Buy Nothing Day: On Shopping

Shopping is punishment. That is not to say that it is unpleasurable; quite the opposite. Shopping intoxicates on every level. It is pleasure to the point of torture. Busy high streets, with their chaotic, human trajectories, or department stores, with their exotic smells, are settings for dreams, for tragic stories of addiction and debt.

We access shopping, as an experience, via the pornographic visual regime of the high street, with its endless succession of perfect, gleaming surfaces and moments, which promises orgiastic adventure (without commitment or risk), narcotic pleasure (without cease or exhaustion).

Shopping is not only abandon, but abandonment, of fear and restraint, but chiefly, of need; for ‘shopping’ is all that is unnecessary. Unlike a trip to ‘buy new socks’ or ‘replace my iron’ shopping does not legitimate itself by successful acquisition.

It is something we do. In French we ‘faire le shopping’, ‘do shopping’ (or even better ‘make shopping’), with all that that suggests of activity. Shopping is a practice. It is the practice of which consumerism is the culture of which advertising is the language. Shopping is aimlessness, shamelessness, wandering, drifting, chance encounter, glamour, luxury, selfishness, frivolity.

The objective of shopping is not to buy something, but to buy anything, to be in a state of readiness to purchase. Like all pleasures, it is founded in anticipation. Indeed one gets a double helping of it; anticipating first going shopping and then the shopping itself. In that sense, it is pure. It is a state of mind, or rather of emotion, in which rational decision-making plays a supporting role.

To shop is to navigate an emotional landscape, which requires a sensitive internal compass: ‘Where do I feel like going now? How do I want to feel?’ The places where things can be bought take on the characteristics of uppers or downers. This shoe shop gives me a feeling of energy, that book shop boosts my self-esteem, this clothes shop exults me, that one chills me out.

Shopping reflects its emotional idiom. It is an appetite that creates a hunger. One is consumed, consumes. The inverse is also true. Not to lust is not to live (or at least not to have meaning). Shopping without making a purchase is so draining, because it is unconsummated.

If, in practice, one seems to be like a blue whale, pacific, beautiful, surfing the krill, for sustenance, in truth to shop one obeys a remorseless, shark-like logic, impelling one into ravenous perpetual forward motion. Shop until you drop; buy until you die.

Purchases extend the emotional experience beyond the duration of the shopping expedition. One purchases, grips, possesses not a watch or a hair product, but a feeling. Marketers and advertisers trading in suggestion, implication and deferred meaning, know this well. In one of my favourite films, a (rather disturbed) character dismisses therapy as selling you back to yourself; and he’s right in a sense.

Who does not need to know ourselves better, love themselves more? This truth is twisted and returned to us in the clever description of shopping as ‘retail therapy’, whereby we can become better acquainted with ourselves, or at least a fantasy of ourselves, an image, rather like that cast by J.K. Rowling’s Mirror of Erised1, which reflects one’s desires.

Advertising is rich in the metaphor of reflection and revelation of self-knowledge, promising that we will come to know (and love) ourselves better through our next purchase. In this way shopping combines the carnal with the spiritual. Purchase transmutes the emotional experience into the physical object to be savoured again into the future; indeed, it sacralises the mundane space of everyday life, with the treasure of the shopping world. Shopping becomes a day’s work, a performance, an act of heroism.

And though shopping exhausts (literally uses up, burns up, consumes) mind and body, present and/or future finances, even finally itself as an experience (hence, one can be ‘shopped out’ or ‘spent’), that pair of jeans or bag you bought earlier holds the promise of restoration, renewal, revitalisation, resurrection. World without end, amen.

Farewell to Love: A survey

Dear Gwen,

I am leaving you. Firstly, I would like to reassure you that neither of our lives are in danger, nor am I in any kind of ‘trouble’. Neither is it because I have met or fallen in love with another person. It is not because I no longer find you interesting or sexually attractive.

In fact, I love you more than ever in most ways. For example, you are more beautiful now than ever. That is not just my opinion. In the last few weeks I asked friends, acquaintances and strangers - of all genders and sexual persuasions - of varying degrees of familiarity to rate your beauty out of 10. I won’t go into my methodology now, but it turns out you rate a solid 7.375. You are almost 74 per cent beautiful!

And guess what? While all the respondants to my questionnaire found you to be photogenic, they all found you more attractive and funny in person than in your picture. I tell you this because it is unlikely that you will not meet another person.

I will really miss our lovemaking, which is deep, intense and satisfying. Your body is wonderful and I love running my fingers through your red hair, which I will always associate with autumn. Nine out of ten survey respondents agreed that you look ‘amazing’ against a winter sky.

And it is sad that we will no longer have those great conversations. I did not know that about the soap and the Aztecs. Nor did 82 per cent of respondents. I am sorry we will not be able to finish our conversation about the revival of the Czech language; I urge you to reconsider the centrality of the national theatre in the fostering of a distinct Czech identity.

Anyway, I want you to know that I will always love you and never purge you from my memory centres. Please forgive me. 64 per cent of respondents felt that it would be the best way for you to move on and find fulfilment with another being.

Love,

K-7666-V’nak

Love across two dimensions

Tommy loves Lily. Wishes he could spend more time with her, even when he does spend time with her. Lily loves Tommy. Wishes she could spend more time with him, even when she does. Lily frequently phases in and out of reality. Like a soap bubble popping, ceasing to be.

It is hard to carry on a relationship over parallel dimensions. It is hard on them.

Tommy might be holding Lily’s hand, when she disappears. There is a smooth hard sound, like that of a heavy lock being turned and a faint smell, like charcoal, like wet leaves. Tommy stands alone on the street, sits alone in the restaurant, lies alone in the bed; he looks surprised, embarrassed, bereft.

He might be about to say something about dinner or the colour of a cloud, when she disappears. He might be about to say something poetic; tell her she is beautiful; ask her to marry him. But Tommy never speaks his heart, because at any moment she could disappear and he would be speaking to the air.

They can go on like that for years, those two. An itch they cannot scratch. A love they cannot ignite. Each waits for the other; waits to reappear to the other. And what if, one day, they do not return? What if Lily does not pop back into being from wherever she’s been?

Tommy could wait like that, wait and worry, until he grows old, bitter, both. He could wait and then stop waiting, meet somebody else, until Lily reappears and derails his life or doesn’t. He could live like that, with a cloud over him, shaped like Lily, like a cut-out of her, until he dies.

Lily could fear for her sanity, fear for his. She could gnaw at herself with guilt, curse fate, for dividing her between time and space. She could pull at him or push him away, hate herself, hate him for the guilt she feels about coming and going as she does.

But they do not do that. Tommy waits. Lily appears. They smile. And whether or not they are in the same dimension, they love one another. They love one another.

The problem with Corvalua

Why will noone publish my history of the Republic of Corvalua? It is not because of the significance of the subject: between 1612 and 1738, Corvalua hosted a major trading port for tropical hardwood and sugar cane and a stop-off point for the slave trade between Africa and the Americas. Nor is it because of the time-frame of the study, which charts the golden era of the port from its last days as a French penal colony (known then as Coeurvalois), to the fire which eventually destroyed the city.

The problem is that Corvalua does not exist.

A fiction editor told me it was not fictional enough. ‘The problem,’ she drawled, sucking her white wine through her teeth, ‘is that it could be real.’ I agreed wholeheartedly - I wasn’t drinking - I argued that this was just why she must publish my book. ‘I wrote it,’ I said, ‘and even I’m not sure it isn’t real.’ She would have none of it. She was at least ten years my junior. I suspect she was drunk.

Another editor, this time of non-fiction, and an old school friend, could hardly hide his embarrassment. I cited the incredible feats of engineering that allowed Corvalua to build ‘skyscrapers’ before the advent of reinforced concrete and several underwater tunnels connecting the Quartier Chinois and Port August; its uniqueness as the first state to proclaim Atheism as its official religion, while maintaining (brutally, at times) complete indifference to religious creeds; its Swiss-style democratic system. He saw me to the door with a pitiful smile and I noticed for the first time that he was going grey.

Was it not enough for those editors that almost 250,000 Corvaluans died in the typhus epidemic that broke out in 1729, brought by a British privateer vessel? Or that the fire - which seems to have started in the cathedral - rumoured to have fallen into ‘corruption and luxury’ - consumed a further 90,000 and left a pall of smoke reportedly visible as far away as the Azores? History has been unkind to the Corvaluans once? Are we to repeat the injustice by letting them disappear into the mists of time, even if imaginary?

On the Personal Essay

Essay writing was nothing new before Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon (who also had a cool name), gave it a go in the 16th century. Thereafter, and for the following three centuries, it became quite the done thing to read and write essays of varying degrees of informality.

In the course of reading about cities, architecture and spaces, I have come across a lot of interesting essays from the 19th and 20th centuries. There is something about the essay form, which seems to encourage free and creative thought. Maybe I’m just reading good essays.

The personal essay seems an apposite form for the internet, which requires brevity and concision. (Blogging is itself an essay-istic endeavour; confession without a confessor, dialogue with oneself. Perhaps because the internet is a sort of half-way house between a virtual environment and a real practice, self-expression here does not quite have the feeling of action, which makes it feel safe.)

Happily, too, it seems that the informal essay is making something of a comeback, under the guise of Creative Non-fiction (of which more later): it even has its own journal! While searching for an essay by Montaigne, I found Quotidiana.org a veritable treasury of classic essays, presented with evident love by Patrick Madden.

Category F

Well, here it is, my first short story in a decade?! It is called Category F. I won't preamble. Please enjoy it, if possible.

(Actually, this is a little bit dishonest. Nobody knows about this blog. This blog is a secret, at least for the next couple of weeks, until I build up a head of steam.)

This is really just a part of my process. I feel that now that my story is on the blog, now that it's out there, bobbing along on the internet, I don't have to worry about it any more. Now I can forget about it and do something else if I want. Or I can rewrite it later or write another story, sew a hat, do a drawing. But at least it's out there. If somebody wants to read my story, they can read it.

Cool names

Here are some more cool names for stories I am writing:

• The Throne family (of whom I have already mentioned Piers, but not his twin brother, Boris).
• Herman Champ, an ambulance driver.
  
• George Tusk.
  

I must also mention the following place names:

• Lolmont Grange and Lolmont Heath.
  
• Hedging Burrows.
• Drool Hedge and Drool Head.
  

I don't know who any of these people are. I have more of an idea about the places.

Cranking creative widgets

I am thinking about posting my short story, Category F, here on the blog. I've always thought that if I ever actually got around to writing (rather than just thinking about it), I would make the fruit of my labour free to read.

I take a similar view to writing as I do to drawing. (If you've seen my drawings, you may have an idea not to expect a high degree of polish from my writing.) It's not that I don't want my work to be good; I do. It's that I fear that if I waited to produce the perfect drawing or story, I'd produce nothing.

I'm a big fan of process. I'm buddhistically inclined. Focusing on process feels a lot more useful than focusing on outcome. So I treat my creative work like widgets. A widget is a widget. Some of them are bronze, some of them are tin, a few are gold. They are all widgets and I learn something useful from producing each of them.

As for making them freely available. If it's good enough for Cory Doctorow and Kelly Link, it's good enough for me. I haven't finished Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift, but so far I strongly agree with his theory that creative work is diminished by being commodified. The best creative endeavour is its own mean, its own end and its own reward.

This reading, by Kelly Link, of her story, The Hortlak, inspired me to start writing again. Brilliant music too. Cheers, Kelly.

Amazing names!

I really like the drawings of Jon Burgerman. He's kind of a hero of mine. He is really good at drawing and he has an amazing name. I love amazing names.

Here are some names that I have made up recently:

• Flop Jophlin
• Fingdoll Bushie
• Daphne Skullet
• Jonathan Skewer
• Piers Throne (more members of the Throne family to follow)
• Darren Soup

(All name suggestions are welcome.)

Anyway, Jon Burgerman has an amazing name. He's also a very talented illustrator. I wonder if he considers himself an artist, or even an Artist. From what I've read, I don't think so. So I also like that about him.

I go through phases of liking to draw or do other things more than writing (which is my main bag). I went through a big Jon Burgerman phase about six months ago. Unfortunately, this makes it hard to prove that I've more or less always doodled like this - I have college notes and school copy books to prove it - but when I saw Jon Burgerman's drawings it made me realise that it was okay to draw like a spaz.

(Pardon me, Mr. Jon Burgerman, you do not draw like a spaz.)