yorick: evidence #2

☺Hello again.

I'm going to be bold and suggest that you listen to this (if you have spotify, sorry) while you read. Like the Alan Partridge autobiography, but serious.

SERIOUS

This week's haul:

(for the time being this evidence section is a huge backlog of things I have collected, and the dates are jumbled into one foggy mush. some things date back many years)

Wong Kei, Chinatown. Talked about this place a lot. The particular atmosphere of the place is just right for thinking and writing.

In local park place, hot

The dog with the tie on is here again

Someone saying “hello” (baby voice)

But I know this dog

Belongs to an old man with a pornhub hoodie

His hoodie says P O R N H U B on it

in big orange letters

And him, his son and his wife all live together and they have pink hair

I can’t actually tell if he’s their son or if it’s a love triangle

They are definitely swingers

although that’s an outdated term

They were when it wasn’t

In the pink house

Where hippies use the back door

And it surely smells of something unique

Whatever that may be

it’s masked by smell of dog

The white dog who wears a tie

He’s not aware, I hope

Of the meaning of the shapes

hulking in the pink light

I hope he sleeps right through it

He’s wearing a tie, for fucks sake

Well I was sitting with my brother and he said, you know, I’ve got into the habit of taking rather a lot of photos of my belly button. It’s just the places you can’t see, you know. Back, buttocks, all that. I just want it bloody documented you see. Problem is, all this new tech, baby brother can hardly manage the stuff. Lost like a child in it all. So he’s somehow, by accident as he tells me, set it up so that they’re his wallpaper or screensaver on his computers, or whatever you call it, and he can’t seem to change it. Buggered if I know how either, so I took him down to Curry’s and the young chap at the desk had a look. Terribly embarrassing you know; what’s the problem? Well, you see, I’d really like to change this picture to something more appropriate, it’s just up at the firm they’re getting rather sick of seeing it every day. Clients are usually very polite but I see their eyes drifting from mine, even when discussing most pressing matters. In the end I could see how stuck he was with it, so I got my daughter to change mine to a picture of my arse. Hoping the city folk will pick up the trend. HR will shit!

I’m on the way from Bologna to Rome with MH. We haven’t spoken in a while and we’re catching up. He asks about love. I explain to him that I’ve met someone, and it’s going well, but I don’t know where love comes into it, or how long that takes. Am I there already, or is it somewhere in the distance ahead? Do I even need to know? He is inquisitive and focused, but not crude, and he doesn’t ask her name. He stays quiet, in the way he does when he is waiting to give a great piece of advice. When we sit down at a table on the train he retrieves his notebook and draws me a diagram.

“When we are in Bologna, we are entirely indifferent; we are not concerned to admire in any particular way the person with whom we shall perhaps one day be madly in love; even less is our imagination inclined to overrate their worth. In a word, in Bologna "crystallization" has not yet begun. When the journey begins, love departs. One leaves Bologna, climbs the Apennines, and takes the road to Rome. The departure has nothing to do with one's will; it is an instinctive moment. This transformative process actuates in terms of four steps along a journey:

1. Admiration – one marvels at the qualities of the loved one.

2. Acknowledgement – one acknowledges the pleasantness of having gained the loved one's interest.

3. Hope – one envisions gaining the love of the loved one.

4. Delight – one delights in overrating the beauty and merit of the person whose love one hopes to win.

This journey or crystallization process was detailed by Stendhal on the back of a playing card while speaking to Madame Gherardi, during his trip to the Salzburg salt mine.”

When we arrive in Rome I am tired, but MH is exuberant and wishes to take the air on the Spanish steps, as he puts it. I watch as he strolls off into the late afternoon sun and then I bring our bags up to the rooms in the hostel. It looks like it was once a hospital, the kind they used to put people in simply to file them away while they die. It has a certain peacefulness about it. It’s very big and all painted the same yellow and blue, with dark wooden doors. Once I’m inside I feel as though I’ve been there all my life. I walk the cool corridors and, coming to a balcony overlooking a ruined garden, I try to write down some phrases I liked from MH’s theory of love.

In Bologna

We are entirely indifferent;

we are not concerned to admire

When the journey begins, love departs

We cross the mountains, reaching desire

The departure has nothing to do with one’s will

It is an instinctive movement

Here and now, in Rome, you walk, approaching the crystallisation of love

When MH returns later that evening he’s flushed and wild-eyed. He knocks on my door and is already walking away down the hall when I open it. His shirt is unbuttoned and he’s very sweaty and red. He’s shaking. He fumbles with the keys to his room so much that I have to unlock the door for him. He isn’t talking at all but there’s a great intensity to his movements, and as he steps into the room his arm shoots out and grabs me by the shoulder with surprising strength. He raises his eyes for a moment and looks at me, breathing slowly and deeply. It’s one of his usual moods. A bad turn. I nod to him and he gets onto the bed. I close the door and walk down the hallway back to my room, once again turning over his words from the train. I wonder what’s bothering him this time. He often drinks himself into this mad stupor. Only sleep can bring him back to his senses when he’s that way.

The next morning I awake to the sound of low voices speaking in Italian outside my room. In my half-sleep I anticipate a knock, and it comes. I open the door to see a short nun in a white smock looking up at me and pointing down the hallway, where a tall thin man with glasses and a black beard is standing in the doorway of MH’s room. Sorry, he has died in the night, it’s his heart, says the doctor. Did he seem agitated? Yes, all the time. That was how he was, I say. The doctor gives me a tight-lipped grimace. He gestures towards the bed, but I cannot go into the room. From the doorway I can see his feet, still in his red boots, at the end of the mattress.

I go outside and smoke two cigarettes on the front steps of the hostel. After ten minutes the doctor comes downstairs and tells me that someone will come in the next hour to arrange moving the body. I can’t really look at him, and suddenly I feel like a child as he puts a hand on my shoulder, firmly, in the same spot where MH had the night before. I cannot help myself any longer and begin to cry in a hacking laugh. I feel stupid in my blazer and trousers, clothes for an adult. My friend is gone, I lost him. He always had an air of going. Sudden departure was one of his most consistent traits. He actually fucking did it. He was always saying it would happen, but I never believed him.