31 And they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away.
I am frightened of the basketry teacher. She has the admonishing and elemental manner of an old seer. I hear the sound of her ancient, querulous voice but I do not understand her instructions. I do not know what it is that she is getting at but I do know her unbending will is unbending. Why are we making baskets? What is it for, this musty hour? When she speaks, there is in my ears only a harsh and unforgiving, a cracked and mountainous, sound. And her subtle eyes do not look but are looked into; unseeing eyes, like a statue’s or an angel’s, wherein may be found her inscrutable and petrified irony. I do not know what it means when she smiles. Is she Scottish? I don’t know what that is. Is she French or Spanish? What is that? I pass the hour in her class gripped by a terror that seems independent of me. It is a dread so powerful, it cannot be mine. It comes from outside and possesses me; it carries my limp body in its jaws; it is that secret holy fear that will loom up when you are alone in the mountains at dusk, or it is like when you are lost at sea, out of sight of land, and there’s a storm crossing the horizon. I do not speak. I do not look up. I do not move. In her administering presence, as before an angelic visitation, I give myself up to the renfermé. I am frightened she will convey to me a message that I am too weak to bear. I am frightened she will gain the power to see me. Courage is scarce before the unknown, and scarcer still before what is known for certain. I sense I am commanded to live beneath a gaze that has yet to fall upon me. The basket I am supposed to be making never progresses. I am pretending to work at it and hope my pretence makes me invisible. I do not want to ask the teacher for more reeds and I do not want her to show me how to bend the staves over at the end to finish it. I desire only to ward her off for another week, defer her at least until next time. In the totality of my state of fear, I cannot obey the commands she issues because I cannot understand them, then have I also inadvertently refused to countenance a message from God? If I had listened, if I had woven my basket, then wouldn’t I have escaped this place? Isn’t redemption, above all, in hearing? Or, is it the other way, have I heard and understood what was to be conveyed to me? Did I pick up the hidden, true message? Am I the only he who has ears, am I the only he who has heard? Then I am alone with it. Then it is I and the message? Then what I have heard in the basket weaving class is, be afraid? Have I glimpsed inadvertently what it is, the sublime instituting principle of the thing, that pins me here beneath its tutelage? Then, it is true, my frantic unweaving and reweaving is undertaken before an angel of god. Everything I do today I shall also undo. My work at pretending to work on my basket will count for nothing next time - the arrival of the dreaded moment of next time shall be what my hell is, my life shall be in perpetual, anxiety driven, deferrals. At the beginning of every class, I unweave the reeds that I wove last week, and then pass the hour re-weaving them, in and out between the staves, pressing them down until they squeak. At the end of every lesson, my basket is at the same level, but during each lesson I have also shown myself in a way that suggests I am doing something. I do not show myself as if I was doing nothing. By this means I endure. By enduring, I hope to endure. In his Zibaldone, Leopardi writes that only those individuals with a despairing character may find enjoyment, because for them everything is already settled, and contrariwise, those who are yet of a hopeful disposition are fated always to taste disappointment in the world. I perform the re-weaving of my basket as an expression of my sense of being under attack, and wonder at how predated animals such as mice, perceive the work of predators when their their sense of threat seems so uneven. Mice appear fearful only for a short time, until the thing is settled, and then they revert to a state of placidity, and seem not troubled nor traumatised by their difficult experience. At the approach of a fox, stoat, or kestrel, all the mice scatter but once the fate of the unlucky one is settled, and even as it is being devoured on the spot, or carried away squealing, the others appear to relax and return, indifferently, to close nibbling their patch of clover sprouts and dandelions leaves. Their feelings are spare but not spared. If told as a parable, in the style of Kafka’s Leopards in the Temple, the story would end in the mice losing interest in the death of their companion as the strong force of their individual attentions drags them back to the question of self-preservation, harking, twitching, sniffing, nibbling, thithering. However, if it is told as a fable, in the style of Kipling’s Just So Stories, the narrative would go a little further than the end and explain how other mice will always lose interest in the death of one of their number because the predator is not at all above the predated in the food chain as fox, stoat or kestrel might imagine, quite the reverse. The mice creatures are more powerful than those who feed upon them, and they use their own predation for collective benefit. In reality, the predator is in thrall to low creatures such as mice - the fox discovers it is trapped within the preyed upon’s dream, and thus bound into its service to their colony. The predator is an employee, a nurse, a servant, an angel, a fantasy, a pet, a guard who is invoked, as by the tinkling silver bell of a collective desire, and who now functions, domesticated and stupefied by his own hunger, to ensure the colony’s continued healthy metabolisation of its turning world. As I lower my gaze to unweave and reweave my basket, I ruminate upon the dependency of predators and the question of free will, which seems to activate only outside the norm, and at the limit of what is already known. What is free will but opportunism? And what is opportunism but a shocked and snatching reaction to having been first cast out from the order of things? I will encounter my own free will, as I am driven into making a choice, wherever I find I have insufficient information to go on by other means. Free will is an operation that facilitates going on in circumstances defined by insufficient information - it behaves as a path where there is no path. So it is that wherever there is already a path, there is no free will. But if the circumstances dictate it, if circumstances are defined by an insufficiency of information, and I am to go on, then at that limit I have to activate my free will so that I might, one way or another, go on. And I go on so as to increase by opportunistically gathering in the information that becomes available to me, that I might later escape my free will. This is not a matter of my asserting myself and refusing the world, free will is not dissent, but activates where there is no path, where I meet the world’s refusal of me. Free will, as untethered will, begins in bafflement at my being rebuffed by things I do not know. It activates a sort of obsessive compulsive reaction within me as I am confronted by my state of pathlessness. I will continue in the condition of my free will up to the point where the available information is sufficient to deactivate it. I do not dispute that it is also possible I am either always already at, or never to reach, that point. Towards the end of a basketry class, I am distracted by the recollection of a dream in which I am saddened unexpectedly upon pulling open a drawer and seeing inside a collection of insignificant objects left over from an earlier time. The insignificant objects remind me that the days to which they belong are never to be thought of, not a word upon the dear old days gone for ever, and it is perhaps this new significance that suddenly adheres to their insignificance that now causes my sadness. Or it is something else. The dream is not mine but the drawer’s. The drawer dreams its contents with which it goes on to regale me, and thus enchanted I am drawn into its languid, somnambular designs - an allotment rent invoice, heaven does nothing without reason, yellow boot laces in a sealed pack, birds cry out against the autumn lake, an unredeemed lottery ticket from four years ago, my wealth my office my position, two cables, in exile in autumn, a pink drawstring bag containing incense cones, a whirlwind sweeps the shore, a card lanyard, stretching to the horizon, an out of date bank card, everyone wants an intelligent son, a faber-castell pencil 2b, the branches heavy with flowers, a strap buckle, autumn insects swarm about my light, a child’s ring with star decoration bent out of shape, I do not enjoy life to the full, a winkle shell, rain sounds mournfully in the aspens, a post it note with the words admonish and withdrawal written in 2b pencil, waters tremble mountains fade, an empty jewellery store box for a silver chain, my rouge stale and my headdress heavy, five of hearts, the two who are one think always of each other, an off peak day return rail ticket to Ely from 5th September 2022, the fragrance of this red water lily, a man’s empty leather wallet, my last letter unsent and wrapped in golden cloth, thin red lace not for a shoe, morning is no longer the spring of other days, a guitar gadget, a branch of peach blossoms says farewell, a cigarette lighter, how strange the moon passes my window, a notebook with shopping lists and the words ‘I love my family as they are right now’ written repeatedly as a mantra, I ask the pond where I might find what is reflected there, an electric plug adapter for Europe, little egrets each tense as a fist, a coffee shop loyalty card, my little children were once my reason to live now they are grown away, four of clubs, something’s troubled murmurs running through the high grass, queen of diamonds, nobody has ever returned and my dear we are apart, a Covid vaccination card, a brisk wind fills the fishermen’s dirty grey sails, two gym membership cards, years have passed and suddenly I look up, a whelk shell, I cannot see far in this fine spring rain, a library card, my drunkenness wears off and my cares wear me out, the joker, green shadows red silhouettes, a supermarket loyalty card, who looks sidelong in her phoenix mirror, a scallop shell, all men respect hard work, a Christmas cracker kaleidoscope, I am sorry for the children of this time, a sea green coloured glass marble with a dull red core, wild geese depart at night recalling for me my old home, a sea green coloured glass marble with a blue swirl at its centre, only ten thousand miles until we reach the frontier of heaven, a rail card for a young woman aged 21, young men welcome the fool moon of April, a postage stamp sized faded photo of the same woman as a toddler sitting bemusedly on an end of pier amusement ride, all that remains of the old days is this soft spring wind pressing upon the apple blossoms, a passport sized photograph of the same child aged 3 in a red jumper and hair band, chance thoughts are crowding into the same moment, a Christmas ball-shaped chocolate in silver foil, I am sorry for the too short hours of night, a passport sized photograph of a niece, neither men nor ghosts stir here, some several hair bands brown and black, I dream everything is as it was before, some obsolete coins and buttons for a forgotten jacket, the winter moon awakens between two leafless willows. My gaze falls upon a work of knitting, perhaps put away in the drawer by a lady now no longer here, put away in this drawer, perhaps late one evening, and somehow forgotten and never retrieved to be finished: a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine needles. I should have thrown the drawer’s contents away, I should have rid myself of them so that they would not come back, because they do not belong to this time, because they only perturb it, because den blick aufzuschlagen. I place another insignificant object, an apostle spoon, St Philip with the quarterstaff, in the drawer, and then close it. Then I imagine the sexton others, navigating the plume of volatile organic compounds emitting from my house, and driven by coprophagous, coprophilous, necrophilous, and copronecrophilous motives, who will thence arrive wingedly, whirring and clattering, upon the event of my death. I picture how the accumulated things of my insignificant life will be transformed into, as they become the contents of refuse bags, a sort of illegible and discardable, an eminently forgettable, rubble. As they prepare the space for future occupants, the sexton others will move methodically through the house, emptying the next drawer, and then the next. Will they pause, on occasion, having gleaned an insignificant object amongst the rest, picking it out, contemplating it for a moment, something that they think is somehow significant to them, perhaps something they associate with me, or by pure coincidence something that was mine but which now suggests to them an idea completely unrelated to who I was, something that is now their’s alone, if only because they have gleaned it. Finders keepers. Or, surely they are past that, beyond it; they have seen it all before, and are too tired to maintain an interest, too weary to glean or even recognise an aura. It would be nothing to them, just as workers in the Christmas chocolate factory lose their taste for chocolate. And as the house clearers work through the old house, drawer by drawer, cupboard by cupboard, shelf by shelf, they will enact a sort of choreographed slogan of disattachment: when will this world into which we dissolve all obsolete possessions become at last our natural home?
