Part 1 here.
OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Ambrose
Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
1.
It
is an unfortunate tendency of people to move with considerable ease and
briskness from one extreme to another; if an idea lacks anything at all in
certitude and perfection, to abandon it as beyond salvage or compromise, and go
instead with an equal vigour to its opposite.
Such was the case with Malcolm, although he would himself have been at a
loss to define a specific or decisive moment when he had went from the light
into the darkness. He knew many people in
his later years that spent a great portion of their time sifting through their
memories, like gimlet-eyed browsers in old antique stores, looking for the
precise moment wherein things had gone awry with them. Malcolm wondered what it would have availed them
to find such a moment; they could not alter their lives, but only know their
overall shape with a greater precision.
Malcolm
envisioned the overall shape of life in general to follow after the experience
of moving to a new city. It is difficult
to arrive in a new place without some sense of a renewal or heightening of
life’s promise. A new city presents us
with endless possibilities for adventure, self-discovery and fulfilment. When over-familiar with a place, we are
over-familiar with ourselves; people know us, and we become in our own minds a
quantity increasingly fixed, solid, and impermeable. To relocate to a new place, particularly a
city, will instantly undo the rigidity of our posture, and the sluggishness of
our nervous systems. We are no longer
known by those about us, and hence our entire history vanishes away, and we
feel as though we no longer know ourselves.
The city itself in its novelty is a place without a precise geography, a
world whose contours are ill-defined, unexpected, and somehow entwined with the
fleeting moods of our own imaginations.
We may come to know two specific places precisely adjacent to one
another, and yet, arriving at them by wholly separate routes, conceive them to
be worlds apart. Then, when we finally
discover their proximity by means of an adjoining laneway or alley, we are
reminded of the fluid topographies of our dream-worlds, where disparate places
are connected by an association or chain of ideas and moods. This sense, however, is transitory. In time, we come to know the city, and to
know, as people say, where everything is.
The city becomes convenient and secure, but it ceases to surprize us,
and we cease to surprize ourselves.
This
was how Malcolm, extrapolating from his own experience, conceived of life: the
exultation of arriving in a new place, the giddy shock of self-conscious
existence, the sense of timelessness and Protean possibility, gradually
corroded by familiarity and deadened by habitual experience and
perception. The scientists had invented
a way of looking into the brain whereby when a subject preformed a new task,
they could see great clusters of electrical activity erupting across the
strange tissued pathways and networks of the brain. But once the task had become habituated, the
electrical arabesques ceased to dance, and the structure appeared dormant. So it was with life: a bright flash bursting
outwards, and then receding back on itself into cool, mineral stillness. From time to time, a certain part of the city
would remind Malcolm of how he had felt when he first arrived there at the age
of twenty, but these were memories in outline, like photographic negatives of
an irretrievable emotion, and he apprehended a world washed out by an
interminable sound like that of the traffic on the streets.
2.
When
he was twenty-three, Malcolm got a job in a factory that produced medical
devices. The devices were assembled and
packaged in the factory, and then they were loaded into trucks from a warehouse
to the rear of the building, and transported to the docks where they were then
shipped to various foreign markets. The different
languages on the devices that Malcolm assembled were unfamiliar to him, and
nobody on the assembly line knew precisely where they went. They go
to the warehouse, somebody told him.
It was a constant cycle: trucks arrived from the docks with the various
component parts, and these were removed from their packaging in the docking
area to the fore of the factory, and sent down along a conveyer belt to the
main factory floor, where Malcolm and his colleges assembled them piece by
piece into finished products; from there they were packaged and shelved in the
warehouse, ready to be loaded onto the trucks and taken back to the docks as
fresh, transformed commodities.
The
factory was located in an industrial park in one of the commuter belts on the
fringes of the city. Every morning, Malcolm
rose at six for the two hour bus journey which would take him to the
factory. With his mind foggy and
half-awake, he watched the gradual shift of the city’s topography: the
beautiful older houses from the preceding centuries were concentrated in the
centre, dwarfed by the office towers which had been built in the concluding
decades of the last; these finally winnowed out into residential districts,
where houses of various vintages were dwarfed by the gleaming apartment towers
which had been the mirrored dream of the last economic boom; the residential
districts eventually connected up with the old, outlying villages which the
city had gradually absorbed in the slow march of its prosperous years; the
villages and the suburbs then giving way to the commuter belts, to mazes of
identical semi-detached houses broken up by identical chains of supermarkets
and restaurants, the effect strangely that of a child’s toy or a designer’s
miniature; finally, the bus passed through a visually anonymous lattice of
traffic islands and motorways, into the industrial district, where motor showrooms
and outdoor furniture emporiums formed little arcades around the parks
themselves, and various multinational manufacturing centres were marooned in
eerily sterile affectations of decoration and amenity. Malcolm then went to a cleanroom where he
washed and sterilized his hands, donned a pair of rubber gloves, white coat,
and hair-net, before finally taking his place on the line. He then day-dreamed and nodded off; a radio
played behind a soothing white-noise hum of machinery. At elven o’clock, they took their first
break, eating sandwiches and smoking cigarettes along the banks of an
artificial lake.
For
the first couple of years, Malcolm envisioned the job as a temporary necessity,
and regarded the hours he worked as a waking dream, a dissociative and unreal
adjunct to his authentic existence and identity. He realized that the industrial parks were
designed to facilitate this mentality; located in distant and anonymous zones
on the fringes of the city, they allowed each worker to divorce their working
hours from the rest of their lives, and believe ultimately in the unreality of
their work. In time, his sleeping dreams
became those of his waking ones: he saw everybody sitting contently at their places
while the factory autonomously carried out its own work. The indolent workers were all happy and
beaming. The wrinkled old women looked
like wide-eyed children. Sometimes they
performed comical pantomimes for one-another; these comical shows were
interspersed with sudden, profound expressions that seemed to convey volumes of
information. Then the bell rang out, and
they filed gravely towards the cleanrooms, exchanging final, pleading backward
glances as they went.
3.
The
paradox and peril of the idealistic tendency is that it expends a great deal of
energy and time cultivating perfected, ideal, and ecstatic realities; and yet
the activity of cultivating these realities must by its very nature negate the
time and energy available to even begin to actualize them. The idealist becomes adept at imagining and
increasingly untrained in actualizing his imagining; in this sense, so as the
grandeur and depth of his idealization increases, so the reality of his
existence shrinks in perfect proportion.
The dream of the true idealist is that peculiar and deceptive lure which
must always recede with just as much alacrity as we approach it, like the point
where the curving arrowhead of the rainbow pierces the horizon.
Of
course, most of us are at least partially idealistic, since we maintain in
adulthood some measure of the fully idealistic psychology which characterizes
the greater part of our youth. It is in
fact considered an integral part of the process of maturation that we should
shift both from a solipsistic or interior tendency to a socially integrated
one, and, in a parallel and mutually reinforcing motion, from an idealistic to
a realist perspective, the two primary meanings of the term idealist being in this sense very
closely aligned. Hence, the real idealist
is he or she who does not, at least at first, yield up their idealistic
conceptions to the inevitable upheavals and disappointments which maturation
foists on all of us in greater or lesser degree. Exhibiting a measure both of tenacity and
belligerent stubbornness, the idealist refuses to accept the world as it must be in opposition to the world as
he or she would fashion it; hence,
the idealist refuses to meet the world on its own terms, but rather increases
their own narcotic capacity to dream and imagine, the need of the imagination
becoming more acute in proportion to the extent to which the reality of the
world belies its productions.
Another
qualification must be added: the type of person who actually succeeds in large
part in actualizing their interior designs and conceptions cannot be regarded
as the type of idealist which we have in mind.
This type of person is rather a realist whose peculiar strength of will
renders the actuality of their existence indistinguishable from that idealized
by the average person. If the true
idealist, on the other hand, were ever to realize but one of their dreams, then
its effect could only be that of an extreme deflation or disappointment. It had never been the object of the dream,
but rather the dream itself, which had so intoxicated the imagination; never
the thing itself, but rather the patient interior sculpting of things at best
only dimly possible. As Narcissus
mistook his reflection for another living person, so the idealist squanders all
the world for gazing at its reflection in a mirror of their own precise
framing.
In this sense,
there must come to every idealist a moment of crisis, wherein they can no
longer persuade themselves that their dreams are ever to be realized; the
realization that their dreams have been all along an escape from life, rather
than an engagement with its higher possibilities. They would, of course, have experienced many
minor upheavals of confidence along the way, but those would always subside,
and give way to the idealist’s habitual condition, his peculiar sense of
happiness and equilibrium which borders on a kind of liminal ecstasy: the
feeling of things just on the giddy brink of their realization, the rapture of
old and tenaciously guarded dreams come finally to the verge of their full
fruition. But there must come the time
when this liminal ecstasy can no longer be regained or ever more credited; and time is itself the crucial ingredient
in the undoing of the idealist. Given an
unlimited surfeit of time, the human mind would tend towards a general
idealism, contemplating all conceivable things and infinitely delaying action;
if the body were not subject to the gradual excoriations of time and the
inevitability of its final closing of accounts, then materialism would be a
perverse and esoteric doctrine of the few.
It is precisely because of our relationship with time that most of us
are idealistic in our youth. It is then
that we have, or feel ourselves to possess, that great surfeit of time in which
everything yet appears possible, and action can yet be delayed. When the slow, boundless, novel time of
childhood fully gives way to the familiar, repetitious, and ever accelerating
time of the adult, then comes the call to action, and the sense of the meagre
insubstantiality of what was only inwardly contemplated or imagined, as opposed
to that, however imperfect, which might have been attained in actuality.
4.
When
he was twenty eight, Malcolm drifted into a mood of peculiar, affectless despair. It was a despair which had a quality not of
emotion, but rather of an idea, of a logic pursued with detached and analytical
rigour. It came upon him not as a swoon
of unrealized desire, or a tender sense of loss or incapacity, but simply as a
precise conviction of how he stood in relation to the world. Having this calm, cerebral character, his
despair did not interrupt the outward flow of his life during the daylight
hours, but at night he began to suffer from an acute insomnia. He considered taking sleeping tablets, but this
idea troubled him for some obscure reason; he felt as though he were being
nudged into a necessary wakefulness during the hours of darkness, as though
there was something there which he was meant to find. He started to take short walks along the
canal adjacent to his apartment, and as the duration of these walks gradually
increased, so Malcolm slowly became a habitué of the city at night.
Initially,
this nocturnal existence merely took the form of long and aimless walks. To walk aimlessly has a character
significantly different to that of walking with a set destination or purpose. The anticipated destination – or some sense
of a further removed eventual destination – provides a colouring on the places
that intervene along the way. Knowing
our own door to be open to us, and some warmth and comfort to reside behind our
shuttered windows, makes all those other doors and shuttered windows that we
pass seem less oppressive and unfriendly.
To the habitual street walker, however, to he or she who has no home,
and no appointments or destinations, this comfort is denied, and everything
they pass is coloured only with the absence of a destination, and the knowledge
that no quietude will ever dim the noise of the street. The street walker becomes intimately
acquainted with those merely functional or abandoned in-between spaces that
constitute the swift and shifting points of transition along the journeys of
others. In many regards, these spaces
make up the greater part of the city’s constitution – the bulk of the people
flow towards its few and widely dispersed vital organs, passing through the
larger net of transitory and anonymous spaces that knit the system together. In this sense, the maze of outlying
motorways, traffic islands, and footbridges capture the essence of the city:
austere and nominally designed spaces which were only ever meant to be passed
through. The sound of the city,
similarly, is generated by individuals all with individual psychologies and
motivations, and yet each one working together produces a sound as motiveless
and alien to human psychology as the ceaseless sound of the ocean. In this manner, cities become simultaneously
the most populous and the loneliest spaces on earth; in aggregating human
intentionality and purpose, and refining them down to an all-encompassing calculus
of concrete and machinery, the city finally attains to the ineffable
abstraction of the natural world.
At
first, Malcolm confined his strolls to the canal, enjoying in a limited sense
the comparative solitude of the city in the early hours. Having stolen away from his bed with an at
best obscure sense of purpose, he felt as though the spaces which he moved
through were unoccupied, as though he himself were not present to them. In this manner, the scenes he observed all
had the quality which the city will sometimes assume in a heavy frost or
snowfall: the quality of a frozen and unoccupied pictorial exhibition, or an
abandoned amenity whose erstwhile function remains discernible despite a
lengthy abeyance. Feeling his own presence
to be somehow insubstantial and ghostlike, the sound of the wind rustling
through the trees and rushes filled him with an intimation of the continued
life and animation of empty places, of its obliviousness to the more variegated
and unsteady human tempers which moved through them. Swans occasionally glided along the surface
of the canal, unruffled and unmoving as the current carried them with an almost
dreamlike mixture of purpose and hypnotised submission to the disposition of their
environment. Malcolm passed by various
human architectures which had in the past concretized the aspirations and identities
of specific socioeconomic classes; in the last decade, these distinctions had
tended to fall away, retaining their character only in the architectural forms
themselves, and abandoning the lives within to an increasing similitude of
aspirational horizons. In this sense, he
felt that his own dreams were aligned to those of the landscape, as though one had
been memorialized by the other, and both rendered distant and historical.
From
time to time, he encountered petrol stations whose shop floors were still
open. The majority were closed and
served their customers via hatches, but some remained open all night. These were the first nocturnal social environments
which Malcolm explored, and they offered comparatively little scope for human
drama. They were frequented by a very
sporadic flow of policemen, late-shift workers, revellers, and the hard-pressed
and aging prostitutes who worked along the canal; for the most part they were
empty with the exception of their impassive Indian proprietors. Malcolm spent an inordinate amount of time
browsing the isles of those cramped shop floors, gazing intently at rows of
confectionary and packaged sandwiches as though they were exhibits in a gallery
installation. He dreamed of encountering
others like him – a new subculture of somnambulists who had mutually and simultaneously
disavowed the tide of purposeful existence, congregating instead with a kind of
animal instinct in the abandoned and in-between spaces of the city, moving with
affectless and lazy grace between the isles, communicating only through body-language to avoid the tedium and dishonestly of words, a congregation of beautiful and
despairing souls whose sleep was troubled by vague intimations of reason, and
whose wakefulness was spent walking aimlessly amid the ineffable dreams and non-sequiturs of the
world.
Continued Shortly.
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