My first time back here in a long while. My first time actively doing this – allowing time specifically to observe and write, be a part of a cafe society, hundreds of us flaneuring and silently recording. I nearly did it yesterday, I thought about going to Victoria, the magnet for drifters, but I prevaricated and felt no energy. No energy for anything, really.
A short time ago I had an illness. Basically it was a cold and possibly an ear pestilence, as I am prone to them, but it was worse than I can ever remember having. A viral weakness, or an impending plague? I was confined to my home on the grey marsh, an experience slightly like a small epiphany. A few days of eating very little, taking strong painkillers, and no external entertainment allowed to enter my inner domain, allowing a puritanical emptying and opening of headspace, thought space, mind. I’ve made plans, lists, cooked, read, thought, got a full time job. The most productive week I’ve ever had. I don’t want people close to me, but, queerly, friends from the past are finding me, which perhaps is good. I don’t know if it is a new form of energy, energy implies movement, yet I feel static. Energy is a terribly overused word. What would be better? Outlook. Arthur Schopenhauer had a word for it, which escapes me just now.
I’m thinking a lot about making spaces productive and purposeful. I don’t want things not related to specific purpose cluttering rooms. I can justify acquiring consumer items if they have a legitimate worthwhile purpose. If not, they are negative space. My life isn’t opulent, just functional. An understated elegance comes from ascetic denial of flamboyant luxury.
I also have places to go to for specific purposes, and other places which hold nothing relevant for me. I could make a Guy Debord-style map of my regular haunts and permitted routes between them, certain railway lines, bike routes, the river. Colour coding for emotive influence. If I stay at home too long the connective channels and nodes fade, passages become less navigable, destinations drift out of reach. When I go to places I’m aware of my non-belonging, and my first instinct is to retreat home. I suppose I have to push myself into discomfort. I can’t be a flaneur if I don’t move.
I’m surrounded by testosterone, post-football and horseplay. Some would say this is unlike me, not “my style”, whatever that might purport to mean. People projecting their views of me onto me are usually wrong. I have multiple needs and layers, I don’t fully understand them myself. I’m content to be single. Some people have taken to calling it “self-coupled”, but they’re probably self absorbed and vacuous. I have friends, I don’t know if I want someone around to think about all the time. Possibly multiple friends and lovers to share time with across several countries would be best, if logistically challenging.
I’d still like to live somewhere more remote and rural. Where is accessible and affordable? I need a local community even if I exist only on it’s fringes. My attachment to the theatre world is a security blanket, but also a hinderance, a tie. Nothing like it exists anywhere else, but I want to try to be without it at times.
The sky is grey now, feeling as if rain is imminent. I find rain comforting, grounding.
Back at home some metal panels are being attached to someone’s door. Someone else is gone.
Andrew Stevenson 