(A chapter in You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born, by Dr. Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html)
You turn thirty when you turn twenty-nine. You turn forty when you turn thirty-eight. You turn fifty when you turn forty-seven. The Doctor expects to be sixty by the time he's fifty-six.
Of course it goes by fast.
You are already changing shape. Your neck is shortening. Your shoulders are narrowing. Your flesh is slipping down your chest. The skin on your throat needs ironing. You are not yet gaga, but how will you know?
The whole experiment is failing.
You do everything very slowly now. You concentrate.
Things continue to happen, that's what's really insulting. The young reach new conclusions about beauty. The movie stars in People are caressed by life while you pass your pebbles from pocket to pocket like one of Beckett's wretches.
The Doctor would tell you you're going to get through this but you don't want to get through it! This has gone far enough! Soon, the drawer.
But we cannot altogether hide ourselves in thoughts of our passing. What the soldier fears is not death so much as mutilation. Before what infirmities will you grovel, how grotesque will you have to become before you are granted the mercy of oblivion? (See DEATH.)
Can the God who made the middle finger the longest, who made shit and urine water-soluble but not blood, have permitted this? (See GOD.) This is what you get for relaxing with the given.
You sit there hunched, palsied, impotent, trying to spend all your thoughts, get it over, but the stream is endless. Are you talking to yourself?
The whole thing is inconvenient.
At least you have learned not to appropriate the future to yourself. You have that poise.
Builds character.
Go out and be soothed by a movie or something. Stop bothering everybody.
Age is a club. Find somebody with more or less the same mileage and compare symptoms. Don't just witness magic! Be it! Age is passion (see PASSION), otherwise it's entirely pointless.
You have always been half one thing, half another--half earth, half sky--it's just that now the ratio is more like one to two. The soul is sticking up out of you like a hardon. Life is a delightful surprise!
Housewives, you can buck the old fart up by encouraging him to think of his leathery carcass as been-through-it-all glamorous. Jaded-but-hanging-in. You never know your luck till the ball stops rolling. It all depends on how you sell it, tell him. You may even get some action(see SEXUAL TECHNIQUES).
Guys, the women in our lives have not stopped wanting it. They're still not sure what it is, many of them, but they do know they want it. The marital regime is once a day (see LOVE, INTERIM), even if it's only telling them. Any old state of grace, what the hell.
The Doctor isn't going to complicate your ignorance with some kind of theory but he would like to point out that your experience here, in the sense of, you know, life, is open-ended (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). To try to reduce it to a hieroglyph may not give you the kind of looseness you need to negotiate the turns.
It doesn't matter if it's taken you your whole life to find out how to do things. It's always present time, which is what keeps your chances fresh. And it's not over yet.
Pretentious Pictures Presents:
Casanova, Come Back!
He’s coming to Oxbridge to give a poetry reading and speak to a few classes…
…and the girls are sort of interested!
(You didn’t know he was secretly married? It happened in England—a nun who had already taken her vows, the Mother Superior outraged, powerful people to please…)
—has the same name, the same weakness for women (and they for him, or at least for his reputation), sports the same drag and is a so-so poet on the campus circuit.
How can he get steady work as a teacher when trouble dogs him everywhere! No one takes him seriously except as a—Except as a—
So when he arrives in Oxbridge he announces that he’s impotent.
Ah, but he’s played here before, and now his past rises up to confront him.
Proposed cast: we don't have our Casanova yet.
Proposed cast: Anna Friel (Henrietta)
He doesn’t remember her but some years earlier he had played Oxbridge and it had worked on HENRIETTA PASTORLY, now a lecturer here with a young son who speaks a private language—one that only Casanova can speak with him. Could it be…
Proposed cast: Donald Sutherland (the ghost)
The GHOST of the original Casanova haunts his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, criticizes his choices and kibitzes the action. No one else can see him and sometimes Casanova almost thinks he’s real.
Proposed cast: Emma Thompson (Deborah)
Chairwoman DEBORAH BLAKE, the no-nonsense head of the Oxbridge English Department, can’t help but be intrigued by Casanova’s reputation. Or is it excited? Or is it, as her husband suspects, in love?
Proposed cast: Brenda Blethyn (Cissy)
LADY CISSY SNABE, a benefactress of the University, falls from a dangerous height into Casanova’s gallant arms, much to everyone’s relief. She’s beyond suspicion in such matters, but who is that mysterious visitor at her bedroom window?
Proposed cast: Tom Wilkinson (Rafe)
Attached:
And the seventh character is Oxford. Or rather Cambridge. Let’s call it Oxbridge, as so many do. Hell for some; heaven for others—like Jack, who could live happily ever after here as a simple lecturer.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”
The Light Touch on Amazon Prime
The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean
The Tunnel: Toby on Air Travel
(Exerpted from Foreign Matter.)
I do like to be there, mind you, in Kenya or Martinique or wherever, taking it easy, gargling the rum punch, snoozing in the sun. But getting there, no matter what they say, is another matter. And once I am there, nothing short of falling temperatures and monsoon rain can move me on. Hard to sleep with all that drumming on the roof.
Oh, I admit there’s a certain drama to boarding an airplane where the snowplows are at work and getting off where the palm trees are swaying in the evening breeze, as if the stagehands had wheeled out new scenery. Sort of exciting. If only it were that simple.
The brutal fact is that in order to get from one place to another at this phase of the technological march, you must bow your head and shuffle into the tunnel.
What is the tunnel?
It begins when you telephone for a taxi. Already your stomach sinks. Your bags are loaded and you are driven along expressways to a place at the edge of the city where the planes stand in profile in the wavy air and the smell awakens long-buried racial memories of nausea in the back of your throat. I get airsick on elevators.
You can’t find a porter to deal with your bags; you search out a trolley and push them around looking for your counter, which will frequently be indicated by a tiny plastic shingle beneath a large and misleading sign.
Ideally, you will arrive late enough that the mass of your fellow travelers will already have been processed, and early enough that your seat will not have been resold. Otherwise you will line up among people whose competitive instincts are unmatched outside corporate board rooms, and inch forward with other trolleys nipping at your ankles, staking claims to square inches of territory and prepared for unpleasant confrontations if they are not recognized.
If there is a hell, it means standing in line forever and ever and ever.
You proceed to the departure area where your hand luggage is X-rayed and you are frisked with a promising-looking instrument that squeals at the change in your pockets. Depending what country you’re in, you line up for an exit visa and are frisked again for illegal currency. If any is found, you sit in a glass-walled office explaining your unfamiliarity with the rules of the place, and do much to oil the machinery by handing over the money in question and not asking for a receipt.
Your flight is delayed. You browse in the duty-free shops. You leaf through a magazine. You discover that you have nothing to talk about with your companion. You go to the bathroom and stare at your face under fluorescent light, one of my favorite ways to contemplate mortality. You try to sleep, but the Muzak is interrupted by announcements so shrill they would jerk you alert if you’d taken half a bottle of Seconal.
As departure time approaches, the atmosphere of anxiety and endurance intensifies in what is called “the lounge.” A misconstrued announcement or a stray gesture by the ground hostess can stampede the herd towards the glass doors, eager for the best seats on the bus. Especially sadistic airlines sponsor a game known as “free-seating” on the plane, whereby passengers are not issued particular seats but shaken, as it were, in the dice cup.
Of course even seat assignment can undo you. Faint sentiments of claustrophobia prompt you to choose one on the aisle. Just as you have strapped in and are dozing off, a fat person with a plaintive child in tow pauses meaningfully beside you. The stewardess addresses you with professional obliqueness, such as to say, “Are you sitting here, sir?” to which I usually reply, “No, I only appear to be sitting here. Actually I’m levitating about a quarter of an inch above the seat. I keep the altitude down to avoid drawing a crowd.”
Meanwhile, the fat person, unwilling to wait for the aisle to clear so you can rise and make way, is straddling you and struggling past. The effect is of the sudden inflation of a collision air bag. Distressed by the spectacle, perhaps, the child bawls.
You feign sleep but cannot fade out before takeoff because of an irrational suspicion that remaining awake can keep you from dying. As the plane rumbles towards the requisite ground speed, your mind flits to your flight insurance. If you are a productive member of society each of your limbs is covered by one of your credit companies for amounts roughly proportionate to their dollar value, so don’t worry.
Airborne, you fall asleep during the safety demonstration, your life jacket being of limited use anyway if you are crossing Asia or something. But no sooner are you dropping off, if you’ll pardon the expression, than the passenger in front of you suddenly snaps his backrest so solidly into your knees that, but for having neglected to unbuckle, you would be ejected upwards from your seat.
Give up trying to sleep for the moment. Soon they feed you. With the precision of a military parade, you and all your little buddies chow down while jugs of steaming coffee hover precariously over your head. Then you mop your chops with the chemical hanky and lean back with your plastic toothpick, ready, finally, to nod out.
No. The plane falters as if it were dropping out of the sky, and your senses cannot detect a leveling off. You check the kangaroo pouch for an airsick bag. If you are in the bathroom, you stagger and urinate on everything. You are warned with cheerful bravado to buckle up as if nothing really serious were happening.
You call for a glass of water to wash down your Dramamine pill, anticipating with pleasure the sleep inducing side effects. You are too far under the surface to hear the landing announcement, and the stewardess, piqued that you have ignored her instructions, straightens your seat back sharply without consulting you, propelling your forehead against the seat-back in front of you and initiating a chain reaction that straightens at one yank all the seat-backs in your file.
Now you can witness descent. It may involve several trips around the city of your destination, and can be especially dramatic if the pilot pulls up just before touchdown and circles again. Keeps you awake.
Then the crisis: the ground is speeding by outside the window and you ease towards it until you hit and the plane rocks forward onto the landing gear. The passengers burst into applause at the prospect of further life. It is a moment for which even the Muzak has held its breath.
For several minutes you lurch towards the terminal. Then the rush to stretch the legs and unlock overhead belongings. Coats swing in your face. The smell of exhaust seeps in.
The aisle is jammed, and you stand hunchback under the baggage compartment waiting for something unspecified to happen so you can leave. Three or four mavericks sit suavely on until the aisles clear as if their underwear weren’t strangling them. At the door the stewardess says a bright good-bye. You humor her and go down and stand in the bus.
When you have swayed along some devious route across the tarmac, an identical piece of terrain from Bombay to Bogotá, and been poured out with your fellows before a terminal building, you troop inside and stand in line for immigration. Another glimpse of the afterlife. Inch forward and kick the bag, inch forward and kick the bag.
You compete for a trolley on which to pile your luggage. If you are traveling with a woman, you may need two. (Sorry.) You push through customs, whose policy is not to harass the income, force your way through a crowd of greeters who look at you disappointedly, and stand in line to wait for a taxi.
Or, if you are making a connection, and provided your plane is on time, it all begins again.
Of course the above applies only if you travel with the horde, as has usually befitted my means. If you go first-class some of the line-ups are shorter and they try to keep you drunk.
I await the day when it will be possible to have myself frozen and shipped as cargo. If my mistress would cough up a little more money I could be sedated and arrive at the airport in an ambulance; a team of white-clad attendants would lift me out on a stretcher and place me directly on the plane, a plasma bottle swinging above me, and I would be brought to only when I had reached the safety of my hotel room. It’s the nearest thing possible to being carried on a divan.
The tunnel. I wish there were some lesson in it.
(Exerpted from Foreign Matter.)
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