The relief of not living.

The BBC is running pseudo-big-picture 'features' about the World Cup. This is where you pretend to get into the social analysis, safe in the knowledge that soon you can cut back to the pumping thighs and super-slo-mo, ejaculatory strikes by burly midfielders. It's like an insurance policy. Totti's a fascist, yes. Yes he is. But also a great player. Handsome too, don't you find? The game's the thing. And the look.
Thus it seems there are amputees in Angola who play football on crutches and so on. The World Cup has validated their cause, raised their profile. There's also a cholera epidemic, but nevermind. Those 11 men in Germany going out in the group stage will resolve the legacy of that 30 year civil war. Angola lost 1-0 to Portugal, but that can't obscure the importance of the fact that they're there, can it? The rainbow game returns from the ex-colonies to triumph in the former home of eliminationist racism. Gooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!! The historical synthesis smells as good as the players' deodorized armpits. When it's all over, the cholera will still be going on, but everyone will feel more relaxed.


Clearly we need some changes to the rules. First, all the professional pundits have to go unless they're genuinely articulate. So Martin O'Neill can stay, but big Ron and Christophe Dugarry et al. have to go. In their place we'll have post-modern philosophers. The BBC will have Baudrillard, ITV will have Slavoj Zizek. At half time he will discuss the dual function of the stadium in the twentieth century. The Velodrome d'Hiver full of Jews in 1941, Bari's home ground packed with Albanian immigrants in 1990, the Taliban watering the centre circle with the blood of unfaithful wives, the junta in El Salvador broadcasting assassinations live, nationwide from the National Stadium. His monologues, during which he will smoke constantly while wearing sweatbands on all members, will be broadcast to the crowd over the P.A. system.

Second, the players need to be less coddled and less rich. Win bonuses to be replaced with massive personal fines for losing, progressively levied according to annual individual income; the latter will be printed on the back of players' shirts to illustrate the radical inequities between, say, Togo and France. Zinedine Zidane is to be banned for life from endorsing any more useless commodities.

Third, TV rights will be sold with a clause obliging the media companies to organise and broadcast a parallel tournament along the lines of the Disabled Olympics, in which unrecognised nations will compete for a golden prize. Tibet, Taiwan, the Kurds, the Quechua and so forth. Anyone can enter as a nation - familes, groups of friends etc.

Fourth, Figo will have to sing an R n B ballad before every match he plays in and the Argentinians will have to apologise to the cameras on behalf of the junta. The England team will all grow their hair and beards.

Fifth, Socrates' doctrine will be adopted as the offical slogan of the competition:
"I'm struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a soccer player preserving the ludic, joyous, and pleasurable nature of this activity."

Ample and unrestricted discussions. Exactly.

Du passé faisons table rase.

In January and February you could have made me eat dinner with Anne Geddes and I wouldn’t have batted my heavy, tear-laden eyelids. I’d have sat there like a human screen-saver, making the appropriate noises and signs. Anne would have ranted on about the incredible preciousness of newborn life, the rain would have smashed against the window panes, I’d have daydreamed about becoming a rich, responsible management consultant and everything would have been mais vachement comme il faut. Falloir: heavy overtones of submission and legality, Luciferian necessity and solid, pornographic obedience - with that pseudo-voluntary gloss.

In winter you can be fined, you can watch star academy in the evening, you can borrow money to go to a shitty ski resort where there’s no snow. November to March is a sort of plastic corridor, like the thing that trails wildly behind the ambulance at the end of E.T. The paramedic at the wheel is the Devil.
It panics you, but in a screw-tight way: you splinter but the wood is dry.

Now it’s a whole different story. The June Days ™. But not ™. Fresh necessities spring forth, the porn stars go on holiday, urgency melts, walls warp, scales fall from eyes like rain. The eyelids are light and baby soft. Precious almost. France too goes on holiday, for Pentecost, and you get the impression that it might never come back. Seat Anne Geddes opposite me at dinner once more. She is initially brash, recalling her tirade of six months earlier and fresh from seating a tot in a hollow melon. But I have no shoes on and there’s a light spraying out of my eyes like a hail of white pollen. Anne Geddes looks at me and chokes on a pistachio. I accuse her of cannibalism and so forth. Anne’s wattle trembles in the solar wind of my critique. In the many cameras hung from her withered, drooping frame, the film begins to yellow and burn.

In March go and run in the park by the lake and slip on the mud, tread in the swan turds, get overtaken by teams of marathon-hardened Aryans, but in June...in June walk down the street. The revolving sign swallows itself and reappears with the phone number for ‘SOS Incest’. Turn left by the Bourse du Travail and overtake a little old lady. On the wall a brass plaque announces the Organisation Centrale pour Hygiène Social. Follow the road, named for an eighteenth century general, down to the park. The grass is covered with babies in nut green hats.

Lieu Dit.

Recurrent dream: the skin is very pale, a little fat and studded with big brown moles, their surface as round and smooth as muffin tops. The colour of cooking chocolate, all over the body, an inch apart, sufficiently protuberant to caress easily. On the thighs they’re scattered prolifically, like an aerial photograph of a battlefield. A couple on the balls, hidden in the folds at the back.

Pick gently at one on your cheek; nudge, tease and discover all at once that the nail slides under the edge, between the skin and the rubbery dome of the mole. The mouth waters and a mild nausea flickers.

You break down and become operable, as if digging out a splinter or surveying the steel puncture of an injection. Engineer eyes. The body swallows into a kaleidoscope of its components. Under your back the sheet rubs against the mutltiple bumps that carpet you. Between thumb and forefinger the mole does not slip and sweatless, you twist it. It turns, with the faint, generous resistance of a screw in new wood. Fission.

There arises a lust for purity, like a shooter’s desire for empty cartidges, or a drunk’s pleasure in the squeak and glide of another easy uncorking. An uncompromisingly external perspective.

Starting with the legs, you ease out the moles and watch as the little craters softly fill. You let it flow; trust in coagulation. The evacuated moles have an hour glass shape, a consistency between jelly and rubber, both inviting and escaping compression between the fingers. You flush them away and stand in the bathroom, covered in blood from the waist down, and contemplate the stomach and chest. A long way to go.

Keaton

I will be good; I will be good.
I have set my small jaw for the ages
and nothing can distract me from
solving the appointed emergencies
even with my small brain . . .

I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man.
I will be correct or bust.
I will love but not impose my feelings.
I will serve and serve
with lute or I will not say anything.

If the machinery goes, I will repair it.
If it goes again I will repair it again . . .

The rigid spine will break, they say –
Bend, bend.

I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
I do not find all this absurdity people talk about.
Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands

and everything works.
I am not sentimental.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Pick-Clop

The morning calls, like God, to those who will hear. Otherwise the morning seems open and susceptible to prolongation. At 2.05 pm, the morning is still potentially on, a little dried, but on - dry and hot, like a hob left burning.

Some market stalls are still there and though nothing is fresh, and many families have almost finished lunch, you can still find cheese, bread. The procession of clouds interrupt the sun, and when it speaks again, electrically all of a sudden, there is a sense of waking. In this way, with enough dexterity, you can hop among epiphanies and keep a small smile. Your shadow stays close behind you, and your face appears unlined, although behind it, the flesh is pulverised, like a sodden loaf.

This prolongation, this deferral, nourishes a variety of idols. The Baal of brunch for instance, served until 5 pm, for 18 euros, in reverence of the infinite returns to sleep. Wake at four and the eggs are still waiting, on the boil, yolks magically soft. The morning is plasticene, and your maker's hands shall do as they will. What elasticity appears to surround you! Yawn all you like as you read the menu. The ashtrays are clean, the water is cold; outside, the chains of the bicycles are sufficiently greased.

Archive Chèvre No. 2


The unsought, silent companion of a whole afternoon, allocated by the lottery of the library computer, uncannily resembles a spouse of 43 years. You never talk to one another but you’re always close enough to hear the other scratching. You know their rhythms and foibles, you know how good they are at Solitaire and how addicted; you know what their intellectual passions are, you supervised their nap, they yours. Possibly you even fancy them. Particularly as it grows late, and the empty places around you both multiply, a lifeboat sensation of mutual reliance develops, the range of conversational gambits considered grows narrower and deeper, teetering along the lip of the lost.

‘Kerastase, right?’
‘I’d like to sing to you.’
‘I think we’ve done so well, don’t you?’

It is abandonment when they go, and the shocked temptation is to start up, to call out, to remind them of the obligation, the trust, the accumulated mutuality. Take comfort in your stamina, or leave first?

The heart is a nest of spiders, that abscond and seek
Under the afternoon skin, like itched
Knees under a blanket.

In the elbow of my glasses there caught a long black hair,
Like a crack wandering across my eye and I plucked and
Plucked at the box of space before my nose, trying to get it.

Do not love sclerosis, or mistake eight legs for cunning, but hear the bow stretch;
Joue le con.

Qui s'accuse s'xcuse.

So accuse others and jump back on the hook, no? Zola? But it depends. If you accuse people in the shower, as I'm wont occasionally to do, in the morning - as though the water cleans the dream residue off my tongue, and the soap mixes with words; as though I'm gurgling like the plug, in chorus but in reverse - then it doesn't much feel as though you're building a solid scaffold of self-incrimination, or even understanding. It's really the workaday ecstacies of control: turn the hot up, lean against the plaster, pronounce foul curses against your enemies and friends. Say all those beyond-the-pale atrocities you hadn't the bad character or strong feelings to generate on the spot. Say 'fuck' a lot, as part of this, especially to older people, grandmothers, religious aunts. Demolish the self-serving, castigate the righteous, carefully illustrate their role in the germination of your disappointment. Your global disappointment, your crafted nihilism. Adjust the hot water and let a little run into your mouth. Hurry through the rest of the day so you can get back to the retroactive monologue. Purge your maternal feelings, ignore the circular, the round. Think in darts, remember you're on the top floor. If you're still in the shower, you may look like a prune now.
A prune.
So beware! Turn on the cold! Orphan yourself! Or else your enemies will prosper, your fidelity will be exposed as a sad stunt, a moral impotence, a dogmatism, a canine madness that laps around at the floor, eyes closed, remembering the teat.
Don't take it all so personally. Towel down, find some clothes. Riffle through the post. Run out of deodorant? Throw in some paprika, or some honey. Intimacy cannot count, it is unlike your bank manager. Were intimacy to inherit, intimacy would give it away, to larcenous charities that are really cults or mafia fronts, all of it. End in the gutter. There are no debts in intimacy, there is only the chance for recognition, and if you want to say that there is solidarity in that, by all means. Feel betrayed? Get out! It's a gigantic cavern and you can fit through the entry hole. You won't have to wash for a week.

Taxidermy

One of those arch metaphors, like a finger slammed in a door, that everyone knows. Tape on the beak with cunning solvent, wiggle the claws into their dessicated, gummed sockets, flatten the fur carefully around the wooden haunches, throw out the ick. Here's me, stuffing Marceline and Mado P'tits Pieds, for the benefit of parched Francophonie, high only on glue-fumes so far:

'Là-dessus, elles demeurèrent silencieuses, penseuses, rêveuses. Le temps coulait pas vite entre elles deux. Elles entendaient au loin, dans les rues, les pneus se dégonfler lentement dans la nuit. Par la fenenêtre entrouverte, elles voyaient la lune scintiller sur le gril d’une antenne de tévé en ne faisant que très peu de bruit.’

Der-my I say! Duh! Me! It's me under the fur! I have wooden haunches but I walk well, especially near water!

I like that hot moon, playing the metal ribs of the antenna like a piano. It's a hot moon from a hot summer when a meteor passes close to the earth, causing the tarmac to melt and everyone to be awake all night. A fragment breaks off and spins into the arctic sea, where it lies steaming. Marceline never does or says anything without the gesture or word getting qualified with 'doucement'.

Back on Rue Basfroi, time runs slowly. The birds chirp and chip away as though they can't get it right and won't graduate till they do. They're wedged in. The lock doors won't open. There are loads of mistakes to make at this time of day, from eating more than a quarter of your baguette on the way home, feeling stuffed and having a cup of tea for supper, to deciding not to do anything until you've shaved, to the big-time, take the bottle of Chartreuse and go read in the cemetery-type errors. There are also the middle ground imbroglios, the flesh wounds of the evening choice war, caused by a lack of familiarity with the flat terrain: try talking to someone in the supermarket, buy much more than you need 'for that family sensation', sign up for a marathon in the autumn, take the train to the Tuileries to go running.

It's not that careful a process, taxidermy. You'd want to sell it as a highly convenient means of aging: a well-known and trying process - reduced to convenience! Can't imagine the next 40 years? Get stuffed!
But it's not an exact science, as I said. You'll have to rely on the expectations of your interlocutor, so never talk to strangers. Insure yourself with an economic and social context, a psychic letter of introduction. Keep talking about neutral topics: the relaxation of life with cheap crockery, onto the Greeks, the pleasures of bare feet, anecdotes about schoolday swimming, teachers called Mrs Gill, veruca socks. Keep going...
Eventually you won't notice either. The glass eyes will feel less cold, you'll be able to to go running anywhere, you'll never have to shave again. Recall Mr Bean at Christmas: he's lonely, he wants to do it right, he ends up with his head inside the turkey. That's the logic.