The world lay motionless in the golden spell of summer. The deep shade beneath the trees, the blinding fingers of sunlight, the windless warmth, the humidity that causes a peculiar ennui in the city, the dazed look of sweating commuters, the traffic fumes, the distracted tourists, the impassive grandeur of the city’s architecture, the leaves of trees caught in summer’s yellow enchantment, the childhood dreams of happier times by the seaside, the faded hopes of adulthood, the failed loves, the collapsed ambitions, time’s merciless betrayal of our youthful certainties of becoming one of the masters of the world, the elusive nature of success and happiness, of a life with work and fun in rightful measure, the faintly disreputable middle-class aspirations now in their death-throes on summer’s splendid lawns of life’s ironies – these are the sweet poisonous sensations that accompany you homewards as evening draws nigh, with the sun still deceptively high in the heavens. Mariners must know this feeling, this sinking feeling, of islands glimpsed from a long distance, receding, dissolving into the fata morganas of the sea.
Oh, how life bites those who did not set out early, with stoutness of heart, and single-mindedness of intention, and a certain invaluable stupidity of soul, the stupidity that makes you pursue society’s truest measure with all bullishness and crudity, with shamelessness. Oh, to be too sensitive to fight for the vulgar things of life, and then to find that the vulgarity is the very stuff that makes life in society possible; to find, too late, that the vulgarity has a hidden sublimity to it, the sublimity of leisure, of holidays, of social freedom, freedom from the awful slavery of being poor, and taking a load of nonsense from the rich, who freely admit to their superiority, the wonderful superiority of being stupid enough to put the least important things in life absolutely first – which is to say the healthy, robust, and the utterly fascinating pursuit of money, the grovelling slavering slobbering greed and lust for it, the barbaric gloating for it, the superhuman translation of all the finest energies and intelligence in the human spirit into an unholy scrum and scree for money, the gagging gasping frothing passionate crawling for money, wherever it can legitimately, or quasi-legitimately, be found, and accumulated. For here the gorgeous vengeance begins; the price has been paid; and all those who didn’t pay the price, make the effort, who didn’t bleed and beg and lick and stab for it deserve their unfreedom, their slavery, their unbearable airless lives, their despondency, their rat-like psychotic resentment, their bitterness and bile, their horrible envy, and their dreadful stinking powerlessness.
Oh, but it was nonetheless summer, and the world was all abreath with the glory of the fine season come round at last with the great benediction of light everywhere spreading delicious warm throbs of lust in the blood of the young girls and the beautiful women who are now all out and transformed from their sylph-like slenderness, their unripeness, into absolute desirousness. Oh, desire was abroad, and love was dancing in the air, cavorting along the invisible passion pylons that connect us all in a gaze. And where desire can find no hope, wracked by poor self-esteem, oh, how summer fills you with an impossible longing and resentment, an envy for all those who are in love and who are just being devoured by the great illusion of it all, the illusion of life’s fairytale, of happy resolutions in the midst of living, when in living there are no resolutions at all, as any intelligent person will tell you, but only the tangled tale that goes on…
In the throes of these tangles, I beheld the world spinning in summer’s richness as I made my way back home. And it occurred to me, amid the dissatisfactions of life, that maybe my screaming nerves had a secret resonance with this forthcoming journey. Besides, I had to start thinking and feeling my way into the journey’s theme. When one’s life is a chaos one only seeks more chaos if what one really seeks is oblivion. But no matter how awful I feel things to be, I don’t want oblivion just yet. I want to hurl a few marvellous surprises into the great jaws of life. I want myself to be the surprise. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life stewing in bile. I too dream of a workable resolution, but I can’t seem to find the will to straighten things out. I can’t seem to go forward, therefore I must go back. I must find the lost beginnings, must reincarnate childhood, find a new reason for breathing, make a new covenant. I must find a way to make death not a threat, an enemy, a terror, an excuse, but a friend, an aid, a liberator. For it would seem that death is the golden key to the mystery of living, but I don’t know how to use it. And so, raging or not, hypocrite or not, loathing the camera or not, cynic or not, I need this journey. I need to find out what reasons other people have for living. I need to be broken down again into the simplest components and re-assembled like a beautiful jigsaw into a more lovely picture of who I really am and what I can be.
Slowly, I was learning to love my theme. Hello to journeys. Salut to escapes. I hope my escape leads me back to myself, by a new route, so that I can see my life and its possibilities as if for the first time.
And so this journey must be a sort of dying for me; a dying of the old self; a birth of something new and fearless and bright and strange.