There are ebbs and flows of experience and sensation that we are all subject to, some moments of joy or delirium and phases of morose tempers that we can’t escape. That we are inevitably animals in this world is a thought that is never far from the front of my mind. For all of our sensibilities, electronic wizardry and high-culture, we are essentially monkeys with toys and aspirations. It may seem negative to adopt such a school of thought, one that reduces what our species has achieved to mere trinkets and delusions of grandeur, but it also explains quite a lot to my mind of the nature of things.
Last night, having been drinking with friends and colleagues I had left early to return to my girlfriend. I was on the precipice of drunkenness, planning my route back down to the foothills of mere tiredness and had had my exuberance sapped by my friends; they were stressed and timing had laid the role of sympathiser at my feet. The journey home was difficult, as the buses in London are often too full, and what little space remained was filled with the chatter of innumerable languages and lives. Simply, I longed for the comforts of my love and for something to renew my tired consciousness.
Ensconced on the sofa and safely wrapped in the former of my desires I was too apathetic to seek the latter. As with all of these times between times these days, it was filled by the never-ending cultural internal monologue of television. Diluted, refined then reduced, artificially sweetened and finally dehydrated, the product that shone out at me provided no nourishment. I was tired and feeling low and desired nothing more than to be shown that progress was still being achieved, that I was not wasting my life and time on my current course. Where people the nation over were taking comfort in the brash slapstick transmission, I felt myself retreating into my shell, unable to articulate the weight for fear of reprimand, or worse sharing the burden. The penance for no crime committed was unavoidable, to be terminated only by sleep. My love, as ever, was there for me. Depressed, I told her of other concerns. I spoke of unrequited affection, stresses to come, or challenges to face. I did not speak of my fear.
It seems hard to accept that I am not always in control, but then it is the truth of things. When I awoke the next morning I did not consciously move to the kitchen and make coffee. I did what I had done every weekday morning that year. These are rituals and routines, I know, but the more they are repeated the less involvement is required in my own life. Even in conversation the same sensation that I am not involved or required occurs. What if you are ordering food in a restaurant? We learn how to do this and do you not find that your tongue leaps ahead of your thoughts? Strangely, when talking to my loved ones and friends I notice this the most. We have little jokes, our own words and phrases that we have built into our relationships over the years. Using these bricks I sometimes forget I am making a wall.
All of this discourse, of course, has a catalyst though. The crystallising element to all of these realisations, as it always does, came after the event. Experience is what you get five minutes after you need it, remember? The cyclical form fits the purpose as there is a resonance of setting underlying everything we do. The pragmatist in my points out the repetitive nature of our daily travels, but the part of me that is telling you this now is the part that notes that on the 29 bus, the following morning, my unspoken queries were answered.
This bus travels up and down a spectrum of life in the capital, taking in as it does on its route the poor, the rich, the imprisoned and the sick. It collects people from train terminals, and takes them to the shops of Oxford Street and the galleries of Trafalgar Square. It also has the dubious privilege of being a bendy bus – for those who are not familiar with the subtleties of London transport, this means that it is essentially free for all and thusly favoured by itinerants, fare-dodgers and those who simply can’t afford to travel any other way. Tourists, foreigners living in the city and settled immigrants abound, the medley of languages mixing with the already diverse collection of accents and dialects from the UK. Times are that I feel like an ethnic minority, vulnerable to all those around me who can understand my conversations and keep their own secret. Other times I feel privileged that my generation no longer have to flee domestic bounds to experience the diversity of human cultures and that they will come to me unbidden.
It was on this bus that I encountered an individual who seemed to bounce off this miasmic environment. He was homeless and dirty, his fingernails black, his skin calloused from the cold. He sniffed periodically, dragging mucus up from his nostrils to reside at the back of his throat until it would inevitably drip down again. More importantly, to the commuter programme that was dominating my thoughts at the time, he was the only obstacle between me and an empty seat.
I freely admit that I felt a touch of superiority over the other, more reticent passengers as I politely requested to sit in the empty space. His raised eyebrows conveyed his surprise as he lifted a hitherto hidden can of lager out of the way and let me pass. As I lifted myself over I saw his nose in closer detail and saw the bulges and scars that covered its surface. It struck me as I sat down how odd it is that people describe rough faces like his hewn out of stone – it seemed to me very much the case that his skin was a layer of paint blistering under heat, or that his very tissues were swelling and bulging, fit to burst their way free.
And by my routine, I got out my book and started to read. It seems appropriate that I address this detail most clearly as the book I was reading was Immortality by Milan Kundera, (for those who know the title Agnes died that morning as I turned the pages). His ongoing challenges to the conventions of literary conventions, his entering the book and addressing his own characters and discussing the plot to come had made my journeys more stimulating than usual for some time. I was also listening to the soundtrack from Drawing Restraint 9 – being an isolationist commuter, preferring sensory overload to the tedious reality of the bus – and the distinctly foreign sounds of Japanese Noh music completed my surgical separation from the England I was occupying.
I explain all of this so that you may understand that when the man I say next to leant forward, rested his head on the bar in front of him and fell asleep I was struck by a range of emotions, not the least my distinct sense of living in a world very far removed from his. As he slid towards me I passively tried to waken him and after a little time did so, to his apparent chagrin. My head, to my shame, remained down and in my book, though I couldn’t read through the eruption of self-consciousness, as I heard the sound of his voice over the music in my ears. I feared a conversation with him, even though I myself had created this situation, because I suddenly perceived nothing but the gulf between us, the untold distances of a few inches. So as passively as I had disturbed his world, he replied in kind and blew his nose on the sleeve of his coat with such noise that it penetrated my shell.
I was unperturbed by this display at the time, finding it hard to judge for recompense for what had been done, and was instead troubled by so many things simultaneously that it took me until I got off the bus to sort through them. How did those around me react to his congestion? What had he said? How could two people so different in prospect expect to share a seat? What place did the television’s transmission have in a world that allowed people to suffer like him? Did he suffer, or was he even more disaffected with society than me – jaded beyond vanity and self-respect? How, indeed, could I maintain my depression in the face of the potential miseries I saw in his past? I felt almost robotic as I systematically digested my own thoughts and continued my journey to work.
Selfishly, perhaps, I have kept all of this to myself. I don’t know what I expect to gain from this confession, other than perhaps the validation of knowing that I am not alone in being troubled by these thoughts. I felt myself following two opposite paths that morning, where one led me to taking comfort in my numerous blessings and the other to adding this man’s woes to my own. And today, weeks after this event, I’m not sure that the paths ever meet again. This is a tumultuous world and I cling desperately to my self-defining points of my love, my career, and somewhere away over the rooftops my family (and these are temporary landmarks I know – but that fear is another story) but it feels that every time these moments occur a piece of me splinters off. When I choose, I can move myself from one of the paths to the other, and when I get there I can see another path to cross to. And what if one day I were to move to that new path, would there be another beyond that? And beyond that? And how many of these paths will I cross before I am sitting on the 29, blocking a seat from someone who is just trying to get to work?
