Karine and I were on the way back from the movies at the Louxor Palais de Cinéma the other evening. Since it was a nice night – no, that’s not right. It was not a nice night or, not yet or, not again, a nice night.
It no longer signifies that the air was warm as we left the theater. Warm and cold fronts seem to change and change about in the atmosphere like the ticks of a crazy clock: cold, colder, warm, cold, warm, warm, hot, cool, cold, warm.
We now decide to walk only on grounds of physical or spiritual need. “Nice” has become “lucky”.
The walk east along the boulevard de la Chapelle is only for people who unconditionally love urban landscapes: all crash-banging elevated, enameled cast-iron pillars, blank walls and emptied space.
Hand-in-hand, we set off toward Stalingrad.
I was just opening my lips to begin enlarging on my new Theory of Vaginal Perplexity and its pertinence in respect of the socially and politically retrogressive Jihadi movement and its hypocritical patriarchist lickspittles when Karine said something I didn’t quite catch. No wonder, either. Using this type of abstract political language makes me temporarily unable to hear, or even notice, other people.
Even so, I am using such language to talk to Karine, who, like many people of a progressive bent, has a tendency to put things in abstract and analyzed political terms. So, like the cheese-eating surrender monkey I truly truly am, I try to mime what she most easily understands rather than just wind her up with perplexing blather she has no hope of ever getting.
The mime comes out as bombast, sure. But when two ways of expressing one’s self are so contrasting, what do you want?
For instance, hearing that Donald Trump has endorsed torture, Karine might say, “This man personifies, as well as legitimizes, the sense of radical victimization that masquerades as politics these days. Thus, his politics naturally has a fascistic expression.” Or, hearing of Marine Le Pen, the egregious American’s Gallic counterpart, murmuring on the special nature of white folks, she might say, “The question here is power. Such people want to put themselves into power. Thus, she mouths the narcissistic self-congratulation of the majority without necessarily believing in this or anything else beyond her own need for power. Heaven only knows what that woman will do if she climbs into office.”
For my part, I tend to express my socio-political opinions in terms of hidden erotic anxieties and fears. Thinking of Trump, I hear the wet slap of his meaty red hands on the pale, withered, buttocks of a superannuated prostitute. I share this man’s shiver of creeping dread as he realizes that, this time, he may just have to work too hard for the money. I think of Marine Le Pen and see through the quivering lens of my anxiety: the bead of sweat bulging out just below her ear as she makes me a coarsely-worded proposition in a public toilet. The proposition involves putting her hand on my throat.
it still a wonder that I am reduced to bombast in talking socio-politics with Karine? She thinks, then analyzes. I fear, then luridly, hysterically visualize. Even if I think that our views are quite the same in the end, I often wonder how is it that this woman can stand me?
She squeezes my hand too tight, often, so she may wonder the same, at least sometimes.
Anyhow, she beats me to the talking point when she says, “Did you like the movie?”
I did, so I say, “Yes.”
The movie was a Japanese slice-of-life movie called in French Les délices de Tokyo by Naomi Kawase. I have no idea what the English title might be, so it’s lucky for you “Tokyo” is spelled the same in French and English and that délices resembles a word that fast-food giants desperately want you to associate with their slumgullion.
Les délices is about how liberty can be expressed in a world of self-limitations and external constraints. In spite of that, and even in the absence of gunshots and car chases, it’s a good movie.
Jumping suddenly into the phosphorescent wake of my too-thoughtful “Yes”, Karine breaks in to say she believes we are ruining ourselves with the Hierarchy of Time.
“It’s this question of how much time you invest in worries over what hasn’t yet happened,” she declares. “I mean our concerns about things, rather than about the doing of them. You know, toi, you know … I mean about the way you judge how much Time you waste talking to the woman at the checkout counter as opposed to the Time you invest in worrying about paying off the house early or something.”
Some months before, Karine and the cashier at her regular supermarket had decided to “thou” each other – after ten years’ acquaintance, ten years of groceries and tampax and formal “you”. So, now they call each other toi and not vous. It comes to me that no remark, none, period, is ever a throwaway.
I lower my head slightly, turning my ear toward her, to catch her voice, which, I notice, is slightly hoarse.
“Expressions like ‘Invest your Time” are made up to mislead us into thinking that there really is a Hierarchy of ‘good Time’ and ‘bad Time’, ‘Time well spent’ and ‘wasted Time’,” she continues.
“We make as if the Time of Life is a sort of sophisticated financial package, a CDO, that requires Timely Action On Your Part… Or…”
The capital letters are hers.
To demonstrate the pretended outcome of not Taking Timely Action on the Time CDO, she draws the hand that is not painfully squeezing mine across her neck. She grunts, “Before the Special Offer expires. Tu comprends?”
We are just in the shadow of the number 2 Métro line tracks.
It is spitting rain. There is a long blank wall drifting off toward Stalingrad, blankness bathed in a fetid twilight rising from the tracks leading in and out of the Gare de l’est.
“Really,” Karine says, “In the Hierarchy of Time, worry about what hasn’t yet happened or that which might possibly happen is what creates good Time.” She breaks off, enlightened.
To herself, she observes, “This is why economic forecasters and astrologists and prophets are paid so well, though all admit they they are almost always wrong.”
“Anyhow,” she comes back at me, “Worrying about not worrying enough is what ordinarily Good people do before they go to bed or while they are ‘Relaxing’. If you talk to somebody just to talk to her, it’s a Waste of Time.
On the other hand, if you tell somebody that you won’t meet your deadline and don’t have time for a chat, you’re using Time well. Note that.”
She points her finger in my face. “Using Time well. It’s the Capitalist view of Time. It’s like the Capitalist view of money. In the Hierarchy of Time, Time doesn’t belong to us all, but to the Worthy who supposedly produce it, like money belongs to it’s supposed producers.
So. The Hierarchy of Time supposes that those who spend their precious Time worrying about what hasn’t happened yet are those who are using Time thriftily. Such folk are therefore worthy to have their Time in the same way that those supposed to work hard and save are Worthy of their money. Those who are like the lilies of the valley, misusing Time rather than using it by, for example, chatting to the supermarket cashier, are Unworthy.” She sighs.
“I mean, it’s ridiculous… Do the 62 people who own half of all the Money in the world produce it? And are there 62 big Time producers out there, who, along with all the other Worthy people, make and have all the Time in the world, too?”
She pinches her nose and glances at me.
“But you tell me, mon Tracy, where does Time come from, if not from all of us?”
I take my hand away from hers; she has very hard, itty-bitty fingers, like pinch-pliers.
“My mother is so worried,” she continues, “About how things are for me, for my sisters, my brothers, my children, our children, whether doing this or that or having done the other is or might have been, right, wrong or indifferent. So much so she convinces herself that next to me, next to her children, her friend dying of cancer is unimportant.”
She glances at me again. “Thanks to the imposed priorities of the Hierarchy of Time, both friend and death are unimportant, I mean. But, tu comprends? She’s not really thinking of me or the others. She’s thinking about her concerns for me, for them. It’s obviously not the same thing, me and concerns about me, them or concerns about them.
But the Hierarchy of Time Mom’s bought into deludes her into believing there’s no difference between me and the idea of my needs, just as it deludes everybody else who buys into it, deludes us all into believing firmly we are thinking about others when we’re really thinking about anything else but. So, If I wake Mom up in the middle of the night and ask her what’s on her mind and she’ll say, ‘You, chérie’ and can’t possibly mean it.”
Karine chokes with dismay at the idea.
“Underneath, like the rest of us, she’s really, truly worried about really tough things like the dying friend. But the Hierarchy of Time gives her, and all the rest of us, the perfect excuse for not thinking about those tough things. It lets her and us be more afraid of death than anybody presently is of Living Badly.”
She chops the air. “Tu vois, thinking about death would remind her that she can’t do anything about it. Remembering that she’s powerless over the biggest fact in Life would lead to all sorts of Un-hierarchy of Time thoughts – tu comprends?
In the end, it would remind her – remind all of us too – that the only thing that we can really control is what we do, can do, personally, with Life.” She stops in her tracks.
“Yiyiyi! Where might that lead, feeling responsible for our own life? Would we achieve Communism of Time?”
She puffs her heeheehee laugh then heaves the biggest sigh I have ever heard slip out of her.
We continue the rest of our walk in silence.
When we reach Stalingrad, we have a glass of spicy red wine while the waiters wipe the tables, stack the chairs and suggestively dim the lights.
I try to wake up some interest in my Theory of Vaginal Perplexity but, at this hour, my bombast splutters ineffectually, so I lay off quickly.
We hug and kiss, then turn our backs against each other to go on to our separate Métro entrances to go to our separate households. We’ve both got to work in the morning.
Neither one of us had paid enough attention to the time, and neither knows the Métro has closed.
Both of us wind up taking a taxi, separately.
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