Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air.
On the underground, the wonderful central line with its fabulous horizontality, the double metaphor for death-as if two were needed-you glance at each face and imagine the personalities behind them, as if you were a caricaturist or some great detective. The one feature-the tight lips, heavy shoulders, tinted hair, or folded hands that would somehow reveal all. Hands that would grasp, and know so little. How do people look at you? Today, with some affection, for some odd reason.
You overhear two male nurses bitching about the place they work at; the in-jokes, the petty politics, the affairs; who said what...one of the young men, chubby, very fair and with tawny, short hair and narrow sideboards, speaks, amazingly, like a black man (Ali G, to be more precise). If you close your eyes you'd never be able to tell. In his brown and cream striped jumper he looks a bit like Augustus Gloop when he chuckles.
Deep down we're all shallow.
As the doors close you look back and think of the lives of others going on, mysteriously. Timelines. I feel a surge of love for the arbitrariness of our arrangements, that we should assemble here together in this particular compartment of time, sharing public space, at one with each other in our need for retreat and the printed word...this is a familiar yet unique scene. The precise pattern will occur only once-us, here, this moment engraved in a layer of memory-a thought that stirs me to wonderment.
Outside, put on your 'fishing' hat and open your navy blue umbrealla, the layers of invisibility quietly comforting Walking in the slanting mid-morning rain. From a height we all probably look like a picture by Miro. A young Atztec woman in blazing red hurries by you.
Meet old M at the pub. Except the smoky old pub is now really a bar, and everything's transparent, open to the road. Nothing stays the same. A game or two of pool to relive old memories. Still crap. The past is gone and there's something grotesque and comical about the striving to hold on to it. Let the dead...The conversation turns, predictably, to religion: "The only thing that can save us from religion is a sense of humour," he says. Yes, that and drink, I chip in. Drink, tea, conversation, civility, all the things that make us more sociable. Religion far too often isolates, makes us men and women of the underground.
"What's the point," he continues. I remember something Stokowski said on the radio (but attributed it incorrectly to Barenboim). It was this: music is about the interaction of the human hand and the score, the text. Just having a text on it's own, what's the point of that? Which is not to deny the great civilizing force of religion, its inclusiveness, its spur to art and poetry and music (not forgetting its divisiveness and how it also leads to barbarity)...just to say: one has to be human first or that without the human touch what's the point of religion.
On the way back the rain has cleared and the light is stylish, warm, almost revelatory. You couldn't find The conscience of the eye. Never mind. Your step is just at the perfect pace. To walk in the open, with plenty of time on your hands, a kind of ordinary freedom that is exhilarating. You stop in your tracks to marvel at the scene, just beyond the glitzy Freddy Mercury on Tottenham Court Road, of old brick buildings with gentle light and shadows falling on them: Vermeer, not Miro.
words by Carol Shields.
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