Author Archives: Julian Mills

On Lodging

25th January 2013


                                           ...He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies till
They moved him. (Philip Larkin, ‘Mr Bleaney’)

Lodger. It sounds a sad thing. Still, whenever talk turns to houses and someone happens to ask if I own, it seems best to own up. I am a lodger. Not a tenant or lease-holder or anything else, but a lodger, renting a room with no contract in someone else’s house. It’s a peaceful, affordable room at the top of a handsome house, with a garden in summer and cats all year round. I’m treated very kindly and I do call this home, but after perks and excuses it is lodging all the same. Meanwhile friends, in their wisdom, are depositing and mortgaging and getting floors done.

Of course, I’ve no more right to carp about property than I have to property itself. Home-owning is a complex and uncomfortable aspiration, one which strains the frayed ligature between what I want and what’s expected of me. Particulars, surveyors, gazumping and deeds are things that happened to my parents and, like cufflinks and car-keys, always seemed part of the regalia of growing up. And this means that now that I am 30, I am a lodger with small anxieties about property – and whether adult life will ever coincide with what it looked like from childhood. And so what?

One way to look at these anxieties is to muffle their psychological noise. For might they be not merely fixtures in the head of a lodger, but also somehow characterise the cultural disquiet this marginal figure cannot help but embody? The literary historian Sharon Marcus points out that as early as the 1840s – as the Victorian domestic ideal firmed up in the wake of a widespread separation between home and the work-place, and its attendant boom in speculative house-building – lodgers took on an unsavoury, even menacing aspect. In part, this was because the shabby, urban lodging-house, which blurred people and spaces and who-did-what-where, provided a seemingly anti-domestic model of dwelling against which the middle-class household could be evaluated. But it was also because a version of the lodger might encroach on the life of that household itself. The term, after all, encompasses all manner of solitaries of both sexes – from the destitute to the dandy.

For no sooner did the ideal take hold of home as an individuated space, demarcated by four walls and with a discrete entrance from the street, than the fudging began. Home-owners, tenants, and even sub-letters strove to uphold what that space ought to house, and sustain the imagined connection between property and propriety: the hierarchy of types of occupancy seemed to advertise the impermanence of many domestic situations, while meagre opportunities for freehold led the nation, wrote Ruskin, to ‘look upon our houses as mere temporary lodgings’. The privacy of home sometimes needed to be subsidised to prevent its economic subsidence, and one solution was to bring in lodgers or paying guests. The price of private life could also be its tarnishing.

People take lodgers for reasons other than purely economic – for company or from kindness, or because they have space – and recent politicking about spare bedrooms suggests that attitudes towards property are themselves in transition. But so far as *his* historical status is connected to the cost of domestic ideals, the lodger has inevitably been represented as a dislodger, undermining the stability of what rent ought to fortify. The word and its cognates are fidgety and disruptive: a lodger might just as well be the person housing as housed, since the verb transitively allows someone to lodge somebody, but intransitively forces someone to lodge somewhere.  It’s as if the word knows it describes something that makes dwelling vulnerable – as the compromises made by temporary residents seem to transfer to their hosts.

Put another way, while a lodger’s routine may be subject to any number of rules and restrictions, allowing a stranger to share home and its facilities is liable to limit one’s own privacy and domestic behaviour. After all, strictures also determine the habits of those who enforce them – like the gaoler in clinking duet with his prisoners’ timetable – as well as exaggerating the visibility of those things they can never fully control, such as bodily functions with their smells and accidents.

I am often asked whether my mealtimes are fixed, if I have to keep hours, and even, once or twice, how I stomach the celibacy (in some people’s minds, the idea of lodging conjures a version of bachelordom or spinsterhood that is decades too late). This type of dwelling implies a circumscribed domesticity, in my case happily based on lenient and unspoken courtesies, but in other situations no doubt set down and policed. For Gordon Comstock, the dingy lodger hero of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), the foremost infringements are brewing and screwing: ‘This tea-making was the major household offence, next to bringing a woman in’. (The lodger’s nocturnal misdemeanours have their own brassy genealogy: ‘Roger the Lodger’, an old music-hall turn, descends from Nicholas, Chaucer’s priapic lodger-clerk in The Miller's Tale). 

Orwell’s novel is very good on how sharing space with strangers inverts how we live: the hallways and landings of Mrs Wisbeach’s lodging-house are not places to pause but to hurry through; the noises off, heard through doors or thin walls, are not comfortingly familiar but remorselessly alien; mealtimes fail to bring reprieve. Other grubby novels of the period, chief among them Patrick Hamilton’s, are equally wise to how the noises, smells and sights that a house usually keeps hidden become public – that is, shared but never communal – in the presence of lodgers, in an amplification of the embarrassments of home.

Slaves of Solitude (1946), for instance, unravels in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a generic boarding-house outside London where inhabitants take rooms to see out the war; they cannot help but live in earshot of other people’s petty indiscretions and, as it eventually turns out, the real noise of life. It is impossible for Miss Roach, Hamilton’s protagonist, to scuttle past fellow boarders’ ordeals:  

   She climbed the stairs, and the groaning met her as she rose. ‘Oh!… Oh!… Oh!…’
   Mr Thwaites’ door was closed, and she listened outside.
   ‘Oh!… Oh!… Oh!…’ she heard, and, beneath this noise, the sound of two strange men talking in quiet and level tones. Only doctors, and frightened doctors at that, would be talking in just that quiet and level way.

In other contexts, ‘Oh!… Oh!… Oh!…’ might titillate or kindle comic misunderstandings. Indeed, elsewhere the spilt sounds of lodging do provide grounds for mystery or comedy. In The Ladykillers (1955), the crooks take for granted the meddlesome credulity of the little old landlady; knowing she’ll swoon at his door, ‘Professor’ Marcus, her lodger, sticks a minuet on the gramophone, while his bogus string quintet plan and bungle a heist. Or take Hitchcock’s title, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), in which the sound made by a lodger – the sound made by ‘lodger’ – acoustically breeds the nebulous city he stalks through. (The film, like so many of the best silent movies, truly enjoys the noise it can’t make; there is a memorable shot of a ceiling that dissolves to glass to render the sound of the furtive lodger as he paces overhead).

To urban writers, in particular, fixated so often on achieving rooms of their own, the figure of the lodger clearly resonates with professional anxieties about the durability of writing and the shortfalls of the spaces in which it takes place. Lodging is a reminder not only of the transience of what is supposed to endure, but also that what is temporary can inadvertently become permanent – as lodgers become lodged, like pieces of shrapnel.

‘He stayed / The whole time he was at the Bodies till / They moved him’: I used to read Larkin’s lines as a euphemistic description of Mr Bleaney’s death, as if he had been carted from his rented box-room in a box still more compact. But looking again, he might just as well have been assigned to shift-work elsewhere, so that what I took for an ending was just transition elsewhere. ‘Sometimes I feel I’ve got to move on, so I pack a bag’, sings David Bowie in ‘Move On’, the third track on Lodger (1979). The album’s gatefold sleeve shows him splayed on the ground, with his broken-nose bandaged – a repeat jumper from a rented window. You never know with the lodger, quite where he is going.

To My Unborn Child

It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force. (Middlemarch, George Eliot)

I went to a party once – a long time ago, once upon a time – and it was fine, but fairly boring. (Parties had started to get more boring at around that time). There were lots of my friends there – some of the same ones as now, but thinner, then, and less tired – and we talked about the things we talked about at that time, and we drank wine (your mother, it has to be said, drank steadily more than the others), and we laughed and made jokes. But when some of the jokes, or perhaps just my smile, had fallen a bit wan, I finally played the old excuse card, and went upstairs to the loo.

As I walked up several flights of stairs, the occasional wooden board creaking softly under the carpet, I heard a gentle, but troubled wailing. I followed the sound, and as the lame uproar of the party diminished into a muffled warmth, the startled notes led me to a door, slightly ajar. I pushed it gently open. There was a baby, just like you, lying in a cot on the floor. In fact there were two. There were two little boys (are you a boy, I wonder?) all wrapped up in their cots. One of them, the one I had heard, was crying, and the other one was stirring – making irregular little starts – just about to be woken up. I bent down to the floor, and kneeling in front of the crying baby, looked into his questioning, quietening face and picked him up. It was a natural thing to do. But I still felt a bit like I was pretending. As I walked around the darkened room, bouncing this soft body on my hip, and singing into its ear, I felt like a bit of a fraud. No, not quite a fraud, that’s not quite right. More like an impostor. No, that’s not quite right either; a surrogate, the shepherd who finds the changeling: I’m not this child’s mother, I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I will try to teach it other things.

After its little body had stopped shaking, after we had travelled the moonlit room in slow, conspiratorial circles, I laid him down on his blanket, and we stared into each other’s eyes. For what was a very long time. And I am absolutely sure that we had a conversation. Of secrets, and inklings and smiles. And I was terrified.

You see, to that child, I could be the one who taught it strange things. The eccentric aunt, the fairy-godmother, the snowman who vanishes into the night. But not to you. To you, my very unborn child, I have to be a mother. And that’s an awfully big thing to be.

I am worried, you see, that that you will steal my soul.

You’ll want: love, structure, calmness, routine. You’ll want to be the first thing I think of in the morning, and the last thing I think of at night. You’ll want to climb into the spaces in my head where no one else has ever been let in and stay there forever. And you will deserve all these things in honest, animal need.

(I am sure that once you have stolen it, I will be more than happy to have seen it gone. It’s brought me quite a lot of trouble, in any case, and frankly, I’m quite bored of it. But sometimes in the odd moments I have of successful solitude, I am a miser for my own loneliness. My own own-ness.)

Sometimes, I hope, you’ll just want to have fun. And I can imagine that: the silent games of eyes, and sound and touch, the animal improvisation of love. I like the thought of that. Because it’s not that I don’t like children. I prefer them to adults, most of the time. Lost in their (not so innocent by the way) curious, limber play.

What I can’t imagine is you. I imagine … being desperately in love with an utterly irrational man (terrible – I’ve tried it); having a funny, delightful, irrepressible friend that can’t help projectile pooing into your hair; or having acute insomnia for 40 nights straight where an unknown but deeply felt sense of responsibility makes you run around a house in which all your belongings have been upturned in terrifying chaos; and I take all of that, multiply it by a biologically galvanised n to the power of everything squared, and the thought of you still feels as far away as the moon.

And maybe that’s where you should stay. There is quite a surplus of little crawlers in this once upon a time, lots of whom I already have a real and deep affection for. Reproduction is certainly no good thing for the planet or for the poor recipients of its force. You certainly DIDN’T ASK TO BE BORN, words you will no doubt hurl at me some distant day in horrified accusation, when I have become a mother – a person who is always awake at breakfast time, who has to learn her timestables and the Tudors all over again (are they still teaching that?), and careers (not herself but) a trolley around the frenzied aisles of a supermarket while you sneak fizzy drinks and biscuits into its hold.

Because even if do you steal my soul, what will become of yours? How will I protect it from the horrors outside the door? Or even harder, how will I protect it from the horrors within? Will you be made to carry the family baton in this long endurance race of grief? Will there be that first night where you sit awake till dawn, with terror pounding through your unfortified heart, aware in sudden and new clarity of the absolute futility of it all? Will falling in love, or the spring light as it falls on a tree, or just a pull-your-socks-up-common-sense of your luck in the general scheme of things make it all worthwhile? Or – god – will you not be lucky in the general scheme of things? Will you be prey to earthquakes, and fuel wars and violence and mistrust?

If Larkin had his way, you would be ordinary. In fact, he’d have you dull:

If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

Yeats would have you happily married off. I am trying to summon all my strength just to not want anything for you. Not to hope you have all the things I didn’t, and all the things I did, nor to frame your being with the stiffened angles of my own regret. Not even to hope you will be able forgive me, for all my many trespasses. (Forgive me, your not yet mother, for I know not what I do).

You are of course a miracle. A common, but no less miraculous, thing. You have hands and feet that are so small they make people remember an innocence they never knew. You are endlessly fascinating to me, even if I did sometimes find myself – in the slow, empty chaos of hours and days and weeks after you were born – torn asunder by fear and boredom and shock. Even if a genetic predisposition to not dealing with you at all well hovered in the shadows of the room as I held your hungry mouth to my breast. No. I love you, I am sure, more than all the love I have ever held in my heart. 

But in this catching of happiness – if I am to be a good mother – will you make me dull? Will the patience and the calm and the safety I hope to god I will give you upend the glorious mess of my days? Will the stability you deserve constantly battle with my need to be free?

It’s the women I listen to. George Eliot ridiculing Celia in Middlemarch: that familiar figure of nappied inanity lost in a world of maternal arrogance. A pregnant Plath, having 'boarded the train there’s no getting off'. But then Woolf, with whole houses and a mind of her own, howling, childless, in the night…

My very far away, unborn hope: of you I am as terrified as of an unknown child in a darkened room, whose clear vowels rise through the moonlight, asking only for love.

In the Audience

24th January 2013

 Honoré Daumier, Le Mélodrame,  (c1860-64)

In Daumier’s Le Mélodrame, a heaving crowd watches the climax of the play. On stage, a woman swoons. The love triangle is resolved, a man lies dead. Meanwhile, outside, Hausmann’s plan is taking shape. Homes as well as playhouses are coming down, streets opening up in new lines of sight and force. Wide streets make manageable spaces. Room for artillery, for crowd-control. But this is a dark place, full of the energy of the audience. The Gaîeté, maybe, or the Théatre de Porte Sainte-Martin. The wrecking crew is on the way, right behind the stagehands. This city, Paris, is an old set, too, waiting to be struck for the next opening night. The Paris Commune is only a few years away. But here in the darkness, a man is leaping up — or better say he is caught up — on his feet. He isn’t part of the crowd any more: he’s part of the play. (more…)

Tango

Verás que todo es mentira
Verás que nada es amor
Que al mundo nada le importa…

You see that everything’s a lie
You see that nothing is love
Nothing matters to the world…

The music of tango is the hoarse curse of the woman to her lover. It’s the insolent hand that creeps to the cusp of a man’s hipbone, retreats, silent and knowing. Tango is the woman's dance. Even if the man leads, the woman follows not in compliance, but absolute assurance of where that step will land, knowing even before her partner does where they’ll go. It’s the constraint that makes the tango, the unfulfilled offer, the delicate tracing of steps in an elliptical struggle between lover and whore, passion and passivity. Tango is the dance between the prostitute and her client, in the days when whoring was illegal and brothels assumed a semblance of respectability by claiming to be dance schools.

I stand in yet another bar in heels too high, sipping a souring drink and smiling pleasantly at someone who I will fuck yet never call, and it’s all I can think of, the dance. The twirls and the giros, the touch and the retreat, the moment of arrest when eyes lock and pupils dilate, a glance down and away as we continue the steps – the front ocho, barrida, gancho, media-luna – so choreographed and practiced over years of sad, sorry, sexual experience, too much experience. A dance we know so well that there are no surprises, though we may gasp at an unexpected improvisation, a slight deviation from the known.

Maybe it’s because sex and dancing were so inextricable in the lonely years I was in Manhattan – writhing in some asshole’s lap, squirming and gasping onstage, a hand tracing another woman’s curves while some jerkoff reaches into his pocket for more Benjamins – that this dance became akin to that other one, that sexual tango I keep living over and over again with devastating predictability. Life becomes one huge milonga, and entering a bar I’ll catch sight of my compatriots and our eyes will never quite meet as we feign, like those whores in Buenos Aires, that it’s just a dance, it’s nothing more than a dance.

I change partners frequently, like I did in secret dark rooms hidden in the bowels of echoing, flashy buildings when I’d make you believe it was lo- well, sex at least, the moves spontaneous and unrehearsed, the attraction unmotivated by money. The milonga’s bigger now; the expectation a little more dangerous, because back in that strip club we both knew it was a lie, a little performance, a show, a fiesta. The steps required out here are more intricate; the lies are harder to gauge because we’re not in a place which condones illusion anymore: we have to pretend we both think it’s real. So we’ll meet, have a drink or two, warm up with some preliminary stretches, some inane small-talk to ease tense muscles and jerky ligaments, let the alcohol relax us. And when it does I’ll make him feel as if he’s leading, as he holds his hand out and asks me to accompany him on this giddy trip, this tango of sex. And he steps forward, never pausing to question why it is that I can step so perfectly in time back with him, why I’m already in the same beat.

‘Dating’ they call it nowadays, this sorry ritual. It’s fun for a while, a merry-go-round, a calesita of dates and meetings, coffees and luncheons, dinner and strange beds, but the tango dancers know that the climax of the dance leads to nothing – a walk home alone, sitting at the end of the bed pulling tired nylons down pale, slim legs that stink with the juices of someone else. But I keep dancing. I keep doing it. I don’t even know why: my obsession with the performative perhaps, my need to keep practicing the steps for fear I’ll forget them. I’ve become brutal in choreographing my routines: one night, four drinks, back to his. “I didn’t expect it to come to this,” he’ll say, and I keep going with the swing, “Oh neither did I. I just thought we’d have a late night coffee.” Oh yes really, oh really. Our lower bodies touch, entwine, become one, but the upper part of our torsos, where the heart is, remain erect and untouching, the arms held stiffly and elegantly, the gaze in opposite directions. To change it up I’ll perform a cambio-de-frente, a change of face. I never expected it to come to this, he'll say, tongue-in-ass or something, and I'll stop, stare mocking and mean. Oh come one. Don’t be so fucking stupid. Of course you did. Why else would you put your fucking card behind the damn bar and invite me home to see your freakin’ cat? And then he falters, realizes that you stepped back, but he forgot to step forward, or didn’t know how, and the dance goes on without him. I leave.

It takes practice, of course, to master the tango. The upper body is stiff and unyielding, from the waist down legs hint at the endless combinations of pleasures they can divulge. Yet the torso stands aloof, compliant to the whims of a partner, a cold embrace that reveals nothing but the restless stirring in two sets of eyes. Most people can’t master this, though nowadays across a crowded bar crammed with British slobs, I’ll notice the women are always more practiced than the men. We practice and practice, keep practicing. And as we practice the lyrics change, even if the steps stay the same. The song about a prostitute and her client becomes a song of melancholy, lost love, lost family, wasted lives, a love of your barrio, but more than this a love of tango itself. We start to love the tango more than what it means, if it means anything. They say that the tango is about love between two people, a connection, the brevity of romantic love and yet its heartfelt depth, my death-defying love for you… but these people have forgotten its history perhaps, because the tango is about sex and performance, illusion, choreography. The tango has always been about the inability of two people caught in a dance to connect with anything other than the steps in their feet, hearts which never touch, glances which arrest for no more than a second, nothing more than technical precision. And you never realize until you meet someone who knows the steps better than you.

I danced with him until 7am one Friday night, kept it going and going with indefatigable combinations until eventually, over roulette and staring pale Asian kids in Nike, he leaned over and kissed me. We went home together, naturally, yet didn’t play out the dance. Exhausted by alcohol and hours of gambling in some shithole in SoHo, we merely slept, pickled happily in booze. Perhaps it was because the dance didn’t end that we met up again, and again, and each meeting was a hedonistic flamenco of fun; a staccato, fluent love song sang by faceless people in the wings, us the main performers. I forgot to dance tango, with him, found myself losing the rhythm and dropping beats and stumbling over steps, and finally emerging, gasping, illusions dropped, the dance played out. We sat on a beach and stared out to sea, and there was silence: no music, nothing - suddenly in the distance an explosion of pyrotechnics, back to black. Stillness and a black sea; cold, hard pebbles beneath frozen butts sitting companionably on the shore. And so I didn’t realize that he hadn't stopped dancing, and when he got up, took my hand and dragged me to my feet and we set off down a pier that led far out to sea, I couldn’t keep up. I’d forgotten how. When our legs entwined I leaned forward as if to rest my chest against his, but he wasn’t there, had danced on, and I nearly fell.

I recovered quickly, like a trouper, the star of this tacky performance, started dancing again, returned to the tango as something reliable, dependable, my dance frenzied, gnawing and unsatisfied. Went home with someone else, another, the steps promiscuous and braggart, steely and determined. Kept moving. Keep moving. Still am moving. What I had with him was just a paraditas – a small stop, and I doubt I ever will make it a parada, a final curtain call, shoes unstrapped, abandoned.

There’s another definition of tango, one I prefer, one I find more appropriate to me, to the milonga of sex and dating and love in the 21st city-century. This one states that tango is the dance of the emigrant. Someone who is always leaving and never finds home. Someone whose heart is yearning for something, something that they can never have.

Table for one

In a tiny Tuscan hilltop town not far from Chiusi, there is a modest trattoria which I will call Lilla, perching on the downslope of one of the steep streets that draw the eye towards Siena. Some years ago, I had reason to spend a while in the town, and being there, passed many lunchtimes eating alone in the restaurant. (more…)

Dr Eckleburg’s Myopia

When I was growing up in Chicago, my mother kept a large print on the kitchen wall, showing a New Yorker’s View of the World from 9th Avenue, a map with skyscrapers and a large Hudson River in the foreground, a strip of New Jersey, and five cities (Chicago, Washington DC, Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles) beyond. In the middle distance lies the Pacific Ocean, in which float three blobs at the edge of the frame labelled China, Japan, Russia. Eventually I discovered that we weren’t the only family who found Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover image amusing; people around America, and around the world, recognized a wry truth in its suggestion that New Yorkers’ perspectives can be a trifle myopic—and by extension, that this most iconic of American cities also symbolizes a national myopia that is highly visible, and risible, to the rest of the world.

What I didn’t know then, and what most people, I suspect, still don’t realize, is that Steinberg’s 1976 satire of New York’s inability to see beyond its own boundaries was not the first recognition of such American short-sightedness. Fifty years earlier, The Chicagoan, a forgotten 1920s magazine created as a response to the popularity of The New Yorker, got there first. In February 1925, Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founder, famously articulated The New Yorker’s vision: 'The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.' Dubuque, a small city in Iowa, soon became shorthand for life in the American provinces. The Chicagoan was launched in 1926, and lasted a decade, before the Depression killed it in 1935; in 2008 historian Neil Harris published a beautiful illustrated volume, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, reproducing much of the magazine. One of its pictures was a revelation:  on July 6 1929, The Chicagoan included a cartoon by J.C. Davis called 'The New Yorker’s Map of the United States', which showed a standard American map of 48 continental states, each state dense with scattered cities, all of which are called Dubuque. The only cities in America that are not Dubuque are New York, Atlantic City, Los Angeles, and Reno—where New Yorkers went to get quickie divorces in the 1920s. Now there’s an irony that a Chicago girl like me can appreciate: even New Yorkers’ jokes about their own myopia are myopic; it turns out that Chicago got there first.

But the truth is that someone else beat them all to the punch, at least conceptually, in seeing New York’s myopia as a synecdoche for American short-sightedness: two months after Harold Ross launched The New Yorker, F. Scott Fitzgerald published the great novel of the American 1920s (some would say of the 20th century), The Great Gatsby, which features among its network of symbols the billboard of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, whose vast, bespectacled eyes peer unseeing over the ashes and dust of the New York landscape. 'The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic', wrote Fitzgerald:

they look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Eckleburg’s eyes have become one of The Great Gatsby’s most famous symbols, their meanings debated as frequently in classrooms around the world as Jay Gatsby’s beckoning green light. One of the first publicity images to be released from Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming film adaptation was of his vision of T.J. Eckleburg’s billboard, while Francis Cugat’s original jacket illustration for The Great Gatsby featured a woman’s large, haunting eyes hovering over an amusement park while a single blue tear drops down into the night.

In fact, Fitzgerald’s entire novel is carefully patterned around images of perception and vision that he links to the meanings of America. From T.J. Eckleburg’s gigantic eyes to Nick’s 'eyesore' of a cottage next to Gatsby’s mansion, from Owl-Eyes, the man in Gatsby’s library who’s been blind drunk for a week to Gatsby’s father, who looks at the grandeur of his son’s house while 'seeing nothing', eyes are mentioned repeatedly throughout the novel—and those eyes are usually unseeing. Even Myrtle Wilson’s little dog views his mistress’s squalid prohibition party with 'blind eyes through the smoke'. This is no accident, of course: it lets Fitzgerald suggest that Gatsby’s greatness comes from the grandeur of his visions, while everyone else in his world is blind.

Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby across the summer of 1922, and as fate would have it, in the spring of 1922 The New York Times printed an article about its own popularity throughout America: 'The New York Times has been called the masterpiece of American journalism. No daily newspaper printed in New York City is so widely read outside of New York … The success of this newspaper represents a triumph of clean journalism over a very different kind of competition… The Times is by far the greatest advertising medium in the East… it circulates, in fact, among 10,000 cities, towns and villages throughout the world… It is a newspaper with a perspective, seeing beyond merely temporary profit to the larger and more enduring benefit of its readers, and thereby of itself.' This 'far-sighted policy', the editors were certain, made The Times far more successful than 'its myopic rivals', who traded in sensationalism and gossip: 'the ultimate fate of vicious journalism will be that an enlightened public will refuse to read it, not only because it is indecent, but because it is dull.'

Fitzgerald’s guess was better: not just New York, but America, would embrace the myopic self-interest of temporary profit, a view that would threaten the values the nation purported to uphold, including the very survival of the 'clean journalism' in which The New York Times was so confident less than a century ago. Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes symbolize not only what Fitzgerald viewed as America’s short-sightedness, but the way such myopia suggests a nation buying into its own myths, and the financially asymmetrical society that these self-advertisements have always shielded and protected. What is being sold so aggressively doesn’t exist: Eckleburg is a defunct billboard, after all, selling services that are no longer available, an apt image for a nation selling itself a dream that increasingly seems to many like just so much snake oil. (In this sense it is not unlike the idea of 'moxie', a very American blend of spirit, audacity, and enterprise, which began as a patent medicine brand, and evolved into a soft drink: always selling something.)

Thus Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald tells us, is a representative American, a believer in his nation’s secular faith: and so 'he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty'. Gatsby’s greatness comes from his vision: his tragedy is the distortion of that vision by a country that increasingly can see only the business of buying and selling, reducing human aspiration to asymmetrical material acquisition. By the end of Gatsby, Eckleburg’s colossal, bespectacled eyes will themselves be mistaken for God: the false god of advertising, worshipped by sad, ghostly men like Myrtle Wilson’s husband George, who runs a garage among the ash-heaps, once aptly described by Lionel Trilling as resembling a little corner of Dante’s Inferno. In other words, just as The New Yorker’s myopic view of the rest of the world rang true for those outside of New York who had been made all too clearly aware of their own invisibility, so do Dr Eckleburg’s eyes suggest the ways in which America itself remains a myopic place, blind, unseeing, a billboard selling itself, and the world, something that no longer exists.

Of course, it is myopic to think that Americans, or New Yorkers, have any kind of monopoly on myopia or on monopolies (or giant spectacles, for that matter, which are enjoying a fashion moment, as if Dr. Eckleburg’s advertisement has finally reached its demographic, nearly a century later), but it is true that there are not many places that convert myopia into a virtue. It’s not really myopia from which America suffers but astigmatism, characterized by a recurring problem with symmetry and the loss of finer detail. It is that finer detail we miss in the landscape stretching beyond us, back in that vast obscurity beyond New York City, where, as Fitzgerald famously wrote, the dark fields of the republic still roll on under the night.

Looking After #numbertwo

Nothing happens unless first a dream. (Carl Sandburg)

In the bar of a Holiday Inn in Ipswich I find myself in conversation with the writer of a popular television drama, when the subject of Twitter comes up:

‘The thing is, Dan,’ he exclaims with a characteristic pause for emphasis or comedy, I could never tell which, ’I don't want everyone to know when I'm sitting on the toilet.’

He has a point. Though currently this sort of information is only made available if you choose to make it so (­and I'm sure there is an app for that) it is a perfectly rational fear.  When we trace the origins of the internet and observe how it, and we alongside it, have evolved, and where it all seems to be heading, it is not unreasonable to assume that details of this nature, and indeed every other facet of daily life, may eventually be shared or even required by the system. For now, however, if you wish to broadcast  ‘#numbertwo’, it's up to you.

The Internet is the current tail of our communicative development: from telegraphy through telephony, radio to the personal computer, our connective network systems have evolved since the first remote message exchange. It began in strictly academic circles, developed primarily to assist in the sharing of research and resources. Yet the web always had a human interest; from J.C.R. Licklider's delightful concept of a 'Galactic Network' at MIT in 1962 to Doug Engelbart's 1969 Stanford research project, the 'Augmentation of Human Intellect', it was seen that by making computers talk to each other, to find a common 'language' between two machines, we might mirror something of our own development, might learn from it and improve our lives.

Early advancements came about through missives known as 'RFCs' (or Request For Comments), initially sent via physical snail-mail (remember that?) then quickly replaced by primitive email. Users would keep each other informed as to how the general infrastructure of the online experience was working and how it could be improved. Just as the concept grew out of our own invention, so it developed and evolved with our own feedback. The development of the Internet was in itself a social network.

We have assimilated these advances linguistically too, so that they seem to fit naturally and grow alongside us. Words such as 'host', 'domain', even the ancient precaution of a 'firewall' all evoke a solid, historical idiom; a brave new world that has such familiar terms in it. 'Forum' is a perfect example: the ancient roman marketplace where one could find so much more than just market stalls: sales pitches, entertainments, side-shows, soliciting, and drunken japery as well as nodes of discussion, arguments, opining and pontificating, quite aside from everyday bitching and gossip. Where the early digital lexicon involved many hybrid terms or neologisms, a few of which survive (e.g. 'blog', 'download', etc.), the mainstay of our virtual vocabulary is drawn from our own preexisting, 'real' world. As the 'appliance' was to electricity, so is the 'application' to the Internet. The 'architecture' of the online world has its topographic 'sites' created by 'developers': all of it sounds like it has been here before.

Of course, as with something like the 'Hoover', there are certain brands that dominate a new field and become words in their own right. One of the more significant of these is 'Google'; itself a misspelling of the word 'googol', the expression of the number 10100. Google has always occupied a curious position in the online sphere and has achieved something of Darwinian prominence in its survival and defeat of other lesser search engines and operations: how many 'Chrome' users remember the web's first 'browser', 'Mosaic'? Who now asks that tired old butler 'Jeeves'...?

When the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil was signed up as Google's Director of Engineering a few weeks ago it seemed to be a moment of great significance. The visionary, the pioneer of technologies such as optical and speech recognition and text-to-speech, one of the great prophets of artificial intelligence and the Cyber Age was officially absorbed into the belly of the beast. The brand, indeed the word, which has infused our daily lives had co-opted the services of this digital dreamer. But nothing happens unless first a dream. The title of Kurzweil's best-selling book now begins to look like a statement of fact: The Singularity Is Near. The age of super-intelligence is practically upon us; the point at which the global supercomputer has received enough feedback, enough information that it can develop and improve itself so as to be self-governing, even self-conscious; the point at which the machine has learned to mimic human behaviour and subsequently to improve upon it; beyond which anything might be possible.

In a recent issue of Wired magazine, 'Senior Maverick' Kevin Kelly writes of this imminent 'singularity',­ the eventuality that the robots will ‘take over’,­ in an essay entitled 'Better Than Human'. In it he includes a visual matrix of new and existing jobs that humans and/or machines can and cannot do. He briefly touches upon the progression of humans towards roles that they, uniquely (‘for now’), can fulfill:

‘ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one of a kind titles on their business cards.’

He qualifies his tongue-in-cheek list, projecting that ‘of course, over time, machines will do these as well’.  I'm not so sure; after all, the Luddites were wrong.  Fear of unemployment caused by mechanisation, or what economists call the 'Substitution Effect', proved unfounded since a conflicting 'Output Effect' in fact created work, albeit displacing it. So today there is a shift, a displacement. Kelly's list seems to echo the less ironic words of the Dalai Lama, that the planet ‘desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds’, roles that will remain human long after many others have gone the way of all wires. It is the quintessentially human characteristics that will prevail; curiosity, imagination, innovation, compassion, irony, humour. ‘Drop by drop’, as Chekhov wrote, we ‘squeeze the slave’ from ourselves: our roles become ever more prescribed by the technology we have created and perpetuated, and consequently our introspection increases. The network and its resulting gadgetry is now such an inextricable part of our lives and is so entwined with our evolution that instead of it distancing us from ourselves it is forcefully reminding us that we exist and, hopefully, awakening us as to why we exist.

Feedback loops of all kinds are vital, even those not directly contributing to the development of the Internet itself.  Our online presence stands as a Book of Reckoning; every click and comment defining us.  Supposed anonymity perpetuates a lack of accountability and therefore trawling (or trolling) the 'bottom half of the internet' reveals how far from greatness we can sink. But the anonymous, pixelated veil is an illusion; whilst the individual identity seems hidden (for now), this input shapes us all, standing as a record of our thoughts and motivations. It is our collective consciousness made visible, viral warts and all. Leaning towards digital optimism we face a conscious choice and a responsibility to our own self-improvement, to find the good. Tweet as you would be twoten to.

In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing upgraded his initially proposed question, ‘Can a computer think?’ to ‘Can a computer do what we (as thinking entities) can do?’ Now that the answer to that question is almost ubiquitously 'yes', the questions we face are ‘What is it we can do that the machine can't?’; ‘What is it the machine may never be able to do?’ Go to the toilet? To laugh? Perhaps to love?

Croak

Seeing the love of your life for the first time since she left you is one thing. Seeing her perform naked at a live art event, defecating into a condom and then masturbating with it is another thing, a thing that does damage, and a thing that Dean knew was going to be the undoing of Johnny Penguin.

Johnny was tall, beautiful with his flowing hair and bold suits, well spoken and confident, but for all his wit and spirit he had no defence against the colourless brutality of life. The world, dark and unrestrained, could pour itself into him and batter him and drown him any day of the week, and Dean had to fish him out and dry him off and teach him how to live again. Johnny was no saint, of course. He was often cruel in his descriptions ('She looks sweaty and unfinished, like a pickled foetus') but at the same time he was intensely vulnerable. Like Oscar Wilde missing a chromosome.

Jasmine, the love of Johnny’s life, had been on Art Foundation in Camberwell when they met. Four years later she dumped him by post from a trip to Japan and he never heard from her again. Dean saw him through the worst of it by shopping for three-piece suits, taking him to a friend’s house in the middle of the English Nowhere, and learning to make a cocktail called Death on the Back of my Hand. Someone said Jasmine had opened a cupcake shop in Cornwall. Someone else heard she was in New York with a punk rocker turned animal activist turned painter turned sex guru. Perhaps both stories were true or perhaps just one or perhaps neither, but here she was now, in East London, billed as an up and coming performance artist and writhing on a concrete floor with a dildo made of her own shit.

Earlier that night they had been doing some excellent drinking when they saw Whistler outside Bar Italia, smoking and ignoring a girl in a fur cape. She was pale and talked relentlessly, as though she might explode the second she stopped. Whistler, legendary party host, dandy, gentleman of the night, looked golden age Hollywood in a double-breasted suit and Chinese tie, pencil moustache freshly trimmed, ready for more.

'I’m on the list for a secret art show,' he said. 'Sounds fishy, yes, but there’s free wine and we can go to mine after.'

They shared a taxi whose driver they seemed to terrify and twenty-five minutes later negotiated entry to a dark warehouse near Dalston Junction. The boy at the door was gaunt and angry and when Dean refused to let him put a stamp on his wrist the boy called him a ponce and stamped it on his cuff instead.

Someone had set up a bar at the centre of the concrete emptiness and the lighting was clever and the music unbearable. It was a monotone scraping noise, apparently generated by a topless fat man who sat like an abandoned hatchling in a nest of flashing electronics.

Whistler and the talking girl went to get wine. Johnny gave Dean a vexed look and Dean held his walking stick like a sword, pretending to fear attack from the other visitors. People who looked like variations of Patti Smith and Andy Warhol drifted by in streaks, silently, huddled in cocoons of hostility. They formed a crowd under a lighting rig in a far corner and Johnny cocked his head for Dean to come look. Johnny, sleek in his yellow houndstooth, fast and stunning, strode forth and through the crowd before it closed up. Dean tried to follow, but a very tall person of indeterminable gender glowered at him, deliberately lingering to disapprove of his hat and walking stick, and Dean stayed where he was.

He saw enough of Jasmine to recognise her. Mop of dark curls over pale skin, fat glasses, full lips with her trademark lipstick, outlandish, emerald green. Beyond the congealing audience she squatted and squinted and concentrated on, as it turned out, the act of shitting into a condom. Her expression was business-like. A loudspeaker was mounted to the scaffolding above her and the scraping noise was especially loud now and acquired an abrasive sharpness. Dean had the impulse to run away. When a sweet, sturdy odour asserted itself he recalled Johnny’s complaining about Jasmine’s vegetarianism. He felt something on his shoulder. As he turned, Whistler talked into his ear.

'There’s no booze,' he said. 'They stuck a bar right in the middle of this horrible place and there’s no booze. Can you believe it? There’s nothing in the middle, Dean. We must leave at once.'

The talking girl tugged at Whistler’s suit. She had something urgent to say.

'It’s Jasmine,' Dean said.

'I know,' said Whistler. 'I’m going outside for a smoke.'

Johnny looked green under the crazy light. His posture was at once upright and alarmingly limp, as though someone had run him through with a spear and only the spear was holding him up.

Dean was angry and impatient. Seeing Johnny exposed made his stomach turn. He thrust out across the crowd with his walking stick and tapped a man just behind Johnny on the shoulder.

'What’s she doing?' he asked the man.

The man’s facial tattoo gave him a permanent scowl. 'She’s defiling herself with the rancid fruit of her own imperfect body,' he said. His voice was crisp and metallic. 'I’m her mentor. Who the fuck are you? You look like Salvador Dalí.'

'I’m Dean.'

'I’m Croak. You look offended. Does this offend you?'

Dean looked at Johnny. Something was happening. He was swaying. His eyes were half closed and his chin quivered. The scraping noise grew louder and louder and the lighting erratic. Dean shouted over the mounting chaos.

'I’m worried about my friend. I don’t think he’s well.'

The man named Croak turned to where Dean had indicated and just then Johnny’s entire body began to shake as though electrified. His mouth fell open. Dean thought he might be screaming or screaming silently or crying. Croak pushed people out of the way and gestured for Dean to come through, and Dean reached Johnny just in time to catch him.

'Help me carry him out,' he said to Croak.

Croak motioned into the crowd and seconds later the tall person of indeterminable gender was helping them carry Johnny to the door.

'Your friend couldn’t take it, huh.'

The gender person addressed Dean in a voice similar to the scraping noise. 'The reality of female sexuality frightens the bourgeoisie, you know.'

Dean had an idea the gender person might be a woman. She sounded kinder than she looked.

'And the anus,' she said, 'is the grave of human dignity.'

It was cool outside and there was a drizzle and in the distance there were sirens. Croak gave the gender person a conspiratorial smirk and the two of them put Johnny down on the pavement and walked back inside. They looked hot and spent and happy and full of life. Johnny’s eyes were opening.

'What’s going on, man?' Dean said.

'I have no idea,' Johnny said, entrusting to Dean his full weight.

'D’you know,' he said finally, 'I think I’m just really bored.'

Dean understood now that for the last two minutes or so Johnny had been wrenching open his mouth in a single, big yawn. Whistler came to steady them both and offered Johnny a cigarette with the filter snapped off and Johnny smiled at it as one smiles at a child. Then he shrugged pleasantly and craned his neck like a howling wolf. Whistler gave him a light and it was then, as the flame dashed out towards Johnny’s face, that Dean had the sensation that Johnny was entirely transparent, that the brickwork and shimmering pavement shone through him, each ground-out cigarette and blackened chewing gum visible beneath the intricate geometry of his suit. It lasted no longer than a split second, but the sensation was so vivid that Dean thought Whistler must have seen it, too.

The talking girl was upon them again.

'What’s with him?' she said. 'I thought there wasn’t any booze.'

'Would you please shut up for one second,' said Whistler and took out a cigarette for himself. The girl looked offended.

Golf

‘incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things’ – Czesław Miłosz

I was drinking gin
at an airport bar in California, I think,
awaiting a flight
to Denver.

They were showing the golf
at St. Andrew’s.
It was evening in Fife,
and the sun was lobbing shadows

over the green at the 18th, which means
it must have been mid-morning, my time.
Too early for gin?
Time is nothing to the true believer.

[The rules of time differ
on either side of security.
One becomes a part of the process.]
Besides, I could have come from Australia.

Growing up on the east coast of Scotland
I was known to wield a golf club as a child
and so deeply feel the way the late-afternoon sunlight
touches the grass in that part of the world.

I pretended I was someone else as I bought another drink
for my anonymous companion.
She soon lets slip her name; Amanda.
Trouser-suited Amanda: it is as impossible for me

to feel completely at home on this earth
as it is for my eyes
to totally absorb the proportions of your body.
This window-seat life that separates me

from the game I'm under orders to describe:
Fourteen clubs,
one ball,
and no reason why.

Flow

16th July 2012

'Clearly I am thinking about nothing. I am most certainly looking at nothing. Since nothing is present to my consciousness to beguile me with its colour and movement, I have not become one with anything. Yet I am in motion: motion neither within the world or outside it - simply motion.'  Natsume Soseki, Kusamakura

I'm standing at the edge of a lido at 7:05am. This is the momentary pause when I spit into my goggles and brace myself for the exertion ahead. My mind rests for a moment, as it often does of late, on the word ‘action’. I’m really thinking of karma, but that word is, for me, too heavy with ideas of fate, preordination or determinism, which - though in line with the Hindu definition, wherein a personal supreme God plays a role in its delivery - is different from the Buddhist meaning I have come to learn. In Buddhism the word karma, translated literally as ‘action’ or ‘deed’, is simply a law of cause and effect, albeit one that works on a number of different scales - from instant karma to karmic rebirth. Though I have no belief in reincarnation, which excludes the greater of the scales from my purview, I’m finding this concept of volitional responsibility both a comfort and a drive. ‘Action’, I say to myself.

It's a mildly chilly, grey summer's day. As light rain steadily falls, I lower myself into the pool. This lido is, unusually, not laned-off for the early morning swim. Rather, swimmers space themselves along the 60-metre length to swim across the 18-metre width. Drops of rain gently burst the surface in an even patter, twinkling like stars above mesmerising ripples. A heated outdoor pool - this morning it’s 22ºC - doesn’t give the shock and rush of being immersed in the piercing cold of sea or river. I’m strangely disappointed, feeling faintly nostalgic for contracting muscles, pulsating limbs, blood rushing through head and toe - that marvellously fleeting part of swimming in the outdoors: the brusque awakening. Twenty seconds later, acclimated, goggles rinsed and in place, I'm off, mindfully propelling myself forward, timing my breathing with the action of my strokes.

I came to swim for much the same reason I came to practice meditation: to relax. To reconnect myself to a body that had become a stranger to me and free it from tension. For more than four years I had been struggling with, and endlessly distracted by, an increasingly draining dermatological condition. I shudder every time I hear the word eczema. Although my doctors have referred to it in equal measure as seborrhoeic dermatitis, which is not quite so bad (but still horrendous), there is something about that word, pregnant with memories of childhood affliction, that points to why skin conditions in adulthood seem to the sufferer, well... a little pathetic. In some respects eczema tells of a vulnerability - an inability to cope with certain external phenomena that is perfectly understandable in childhood, but which in adulthood suggests psychological or physiological shortcomings. In my case it was a cause of anxiety, insecurity and depression.

After years of managing my condition daily, an often stressful routine using a concoction of medicines in a futile effort to control the symptoms, I finally came across a doctor who suggested that stress was the most pressing issue to address. I began to think that my natural tendency to suppress stress - to divert it away from my consciousness - had made me ill. As I began to research relaxation therapies I came across Vipassana - a Buddhist  meditation technique and ‘mindfulness’ practice - by chance when, stopping at a bookshop midway through a meandering walk, a friend picked up a copy of a Tim Parks book. Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing is an account of his journey through the neuroses of chronic illness, a story which ultimately found relief through the discovery and practice of Vipassana.

I soon booked myself onto a ten-day Vipassana retreat at a centre in rural Herefordshire taught (albeit remotely) by S. N. Goenka, an Indian lay teacher who had learned the technique from Sayagyi U Ba Khin in Burma. His method - non-sectarian in emphasis, but rooted in the Theravada school of Buddhism - is taught in centres around the world using audio tapes and evening video discourses, with assistant teachers overseeing the group sessions and answering questions on technique twice a day. At each group sitting, in the company of about 70 men and 70 women seated by gender on either side of the meditation hall, I was greeted by Goenka’s deep bass voice calmly issuing instructions in rich, resonant surround sound. It wasn’t quite the intimate experience I had expected having read Parks’ account of his retreat - taught in person by one of the American Vipassana gurus - but it was, nonetheless, a deeply affecting and transformative experience. Waking at four each morning to the sound of a gong, meditating for more than 10 hours a day, living in a commune of silent contemplation and concentration financed by the generosity of others, we lived the lives of Buddhist monks and nuns for the duration of our stay.

The first three days were spent practising anapanasati (literally, ‘awareness of breathing’). Concentrating our attention on the inflow and outflow of breath in and around the nasal passage we gradually narrowed the focus onto the sensation of breath on the upper lip as it enters and exits the nostrils. Going into the course I had been aware of the basic principles of this technique, but I hadn’t understood quite how difficult such a simple sounding task would be. Not only was my sensitivity to sensation dull to begin with, but keeping my attention trained on one object without being continually distracted by disparate fleeting thoughts was nearly impossible. Newly awakened to a distinction between thought and consciousness, I felt a little out of control. To concentrate on this sensation of breath without being distracted by thoughts that appeared to be autonomous entities, it seemed that I needed to be conscious but unthinking. The longer we practiced, however, the more alert and grounded I became, and the more I appreciated a depth of awareness and focus I had never before experienced. After 30 hours of slowly refining my sensitivity and strengthening my focus, I could concentrate for the full length of a session on a tiny area of skin below my nostrils, noting not only the strength and temperature of breath, but pulses, itches and subtle vibrations. We were now ready to move onto the main exercise - Vipassana. I was at first a little bemused to discover how hard it was to find the spot at the very top of my head, but once started I tentatively drew my attention, little by little, down my head, face, arms, torso and legs to my feet and toes before returning in the other direction, back to the top of my head. Over days of practicing, these ‘sweeps’ of the body became fluent, my awareness of sensation increasingly refined.

Our attention was regularly drawn to the transience of every sensation with reference to  anicca, the Pali term for impermanence (one of the ‘three marks of existence’). Anicca, the unrelenting state of flux, the arising and passing of the phenomenal world, was, it seemed, an observable reality. Apart from the discomforts of the seated position, which wore off after a few days, no sensation seemed to last very long at all. Over the years I had become a compulsive and unthinking itcher, but on paying close attention to the itching sensations I had habitually scratched, none of them seemed to last more than a few seconds. 'Annica... annica...' Goenka would repeat. 'Everything that arises passes away...' The fleeting nature of sensory experience was framed for us within the context of an impermanent, unstable and highly contingent world, through which I came to a sense of self, less fixed and more fluid.

I’m on one of my quick lengths, torpedoing off from the turn before bursting through the surface into rhythmic action: my torso rotating with each long stretch, legs kicking as straight as I can manage, pulling myself forward with cupped arms, breathing with the outstretch of the left every four to eight strokes, feeling water both resist and give way, the rush of liquid and bubbles gliding over my entire body. There’s certainly a fluency, but I feel fully aware of everything I’m doing. It’s not like running or cycling, where I can switch off from the mechanics of the exercise - here in this pool I feel entirely present, vitally conscious of the subtle dynamic shifts of each changing stroke.

I have never jumped out of a plane or off the ledge of a bungee jump, but I think I understand the exhilaration of such weightlessness. Here in the pool, suspended in slightly chlorinated water, buoyed by its density, I feel free to glide along unbound by the pervasive grounding force of gravity. The aquatic realm is, as such, a respite from the seemingly fixed, inescapable material realities of the terrestrial world. As my alignment to the earth’s centre rotates by 90º, and upwards becomes onwards, my sense of place dissolves - focus shifting from where to what I am. Being immersed in water is like being placed in a bodily echo chamber - sensations and sounds reverberate through my consciousness. The cascades of bubbles following the strokes of my hands seem almost hyperreal. The sound of my beating heart so present, it could be coming from directly between my ears.

In the mediation hall the words awareness and equanimity were repeated endlessly. We were to be aware of sensation, but importantly we needed to observe these sensations calmly and objectively. The concept was a simple one - by observing bodily sensations with neutrality, one could train the mind to be less reactive. To simply be aware would carry on the natural tendency of reacting positively to pleasant sensations or negatively to unpleasant ones - developing or propagating cravings or aversions. This, we were told, is the root of all suffering. By learning to be aware with detachment we could reverse this trend, gradually weakening and then eliminating the tendencies of craving and aversion: agitating urges that dampen both awareness and appreciation of the present. By day ten the technique had been properly established. My body sweeps were as fluid as my sense of time and place. An hour’s sitting suddenly felt like twenty minutes. I experienced neither discomfort, tension, or pain.

I'm sitting cross-legged on a cushion at 6:05am, half way through my morning meditation. Clearly I am thinking about nothing. I keep my attention on scanning my body for sensations in a smooth but careful movement, registering subtle vibrations, pulses, currents, itches and strains. Occasionally thoughts do appear, hanging around for a moment before wandering off again. I train my attention back to the task in hand - to observe. In the calm still of silence I feel fully alive. An alarm signals the end of the hour. I quickly dress and excitedly prepare to cycle to the lido in the next town. After the 12km ride, paying the £3.50 entry, changing into my trunks and rinsing myself in the shower, I stand before the water's edge, ready to begin.