The Quiet Road

“I’m in a bit of turmoil at the moment.”
– Turmoil?
“Yeah… teetering on the edge of full-blown despair, in fact.”
– Hmmm. Nasty place to be teetering. I’ll bet it’s that bloody peak oil again, isn’t it?
“No. Well, not really. It’s more general than that. I’ve been thinking about some of the challenges we face in order to ensure that the future isn’t an extremely unpleasant place for us and our children to live…”
– Sorry, I’ve got to butt in there.
“Why? What did I say?”
– Just that the future might be an unpleasant place to live. The future isn’t a place; it’s a time. And even if you want to get all metaphorical about it, who was it pointed out that we don’t just ‘arrive’ at the future, we ‘build’ it?
“Tim Leary, I think”.
– Well there you go then. Nobody does metaphor like acid-heads.
“Actually, that’s a big part of the problem.”
– What? The ability of LSD to provide a metaphorical perspective to things?
“No! And stop trying to deliberately derail me. It’s the very fact that the future will indeed be a product of modern man. I’m just not sure I trust us to do a good job. In fact, worse than that, I’m starting to think our hands are tied. That the foundations have already been laid, and the job’s a bad one.”
– Jeez, I’m sorry I brought up the building metaphor now.
“Fair enough. To be honest, I usually use the ‘bus heading over the cliff’ image.”
– Ah, but of course. It’s a classic.
“Indeed. Here’s my thing though… I’m starting to get the feeling that when it comes to those big challenges; resource depletion, climate change, biodiversity collapse; that the bus is already in the air. We haven’t hit the ground yet, but attempting to slam on the brakes has become a singularly pointless exercise. May as well convince all the passengers to flap their arms for all the good it’ll do.”
– So what are you saying? We should keep taking those 99cent flights to Las Palmas while we can? Seriously man, if you tell me I’m in that bus waiting to hit the ground, then I’m going to party hard with the few minutes left to me.
“Well, it’s entirely up to you. I’d be lying if I said I honestly believed it’d have a measurable impact should you decide never to fly again. Peak oil is going to stop all that within fifteen years anyway. All of these airport expansions and all that airline investment; it’s the last gasp of a dying industry. And a shocking waste of time, energy and resources given their limited lifespan.”
– So that’s a yes? Let’s all party? I can hardly believe it.
“That’s not what I said and you know it. If we go back to the bus metaphor: We in the industrialised nations all bought our tickets on that bus. And the tickets came with complementary booze and strippers. But we also rounded up most of Africa and large chunks of Asia and stuck them in a badly-ventilated box and tied it to the back of the bus. I guess I just don’t have the stomach for partying when I think about that. But hey, you should enjoy yourself.”
– Miserable bastid.

Crappity crap crap fuckity fuck!

Well, I’m back from my interview at Trinity. Many thanks for the good luck wishes (in the comments to the last post) Zoe and Lucas… plus the others who emailed or texted. In the end, however, I fear I may have squandered all those positive vibes. Of course, it’s very easy to exaggerate one’s screw-ups in retrospect. And just because things didn’t go 100% perfectly doesn’t mean they were a disaster. All the same…

Q. So which philosophers are you currently interested in?
A. Er… [jim draws a complete blank… can’t even think of a single philosopher’s name, let alone one he’s currently interested in]… er… [the seconds tick by. For feck’s sake, there’s a copy of Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method in my bag not three feet from where I’m sitting! Yet can I think of a single name? No, I can’t.]… er… Nietzsche?

Or how about…
Q. So describe the basics of Freud’s theory of dreams…
A. Wellll… [once again jim draws a total blank. The words “symbolism” and “displacement” refuse to come to mind, as does the phrase “wish-fulfillment”. So instead there’s two minutes of incoherent nonsense as I try to describe Freud’s theories without recourse to those three terms].

Of course, the moment I stepped out of the interview, my brain kicked in… and as I walked down the flights of stairs and out of the building, I was muttering… Freud saw dreams as being of central importance to psychoanalysis. Initially he viewed dreams as a process of wish-fulfillment undertaken by the unconscious mind. However, because dreams often don’t appear that way, he hypothesized that dreams had both a manifest and a latent content. The manifest content — how the dream is recalled by the dreamer — is often a heavily-disguised or censored version of what the dream is really about. And what the dream is really about is the fulfillment of unsatisfied childhood desires. These desires — often shocking to the conscious mind — are rendered safe by two separate but connected processes; displacement (the association of disturbing emotions with apparently innocuous images) and symbolisation (almost always sexual in nature). Later in his life, however, after working with World War One veterans who had suffered from shellshock (what we’d now term Post-Traumatic Stress), Freud was forced to modify his theory of dreams. His ideas that dreams — almost invariably — referred back to childhood was incompatible with the clinical data he was gathering from the war veterans (whose recurrent nightmares of the trenches were clearly neither wish-fulfillment nor related to childhood events). This eventually led Freud to hypothesize the existence of ‘The Death Instinct’ or Thanatos.

Now, why the hell couldn’t I have said that in the interview? Why did I end up muttering it to startled passers-by instead? Goddamn it!

And what makes it all worse is the fact that the interview wasn’t exactly intimidating in any sense. The professor (Dr. RS) is very amiable, easy company. Formality was kept to a minimum and the whole experience was more like a chat than a classic interview. Albeit, a chat where one of the participants has inexplicably forgotten half his vocabularly and about 90% of what he’s read in the past 6 months.

Still, all I can do now is wait and hope that I’m recalling things as worse than they were. I’ll find out “within a month”. Fingers crossed and all.

I’ve probably spent between 18 months and two years living in hotels. So perhaps it’s no surprise they feature so prominently in my dreams.

It’s interesting how the same dream can go through phases…

… the essence of the dream is always the same though I’m sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion. I’m trying to get somewhere – it’s unclear exactly where – while trying to avoid being seen by certain people. I spot the hotel and decide it would be a good place to lay low for a while… you can loiter in a hotel lobby for a long time without drawing attention (usually in a comfy chair), and hotels have dozens of places to hide. In the dream the hotel isn’t quite a safe place, but it’s safer. It’s a place where I’m at a greater advantage.

I spent several months of my early teens living in the Athens Hilton and then later another spell in the Nile Hilton in Cairo. It always felt like there was intrigue in the air… that a James Bond film was just about to unfold at the top of the stairs next to the hotel casino… or perhaps in the rooftop bar… It was a world full of beautiful, self-confident women and successful, powerful men; a world where the most sumptuous luxuries a palate could desire would be demanded on room service as a snack to eat with a movie; a world of swimming pools and tennis courts and important business breakfasts with Jordanian princes and Kuwaiti sheikhs.

For about a year after returning from Brazil I would dream of grand old colonial hotels crumbling and decaying; overrun with amazonian flora and fauna. It was always night-time in those dreams, and the hotel would be bathed in moonlight, seeping through cracks in the ceilings and walls, splashing off a million shards of shattered chandelier. The air hung heavy with the scent of jasmine.

But recently it’s reverted to a slightly less exotic setting. It’s daylight and I’m making my way through the streets of Chicago. I spot the Hyatt Hotel where I spent four months. Trying not to run, because I know that’ll draw attention, I walk through the revolving doors and into the lobby. The lobby is sparsely populated, and the few people who are there are non-threatening. They’re exactly who you’d expect to find in a hotel lobby. They are hotel people. To my right is the news-stand and beyond that a smaller lobby with comfortable booths and relative privacy… straight ahead is the Atrium Café, currently serving lunch… there’s a hushed stillness to the air and my footsteps make no sound as I begin walking through the lobby.

The hotel becomes a carpeted labyrinthe. I walk through it for a long time, down corridors, past gift-shops and restaurants and bars. Up and down rarely used staircases and through dimly lit lobbies past mezzanine coffee shops. Around me the hotel goes about its business. Ignoring me exactly as it should. All the silent hotel people dreaming of sleep and going about their day. And the far off tinkling of a piano can be heard above the muted hum of the hotel soundscape.

I stayed at a hotel just outside Chicago – a place called Rosemont – for 5 or 6 weeks. The project I was working on required collating and analysing data gathered by a dozen or so field engineers. There were four of us living at the hotel. Four separate rooms. Plus another room which we converted to a makeshift office (the result of our analysis would determine whether or not it made sense to set up a permanent office in Chicago). Another two rooms to house the field engineers who each made regular short trips back to “HQ” to be debriefed and receive further instruction.

I would wake in my room. Walk the short distance to the elevator which dropped me off next to the breakfast bar. There I would choose from a menu and buffet containing every breakfast your heart could desire. I would eat with my three colleagues, and at 8am we would walk the short distance from the elevator to our “office room” where we would work until 8pm (with a sandwich ordered in at lunch). Then it would be back to the room to order room-service and watch a pay-per-view movie.

After work the other three would eat together, with a few beers, in the sports bar. I was seen as a little odd for disappearing as soon as work was over. Me… I just couldn’t spend an evening with the same three people I’d had breakfast and lunch and spent the entire day cooped up in a hotel room with. I need a bit more space than that.

And there’s an amazing sense of space to be found in a hotel room. I mean, these rooms in Rosemont were huge (two big bedrooms and a living area; each with big screen TVs; plus a bathroom and small kitchen… that was one room… like a mini-luxury-flat). But I’m not talking about the physical size of the room.

When you get back to your hotel room after a day working, the time you have in that small box belongs to you in a way that time rarely does. And the space around you expands to compensate. All of the essentials of life are provided for, but you’re coccooned from the real world. The real world may as well not exist when you’re in a Hyatt or an Intercon or a Hilton or Marriott. You’re in a castle outside time. You and all the other hotel people.

The dream continues until I emerge from the hotel through a side entrance. I occasionally become lucid or – more often – wake up at this point… leaving the hotel is leaving a dream.

And finally…

I apologise, by the way, for yesterday’s dreadful joke (the George Bush / bird flu thing). I was trying out a system for styling blog entries by category, and came up with the “NewsBite” category. And that dire attempt at comedy was the first thing that came to hand. I can only hope that my category-styles will tart up better content in the future.