Sunday, September 27, 2009

Plinth

I must have banged the door shut on my entourage, like a raving, debauched guitar god from the 70s, and swivelled back to my bathtub full of vomitty fluid and fallen face down into it. You don't need to like your entourage do you, especially when you don't like them. How can you like them when they are weaselly and wallowy and a bit flaccid? So that felt nice, and I liked the isolation and the distinction of my pungent bathtub. I felt like a capital letter amid the lower cases. I felt like people in Moldova or Tajikistan, with their Moldovan farm lands and Tajik goats, and their thin lips smirking at the Russians in the distance. Banging doors on people or things or the past always distinguishes oneself and puts one on the plinth.

Ask Lord Nelson, if he finds standing on the plinth easy, with his back shot through in a battle some 200 years ago. It gives him distinction and plenty of altitude. Years of practice have made him a good background, a familiar canvas in front of which you stand and pose. That is what happens. As you stand on the plinth, an invisible face might suck you in from the foreground and spit you onto the background.

Seeing you after a year is a strange experience. I am down here, you are there on the plinth and the entourage is there too, giggling inanities to one another. I can't look at them anymore, that's why I stare at you. But you smile at me, knowing that I want to be with them and find comfort in inanities.

1 comment:

Vasu said...

Inanities.
That's what they precisely are. That word, should be put in double quotes, underlined and written in capital letters.You go near them, take a whiff and feel that your pungent bathtub is a better place to be in, after exactly ten minutes. That's what I felt when I was there. I wish I was there with you to tell you that in person.
But on the other hand, that could have been quite awkward, with the principal inanity looking at me and evaluating me.
I would have liked to see the person on the plinth. Last year, she was quite beautiful. But then again, that was when I had just landed quite naive, without any ideas of the complexities of the postcolonial predicament.