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A philosophy of everyday life
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EXPERIMENT: TAKE THE TUBE WITHOUT GOING ANYWHERE Duration: about one hour Take the Tube without going anywhere? Call that a philosophical exercise, Monsieur Droit? Let me tell you, for thousands of us here in London that is a daily reality. You take the Tube, it stops in a tunnel, you dont go anywhere. But we must not be negative. The point here is to open the mind. Taking the Tube, apparently, is different to using it, ie, to facilitate a journey. The reward? To see the landscape in a different light, perhaps even to find tiny moments of awareness. So I rode the Circle Line a route with no beginning or end for an hour with no ultimate destination and with no one expecting me at the other end (not that there is an end, of course). And guess what? I think I might have learnt something. For starters, standing on a platform not particularly caring whether the train comes or not is empowering, something which seems obvious now but which I had never countenanced before. Being the only person not staring manically at the screen and counting off the minutes creates a feeling of superiority in the indifferent traveller. They the ordinary folk are at the mercy of this train. It has the power to ruin their day. It is already stealing their time, but not yours. You strip it of its power by making time irrelevant. So here, among the discarded Coke cans, grime and pigeon droppings, and against all expectations, you start to feel very relaxed. Dreamlike, even. The train is packed with tourists, parents, children and everyday London residents. All I have to do is to look at them. And what do I see? The extraordinary lengths to which people will go to avoid doing the same: sitting with their head in their hands, clamping a Walkman to their ears and shutting their eyes, poring over a stained, illegible page of the Metro which they found on the floor. An extraordinary amount of energy is spent trying to block out reality. But then, what is reality? Droit recommends that I consider the possibility that I am not the only person sitting here for the sake of it. All passengers, he says, might be going nowhere too, because they are really here to spectate, like me. In other words, public transport is a ruse for aesthetes to examine each other. Mmm. There are limits to how much disbelief can be suspended. And mine is accepting that people whose faces contort in patent misery each time the train grinds to a halt mid-station are here for a social experiment. That said, this was a Saturday and there were an awful lot of people travelling who didnt have to be. They werent all tourists and this wasnt a work day, so why werent they at home instead of here trying not to look at other people? But people-watching to the gentle rocking of the Circle Line is a mesmerising experience and, though they might not add to the sum of human knowledge, here are three observations: some tourists go to Victoria just to hear the Mind the Gap announcement and find it hysterically funny; the elderly study other people more than the young; and the more you accept that you cannot battle with time, the more time you seem to have. CAROL MIDGLEY EXPERIMENT: BECOME ATTACHED TO AN OBJECT Duration: several years at least
IT IS NOT possible to predetermine the objects to which you will become attached. If it were, I would have some much nicer things in my house. When I think about it — as I have for this exercise — the allure of these objects is random. They have no beauty or value in themselves. In fact, they are mostly embarrassing. Take the weird little dish full of change and safety pins next to the phone. It is a gewgaw from Malta. Somehow this dish, with its painted beach scene, has become a link to my paternal grandparents. (Which raises the question: why couldn’t I have got attached to the grand piano instead?) This is true even though I never saw the dish actually in use at their house. But there is something about it — and the way it sort of signifies how they were always on a cruise — that I like. Then there is the trophy. It is a tall copper trophy, topped by the figure of a man reaching up with one arm, a basketball in the palm of his hand. The inscription says: “Freshman Scholarship Award: James D. Treneman. 1949-1950.” It is my father’s trophy, received before I was born, from the university in the American Midwest which would eventually make him a doctor. Later there would be other trophies, mostly for golf. He kept them on a shelf at home. The one I remember best was a big silver cup. My father died of brain cancer a long time ago. I do not remember wanting any object at the time. I do not think it would have helped: people whom you really love can live on only in your heart. However, I did acquire his watch and various bits and pieces and, occasionally, I get them out and look at them (and on important occasions I wear the watch). And then one day I acquired the trophy. It must have been at least ten years ago, although I cannot remember how and when. There certainly is no why: I have no memories attached to this particular trophy. I must have asked my mother for it on a trip home. Anyway, for years the trophy sat on my shelves and in dusty corners until, at some point, I started to feel attached to it. Now it means a lot to me: it reminds me that my father was once young and full of ideals and that, regardless of what the world threw at him, he always thought that such things were important and that one person could change things for the better. It makes me particularly sad when I see objects like the trophy in antique shops because, without the human attachment, they are dead too.
ANN TRENEMAN EXPERIMENT: VISUALISE A PILE OF HUMAN ORGANS Duration: 30 to 40 minutes
BY THE END there were the heads of Bill and Chelsea Clinton, plus those of the two nice people at the library who had advised me on my unpaid council tax, on top of a huge heap of other disembodied heads rising above the fencing round the derelict neo-Gothic house at the end of our street, where it meets the South Circular. Bill and Chelsea’s heads were next to each other but they were not making eye contact. Down the hill opposite the Harvester pub there was another pile, this time of hands. It was smaller than the head pile, but it takes a lot of human hands to make a heap. From the street side the view was of fingers: black, brown, white, some obtrusively blue from the rigours of death, some with big knuckleduster rings, some with none, all crawling over each other towards whatever hands aim for when separated from their bodies. From the other side, the view was of stumps: lopped-off wrists with jammy blood and veins round white cross-sections of bone. Who did it? The buses did it, or at least their velour and gum-covered seats and tubular steel handrails did it, rising up in mute, spontaneous rebellion, and now they — the buses — were whizzing down the hill and away along Lordship Lane with no need to stop for anybody. How the Clintons came to be on a bus in London SE23 I do not know. Neither am I sure that I followed Roget-Pol Droit’s rules by personalising the piles of human organs that he invites his readers to spend 30 to 40 minutes visualising. But he doesn’t rule it out — and having specified “organs” in the chapter heading, he actually suggests that you concentrate on limbs, heads and faces as more disturbing than “hearts, lungs and livers”. He is right about this. I had a go with hearts but couldn’t get beyond cheap special effects. It might have made a difference to have know better what a human heart actually looks like, but I doubt it. Internal organs have precious little personality, perhaps because we are already so used to swapping them and sharing them and putting them on ice in the name of progress. The hands were different. They were stressingly easy to picture and, unlike the heads across the street, they begged the question of whether their owners were still alive somewhere, bleeding quietly to death, or staggering around like an extra in Saving Private Ryan, or bandaged and bewildered in some hilltop human stronghold that had so far withstood the onslaught of the buses. Droit says that the starting-point of this exercise is the notion that a living hand attached to a living body is so normal you don’t even notice it. The end point, visions of piles of dead body parts, lets you conceive of the end of humanity as we know it and “the triumph of a new world order”. Maybe. All I know is that I spent 30 minutes distracting myself from the one thing that really would have been troubling — seeing on any of the heaps part of someone I knew.
GILES WHITTELL EXPERIMENT: LOOK FOR A BLUE FOOD Duration: indefinite
MOST OF Roger-Pol Droit’s experiments boil down to loading banal actions with pseudosignificance. But the deceptively innocuous instruction “Look for a blue food” hit me like a thunderbolt. Here, surely, was a task demanding empathy with the grand existential tradition of Sartre, the situationist preoccupations of Debord, the surrealism of Magritte, the deconstructionism of Derrida, and perhaps a whiff of relativism à la Foucault. A pretentious journalist can wait a lifetime for such an assignment. And Droit’s hypothesis is paradoxical perfection itself. Food comes in every colour — except blue. (He discounts “blue” cheeses because they “frequently shade into green or black”.) Yet we inhabit a planet with a “phenomenal amount of blue” — namely the oceans, the skies, and of course the predominant mood of all self-respecting Gallic intellectuals. We are immersed in blue, but — as Droit charmingly puts it — “it escapes our devouring”. C’est curieux, n’est-ce pas? Indeed. I searched high and low for blue food last weekend, and found nothing that could not be more truthfully assigned to the darker shades of green or the ethereal end of purple. “Do Smarties come in blue?” I asked the woman at a sweet stall in Holborn. “Why don’t you buy a tube and find out?” she suggested brightly — obviously as intrigued by this great philosophical question as I was. “What about a blue ice-lolly?” I retorted, relishing the probing cut-and-thrust of our discourse. But perhaps my new-found friend needed time to digest the full Cartesian implications of my query, because she turned away on the pretext of serving another customer. “Do you have blue vegetables?” I asked a young shelf-stacker at Tesco. He pondered the matter for what seemed, in a very real metaphysical sense, to be an eternity. “Don’t think so,” he replied finally. “But you could try standing a carrot in a bottle of ink. We had a biology teacher who did that with a daffodil.” The scope of the British educational system never ceases to amaze. I returned home, pondering — like Wordsworth — the mutability of daffodils. Then an epiphany struck me. “Sacré bleu!” I exclaimed. “It’s Saturday! The bread bin hasn’t been emptied for nearly a week.” Joyously, I threw open the receptacle and extracted two or three old plastic bags of Hovis’s finest white sliced. Sure enough, inside one was a crust that was long past its eat-by date. And something yet more thrilling. An unmistakable fur had crept down one side. Mould. Blue mould. What did it mean? I had searched for blue food and found not the honey-dew of paradise, but a doleful portent of decay — a veritable intimation of mortality. Then I remembered the warning words of Droit himself: “Need one recall that blue is also associated with death?” Is that what life’s all about, then? A doomed attempt to consume the eternal blue before it consumes you? As Droit helpfully concludes: “Mysteries, nothing but mysteries!”
RICHARD MORRISON AND ONE FOR YOU TO TRY... EXPERIMENT: TRY NOT TO THINK Duration: 10, then 20, then 30
minutes
This is an experiment which takes us to the limits. Not to think at all, when one is wide awake and in full possession of one’s faculties, cannot be achieved, or only for very brief intervals. So it can only be attempted. Some attempts are short-lived, some go further. Some come close, others less so, to the impossible goal. Why is not-thinking impossible? The experience of it would remove us from the sphere of the human, it would allow us to escape the incessant babble of language. We would tumble into a state of stupefaction; into pure, momentaneous, animal life. Or else, which is possibly the same thing, we would fall into the divine, the bottomless, abyssal silence. It may be that thought is a patchwork thing existing in between. Not quite divine, and not quite stupefaction. It may be a way of rowing between eternity and the instant. Or between silence and words, presence and absence, etc. Take this experiment in measured stages. It is vital, first of all, that you let yourself go. Willpower, here, can act only obliquely. It is obviously of no help to think that we are not thinking. It is better to know in advance that we will fail — that we shall be, at one moment or another, caught thinking. Failure is certain. Therefore any progress is of value. The most effective training consists in letting your thoughts flow by. Don’t stop them (impossible) but don’t hold on to them (possible). Observe them as you do passing clouds, far off and inevitable. Persevere in remaining unclouded yourself, and pay no attention to what is passing by. Remain at one remove, somewhere below the frame, your eyes open on what is in front of you. And that is all. Sensations still exist (colours, light, breath, your skin, your muscles, noises off) but don’t integrate them into your consciousness, still less into an idea or an argument. And finally, in snatches, you may manage to move forward into the clear sky, into the empty light, where there is no disturbance and no form.
Why not try one of these philosophical experiments and tell us what happened ? |
