Sobriety

I am sitting outside a laundrette in Warsaw drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while my clothes are being washed.

The washing turns behind the glass. Shirts, trousers, socks, underwear, all performing the same small revolution. Forty degrees. Fifty minutes. Another Sunday administrative task.

Later I will watch football.

Then I have some emails to write.

I have a new project in my head and, unusually, I do not feel the need to make it happen immediately.

That may be sobriety.

Not not drinking.

Something slightly different.

For much of my life I have had a problem with being seen.

Or perhaps with not being seen correctly.

I wanted people to understand that I was clever. That sounds appalling written down, which is probably why it is worth writing down.

I have a PhD.

I think about things.

I read Hegel voluntarily.

There is clearly something wrong with me.

I have written books, although I remain adamant that I am not a writer.

Writers appear to have some relationship with writing that I do not recognise. They talk about craft and characters and sentences and notebooks. I write because something inside my head is unclear and putting words around it sometimes makes it slightly less unclear.

Or creates a more convincing illusion of clarity.

Perhaps that is all thinking ever does.

There may also have been another demand underneath it.

Read this.

Then you will see me.

Perhaps every article, argument, book, furious Facebook post, intellectual performance and carefully constructed explanation contained some version of the same plea.

You haven’t understood.

Let me explain again.

The angry man was particularly good at this.

The angry man knew exactly what everybody else had failed to understand.

Entire institutions could apparently be organised around the mysterious purpose of failing to recognise his significance.

It must have been exhausting for them.

It was certainly exhausting for me.

There is a peculiar violence in demanding to be seen correctly because the other person is given an impossible task.

They have to return your preferred version of yourself.

If they don’t, something has gone wrong.

Perhaps with them.

So you explain harder.

Look again.

No, properly.

Look.

There is another version of me which requires considerably less explanation.

The footballer.

I was good at football.

Really good, actually.

A natural.

That may be one of the few things about myself I can say without feeling either particularly boastful or particularly defensive.

I could see space.

I understood where people were moving.

I knew when to pass.

Technique came easily.

The shape of a game made sense to me before I had words for shape or systems or relationality or any of the things academics subsequently invented so that people could get paid for explaining what footballers already knew.

And despite occasional allegations to the contrary, I understood teamwork.

Football is impossible otherwise.

You cannot spend ninety minutes demanding that everybody recognise your individuality. Well, you can, but eventually nobody passes to you.

The good player looks up.

Where is the space?

Where are the others?

What is possible now?

Then the ball moves.

There is something wonderfully un-neurotic about that.

Nobody asks the midfielder to explain his childhood before accepting the pass.

The ball arrives.

You control it.

Or you don’t.

Then there is the drinker.

I know him less well.

That is partly the problem.

He has occupied an enormous amount of my social life while remaining strangely invisible to me.

Drinking is peculiar because the person doing it experiences the evening from inside an increasingly unreliable narrator.

Everything seems slightly more interesting.

Then funnier.

Then more emotionally important.

You become warmer, cleverer, more open, more charming, more aggrieved, more honest, more sexually attractive, more entitled to call somebody.

Other people may be seeing something rather different.

An ageing man who is a bit pissed.

Slightly too loud.

A little clumsy.

Repeating himself.

Funny, perhaps.

Gauche.

Affectionate.

Irritating.

Occasionally a little unhinged.

I don’t know.

That is the point.

I cannot see him properly because by the time he appears I am no longer a reliable witness.

And perhaps I liked that.

Perhaps disappearing from myself was part of the attraction.

A pub gives you a role.

Another drink gives the evening somewhere to go.

People arrive.

People leave.

Stories get repeated.

Everyone becomes interesting enough.

Loneliness becomes sociability.

Anxiety becomes anecdote.

Desire becomes confidence.

Anger becomes truth.

For a while.

Then morning arrives with considerably less interest in narrative structure.

Sobriety does not make me a better person.

I distrust that kind of language.

There is something too Protestant about it.

Good sober people over here.

Bad drinkers over there.

Life is rarely improved by another border.

I have had wonderful nights drinking.

I have loved pubs.

I still love pubs.

Some of the funniest, warmest and most generous people I know are people I have been drunk with.

Alcohol did not fabricate all of it.

But neither was it neutral.

What I notice when I am sober for any sustained period is something much less heroic.

I become more hinged.

That is the word.

Things remain attached.

A disappointment remains a disappointment rather than turning into a referendum on my life.

A flirtation can remain a flirtation.

A silence can remain silence.

A football match can be lost without the fall of Western civilisation.

Someone can fail to answer the telephone without requiring fourteen further attempts to establish whether telecommunications remain operational.

The body stays closer to the event.

Perhaps that is what I have been noticing recently.

Sadness arrives.

I can feel it.

Sometimes I can almost see the old machinery preparing itself.

Here comes the thought.

Here comes the body.

Here comes the plunge.

Except increasingly there is no plunge.

The feeling is not smaller.

Sometimes it is immense.

But it seems capable of being contained inside me without requiring me to become it.

Maybe this is what sobriety means to me now.

Not abstinence.

Not moral improvement.

Remaining present.

The person who feels the feeling is still there five minutes later.

That matters because without the drink, and increasingly without the anger, I lose two very useful methods of controlling how other people see me.

Anger says:

You will take me seriously.

Alcohol says:

You will find me entertaining.

Writing perhaps says:

You will understand me.

Love says:

You will choose me.

Academia says:

You will recognise that I know things.

Journalism says:

You will listen because I have something to report.

All perfectly reasonable activities until they become demands.

I cannot control how I am seen.

This should have been obvious by now.

People see whatever combination happens to be standing in front of them.

Oldish.

British.

A little scruffy.

Funny.

Pretentious.

Kind.

Self-absorbed.

Generous.

Difficult.

Clever.

Ridiculous.

Too intense.

Good company.

Bad company.

A father.

An ex-husband.

Somebody’s friend.

Somebody else’s complete nightmare.

All possibly true.

None requiring adjudication.

I don’t get to stand beside every person I meet holding explanatory notes.

No, no. You need the context.

They can see me incorrectly.

They can even see me correctly in ways I don’t particularly enjoy.

That belongs to them.

This feels strangely connected to money and work too.

For years asking for work could become mixed up with asking for recognition.

It is an awful lot to ask from an invoice.

I still need money.

I still want people to publish things.

I am about to write emails asking academics I have never met whether they might be interested in a research project I have only just invented.

But perhaps the transaction can become cleaner.

Here is the idea.

Here is what I can do.

Does it interest you?

Yes?

Wonderful.

No?

Fine.

The ship remains mine.

That feels lonelier.

Of course it does.

Once you stop demanding that institutions, lovers, employers and audiences tell you where you are going, you discover that nobody else is actually steering.

There is just you.

A small boat.

Some weather.

Occasionally somebody very nice aboard.

And a disturbing amount of ocean.

But it also feels safer.

Cleaner.

I am not going to spend next year hawking myself around Europe trying to persuade somebody to recognise whatever magnificent person I apparently ought to have become by now.

I want to make something.

Once a month I want to leave Warsaw.

Kirkenes.

Narva.

Brittany.

Cornwall.

Places at edges.

Walk around.

Read.

Look.

Talk to people.

Ask them who we is.

Then come home.

Perhaps somebody will fund it.

Perhaps somebody will publish it.

Perhaps not.

The journeys still exist.

The conversations still exist.

The work still exists.

A footballer knows it.

You cannot score the goal before receiving the ball.

You cannot play the pass that was available five minutes ago.

You cannot spend the match shouting at the crowd until they agree that you are good.

Look up.

See the space.

Play what is there.

The washing has almost finished.

I have smoked several cigarettes while writing this.

Not wise.

I know.

The cigarette is perhaps the remaining tiny gesture of rebellion against the humiliating fact of mortality.

Yes, yes.

Exercise.

Vegetables.

Sleep.

No alcohol.

Blood pressure.

Cholesterol.

Drink water.

Apparently the human project concludes with everybody becoming extremely well hydrated shortly before dying anyway.

So I smoke the cigarette.

Coffee beside it.

Cars passing.

Washing turning.

A very small rejection of death.

Or perhaps an extremely inefficient collaboration with it.

Either way, it is mine.

Tomorrow will contain ordinary things.

I am increasingly attracted to ordinary things.