Unlike Arthur Rimbaud, the influential and at times downright wacked-out 19th century French poet, I have never smoked opium nor enjoyed, if that's the right word, opiates of any stripe for which the name was not first gently scrawled across a prescription pad. I know nothing of heroin, except that it would seem to be a really, really bad idea to seek out someone who sells it, let alone try and most certainly buy and buy and buy it. My sole insertion of a suppository made of morphine yielded only one of the most psychologically and physically vacuous evenings of my life - and given the gaping three-months-deep void in which I spent the winter just gone, that's really saying something.
No, narcotics and I don't mix. But sloth and I most definitely became more than acquainted this past winter. I lay around the house so convincingly that if a casual observer from space managed to stay awake to monitor the duration of the sorry situation that did not unfold on the surface of the backwater planet to which she'd been regrettably assigned, she'd have shot herself with a ray gun, exasperated by the sheer futility of it all. I spent many, many days between January and March indulging in the false bliss of the nearly total absence of the urge to create, a status affixed by David Mamet to the definition of the word 'decadence.'
I have been brilliantly decadent. Some days, I awoke in the late morning angry at the fact of sunlight. Another day leering and mocking, arms folded, staring at me cockily, secure in its knowledge that, if this was another day to be wasted, it was all my fault. And I'm sure I wasted many probably beautiful, sunny late-winter days lying about and staring, from across the room, at the covers of the increasingly thick stack of New Yorker and Time Out magazines gathering moss on the dining table - at which, appropriately enough, I hadn't sat down to eat in the two months prior to having guests round for Sunday lunch in February.
I reposed my way through this darker and colder than normal winter, tacitly squashing an ass dent in the cushion of my sofa so convincing that it still exists despite rearranging the couch bits more than a month ago. I did nothing all winter apart from write copy for clients for money, which I also managed to do from a prone position in the sofa dent.
I gained weight for the first winter since 2004, when I was still with my last long-term partner, who, in his attempt to be adoring, proclaimed the March me 'winter Frank.' Winter Frank returned this year with a record-tying body fat accumulation of something like five spanking new kilograms.
My 32-inch LCD television became one of my best friends, and the back stories of the characters of Frasier became more interesting than my own. My other friend was a dead git from Tennessee called Jack Daniels.
It's puzzling when a localised death creeps into your house and breathes its grey carbon dioxide into you. I still don't fully understand what motivation - or lack thereof - lead me to flop idly for three months as I watched my friends' careers accelerate. Even my friends in the performing arts moved a notch or two up the rickety ladders they've chosen to climb. But I got nowhere other than exactly where I'd been since October of last year, stuck in a silent neutral gear, not of despair or hopelessness, but clearly not of their opposites, either.
Absolutely. Nothing. Happened.
In New York in the middle of the 1990s, I fell in with a group of quasi-activist pseudo-philosophers who proclaimed themselves proponents of a 'New Humanism.' I parted ways with them after a year or so of being accused of 'weakness' for not vigorously proceeding through life with thought, feeling and action in alignment. I didn't feel the need to grandstand about my achievements, and I still don't. I may work in marketing, but I've never been terribly fond of selling myself. They took what they perceived to be my reticence for weakness, and I never forgave them for being such blockheads that they couldn't see that my way of cutting a subtle but progressive course through life was not weakness but individuality.
What I did take away from the experience was a simple truth that still makes absolute sense to me: there is no such thing as stasis in human life. There is only movement forward or backward, progression or retrogression. Only by ploughing on determinedly can life be considered to be moving forward, even if that determination leads one down paths that slam suddenly into unexpected dead ends. We generally refer to this as 'learning by trial and error.' Obviously, self harm and its negative-Nelly neighbours lead one backward. But what of the self-delusion of 'remaining the same?'
This, the New Humanists half preached to me, was akin to executing a self-harm regime against the soul, for each day that one remains in an apparent holding pattern, one learns only that tomorrow will be more or less the same as today. And when tomorrow's inner life can only be expected to yield the same result as today's, hope is expunged from the heart. Sustaining a stasis, therefore, leads only to spiritual death. Things cannot stay the way they are; or, in short, when we hold still too long, we die while living - or perhaps 'metabolising' is the better word.
(Clearly the winter weight gain signaled that I wasn't metabolising efficiently enough.)
And now, in the springtime of both season and soul, I turn to ask myself, 'What the fuck was that all about?' Why the sudden, sustained interest in next to nothing? Was it seasonal affective disorder? An exhaustion with life? A stretched out bad mood? An unnumbered chapter in the book of Mid-life Crises?
I think perhaps it was as simple as this: Left largely unchecked, and working alone at home, I forgot to get on with it. The days in London in winter are short. They end before 4pm. The tendency can be to hibernate, and it appears that I had done so. Perhaps the current phase of my career had reached its pinnacle, and it was time to try other ways of making money. But the winter came, and my cosy little flat turned into not just a sanctuary, but a bear cave with a leather sleeping area.
Or perhaps I'm underselling myself, as I've frequently done, to myself. I arranged a work area in the corner of my room, eventually, in order to clearly differentiate between 'home' and 'office.' I installed insulation around my doors and windows. I put up huge roller blinds to provide more privacy. But even these things pointed to a tendency towards self-isolation, to adopting a 'please leave me be' posture. Was it time, as the old REM song goes, that I had some time alone?
Living alone is wonderful, but it has its drawbacks, not the least of which is the lack of another human being in your house off which you can bounce ideas, thoughts and opinions. Or just someone who expects you to get up in the morning because they have to get up in the morning. Or a life form other than a plant to remind you that you simply must keep going, keep trying, keep creating.
I'm thawing nicely now, and ideas are beginning to flow again. In the final analysis, what probably happened was an unintended conspiracy of forces. I needed rejuvenating, and it wasn't springtime. I needed energy, and the sun wasn't shining. I needed strength to move off the sofa, but the gym was a mile down the road through the rain and cold. Did it all just stack up against me in a wall of bad timing and bad luck?
Whatever it was, it stands as a warning for next winter and a lesson I shall not soon forget. I mean, my god! I'm so fat!
No comments:
Post a Comment