The gestalt of personal design

 

The what? Exactly. Pretentious? Moi?

Possibly. But why is it that we unconsciously select some things as being legitimately of interest to us, and reject others as “not us”? Some components of this great experience called life seem to self-select for our attention and enjoyment, others shy away or skulk in plain sight, confident that we’ll never flick them a second glance. Some aspects of our ambient environment become foreground from early on in life, much remains in the background; prominent and recessive soon shuffle into their natural habitats. That way we make sense of things and survive.

Operating this necessary gestalt inevitably generates casualties. I’m never going to be even remotely interested in anything to do with horses, economics, hip-hop, video games, or baseball, but I still convince myself that there’s time to acquire some elementary Russian vocabulary, to listen to more Elgar, to be able to distinguish cars by techniques more subtle than the identification of colour, to visit the Uffizi again (pandemic permitting), and to read the entire works of Charles Dickens. The truth is, I’m probably not going to get far with any of them; they’re not “really me”, yet they might be, and I feel that they should be. They’re not core, and I can do without them if I have to. My core interests will remain as they are, bubbling away with steadily ebbing energy and diminishing motivation in the glorious cauldron that pulls them all together, that disorderly melting pot otherwise known as my mind or - more briefly - as me. I will attend to the core, because I have to, because it’s instinctive, because it’s me. But how has that happened? Why this and not that, and why any house room at all for the potential ought to in-betweenies? Well, I’ll avoid addressing most of the specifics for now.

Spoiler alert: fish coming up.

The dilemma is between having a fixed personality with defined interests and tastes, as opposed to one much less rigid, but open to anything and everything. I imagine most of us lie between the two extremes of cognitive rigidity and cognitive flabbiness, but however hard we try, we can’t design or redesign our personalities. We can fiddle with the edges, we can adjust the rigidity- to-flab ratio a mite or two, but in truth we have little real say in the matter.

The twin perils accompanying this conundrum are of wasting time, money and energy on things we will never like, and excluding much that we might enjoy but for ignorance or fear - like a relative of mine who won’t eat Stilton because about 70 years ago his father told him it reeked of smelly socks (one of several successful paternal ploys for rendering him quiveringly larkined for life). Then again, I can’t talk; I’ll never enjoy intimacy with a haddock thanks to a childhood fear of the man in the Co-op fish department. However, if we are able to progress beyond such deep seated, life-impoverishing, debilitating quirks as Stilton-specific turophobia or chronic intractable generalised  ichthyophobia then surely we can tentatively explore, we can probe gingerly into previously unknown territories.

Advertising, and the kind of “if you like this then you might like that” recommendations that the internet handles so well, are deliberate, commercially motivated attempts to nudge us towards other “likes”, entities in some way similar to those we already enjoy – or which our online activity to date has betrayed an interest in. Pushing the envelope is good for those seeking to profit from us, and may be good for us as consumers too, especially if it’s in unexpected directions that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to us. Sometimes we resist, sometimes we’re happy to be nudged. Sometimes something registers at the back of the mind, festers for a while, and gets to us later. But we like our comfort; we like what we know and we know what we like and every conceivable quasi-Rumsfeldian permutation thereof. Comfort zones are comfortable and are to be enjoyed, preserved, and generally left alone, despite the holier-than-thou goadings of emotionally-stunted HR officers, sadistic gym teachers (is there any other sort?), empathy-deficient team-building training-day fascists, and other malignant species of professional bastard lowlife who think they know better. I know what I know and I like what I like. There’s no compulsion to extend.

For most of us, I imagine, under normal circumstances, we stagger unpredictably from one thing to another, from one transient taste or interest to another, from one must have or next big thing to another, as fads and fashions and accidental circumstances suggest, seduce, or demand. An advertisement here, a TV programme there, a visit to an historic site, an enthusiastic review, something that a friend said we might enjoy. Instinctively we’ll judge, select, reject; potential inputs that make us “us” – a deeper “us”, or a wider “us”, or both. Or not. Instinctive, automatic.

That’s fine in principle. If we had unlimited lifespans and bottomless pockets there would be less - or even no - need to select, for we would have infinite time and capacity to benefit from all that the world has to offer. Potentially we would in time all be omniscient, and identically blessed, leisurely perambulating through every treasure to which our minds and senses are capable of response. But life isn’t like that – fortunately. In the absence of an infinite capacity for flabbiness the question may gradually focus on whether we should spend time revisiting what we know we like, deepening our knowledge of and pleasure in those things, or whether we should devote more time to exploring what we don’t know, on the off-chance of reward and surprise. Experience tells us that the tyranny of choice usually reduces to the dictates of circumstance, time and money.

Coronavirus, thanks to enforced limitations and increased awareness of mortality, has encouraged focus. Arguably, that’s one of its few positives; warfare might act similarly. Under normal circumstances rarely is “personal design” deliberate or planned. Like stuff in general, it just happens – we are who and what we are.

When we’re younger, however, and we know we’ll live for ever, we may more self-consciously draw up life plans, agendas, to-do-lists. As energetic adolescents we may draw roadmaps of ambitions, critical flow diagrams for intended accomplishments and ambitions; we may scribble on wallcharts the goals we want to achieve, the milestones to reach, the attainments to attain. Earlier in life the more open-minded and less rigid strategy is surely the one to be recommended, the more daring, experimental one, the jumping out of aircraft or hopping across Antarctica one, that blissful phase of life where – if you’re lucky enough to have all the support mechanisms in place - you can shock yourself pleasantly with your catholicity of outrageousness and your eclecticism of taste for the existentially challenging. Time will never end, so you can give full rein to your declared fondness for Karlheinz Stockhausen at maximum volume, your self-impressing bedtime addiction to the works of Martin Heidegger, your smug infatuation with Georg Baselitz. You must! Go for it all while you’re young and life stretches endlessly ahead, even if occasionally discordant, incomprehensible or upside down. Sorry, I’ve had a bad week with the Germans, but you get the idea.

Much later on, when you reach that age when the sands of time are rapidly running out (the same sands we considered last time), deliberation may become more, er, deliberate. The question of what to spend one’s time on becomes more urgent but, I suspect, the answer not much easier to reach.

The Sands of Time

We’ll start with a probable irrelevance. John Frederick Lewis, born in London in 1804, was an  artist who worked mostly in watercolour, specialising in what were described as “orientalist” scenes. He lived for a long period in Cairo, ultimately returning to England, settling in Walton-on-Thames in 1854, and dying there in 1876. Seemingly a satisfying nineteenth century life trajectory. In 1860 he painted “Edfu, Upper Egypt”, which hangs in Tate Britain. I’ve never knowingly seen it.

So why is this irrelevant? Well, almost certainly, J. F. Lewis was not guilty of a couple of paintings which hung, in reproduction form, in enormous frames in my grandparents’ house in Flintshire. I think the originals must have been in oil, with a softer style than Lewis’s, but they featured the right sort of subject matter, groups of sad-looking people with sad-looking camels and vaguely Egyptian artefacts – perhaps the odd distant pyramid and a couple of palm trees – somewhere in the middle of a sandy desert. Sand was much in evidence. That and more sand. I don’t know whence these monstrous items came. They may have been purchased at Woolworth’s or one of the big department stores in Liverpool, perhaps even the dubiously eponymous Lewis’s right next to Central Station. The effect they had on me was to make me feel tired and depressed and that life was futile. Sandy camels at bed time were soporific; when I had pneumonia they were almost lethal, unreachable by antibiotics. At least I was spared the dreaded malachite Tretchikov, notoriously a Woolie’s favourite.

I think I transferred this morose feeling to the sands of the estuary of the River Dee, not far distant, where after a day “down the coast”, on the return journey we would look across towards the Wirral, at the point near Mostyn where the railway runs right by the water’s edge. On a late summer evening, perhaps overshadowed by thoughts of return to school, a new term, I found the scene overwhelmingly melancholy, with wading birds pecking and poddling about aimlessly, the sand tired and wrinkled, low tide, the end of the day. Yes, those paintings and this piece of coastline worked similarly on my early awareness of an underlying mortal sadness. “The Tragic Sense of Life”. Ha ! Unamuno didn’t know the half of it, scribbling away in Salamanca; he should have tried Mostyn, just along from the ironworks. Other authors, though, caught something of the atmosphere of this part of the world, most notably Charles Kingsley.  My mother sometimes recited to me fragments of “The Sands of Dee”, the cows and poor lost Mary and all that, but she never remembered the whole piece. Sometimes she would remind me that it’s a dangerous, moody estuary, much prone to sneaky tides, quicksands and misleading mirages. She would know, having nearly drowned in the Dee as a child.

If I wanted to try and pinpoint a contender for my earliest memory, one of them would be situated a few miles to the west of the point where the Dee enters the Irish Sea, and would be a mental snapshot of the old-fashioned wicker beach chairs, sand-encrusted, almost enclosed like cocoons, badly battered and fading in pinkish red or pinkish blue, then still to be found, clustered and clumped together by the wind on Rhyl promenade. These unsatisfactory objects spoke to me of a life past, one that would not be mine, one that I would never know – or need to know. My mother’s world, my grandparents’. Old lady chairs. “Missed that”, I may have thought, in some childish way as my inner self-conscious world began to click into place; on that day some serious mental processes must have been set in motion. They’re starting to come to the surface again. Perhaps the sandman is coming.

Dying from cerebral haemorrhages, my grandfather’s supposed last words were “I’m going to Rhyl”. He was a good man who suffered a lot during his last decade, so I’d like to think he went somewhere better. Even Colwyn Bay. I wonder if he saw the sandman

The threshold of the age of autophagy

The day before my twenty-first birthday, after morning lectures, I took a train into Paddington, accompanied by Juan, my Venezuelan neighbour who was going to Hammersmith Hospital for a consultation about the painful rheumatism affecting his hands. On arrival in London, he bought me a coffee and went on his way. I crossed to Fenchurch Street, and bought a day return to Shoeburyness (80 pence). While on the journey I read some of Solzhenitsyn’s “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. The Thames estuary came into sight, one of my favourite bits of coastline, so I put the book away and before long arrived at the end of the line. 

Armed with OS map Number 162, “Southend-on-Sea”,  one inch to the mile, published 1957, price seven shillings and sixpence, cloth-backed, total imperial luxury, I headed north from Shoeburyness station. I took the road towards Foulness, for I had spotted on the map a waterway called New England Creek, and had formed the idea that beyond it was a small area that might – or should - be called New England Island. For my milestone birthday, into adulthood, I thought that would be somewhere suitably symbolic to visit, even if it was only a patch of Essex mud. A New England, a fresh start. I walked out of Shoeburyness and through places with odd corners and malign-looking inhabitants. Through Great Wakering and Samuel’s Corner. Off to the right, the North Sea and the fabled Maplin Sands, already being considered for London’s third airport and, under the soubriquet of Boris Island, wittered about - still runway-less - to this day.

I reached a barrier across the road; a military checkpoint. “And where are we going today, laddie?” “Er, towards Foulness”. At that precise moment, some distance ahead, came the loud crump of munitions. Perfect timing. “I don’t think so, squire. We’re in the middle of training”.

Welcome to adult life. I smartly about-turned and headed back, past the malignant corners and the odd inhabitants, and caught the next train out.

Later, in the evening sunshine on Primrose Hill, which I’d never visited before, I sat near the summit admiring the view towards the recently constructed Snowdon Aviary, Centre Point and the Post Office Tower, symbols of the decade just passed, and composed a sort of manifesto about coming of age – what I had done, where I had got to, where I wanted to go. Then I walked down across the park and returned to base. Mercifully, the manifesto soon disappeared.

Now it’s the eve of another milestone birthday. No more manifestos, but something more like an article of surrender. Now isn’t the time to be having a midlife crisis, so I shan’t be investing in a Harley-Davidson or a red Ferrari, parachuting onto the summit of the Matterhorn or walking to the South Pole, starting a new family with a Polynesian pole-dancer or having the operation so I can enter a convent. Now is not the time to be jumping out of my comfort zone, although I might gingerly explore its blurred edges. I might, for instance, consider a new pair of slippers, try to remember a few more words of Welsh like you see on bilingual roadsigns, become a more pro-active gardener, or listen to more Elgar than is strictly necessary. At The New Thirty (see blog posting for 1st June), while one should not rule out new activities - absolutely not - I feel that one should start to behave largely within the perimeters and parameters of expectation, not out of consideration for others, but for oneself, because one has accepted what one is. Circumstances of birth, parentage, location, education, time in history, the accidents and coincidences of life and opportunity, have made one what one is essentially always going to be. Now is the time to get on with it.

There are boundaries, limitations, preferred territories which it is absurd to try and deny or disrespect, and it is largely within these constraints that henceforward one will operate. This, basically, is it, this is all there is, all there is ever going to be. 

Input will surely affect output. One will begin to ransack the past for things to say in order to try and communicate, in an ongoing act of autophagy, of eating oneself, of draining the swamps of fickle memory. A meaty forearm here, a juicy earlobe there, a tasty buttock somewhere else; when you get to my age you have to bite what you can reach. This tendency for devouring oneself is no doubt augmented by the current viral pandemic, by the restraints imposed by lockdown, and in my own case by this entirely unnecessary habit of blogging. Perhaps I should keep stumm.

As one grows older, if one is fortunate to age in reasonable health, one can expect that the tendency towards self-consumption will become more pronounced, until most of the substance has been used up and one has reduced to a skeleton of core fixations, into an etiolated being boring others to death with the same old pointless and increasingly disjointed, mangled, predictable anecdotes and derailed trains of thought. Ultimately, a time will come when even these cannot be accessed, even via the most tortuous routes of mental association and by the well-rehearsed promptings of one’s kind and patient relatives. And then what happens? What is left? Is what is left what one truly is, what one has been all along, no longer worried by detail or meaningfulness or relevance, no longer clothed in the flatteries of language and productive life? What then?

I wonder if I’ll get some new slippers for my birthday.

The New Thirty

My contemporaries are one by one celebrating their three score years and ten. “Happy Birthday” to all of them. 

(3 x 20) + 10 = x 

Algebra was never my strong point, but since some of these individuals spend half their time going on and on about things that happened in their teens and early twenties, I can only calculate  that “x” is The New Thirty. And as they are my contemporaries, an elementary deduction tells me that age-wise I must be somewhere in the same territory. As indeed I am, similarly obsessed with the wonderfully named hump of reminiscence and having today entered the month in which I will, all things being equal, reach another decade in which to decay. X marks the spot.

Given that looming biblical endpoint, not to mention the coronavirus-linked heightened emphasis on mortality we’ve been force fed in recent months, plus the recent shocking deaths of several friends and relatives, it’s hard not to have a few gloomy thoughts. It’s a dangerous age, and a more dangerous world than at any time in the last half century or so. Although as thoughts about one’s own mortality are impossible to focus or to face in any convincingly sincere emotional manner, one displaces sideways all the potential unpleasantries implied. Instead one tries to make a few necessary preparations, half-hearted attempts at putting one’s house in order in preparation for the long journey ahead, that trip whose departure date remains mercifully unknown, the ultimate magical mystery tour that is waiting to take us all away. Otherwise one carries on, as always, on the assumption of personal immortality, cheered on by televised images of enviable longevity. Look at Sir Tom, and what he’s been doing around his centenary; look at that lady who just turned 107. Surely nothing to be alarmed about for a long time to come …

Not that I’m going to announce my retirement plans here because I have a sneaking suspicion that from time to time God – when He’s sufficiently bored with logging all the tiresomely predictable misdemeanours of His ungrateful creations and is feeling desperately in need of a change of activity - reads my blog. And yes, He does have a bit of a reputation for not liking to be taken for granted. What I’m going to do therefore is to be thankfully reminiscent (and not in any humpy kind of way), to be tremendously grateful for what I’ve had so far, having lived through such a wonderful period of history, and to say nice things.

A lifetime spanning 1950 to 2020 and spent mostly in the UK was not a bad hand to have been dealt, bar a few hiccups. Perhaps if I’d been given an earlier invitation to the celestial timetabling department I might have put in for an emergence event sometime around 1930; that way I could have enjoyed the Second World War without any risk of having to fight in it, I could have been there at the proper start of rock’n’roll, and I could have quietly shuffled off, content with the state of the world, before this present century became as distinctly unpleasant as it very soon proved itself to be. I might even have opted to be French or American. I regret missing WW2 and not being old enough to properly enjoy its immediate aftermath, but that’s a small price to pay for being at my most impressionable during the 1960s and for coinciding with the best music ever in the history of everything. Becoming a teenager in England in 1963 was pretty much hitting the bullseye.

I’ve had a lucky choice of family – parents and grandparents, wife, children, and others – who have all been lovely, kind, sensitive, and caring, and in many instances tremendously talented. Over this seventy year period I’ve enjoyed the benefits of inhabiting a moderately adequate body, of being inhabited by an occasionally adequate mind, and of long term freedom from major defects and diseases. I’ve lived through – from a British perspective – mostly peaceful times. It’s always nice to think – especially when considering the lives of your children - that you’re leaving behind a world better than the one you arrived in; until around twenty years ago I did think this.

Perhaps what I feel luckiest about is that my lifespan straddled the great digital divide, roughly speaking coincident with the turn of the millennium. I refer to that irreversible transition which separates everything of an informational character that went before, namely the analogue era, a kind of dark ages since the beginning of time (a very long time ago), and the digital era that will last forever (probably quite soon, the way things are looking). That period of crossover with which I coincided fairly exactly made for a very interesting life for someone with my sort of appetites. I can’t imagine the future is going to be anything like as rewarding for those who like variety and for things to be interesting. The story of a process of evolution for a promisingly stroppy two-legged species of hunter-gatherer that ends with a small oblong virtual box labelled “search” – or one of its functional equivalents : “Alexa, wipe my bum” - is always going to be something of a let-down. From sapiens to zapiens to - can’t be arsed? Is that it, then? Is that the final destination for the human race?

Sure enough, though, back in the day, computers – along with a hovercraft in every domestic garage, pill sized meals, noötropic cognitive enhancers, personal jetpacks, holidays on Titan, an 8 hour week and retirement at 35 – were the future. Conspicuously it’s not the kind of future like what we witness today. Lockdown has in some respects been a blessing for someone like me; there’s much about today’s world that I haven’t missed at all. Likewise, when the time comes …

What I shall be missing though, in the very near future, is a proper celebration on the big day, thanks to social distancing requirements. So instead, I’ll look forward to having a “proper do” when safer times return. Then, God willing, I’ll start enjoying my own “New Thirties”.