My Name - The Nightmare

[…] the sight alone [in the mirror] of the whole form of the human body gives the subject an imaginary mastery over his body, one which is premature in relation to a real mastery.
Jaques Lacan

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek

It was the preceding normality that made it so disturbing: utter habitual ordinariness, a well-rehearsed routine, page after page I go, the pleasure of the text, ding, ding, ding, all my values reinforced and kept in their place, blah blah, all the usual stuff, words leading to the same conclusion but in a slightly different way – it was all good. Then, kapow, something tore a hole in the page – I’m talking metaphorically here obviously, I didn’t turn the page in a particularly ungainly manner, neither did a stray cat, while attempting to get my attention, puncture the page from behind with its claws.

…

I picked this particular book out of a pile to be disposed of during a flat move in August; I’m not really sure what it was that caught my eye now, it was a book published in the USA in 1993 called Criminals by Margot Livesey, and the cover had two hands coming out from the centre of a lake holding a baby. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to what attracted me to it – fate, the objet petit a, coincidence, all of the above; but I picked it up and stored it for reading later.

…

But, what if they were true, all those paranoid thoughts and obsessive mental meanderings that swirl in our heads, and what if they were confirmed all in one fell swoop?  Arrrgggghhhhhhhhhh. I’m pretty sure we all have these well-worn fantasies, albeit irrational, of being the centre of the world, that there is someone or something following us and going to great lengths to get to us – something that is organising the whole world just to freak us out and keep us down; I often hear people talk excitedly of events that seem impossible but have become somehow linked in reality. There sometimes seems like a consistent thread in our lives leading us to the simple conclusion that there is a cogent narrative. Rationally, these are things that we try push into the background of our thought-holes, I mean, it’s all just imaginary bunkum isn’t it? Fairy tales from another world, lots of chance events mixed with a will for meaning, it can’t be true, really; but we have all thought it…haven’t we…erm haven’t we?

Well, I got caught bang in the middle of the knot, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real were suddenly the same thing, one cohesive howl in my face, anything I could imagine was a fact. The whole world suddenly did revolve around me, it was 100% true, it was so many feelings at once, it was the exact opposite of the absurd, the opposite of an epiphany, the opposite of inspiration – is there a word for this feeling? It turns out there might be…

…

My name is Martin Pettitt, yes, that is four ts in my surname, somewhat unwieldy you will agree, there are so many ways my surname has been mis-spelt over the years and indeed so many different variations of the surname that other people claim as their own: Petit, Pettit etc. – also, yes, I am aware it could possibly derive from the French word for small. This is my name, I see it and I recognise myself in it, I wilfully say 'that is me', in much the same way I say the same when I see myself in the mirror.

So, I was reading this book, I was about two thirds through it, when this happened:  

What‽ What‽ What‽[1]

Yeah, you saw right, that’s my name, my rather unorthodox and cumbrous name, all of it, every last t.

And the world set afloat, the first thing I did was look over my shoulder, I was actually lying in bed at the time and so almost hit my head on the wall, everything had changed in that moment, walls no longer had physical substance and I was the messiah. It was that initial reaction that was the most disturbing and the loss of control lasted for about 20 seconds, a bloody long 20 seconds – it was like placing the finishing touches to a structure that you always feared you were building and realising that the final pieces were those bars on the window.  It was like a glitch in the matrix, someone communicating with me from beyond; it was fantasy realised, which as Žižek states, equates to nightmare – a disturbing fantasmatic intensity of never-ending pursuit perceived as real.

My good friend (and she would know: http://muthacourage.blogspot.co.uk/) described that feeling later as: ‘experiencing a little bit of psychosis’. This made me think of Lacan’s suggestion that neurotics are characterised by doubt, ‘psychosis is characteristic of certainty’. Normally I’m firmly ensconced in the neurotic camp, doubting everything from whether I’m standing in the right way to whether 136+235=371. Nothing I do seems to have a single irrefutable line of thought, I can destroy the immutable principles of mathematics with my raging uncertainty; but in that moment, that 20 seconds or so, everything was certain, every last fear and neurosis regarding the true desire of the Other was confirmed. And it was… odd, unbearable, head-under-water; every imaginary tangent was real, anything I could imagine had lost its definition, it was hued into one single horrifying narrative that was certain. 

...

Was I experiencing psychosis, well, ‘a little bit of psychosis’? If it was then bring back my neurotic tendencies, all is forgiven. All of those people with smiling faces on pictures and all those experts with confidence and charm seemingly certain of their actions and feelings look so attractive; I always presumed certainty would be amazing, I could swagger around solving problems, ‘high-fiving those who dared, then moonwalking out of the scene’; and but it wasn’t, it was bloody horrible, too much. To anyone with a vivid imagination certainty is the worst nightmare. 

...

Of course my reason returned after 20 seconds and I laughed at how foolish I had been, nuzzling my neurosis like a plush toy, after all it’s all just a load of twaddle isn’t it, ahahaha. A pure coincidence, layers upon layers of actions, mistakes, chance events and all that other stuff; who knows where Margot Livesey got the name from, but she certainly wasn’t sitting back and chuckling after she wrote it thinking – now we play the waiting game, in 21 years’ time this is definitely going to freak him out. It was ridiculous and I shook off the thought and got on with my life, but it definitely left a trace for a while, a sly undercurrent that didn’t let go quite as easily; like waking from a dream that you can’t remember but that stays with you; as much as I know it was coincidence, there is a part that still wants it to be true.

Maybe this is a phenomenon that is more familiar than I realise, the sudden and brief realisation of certainty that everything you feared is true – maybe there is a German word for it or something. 

I’m off to play tennis with Kenneth.

---

[1] Yes, this indeed is an interrobang: half exclamation, half question, all double-hard bastard of a punctuation mark.

I solved the problem of the decline in book sales

This is what reading books does to your head.

I work in a book shop and it occurred to me yesterday how customers often talk about buying books in the same way they talk about fast food or not keeping to a diet: 'I know I shouldn't but...' 'I just couldn't help myself.' 'My husband/wife will kill me...' This is always said with a sly grin held up by the prongs of naughtiness - a pleasure of transgression. Of course in the most part they are referring to already having too many books cluttering up the wheezing bookshelves of their lives, but there is a similarity in the discourse that must be linked to the same instinct. We all know how big the Diet/Fast Food industry is and how the bookshop trade always seems to be in decline. The solution seems obvious - lets re-market books as bad for you, they will rot your brain make you intellectually obese and make you realise things that you will regret later in life. Reading books will cause you all sorts of trouble, and that's not to mention how quickly they catch fire, if you are holding a book you are potentially a fire-hazard skating on the tightrope of  life and death. BOOKS WILL KILL YOU, DON'T BUY THEM. There that should do it. I have saved the Book trade. Hazzzaaaaaahhh.

My Riot Pt. 2 I Need A Poo

...As I walked to Clapham Junction there was a palpable atmosphere of danger in the air, like a fizzing and pulsating, a sparkling in the skin roots. The people coming towards me from the ‘the riot’ were chatting excitedly, talking to others on their mobile phones; there were displays of passion, real experience, expectations set adrift. This was not reported on the news, the excitement and exhilarating fervour, it felt strangely to me like the last night of a music festival, that kind of loose and lethal comradeship. I carried on walking, passing a Police car with a gaggle of officers chatting to each other with folded arms, I was expecting them to stop me but they didn’t, so on I went past closed shops and houses, many people were hanging out of their windows trying to catch a glimpse and a story of something. 

All of a sudden I was in the centre of it all, it just appeared before me like the entrance to hell or the secret world only accessible through he back of a wardrobe. I saw shops on fire, windows being smashed, people pouring into T K Maxx and out again with concealed faces, many were wheeling stolen suitcases and struggling with armfuls of random products; Starbucks had been obliterated, strangely there was a man and two girls sat inside in the middle of the wreckage drinking from Starbucks cups. Was I scared? Not really, there were the people doing the rioting and then there were quite a lot of people walking through as I was, standing, looking and egging-on like kids watching a school fight; again they were taking pictures, chatting on phones, excited, energised, taking in the atmosphere, trying to remember all the details to tell their friends the next day. A fully interactive film right before their eyes; they had imaginary screens around their bodies as if they weren’t really there. It was almost like promenade theatre, I stood with a group as we watched a man throwing a fire extinguisher at a metal shutter – to be honest if this guy represented the radical potential of the working class to overthrow its oppressors, I wasn’t holding my breath – he wasn’t even making a dent, he eventually got so frustrated he started to kick it, hmm, I moved on.

I could have stayed there all night, it felt good to be where it was all happening – the only thing was I was really desperate for a poo and it was getting more and more urgent, I walked out of the scene, but not before I saw two young men helping an old man in through the broken window of a sports shop. It was this strange type of community that was also missing from the media, they embodied a kind of contradiction part thug, part gentleman. Not linear.

Yes, humans can be bastards and if you promise so much and give so little, something will snap. But on this night some of them were also loving and compassionate siblings, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers – some of them. They are split too, between the reality of their lives and their place in an abstract system of money and things. Are we being run by humans or an abstract system that we created and now can’t control? Death of the author. The pure energy and emotion expended that night, gave a glimpse of the dissatisfaction and potential force of the collective majority – but they were fighting for the wrong team, by stealing stuff they are reinforcing and securing the system that keeps them in the place they are trying to escape from.   

Mercifully, I managed to find a bar just around the corner that was still open, I can’t remember its name now, at the time I only had one thing on my mind. I went in did my business and then bought a drink in the bar and started to watch the TV as they was relaying events that were literally happening 100 foot away. I had a very strange shrinking feeling, it was so weird, all I saw was violence, evil, destruction, some guy trying to break a cash machine,  all accompanied by the monotone, morose voice of the newsreader, relaying the objective, but subtlety derogatory, truth into my face.  Dear emotion, camaraderie, absurdity and inspiration, I’m leaving you, I’m going to live with banality, safety, boredom and the same old shit. All the complexity, energy and multiplicity was taken away and put into reinforcing all the same crap to placate and subdue all those sofa dwellers, shaking their heads along with all the condemnation and linear expected world, tutting and booing together against the evil men on the screen. 

At the same time it was terrible, some individuals lost property and were robbed and scared and disgusted; I saw it all on the news – I didn’t know any of these people and my experience was different, I don’t want to say that my experience is the real and genuine one and the one on the screen was a sanitised trite version intent on reinforcing the views of the audience, but fuck it I’m gonna, kapow; complexity, inspiration and anything new interesting and challenging about what was going on was wiped away.

People’s opinions on the matter after the fact were dreary for fear they have an original thought, stock phrases repeated over and over, blaming the people whose fault it was, whoever that was, and condemning all the senseless violence and destruction; where’s the violence and destruction full of sense? The stale interviews with the rioters full of bravado, made a brief appearance; I would like to see how different they would be if their mothers were also present during the interviews; they may not be as evil and violent as one was lead to believe. We were inundated with people playing roles, reinforcing that reality we are all so used to, there is no Other, we have incorporated it all. Step out of your own head and take a risk, see that shop window in your mind, keeping you from freedom and smash that git with a brick. To be a criminal. The Problem is freedom, self expression is seen in terms of having more things, nice trainers, this is the real crime, it’s all the wrong way around: to create should be our goal. This was what my Riot taught me.

The Things You Didn't Read

I was uneasy, fidgety, lower abdomen nervous; I have a weird compulsion where I methodically stroke the end of my nose over and over, and on this day it was red and getting sore. The interview was to take place at 5:45, it was a day of drizzle and grey moving objects; I started drinking about 4:30 while on the train to the theatre: my special brand of cider that makes everyone else turn up their nose, but I like it, it does the job as quick as possible. I know all this seems melodramatic – I was simply going to interview an actress at a small theatre in central London– but being a fellow of slow meticulous procedure, the first time of anything is always an ever slipping trauma as my lacklustre methods of containment grope at stability, always too late. I simply don’t trust my unconscious, it has a proclivity for spazzing out when faced with the unknown like a tourettic hobo suddenly spurting antisocial invective. My fear, which kept playing in my mind, was that any moment during the interview my nerves would boil over and I would do something silly like punch her in the face, get her in a Kata-ha-jime and make her pass out – and I wouldn't class that as a good interview.  So, you see, a little bit of cider – being part of the meticulous procedure – just takes the edge off and saves a lot of embarrassment and possibly lives; and of course we must always remember the advice of the famous scientist and doctor* Charles Baudelaire:

Some people are improved so markedly by [cider] that their legs grow steadier, and their hearing becomes more acute. I once knew a fellow whose weak eyesight was restored to its original keenness whenever he was drunk.# 

The Dutch-courage, along with a few words of encouragement from a friend via text, was enough to get the beast subdued enough to get me to the doors of the theatre at the correct time. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise the theatre wasn’t open yet so I pushed the door way too hard and way too loud 3 or 4 times before realising I had to be buzzed in – once inside I made a ‘oh aren’t I silly and borderline mentally retarded’ face to the box office woman before informing her of my plight – to interview the Star of the show – which was met with a raised eye brow as she turned and, followed by a splay of tight curls, flounced out from her cubicle and ushered me into the foyer while she disappeared  behind another door.

I laid out my pad on a table in the bar, checked my phone for the sound recording software I had downloaded that morning, popped a mint into my mouth and sat back to ruminate. What was I expecting? I had been replaying scenes in my head all day where she was sat opposite me at the table, being all respectful, naturally beautiful and charismatic, just like all the pictures I had seen during my research, while I asked my questions in a style that varied to bumbling and inadequate to confident and charming – obviously the default position in my fantasies is the former. The box-office girl reappeared, with her hair, to inform me the Star would be a few minutes; I waited, I strolled around the foyer, looked absently at leaflets for other shows in other places, I waited some more. The nerves were starting to return; the door kept opening and closing, each time causing a peak of adrenaline in my body, but, no, just boring normal people: no stars. I left my pad and phone and went into the toilet, the last thing I wanted was to be desperate for the loo while attempting to capture a perfect crystal moment of pure truth from my interviewee, and wetting oneself does not mix well with the truth; cans of cider also tend to make toilet visits more frequent and more pressing, so I was well prepared. Sadly, all I managed was a rather unsatisfactory trickle of peaty yellow liquid, not what one wants to see, but oh well. I finished up and returned to my table. 

After more dawdling and pacing, my box-office friend reappeared, with her hair – which really was amazing, to tell me there had been a change of plan and shepherded me through the big black door, I felt a tad intimidated by this fact, like I was plunging forth into the forbidden – that meticulous method of containment I had built up was unravelling pretty quick and there were no knitting needles in sight, just the brute force of the unknown. We went down and down metallic stairs, there was banging and clattering and the occasional wail and screech from the contorted mouths of actors from somewhere in the distance. We continued down a dingy hallway with pipes running along the walls, a light bulb flickered overhead – we got to a door, box-office girl knocked then looked inside, it was empty; we went to the next, she knocked again, there was a muffled response from inside and in we went.

And there she was, hair splayed in many directions, wiping her face with a wipe, her face twisted into a perturbed madness. She sprung into action. ‘Oh, hello...hello...hello’, I leaned around a clothing rail populated with a panoply of colours and materials to shake her hand, it was brief and limp. Her attention was taken by a klunk and a bump coming from the corner of the room. She went over to the source, a tumble dryer, she started pressing buttons, looking at it from several different angles, my box-office friend joined in as still the rumbling continued: ‘sorry, sorry, oh god, someone’s shoes got wet and they are trying to dry them’. I sort of stood, awkwardly by the rail, smiling and laughing in my usual ‘ha ha everything’s fine everything’s fine’ kind of way. Eventually box-office girl simply pulled open the door of the machine and two more klunks and two soggy grey bodies lay sprawled on the bottom of the bowl. There was a moment - a couple of beats as we all stared, feeling something like a shadowy intoxication. Box-office girl disappeared and the pleasantries began. 

The Star returned to her seat and continued wiping her face and tending to her hair. I sat on a fold-out chair next to the clothing rail, half my shoulder being eaten by a pink voile garment that kept catching the corner of my shirt. We looked at each other in the mirror as she performed her preparations – which was for, I was told, a following interview that was being videoed.  I turned on my recorder, crossed my legs, popped a mint in my mouth and prepared to begin: ‘Ok so, I’m just gonna ask so some questions’.

...opposite of all the slick head shots and...

And it was nothing like I had envisioned – it was almost the opposite of all the slick head shots and performance photos I had seen online; there were clothes and detritus splayed around the room, a wanton smash up as it were, as well as the sound of a particularly screechy children’s party coming from the speaker in the corner was relaying happenings on the stage. The Star was dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a zip hoody, she was present in all her imperfections: her wild hair, her unmade skin, herself in all roughness and spontaneity, and I suddenly felt privileged, I was getting much more than the guys with the video interview. This was where she was really exquisite, not on the stage under the lights. Then I realised, despite the questions I asked and what I eventually wrote up in the interview, this is what I wanted to capture; not the trite words that passed between us; but her youthful energy, the tenor of our combined laugh, the connection, the imperfection and the vulnerability; the moment of truth. This is what interviews should be about: the naiveté and beauty of someone when they are not being watched. 

And all of a sudden it was over, she ran out of words and I ran out of questions and rather than explore the silence between us, we said goodbye; I left, went back up the stairs, through the foyer and out into the rain. Then, I’m not sure why I did it, maybe it was the release of the nerves, but I looked up at the sky and held out my arms, opening my hands, as the rain peppered my skin and with that my mind lifted and disappeared into the ether and the pricks of water felt like a million kisses.

But I didn’t put this into the interview, I couldn’t, it would be too radical, they wouldn’t understand and it wasn’t the time or place; so I wrote up the interview in all of the tenets of a text of pleasure, in the same way it has been done a thousand times before, I ticked all the boxes and it was an OK piece. The above are the things you didn’t read. 

*I'm being jocular of curse, Baudelaire is indeed a poet, far better than a scientist or doctor.

# Baudelaire, C. Artificial Paradise - On Wine and Hashish.