Au fond de on, en cherchant bien nous ne trouverons jamais qu'un certain nombre de ils et de elles qui se sont brouilles et confondus en se multipliant.
Gabriel Tarde: Les Lois Sociales
Whenever you want to understand a network, go an look for the actors, but when you want to understand an actor, go and look through the net at the work it has traced.
I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes.
I came out of the shop and it seemed foolish to go home right away, the city was teeming around me, it was Saturday evening and what was I doing going home at this hour and there was no way I was going to finish reading the Latour text even if I did go home.
It had been a trek to get into town in the first place. Arsenal were playing around the corner, Finsbury Park station was full of yobs, and once I’d gotten through the yobs I was in the middle of a bunch of goddamn tourists coming back from Primark.
The London I envisage in my mind is rarely the London I encounter when I leave the house. When it is, it makes my breath catch. When it isn’t, I want to destroy her. Not the people – the city itself. They can’t help it if they don’t come up to scratch. The city can. She should be above disappointing me.
Right?
I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes.
I had taken the Piccadilly Line to get into town. London Underground is running a campaign on the line to ‘generate a more positive atmosphere during peak times’ and encourage staff and commuters to ‘re-enter the environment of the network’. It’s titled ‘What is the City but the People?’ after the Coriolanus quote.
Fuck the people. That campaign was designed for me. And me alone.
Fuck networks. The beauty of cities is that they allow you to disappear into the throng. And in that throng, to create a reality that is yours and yours alone.
A tube journey isn’t just a way to get from point A to point B. It’s a way to get to point B without seeing the derelict areas you wish would disappear. The ones that insult your aesthetic sensibilities.
The walk home on weeknights through Highbury & Islington or Barnsbury is a way to pretend that you, too, are posh. You live in a house with a Smeg fridge and a Gaggia espresso machine and someone you pay to iron your clothes.
On the weekend, you visit Hampstead and walk the streets and pretend that the houses whose interiors you see belong to writers and artists and families like the one you, too, will have one day and that the books on those bookcases – because these houses have lots of bookcases, that’s why you walk there in the first place – are obscure. Or old. Or gifts from someone long dead.
On weekday mornings you get off at Farringdon instead of Barbican even though it’s farther from the office – because it’s more cinematic, this way. You are a city worker, you tell yourself. You work in the city. This will never cease to amaze you.
Reading Villette a few weeks ago, you ferociously underline the passage in which the protagonist is first seduced by London, ‘wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment’.
You are on the tube, about to get off at Farringdon, as you read the passage about her preference for the City over the West-end. ‘The City seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds,’ Lucy tells you, as you got off the train.
‘Lucy, You don’t know the half of it’, you think. But really what you’re saying is, ‘Thank you for allowing me to romanticise my life’. And, ‘You’re right, Lucy. But let’s keep this between you and me.’ And ‘For how much longer will I be able to keep telling myself this?’
Leaving Carnaby Street, you get lost in Soho like you always do. You’re looking for the fluorescent frozen yogurt shop whose garishness would insult Wilde’s sensibilities. You are buying time.
You don’t need frozen yogurt. You need ideas and a way to link them into a coherent narrative.
You need words and they’re not coming.
And you need to understand the text you’ve been avoiding.
Right?
I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes and I came out at Piccadilly Circus and my mobile phone beeped and it was a text from my first love, this Italian from my mother’s home town who arrived at LSE last month, down the road from the school I’m attending, at LSE, would you believe it, at LSE, where the social theorist I’m reading used to teach, the social theorist whose way with words may be causing me to fall in love even though I don’t get what he’s saying and want to scream why aren’t you here to explain things to me? and this guy’s asking me why the dramatic tone and he’s not getting what I’m saying and I’m thinking about the ils and elles who’re brouillanting and confonduing and multiplianting themselves and my God this is all too much.
So I buy the frozen yogurt I don’t need and go back underground. On the tube ride home I hide behind the Latour text to eavesdrop on the Italians sitting in front of me. I edit out the parts I don’t like.
I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes.
Tonight I will email my thoughts to a friend in Colorado who, while I’m sleeping, will use Google Maps to trace my path.
He will write me words of reassurance that by tomorrow I will no longer need.
Leaving the house I'll run past billboards whose facades will have changed overnight, past new roadworks and signposts and a faulty traffic light that can’t make up its mind whether to say stop or go.
On the Victoria line I will fall in love with the first passenger whose sleeve brushes mine. At Kings Cross, I will play matchmaker with the other commuters – on the Metropolitan, I will long to be the woman in the next carriage. I will come out at Farringdon sweaty and feverish but the city will understand.
Right?
The city lets me be all the characters I am today.
She, who changes in shifting swarms of people as they come and go and come again.
Tomorrow, I will remember a different version of this story. And she probably will, too.
