Musing

I'm not adamantly opposed to the post-bleed, but nevertheless feel compelled to apologise for resuscitating the theme of the previous post, boring by definition as it was. Temporarily, of course; endlessness would be a bit too bureaucratic. I forgot to mention the avocados over here. The trouble is that they have a weird unity of skin and flesh. The outer and inner layers of the avocado, so scrapably separable in Australia (nor is there anything quite like running a blunt knife against the interior of an avo skin, getting every last bit of that green gold), are in England wedded substances. The skins are so weak that they just break off with the flesh. You inevitably spread bits of skin onto your toast, unsavoury shrapnel which must be picked out again in a large scale pre-ingestion forage. Avos genetically modified for annoyance, ensuring more time is consumed than avocado.

But most time is consumed complaining about it. Let's shelve that topic then, for now. Last weekend I made it out of Cambridge alive and decided to enjoy my good fortune by spending it on London, along with a crew of old chums from Australia. We painted the town red (or whatever colour semi-digested lasagna looks like after a night at Fabric) by two strategies: 1. Buying cake at Harrod's and 2. Museums. London, erst capital of an empire which chased the sun across the sky, is now of course a capital of museum tourism. Though (depressingly) the London eye - a giant ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames, monument to mankind's inner gimmick - far surpasses London's splendid museums in terms of visitor numbers, people still flock to the city for these climate-controlled time capsules. We followed suit, knocking off the Victoria and Albert, Tate Modern and British Museum within a few days.

I've been around the museum block in my short time. Any trip to Europe is standardly weighted towards the museum; at least if you're into that sort of thing. Four years ago, on a three month trip around Europe, I could safely reflect that half the time was spent in a form of museum. Europe could be considered one big museum. Certainly, the preservation of heritage round these parts dictates a good chunk of everyday life in urban spaces. So if it's all around you, why go to a museum? I'd never really questioned the museum's validity as a cultural institution, but for the first time, in London, I looked around the spacious rooms and saw strangeness, not treasure. I became paranoid that, as with all systems of canonisation, people were just coming to these places because they thought they 'should', seeking to increase their human points by seeing things with enshrined cultural value. Worse, I became paranoid that that was exactly what I was doing.

It took me back to my own experience of one of the world's greatest artistic anti-climaxes: the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. I didn't know at the time, and I still don't know...though I 'should' know...why the Mona Lisa was so important in art history. I just had a vague conception that it was important. So I hyped myself down the long halls of the Louvre, an idealistic young 19 yr old, skipping along the arrows which took me ever closer to my moment with the Best Painting Ever. But when I finally stood face to face with the lady, the waves of 'Is that it?' were impossible to suppress. That was it, just a painting, or just a Painting. And now a fat woman is jabbing her SLR into my ribs, now a young dad shoving past to get his toddler to the Loo(vre). The noise cycled round the decibels. Periodically an attendant would spit out a big universal 'shhh', and the conversation would drop to zero; but then slowly build until it was time for the next drop. You couldn't stay stationary for more than a second - and museum protocol teaches that the stationary state is the only way to yield maximum effect of cultural injection. It likewise teaches that silence is the rule: but silence here? Some irony insisted that the world's greatest artwork be placed in an environment least conducive to its reception.

Now, however, I'm not so sure that the din ruined it for me. Last weekend has made me press the particular mask of seeing I put on when I cross the threshold into museum/gallery spacetime. By this I mean I nestle into a particular mode when I enter these places, shifting what I look at, and how I look at it. Or at least I imagined the gear-shifting: 'Right, get ready to see some great stuff. Eyes peeled. On the ball. Art.' But I've realised that I don't partake in that much 'looking' at all. Rather, I look in the old fashioned left-to-right, top-to-bottom manner. I read. Not the pictures, but the accompanying blurbs. For some reason I've become so dependent on these that my eye gravitates to them even before the work itself. I want the text before the vision. This habit has become a bad one, to the point that I write off any museums which lack verbal contexts and explanations almost immediately. I'm probably way off the mark here, but it feels like the written word has become far my dominant medium for understanding the world. I read and write every day: these activities are like lounging in well-worn underpants. But when it comes to other media, I feel like I'm becoming downright amnesiac. I forget conversations, and I forget in conversations. I find it difficult to talk about things I might happily write or read about; I'm always taken aback with admiration for people who can deliver a precision discourse on a book or artwork which lasts more than a sentence. Images of visual art I forget easily too. As time passes, the read bit next to the work stays with me more staunchly than the work. Reader beware: read too much and you will be forever reading more.

So I've developed a bit of a habit with the written word. Nothing to worry about. I can stop at any time. Just watch me.

Well, maybe a few more hits. Along with my textual leanings, the weekend's museum sessions also made me think about what museums I've really loved, and why. Or, the related, shamelessly materialistic question: what are the best things I've 'gotten' out of museums? The short answer to that is 'inspiration'. Some works have really got my mind chugging - Guernica was one of them, though I can't quite reconstruct the points between which the chugging took place. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was big time titillating; Paris' Musee d'Orsay a pleasure. For exhaustive, masculine cross sections spanning the infinite times and spaces of empire, I look back on the Louvre, the Met in New York, the Brit Museum in London with much fondness. Then for the shock of the NEW: the MOMA in NY, the Tate in London, Pompidou in Paris. All of these have stuck in my mind as seen, and worth seeing.

The most tangible gift I've gained from these places is a vague sense of wonder, a fruitful bewilderment, which stays with me for days after the visit. I don't feel I've ever had enough time with the works to feel like I've clasped more than the most superficial hold around them (compared with, say, a Latin poem - into which I'd happily pour hours). But from a good museum I always emerge with a renewed zest for life. While the glow lasts, German Expressionism is important - which is to admit that it's not, always - and this is a good way to be. The museum is a rare space where looking and thinking are the norm, a suspension of the holy quest for functionality and productivity. People come out and feel satisfied that they've done something valuable, even if it's just been eying off pretty pictures. The eying is the doing.

In this way, the potent cultural pressure which drives the human to the museum is a good thing, if only to doorknock that internal creature who doesn't get much attention: the thing we've naturalised to 'Creativity', the thing the ancients anthropomorphised as the 'muse' (mousa>mouseion>museum). If only we looked with the same intensity every day as we performed our familiar tasks in the 'real' world, we might see more figures in more carpets. 'That guy's face looks like a splodge from Pollock.' Learning our lessons in the museum, the real amusement begins outside it.

Bureaucracy and the Brit

Living in England can often feel like reading Kafka in the dark, hungover, with a fat man sitting on your head. That sensation, to some extent, arises whenever and wherever on earth you have to deal with the unavoidable drag of bureaucracy. But in England, the dark is darker, the ale more regurgitable, the man fatter, and the Kafka Kafker. Get ready for some virtual bureau-tourism: travel writing that helps YOU decide never to bother.

So long are the talons of British bureaucracy that I first felt the pinch back when applying for Cambridge the first time, November '07. It was a wonderful spring, mild and clear; the children were frolicking outside with their hopskotches and skipping ropes, but I could not join in. No, I had to fill out an excessively long online application form, nor was that the end of it. Transcripts, research proposals, CV's, degree certificates all had to be sent in the flesh, by snail mail. To saving trees and fuel costs, Cambridge said no. Next came the icing: references. One of my referees happened to be overseas, which, one might think, wouldn't be too wacky a situation. I had to print off a form, fill out my part, send it to her in the U.K., then she would send it back to Australia, then I would send it back to the U.K., with the impression of Her Majesty's Mailroom still vivid in the little envelope's well-travelled memory. Efficiency with a capital Ef. Effing Cambridge.

English Bureaucracy is a voracious animal however, and its appetite for paper is never quite satisfied. At the moment I'm filling out exactly the same application, a funny piece of absurdist deja vu - or it would be, in play form. I didn't lie, I am actually studying here. But in order to progress from a Masters to a PhD degree, you have to pen the same thing over again, with the generous provision, this time, that you don't have to submit transcripts (because the forward thinkers at the Board of Graduate Studies kept them) and you only need two references instead of three. Onya, Mr BGS. Keep flicking those crumbs my way and I'll keep picking them up.

The constant paperwork has been a moderate stressfest, given that it calls for attention while other significant paperwork is tugging at your pants and complaining that you never buy it ice-cream anymore. I have had to divert time from my impending essay, but that doesn't really bother me. What pinches me more is the 'big picture' thinking that these tasks enforce, when all I have at the moment is a few very small, very granular pictures. I still don't really know why what I'm doing is important, assuming it is important - and I resent being made to think about it so early in the peace. I've managed to stay happy for 23 years without a big legitimising narrative, delusions of grandeur, or a raison d'etre. So why should I give any of these things to my research? It'll just skulk off disappointed when it realises it has fallen short of redefining scholarship. If I have to formulate delusions, at least give me more than two months to do it in.

But that is my own issue, and one of the few things in this life for which bureaucracy cannot be held accountable. Most dealings with bureaucracy provoke swearing, rather than existential crises. The other week I ordered a new camera online. The box came within a few days, and I was about to launch on the road to happysnapsville, when I realised my own staggering douchehood: I'd ordered the body without the lens. So I checked it could be sent back, obtained the green light, and posted it off. Now, since there was a difference in price between old and new goods ordered, I needed to pay the remaining quid on my cred card. But it didn't work. It took me several holds and transfers on the bank line to work out finally that my card had been frozen because I'd bungled the entry of a password a few days earlier. Secure, yet irritating. Anyway, with the payment processed, I thought it would be smooth seas ahoy. Two weeks went by, distinctly cam-less. In a rare act of consumer aggression, I decided it was high time to give the company a call. They told me the couriers had tried to deliver it three times, but I hadn't been home; so, they had sent it back to the store for holding. Now I'm no nine-to-fiver, but it has always been a fundamental assumption of mine that most adults are out on a weekday, usually working. Sensible deliverers in Australia left notes to combat this sticky problem. Not here, though: they just kept coming, knocking on the door, seeing if I was home to sign off my paid package, and taking it with them on their merry way if I wasn't. Which I wasn't. Apparently it happened about four times before I rang and asked the company why the fook they didn't just call me and arrange a time. Or, even better, leave the package with the custodian, who's employed to receive mail, among other things. The good people at Camera World answered my question with another question: 'Why don't you give the courier company a call?' They gave me the number, another hall of mirrors within an unnavigable labyrinth. The whole process of endless deferral and redirection was becoming too creepy and postmodern for my liking.

Despite my fears, the call to the courier was the money shot. We arranged a time and they came five hours too early; luckily (?) I was in bed, conveniently located at home. There have been more stories of despair just like this though. Applying for council tax exemption (everyone pays an exorbitant amount of tax here to subsidise inadequate recycling services etc.) involved inking out the longest form I've ever seen, and providing photocopies of almost every document with my name on it ever released. Again, like the question which always already seeds another question, and the door that leads to more doors, I was referred to a different department in order to complete the last stage of the application, which involved another application: this time for a National Insurance Number. Another arbitrary number was necessary to reduce the number on another form. I dreamt of terrible deaths by paper: a clerk sticking me in a giant photocopier which was really a high energy radiation machine, making me wait while my form trickled down an endlessly high skyscraper, signed by every level from clouds to ground, a form which approved melting my nipple hairs in a precise order pre-ordained by those invisibles at the top.

The bureaucratic principle of maximum difficulty seems to filter through to other spheres too. I was in a rush to get out the door of our flat the other day, hands fully flustered with laundry. But our door is so heavy that it is impossible to open with individual fingers. You need a total clasp of a strong, prehensile hand to pull it towards you with any success. So you drop everything and devote all being to the labour of the door. Once this obstacle has been conquered, it's just a short walk to the laundry through two more doors which must be opened by code, and then a third door which is even heavier than the first door. Thus are daily tasks made just that little bit more mundane and dreaded. It's no small surprise that this country is famous for limited social mobility when impenetrable barriers clog every passage. England may do many good things, but it doesn't open doors willingly.