he now had to deal with the fact his inability to complete the task revealed that he had an obvious unconscious hatred for the disabled. We swapped places, I was to take the bulk of the weight this time, the pressure was on, I could either prove my superior masculinity over a woopsie in a suit, or I could fail and be just as bad as the corporate pencil sucking loon opposite me. Obviously I didn’t know the man, but for some reason a suit to me signals banality, obsequiousness and soullessness, this is my arbitrary prejudice.
It’s an odd feeling for me to be motivated to succeed, but I could see no other option but to lift that man back onto his chair, even if my arms fell off afterwards. The moment had come, I lifted, he was really heavy, his belly took a huge breath of air as his ample frame heaved from the ground, he was up, barely, there was a huge chance it wasn’t for long as my arm strength was reaching its painful conclusion. I moved fast, shuffling across to the waiting chair, there was trickle of terror in my stomach as I realised his sagging arse was lower than the seat of the chair, I had no time, I expended my last stores of strength with a possibly rather weak heave, there was a moment of panic, then the man’s arse landed half on the seat of the chair, with the other half left swaying in the air, but he wavered a bit then balanced and used his arms to settle himself.
I didn’t feel victorious, I felt sad, a deep plunging of compassion, that resonated behind my eyes. Such a big drama and what had I achieved, lifting a belligerent fat man back into his seat, he didn’t even say thanks, to be fair, he was too humiliated, just wanted to get off and pretend it never happened, I guess I respected that, but part of me wanted to hug him, say it’s ok, what we had shared was an intimacy of sorts, some moments of closeness, maybe that is too patronising. So I walked briskly off towards the station, but I did look back a few times to see him being pushed by the mysterious lady as if nothing had ever happened.
So that was a scene from my life in London. I guess now you will be able to confirm whether in fact you think I’m a idiot; part of me wants you to think so, but another part thinks this is a defence against the fact that I just want to be loved. You don’t yet know this about me but I think too much.
All I really want is a genuine human connection, a shared, ecstatic look into the void, a trust and a tear; a dissolution.
I have nothing else to say.
Next time?
MG
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