Afternoon unsprung
I’ve come to the coffee shop to gather myself. This afternoon was meant to have been many things. None of them involved drinking a cappuccino at the late hour of four pm in the hope of writing in peace from elsewhere than amongst the draft papers on my desk. In fact I had awoken intending that my work should cleanly come to an end by midday and that after some lunch I would get to the guitar practice which I’ve been putting off all week. But, after a couple of hours of preliminary work, I was seized by a new hunger for 'culture' and so I resolved to whisk off D for an afternoon visit to the British Museum exhibition on Sufism. We shall meander, I thought, all while pretending at the play of two artists comfortable in that knowledge of themselves. A little pretense is not such a bad thing. It dissolves the gun shyness which forbids us our true selves. So I promised D an adventurous afternoon with all the embellishments.
The work is now done but it took me well into the early afternoon and left me off on a shelf somewhere between my intentions to tune my guitar and to run and catch the Picadilly line to the museum. A half hour ago I still stood teetering in my socks in the middle of my bedroom, a sort of badly disfigured sketch of the composer of adventures from this morning. It dawned on me that I absolutely could not practice guitar in the oppressive air of this flat I’ve been cooped up in all the morning. That reluctant feeling was then surpassed by the appetite for a lengthy writing session. Yes, I must stretch out of this miserable hunched posture and throw open to the world. My deviousness set to work. I repurposed my earlier promise to D into a half-as-good proposal that we take coffee and write together somewhere in the city. This was no compromise for D, who had in fact been working hard on her short story all morning and with the expectation of the afternoon’s surprise. She sounded bruised on the phone as I awkwardly fumbled around the subject of our plans. The conversation dwindled into many stutters and hesitations on my part and she correctly sensed it was better that we leave to each their afternoon. The call ended and it took me the better part of the walk to Literary Café to reach the same conclusion. She is infinitely more perceptive than I could ever be in matters of emotional weather.
These sips of coffee are collecting my focus. Let me try again. Deviousness is an instant reflex of mine and the great source of my worser side. It is not some assimilated behaviour that stands in need of working through. I rather believe that it is a perverted expression of my own sense of play which gets touched off whenever I get anxious for going against my essential nature. That I must write to get at the Thing, in this case. It may seem suspect if I say I do not worry about this reflex. But given these currents of self-renewal in the past six months, I fully anticipate that the present deformities in my character will give way to a more essential version of myself. This is not the haughtiness of the lottery winner who thumbs their unearned wad of notes and licks their lips in anticipation of palatial real estate and five course dinners. Rather mine is a sort of emerging creative lucidity which is preparing to excavate my deviousness from its roots. I shall be in the same cosy little flat come the end of the summer yet viewing it all with this tremendous new clarity. So the worries I have brought to this coffee shop are a sort of mental bad weather. But all bad weather eventually passes. Just outside the Lit. café window, a pair of pigeons stroll up the sidewalk in parallel as if an old married couple perfecting their daily constitutional. Heads bobbing up and down in unison, if not in actual agreement as to what should happen next. So here I am at the café.