Jonathan Dodd’s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
We all go a bit doolally at times. I always thought it was an essential part of the human condition myself, a resource rather than a weakness. I never subscribed to the notion that all persons of the human persuasion were supposed to be stiff-upper-lipped and well-groomed and upright and sober at all times.
I’m not referring here to the famous English eccentricity, or the recognised state of ‘dottiness’ that surrounds some amiable people like a light dusting of sweet icing sugar. I mean those moments in life when we wonder what it’s all about or whether we’re embarked on a course that’s going somewhere worthwhile. Or in those times when we try or manage to put down an intolerable burden, before becoming free of it.
What will happen after will be much more interesting
This is why I like French films so much. Take American films, for instance. The plots most usually go like this. Boy meets girl (or vice versa, or variations thereof). Something happens to drive them apart. They spend a lot of time struggling with outer (or inner) forces, and eventually they are reunited, and kiss (or more, depending on the target audience). Walk off into the sunset. Happy ever after. End of story.
Apart from the massive unlikelihood of this being in any way the end of the story, given the divorce rate, etc., it’s still only the beginning, because inevitably what will happen after will be much more interesting, as they adapt and change. Unless it becomes like going to Heaven and wondering after a few millennia whether there’s more to it than harp-playing and listening to those heavenly hosts singing the same old thing over and over.
Everyone talking in Foreign and driving too fast
I like French films because they’re much more true to life. Despite everyone talking in Foreign and driving too fast on the other side of the road and having to read subtitles. This is how French films go. There’s a group of people who know each other. Family, friends, workmates. They kiss a lot and eat big meals under trees all together, and they talk a lot about life and art and stuff. Like you do. This is already much more true to real life. Isn’t it?
But then one of these people suddenly falls like a clap of thunder (un coup de foudre) for another, and the thing is reciprocated. They rush off, as people often do, to have a wild relationship with each other. Deserted wives and/or husbands have to be comforted and/or confronted, everyone takes sides, it’s as if everyone is on a tray and they get thrown up in the air. After much talking and eating and driving too fast, gradually everyone falls to earth in a different configuration and they start getting on with their lives again. Until the next coup de foudre.
There’s not an atom of you that’s the same as it was
I once heard that every cell in our bodies gets rebuilt completely every seven years. That means that there’s not an atom of you that’s the same as it was seven years ago, and the same goes for the seven years before, and so on. I always liked the idea of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man too, in which everyone takes a new role every few years, and has the chance to make some changes along the way.
I always thought of these moments as fault lines in our lives, where we might change direction or think about the progress of our sojourn here in this life. Nowadays we live longer than in Shakespeare’s time, so it’s more like ten or even twelve ages of man. For instance, the legendary mid-life crisis most often happens around the sixth or seventh. I’m sure we can each chart a few of our own moments of metamorphosis, or perhaps a change of scene or job or partner.
There should be struggle and an element of danger
Such moments are hardly ever easy, and they often cause us to cross-cut our direction against the grain of those around us. This is a good thing, partly because we upset the equanimity of their lives too, and maybe we’re going against much received wisdom too. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, there should be struggle and an element of danger involved. Change that’s easy is seldom the right kind of change.
This is fundamentally what distinguishes real life from computer games. There’s more at stake, and rebooting isn’t generally available. There’s a certain amount of mythology about life, which can be seen in those American films. After your struggle, everything settles down and there’s no need for further change or further struggle. The mythology is that this is a reasonable expectation, and that having nothing to struggle with is good for you. But it doesn’t happen like that. Ever. And even though we know this, we want it to be like that, because we’re afraid of change. And it’s comforting.
Things change all the time
Change is good. Even if it’s scary and we don’t know what’s going to happen. Actually, if you disagree, I have news for you. Sorry to be the bringer of bad tidings, and you’re perfectly entitled to shoot me if you like, but things change all the time. Just as we are constantly changing physically, with the configuration of all our cells looking slightly differently in each regeneration, so we change in ourselves, as things change around us.
We’ve had a pretty exciting year so far, in terms of the amount of change. And I have a strong feeling there’s a lot more waiting to come out of the woodwork. Sometimes things get better, and sometimes they go the other way. There’s no telling. It’s no surprise to me that it’s the people who’ve had it good who complain the most, and the people who missed out on the good times who welcome it most. And there’s a certain fairness in that, I think.
Rewrite the same story many times over
I’ve always prided myself on never repeating myself in these columns, but I’m thinking more and more that I’ve already gone over this ground once (or maybe more than once!) before. I started to worry about it, but then it seemed like a thing I really believe in that doesn’t lose anything in the retelling, so I decided to go with it and see if it’s still true. In this way I also prove my point. People change. Today’s change, People, is that I’ve decided to be less worried about repeating myself. I’ve decided to be less worried about repeating myself.
In fact, I think I should have an annual ‘Same Change’ column, where I bang out another version of the same old message, like variations on a theme. It could be a whole new art-form. Instead of writing a whole book of separate short stories, I could just rewrite the same story many times over, and people could decide which was their favourite.
It probably won’t suit everyone
My favourite, and alas no-more-to-be-read-or-seen Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, had a difficult father, who made his precarious living as a painter. All his life he painted the same scene, of a lake with thin trees. Sometimes he would paint a grouse in the foreground, but that was his only variation. It drove Kurt mad. So we need to recognise that being exactly who we are may not be the perfect thing anyway, and even though it may suit us, it probably won’t suit everyone else.
I have no answer to this conundrum, whether conundrum it be or not. Every day we get up and do the best we can. Or we don’t. At the end of each day we go to sleep and the whole thing starts again. We have the diurnal rhythms, and the seasons, and the tides, and we get older, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes it isn’t.
Be careful what you dream
I once read a short story, perhaps by Ursula Le Guin, in which a woman sleeps every night, as usual, and dreams. She starts to notice that the world she has dreamed, slightly different to the world of the day before, is now the world she wakes in. She goes to see all sorts of therapists but nobody ever believes her, and she starts to become frightened. When she dreams, her dreams become frightening, and so does the next day’s world.
So be careful what you wish for, and be careful what you dream. Because you might not like the way things turn out. I think I would prefer to let the world be the way it is.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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