MYSTERY OF DISCIPLINE

Funny thing about discipline. If I'm given a task, an assignment, a job or a request, whether professionally or personally, I immediately go into soldier mode. I don't exactly salute but almost. All my dutiful and resourceful neurons start firing and a timekeeper starts keeping time and if there's a deadline I will meet it, you can be sure of that.

But for that machinery to start working, the task or request has to come from outside myself. If it's only me myself and nobody else telling me to do something, even something I really really want to do, you can bet your life I will procrastinate and procrastinate until procrastination becomes my middle name. It's my Achilles heel, my nemesis and my bête noire. Fortunately, tasks and requests do come along to save me whenever procrastinitis has bound and gagged me. For me, discipline is freedom.

VINCENT VAN GOGH REVEALS THE TRUTH

VAN GOGH APPEARS ON FACEBOOK

That ear business, I want to clear it up once and for all. They tell me you can put a notice on this book face and then many people see it and it’s like a disease, everybody in the world gets it immediately. So I’m going to tell the real story about my ear and then I’m off.

That bastard Gauguin started it. I say bastard but I loved the man, I worshipped him before I had the stupid idea to invite him to Arles. Stupid stupid, yes, it was stupid. But it was such a beautiful idea. We would be brothers in art, work side by side, paint and talk and eat and drink together and then the other painters would come and we’d sell our work and support each other. We wouldn’t be lonely anymore and it would be paradise.

But Gauguin, what did he do? He laughed at me. He laughed, stomping around my room waving a brush. Ha ha ha, paradise? It would be hell, he said. Paint with you, live with you? I’d rather die! You’re crazy and you’re a bore and your paintings are a mess. Look at those worms of paint crawling around your canvases, wiggly wiggly, all your crazy feelings crawling around, no dignity, no design, no serenity. Paradise? Ha ha ha! Nobody will come here, they all think you’re boring and crazy.

So I let him have it. I took a tube of chrome yellow, squeezed it into my hands then smeared it all over his face and his hair. He got hold of me, pulled my head back, grabbed a knife off the table and slashed my ear. It all happened so fast, I must have passed out. When I came to Gauguin was gone and I was bleeding all over the place. The pain in my head was bad but not as bad as the pain of Gauguin’s words. I couldn’t stand it. I had to see another human being. So I wrapped up the bloody piece of my ear that was lying on the table and took it to Rachel at the bordello. I gave it to her, she was always nice to me.

 I never told anyone that Gauguin had done it.

That’s it. You won’t see me again.
Vincent

FURTHER TO FACEBOOKING

Further to earlier facebooking post.

There are many more things in life that I disagree with or dislike than there are things I agree with or like. Sometimes I dislike what most others like and vice-versa. This might be because I am an independent thinker with a penetrating intelligence and a questioning attitude towards more or less everything. Or it might be because I'm an arrogant, argumentative know-nothing-know-it-all. Or you could attribute it to age-related grumpiness. I would disagree with the latter because I've always been like this, even as a child, even as a teenager, always. Wait, I'll get to the point in a minute.

Idly browsing the facebook universe (as one does) I often come across quite a lot of things I disagree with or dislike. Often I am tempted to express my dissidence in a comment, possibly even in a comment about someone else's comment on a thread where most of the commenters agree with each other. In my head I compose a carefully worded dissent, possibly curling my lip as I do so. But then I stop and think:

WTF is the point of my opinion? Opinions are a dime a dozen, a dime a million. WTF does it matter whether I disagree or agree? And hey, by the way, what's the intention behind my desire to add my two cents? Is it to imply that I can see while everyone else is blind? Or is it simply to feed the illusion that I'm actually doing something worthwhile when the fact is that I've been spending the past 3 or 4 hours glued to a screen like a fly squashed against a windowpane?

FACEBOOK

Can't decide if facebooking is an addiction, an affliction, an inspiration or an irritation, distraction or destruction, indispensable or irrelevant, here today or gone tomorrow?

Those of you who have resisted Facebook won't know what I mean, those who are on it will understand.

BLIND SPOT

To the South Bank last night to hear Teju Cole talk about his new book Blind Spot.

I went with Jean Morris, Rachel Rawlins and Dave Bonta, all of us old friends of Teju's, part of a group of about a dozen bloggers who met online around 2003, when blogging was a new, uncrowded and exciting platform. Somehow we found each other's blogs via common interests in reading, writing, art, ourselves, seeing and interpreting the world through rainbow-coloured glasses. Then we met in real life, in New York, in London, and over the years followed each other's lives and work.

Teju Cole's career took off with Every Day is for the Thief in 2007, soaring steadily ever since and there's no doubt at all that he's headed for the stratosphere. Unsurprisingly, fame hasn't changed him a bit and I mean that in a good way. His warmth, humour and insightfulness are always genuine and of-the-moment. When he answers an interviewer's questions he takes his time, thinking on his feet, coming up with answers which you know are born right then and there. This is a quality I particularly appreciate when so many public utterances, on any subject, are so often calculated soundbites, selfie salestalk or rehashed re-heated rehearsed rhetoric.

Teju Cole and interviewer, Royal Festival Hall, 17 August 2017

Teju Cole, Royal Festival Hall, 17 August 2017

Photo by Teju Cole from Blind Spot

Clouds above the Thames, from the Royal Festival Hall, 17 August 2017

A HANDSHAKE

I was in Costa this afternoon paying for my coffee at the counter. A man who had been sitting at a table facing the entrance comes up to me and shakes my hand politely. I look at him, wondering if I know him. I don't. He sits down again.

I take my coffee and sandwich and sit at a table towards the back where I can observe him. He's a small, thin, balding man with glasses, nothing remarkable about him, except that he suddenly breaks into a recitation in a high, sing-song voice. I can't make out the words but it sounds like a multiplication table that a classroom of children might recite in unison. The man repeats exactly the same refrain every ten minutes or so, the palms of his hands resting flat on the table, as an obedient schoolboy might do, sitting up with straight back. He's not agitated but calm and concentrated on his ritual, looking into the distance. 

I thought he might go up to other people who enter the cafe and shake their hands but he doesn't. I seem to be the only one he chose for that gesture.

Obviously the man has mental problems. I feel enormous compassion, almost affection for him. I imagine the reasons why he ended up like this - perhaps he was beaten in school or at home for not keeping up with the others... or perhaps... There's no way I can know his story. I wish I could give him a hug but that might not be what he needs. I don't do anything at all.

A rage overwhelms me about those parents or other adults who abuse children in so many ways, unaware or not caring that they may be wrecking their lives forever. Those mothers or fathers I often see in supermarkets slapping and shouting and berating their little kid for some minor misdemeanor, or for nothing at all.

By the time I finish my coffee and sandwich the man is gone. I'll never know his story. But he did shake my hand.

BIRTHDAY

Born at midnight on this date long long ago in some distant galaxy.

VERY STRANGE

The following incident took place on 25th July. I described it on Facebook where it elicited quite a few kind comments, concerned that this might mean I was having a stroke, or a detached retina, or some other variety of disaster. They urged me to get to A&E asap. All of which was perfectly plausible and sensible but instead I went to Google and found an explanation which fitted my experience precisely. I had witnessed an Entoptic Phenomenon  and fascinating it was too. I have had similar visual experiences before but never as startling as this one.

Couldn't sleep last night, drank coffee after dinner, foolish. Stayed up writing until 3 or 4 am then went to bed. Pulled the sheet over my head to hide from daylight, closed my eyes, couldn't sleep. Opened my eyes. OMG what am I looking at?

A dense black and white pattern, like and unlike flowers or insects, slowly moving, pulsating, not going anywhere but contained, like something observed under a microscope, thin fronds around the edges gently swaying. I'm looking at this with my eyes open, not asleep, lying on my right side, right cheek pressed against the pillow (thin pillow, better for the back) left hand under the sheet. I move the hand to see if the 'vision' will disappear. It doesn't. But what the hell is it? Sort of beautiful but also scary. Why is it moving? An optical illusion, a trick of the light? I bring my hand closer and now the hand metamorphoses, turns into a pulsating pattern of dark and light layers, the solidity of the hand is gone, as if it was never there, but the moving, floating layers of plasma remain. 

I'm astounded,  I raise my head up and look around the room - full daylight, everything normal. After a while I manage to get a few hours sleep. When I wake up, I put my head under the sheet to see if the phenomenon is still there but more like a reconstruction of light effects.

Here's a Youtube video explaining the phenomenon scientifically in great detail which is probably more than we want to know but interesting nonetheless.