The world’s most beautiful bellybutton

At night a hundred images of pretty women hovered in his mind, their bodies like a hundred dewy roses: women he had seen on the streets, in a store, turning a corner, boarding a train paraded through his secret self as his life swayed and stretched in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself. A downy nape of neck, a milky way of freckles on a brown chest… Was it Love or Lust that visited him as he turned in bed, was it coy Bethlehem or brazen Babylon looking down on him? He asked Magic to unlock his loneliness and let him collide with a smooth open body. One day he met a girl who told him she had the world’s most beautiful bellybutton. Her bellybutton she said was like the inside of a tiny seashell, did he want to see it? What he wanted was to be alone with this information, to guard these words spoken by the lips of a real girl that would have been enough to keep his fantasies churning for days, but she pulled him into a grove and showed him her tiny swirl and more besides, showed him her deep budding mysteries, took his breath, took his dignity, took his self-disgust, and laid his secret life to waste.

Better than ourselves

At bottom we are better than ourselves, since we abhor our misdeeds.

Strindberg

Love

My grandmother used to tell us a story about a mountain of loadstone. When any vessels came near it, they were instantly deprived of their ironwork; the nails flew to the mountain, and the unhappy crew perished amidst the disjointed planks.

Goethe, Young Werther

Loss

Some time after her husband was diagnosed, she took a picture of him, his gaunt smiling face like a beacon, or omen, she couldn’t decide.

When he went into the hospital for good - the end game he called it - she found herself keeping the photo with her at all times, looking at it at odd moments: on park benches, on the bus, at night. But the more she looked at it, the less it gave her.

One day a gust blew it out of her hands into some thistle. As she moved to retrieve it, it blew away. She thought: I’m losing him.

She sat for hours on end looking at him propped up in his stiff blue gown, a glass of stale water on his bedside table.

His skin was yellow, and a chemical odour rose from his body. The disease was spinning its cocoon around him. He’s falling through the veil of the world, she thought; breathing himself out and away.

He looked at her with a faint smile. The morphine drip gave his eyes a remote look: she wasn’t sure whether he recognised her.

When the end game had been played out, she stole his glass, brought it home and placed it on what had been his bedside table. She watched it grow grimy and studied the fading marks of his fingers and lips. For a while it was saturated with his lost presence, until its meaningfulness evaporated and it became just another object.

Greater and greater things

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rilke

Drug of a nation

He once worked out that, until he grew up, grew a mind and left his parents’ house, he had watched more than a million hours of television.

Television had been a large part his life since he was an infant, since he first began taking notice of the outside world. As a child he naturally preferred the multicoloured hysteria of cartoons and children’s shows, sitting on the floor with his fingers in his mouth, his spellbound face lit up by whatever image cavorted on the screen. But as he got older he watched whatever was on when he turned on the set, from Doomwatch to darts, from ballroom dancing to Melvyn Bragg, from Blind Date to When Animals Attack. He was blessed with an uncritical, unimpressed mind. He watched it all: documentaries on cancer and rutting animals; costume dramas and chat shows; hip-hop videos and political philosophers; and adverts - millions of adverts. For razors, batteries, washing machines, cars, lipstick, insurance, charities, laser hair removal, microwaves, televisions…

He was fascinated by television itself as much as by the programmes and adverts. He loved its antigeography of bizarre juxtapositions, gliding out to him through antenna terminals and wavebands, electron beams and phosphors.

TV had everything the outside world had and more, all conceivable sights and sounds, all of equal value: the experiences of a thousand lifetimes brought together in the screen’s perpetual day. It was always there, filling the void; a calming presence that gathered around itself, like so many dust motes, the aimless incidents of his daily life.

He craved it like a phantom limb when he was out of the house. Walking home in the evening, he shot envious glances at sprawling bodies in blue living rooms. His skin prickled with impatience to get back to his own room and slump into the same state. Then for him, too, the screen would miraculously compose parables of life out of a swarm of pixels, cocoon him in daydreams.

Friends was an American sitcom. Holidays were nature programmes. Drugs were scare-mongering news items. Much better to be numbed by the spell of TV itself.

The first few weeks after his parents decided to get digital satellite television were the most voluptuous days of his life. The technology was a marvel of scientific advancement. Up there was the mother dish, speeding through space in silent geosynchronous orbit, reflecting transmission signals directly into their dish, to be descrambled by the receiver and displayed on their 42-inch plasma screen with supernatural sound and resolution. Suddenly he had access to more than a hundred channels. It was as if the whole universe had opened up and were welcoming him with open arms.

But after a while he began to feel dissatisfied. He started to feel the burden of choice, of what to watch. Watching one programme meant missing others, hundreds of others. There was always something better on. He became a zapper: he couldn’t watch any programme to its conclusion. He could no longer be anywhere there was a television without wanting to change the channel. Whereas before he had been the detached observer, lazily fingering the remote, letting himself be entertained, now it was as if the screen were making claims on him, attacking him with its endless parade of attention-grabbing images. When he learned how to use the system’s interactive functions and inbuilt video recorder, the possibilities of selecting, encoding and storing images overwhelmed him. He was assailed by a barrage of information he couldn’t control.

He watched so much TV that he crossed some kind of boundary: it was if the roles of watcher and watched were being insidiously reversed, as if a receptor were being installed in his head, transistorising his neurons.

It was only after he went cold turkey that he realised it was the screen’s eye that had been consuming him.

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(The Father of Television, By John Dilworth)

Forgiveness starts at home

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

Yeats

Like a refugee

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march
there is no drum
Every heart to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

The mole moves

The mole has moved to another burrow, not far from his old one, but far enough. The new one is in a quieter area with less rumbling traffic and rulier gardens. His needs aren’t great. He’s content with quiet confines, enough to eat, maybe some other moles to sniff at now and then. With snout, whiskers and claws he’s carving out a new space for himself in the world, a new underworld for himself. The peacefulness as he busies himself with fresh tunnels, nooks and scents is intensely pleasurable. Time is a luxury when it allows him to stretch out and snooze in return for being used constructively. He thinks he must be happy.

*

The mole is getting used to his new burrow. He still bumps into walls of tunnels he didn’t know he’d made, forgets where he left things. He hears odd noises and sometimes thinks he sees another small animal flit through one of his tunnels. It’s still a little alien and ill-fitting, this burrow. But soon he’ll assemble routines, develop habitual movements. He’ll know it like the back of his paw: it’ll become an extension of his self.

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