University of Cape Town – ELL1016S

Warren Rourke/Hedley Twidle

11 October 2014

‘In the Wee Small Hours’: Musings on the Dilemmas of Stragglers

“I drifted on a river I could not control,
No longer guided by the bargeman’s rope.” – Arthur Rimbaud, ‘The Drunken Boat’

“I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to…” – Bob Dylan, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’

Verbose Version:

A nondescript number of months ago, I wrote a pretentious poem for the promise of money I didn’t end up winning. This was no tragedy at all. In my case, any excuse for writing is an imposition sorely needed, like a gentle ultimatum to a train’s stowaway. And the composition was brisk and unfettered; its initial inspiration just one spontaneous phrase (‘In the tolling of the Bankrupt Hours.’) that I can’t help but take into this calm rubber-room of an essay for an amicable interrogation.

To be clear, this relative era in the night I’m referring to is not the same as the ‘Witching’ Hour. That, if I remember well, is the noirish time in Roald Dahl’s imagination when the little orphan Sophie awakes just after midnight to find the Big Friendly Giant outside her window, blowing phantasmagorical dreams into her friends’ ear-canals and subsequently abducting her scared-stiff self so as to suppress any witnesses. All ends well, of course. I can reflect now how that endearingly perverted Welsh-Norwegian probably had a more indelible effect on my childhood than most relatives did, though his affinity for RKO-style Horror (personified insects, long-bearded freaks, telekinetic girls etc.) did at some point ineluctably become someone else’s jazz. Then again, that process is a checkpoint for all children who stick with books, in (existential) sickness and in health. So, what became my concern – around my 14th year – was what I enjoy calling the loneliness of the long-distance reader. That is to say I dreamed that a person (me) could become ‘literary’ in character given the right earned instant of self- appraisal. My ego is still in love with the clichéd four-dimensional image here: a trenchcoated smoker, sequestered in a train station or an all-night café, waiting out for a dawn that never comes by polishing off the rest of Kerouac or Chandler, while the red shadows of ghosts pass by in the periphery, each drawn-out sigh appearing as a frostbitten cloud and Bossa Nova playing out indefinitely from the ceiling.

I probably call this space ‘the Bankrupt Hours’1 because I implicitly imagine it as being my personal recess from global capitalism. To me, there is just an anti- materialist element inherent to it, in the way that heat can’t be separated from the idea of Noontime. When Bob Dylan caps the last verse of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ with the motto ”When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose”, I pretty much disappear here. Money never sleeps, as they say, but people do. The privatization of the universe occurs in the daytime, I suspect, and the outcasts, like rats, come out to enjoy the stars in the common squares and rectangles only when there are few humans left to share them with. Literature happens to be the translucent veil of this nocturnal world because, at least in a superficial sense, it is a devoutly anti-social vocation, even if it consists of a canon that is inexpensively found and universally recognized. To read in public is to disavow the banality of the real; a paradigm that often really is stranger than fiction, though ‘strangeness’ does not always end up equating to greater interest or meaning. The sociologist extraordinaire, Erving Goffman, surmised in 1959 that “The world is a wedding”: that reality is structured by the social, and ‘peaks’ in moments that represent the gross sum of the heightened attentions observing it. This is why we remember in greater detail the moments in our lives (birthdays, performances) when we are most particularly being watched: by the world or by ourselves or by both. It also explains why no moment in History had ever felt more acute or prolonged or fantastical than 9/11, and why no explanation to ensuing generations will do it justice. Therefore, in the lowest depths of the night, when trees can fall silently in abandoned forests and the world’s spin seems to slow, I imagine there to be a free space – an ‘unreal’ setting – for our indivisible soliloquys. The latter can be recorded in books, intimated in jazz music and guessed at through cinema, but to experience, as ourselves, our own moments of spiritual bareness in solitude is to suffer the poignant solipsism of self-overhearing. We become the only audience to a bad one-man show. To indulge in a Lacanian summation, we discover our selves as nothing but apparent fictions.

1. Approximately 2:30-4:30 am, that is, when no-one without a sophomoric point to prove, a career to save or a ridiculous jet-lag to wear off is usually awake.

Then again, I am, like most teenagers, knowingly buying into a myth. Mine is just more pretentious than usual. The first painting to ever pique my unabashed attention was in a McDonalds, in my home city, Durban, when I was too young to be conscious of my age and when my parents were not financially comfortable. It was a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), nestled between a Michael Jordan poster and something ringed with neon, and I realize now that whoever was hired as the culture-sprinkler for that particular franchise either had an ironic sense of humour or was too enamoured with the work’s iconic quality to pay much mind to its mood. Either way it made for an impressionable commentary on the setting (depressed loners at a coffee bar eternally awaiting service), and has always reminded me that at least part of art’s power comes from its stoic disregard for its own recontextualizations. I found I could fall in love with something not at first sight, but from idly studying it, like wallpaper, all the while clogging my throat with French fries. Hopper’s inextricable theme of urban alienation (which I would of course only read about a decade later) became apparent to me over time, and it started off certain pangs of the spirit I had only ever elsewhere contracted from untacky tourism posters and cute girls at my pre-school. I recognize the condition now as a very particular version of the empathetic epiphany, which is that assaultive, dropped-penny feeling of realizing that many billion other lifetimes had to be foregone in order for you to be handed yours, as well as that a true separation exists between your lived experience and every other individual’s. Given a few years, I came to believe in a few of my own definitions for the world: that Love, in the all-embracing sense, is the attempt to bridge this essential divide, between ‘me’ and ‘everyone else’, through a revolution of the collective consciousness2; that Love, in the romantic sense, negates everyone else for the sake of ‘overlapping’ one’s self with another3; and Art, as I understand it, is the evocation of the success or failure of either kind of reconciliation.

2. I imagine this is why the Sixties counter-culture is typified in the image of a gigantic substance-infused picnic: ‘free love’ can only be attempted en masse in the happy-go-lucky daytime with everyone present and incorrect.
3. Which is why it’s dissolution is so intimately scarring to either party and for a time can feel tantamount to (pardon the cliché) an amputation of a part of the soul.

I think these philosophical digressions are required here because I’m attempting to justify my ‘romantic’ conception of a lonely, timeless space from first principles, as it were. If I disregard my scholarly pressures and stay up tonight to see the Bankrupt Hours out, possibly strolling out to find an enclave from which to observe the black morning, I don’t think it will really feel like any kind of escape, except maybe one from routine. Embedded in youth is the idea of an objective kind of magic that is almost always eventually diluted by a series of alienating events: a prolonged divorce, a heinous puberty, the discovery of the non-existence of Father Christmas. But experience also brings more gradual humblings, with maturity more often being a state of survival rather than wisdom. Subjective magic also becomes a rarer quantity; not just because of this casual acquaintance with the facts of reality, but because one’s increasing self- awareness comes to cripple a vigorous spirit. So in these years we fight back against insane sobriety with various derangements of the senses: alcohol for self- forgetting, drugs for world-regarding and provocative ideologies for the synthesis of the two. I find I can no longer pass easy judgments. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, wrote that the modern challenge is to “live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned”, and I quite agree. My favourite place to stay in my head has irredeemably turned from the Witching Hour to the Bankrupt Hours, from the promise of innocent madness to the lure of waking dreams. And when I recall the inevitable occasions when I’ve happened to be awake to watch the latter – New Year’s mornings on the streets of London and Sydney, an all-night music video shoot in a boundless cinema, an insomnia session that occurred during this essay’s composition – I once again come to trust the unpredictability of the world.

Word Count: 1515

Concise Version:

A few months ago, I wrote a poem for a competition I didn’t win. This was not a tragedy, really. For me, any excuse to write is a necessary imposition, like a gentle ultimatum to a stowaway. And the composition itself was untroubled; its inspiration just one spontaneous phrase (‘The Bankrupt Hours.’) that I can’t help but take this opportunity to interrogate.

To be clear, the poetic moment I’m referring to is not the same as the ‘Witching’ Hour. That, I recall well, is the time in Roald Dahl’s imagination when Sophie awakes to find the BFG just outside her window, delivering dreams to innocents’ ears and stealing her away to keep his vocation secret. I enjoy reflecting now how that wonderful Welsh-Norwegian left an indelible mark on my childhood, though his affinity for the darker parts of fantasy did eventually turn me away, to other more pretentious writers. Then again, that’s an inevitable process for most children who choose to stick with literature. Thus, my concern in adolescence was what I enjoy calling ‘the loneliness of the long-distance reader’. I reckoned that anyone could become ‘literary’ given the right earned instant of self- appraisal. My ego is still in love with the cliché: a trenchcoated smoker in an all- night café, waiting out for dawn by gamboling through Cervantes, while indifferent ghosts pass by, each sigh appears as a smoke-puff and cool jazz emanatesfrom the ceiling.

I call this space ‘the Bankrupt Hours’4 because I probably imagine it as my recess from capitalism. To me, there is an anti-materialist element inherent to the moment, like heat in the Noontime. When Bob Dylan finishes ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ with ”When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose”, I visualize this. The privatization of the universe belongs to the daytime, and the world’s spectres come out into the common squares only when few humans are left to share them with. Literature is the veil of this nocturnal expanse because, superficially, it is a devoutly anti-social vocation, even if its canon is relatively

4. Approximately 2:30-4:30 am, that is, when no-one without a sophomoric point to prove, a career to save or a ridiculous jet-lag to wear off is usually awake.

cheap and ubiquitous. To read in public is to forego reality’s incidentals, choosing the best representation of the world over the most boringly plain: itself. The sociologist Erving Goffman famously claimed, “The world is a wedding”: that reality is a social category, ‘peaking’ in moments that amount to the sum of the attentions observing it. This is why we remember in detail our lives’ most conspicuously observed moments. It’s also why no moment has ever felt more catastrophically ‘real’ than 9/11, and why it will remain an impossible day to explicate. Therefore, in the night’s lowest depths, I imagine there to be a free space – an ‘unreal’ setting – for our indivisible soliloquys. The latter can be aspired to through art, but to experience, unreservedly, moments of spiritual bareness in solitude is to listen out for our own pathos. We become the audience to a bad one-man show. We see ourselves as just coherent fictions.

Of course, like most teenagers, I am also knowingly buying into a myth. The first painting to ever hold my gaze was actually in a McDonalds. I was too young to care and the place was my parents’ regular restaurant. It was a print of Hopper’sNighthawks (1942), and I realize now whoever was hired as the culture- sprinkler for that franchise was either being quite ironic or else just hadn’t seen past its iconic quality. Either way it made for an impressionable commentary on the location, and reminds me now that art’s credibility also comes from a definite dignified shamelessness. I discovered I could fall in love not at first sight, but just from idle study, even while throwing down junk food. Hopper’s key-chord of urban alienation became apparent over time, starting off a spiritual ache I have only elsewhere contracted from tourism posters and the occasional cute girl. I call the condition ‘the empathetic epiphany’: that dropped-penny realization that countless other lifetimes had to be foregone for your own’s sake, that an essential separation defines your identity as different. Over time, I created my own malleable definitions for Experience: that ‘all-embracing’ Love is the attempt to bridge this separation through a revolution of the collective consciousness5; that ‘romantic’ Love chooses to ‘overlap’ one’s self with just one other6; and Art is the expression of the results of either reconciliatory attempt.

These philosophical digressions are necessary because I’m attempting to justify my conception of ‘timelessness’ from its first principles. If I tried – tonight let’s say – to rediscover such a qualified space, I’m sure I’d be unlucky. In youth we can choose to believe in the factual existence of magic, though this innocence is always soon tempered by circumstance. But even as amateur skeptics, we seldom understand more of the world than our projection of it explains. Subjective magic also dries up: not just because we become less gullible, but because post-adolescent self-consciousness suffocates our temperaments. So we combat this regression into sobriety with anarchic means: alcohol for self- forgetting, drugs for world-regarding and provocative ideologies for their synthesis. Gramsci wrote that the modern challenge is to “live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned”, and I agree. I know my imaginary sanctuary has irredeemably turned from the Witching Hour to the Bankrupt Hours, from innocent madness to waking dreams. Now I recall the occasions when I’ve happened to be awake to experience the latter – New Year’s mornings in London and Sydney, a video shoot in a boundless cinema, an insomnia session that accompanied this essay- and once again trust in the world’s unpredictability.

Word Count: 1005

5. I imagine this is why the Sixties counter-culture is typified in the image of a gigantic substance-infused picnic: ‘free love’ can only be attempted en masse in the happy-go-lucky daytime with everyone present and incorrect.
6. Which is why it’s dissolution is so intimately scarring to either party and for a time can feel tantamount to (pardon the cliché) an amputation of a part of the soul.