19 - 25 July 2001
Issue No.543
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 19 - 25 July 2001 Issue No.543 |
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Pulling the plug
It may well be a function of aging when what once appeared the most innocent of pleasures no longer seem that innocent. Indeed, that simplest of activities, one in which children endlessly indulge, is now fraught with guilt: gone, long ago, are the times when it was possible to simply daydream, whiling away the hours in indulgent fantasy. The world is too mean a place to allow such idling without the sudden intrusion of a spasm of conscience, though if you are ruthless enough about setting aside a time and space it should remain -- though only just -- possible to retrace this particular escapist route.
The important thing is to allow yourself to forget, for a fixed period, the concerns that every day impinge. Forget the faces that you meet in the street, in the office, as you go about your daily business. The quiet desperation of the lives of others is not the stuff of which daydreams are made. Forget, too, the larger picture, that ultimate excuse of hands-off mangers, for it can only distract from the activity at hand. The world of the eco-warrior and the zealot, of the venture capitalist and his clients, is not a place sympathetic to the whiling away of even a single hour in unproductive fantasy. Inimical, too, is the merely quotidian: the telephone bill to be paid, the shopping to be done, the dinner prepared, the dog to be walked or the plants watered. The empty toothpaste tube stares you in the face, you have been intending to buy more for days. But it can wait: there is always a little bit more to be squeezed out.
Set the time and keep, for a guilt free experience, to this timetable. The venue, of course, will be determined by individual preferences though I would suggest you try the bath. Not too hot, not too cold, and leaving enough hot water in the tank to top up should your allotted time exceed 15 minutes. Allow the bathroom to fill with steam, it will take the edge of all that hard-edged porcelain and obscure any nagging little defects, any tiles that need regrouting or a somewhat slapdash approach to cleaning around the taps. Such things act as little barbs, catches to keep you tethered to an overweening domesticity, and are best not seen.
If you have a propensity to theorise about housework, then this is, in all likelihood, going to prove a fruitless exercise. The same, too, if your reveries tend towards the pathological -- those are best kept at bay, or else indulged exclusively on the psychiatrist's couch. They certainly should not be deliberately induced.
It is, perhaps, dangerous to use a newspaper column as confessional. Dangerous, under any circumstances, to commit one's own reveries to print especially when, like mine, they tend alarmingly towards the prosaic. Yet there are time when it does good to get a little something off your chest.
Important to stress, if only in self-defence, that what is described below is by no means a daily occurrence. Once in a blue moon do I so indulge, and it is not that every daydream is the same. But this one does crop up occasionally. And if what it reveals is hardly an exemplary personality, neither is it something for which one can be condemned out of hand.
Perhaps it is merely a product of professional frustrations that sometimes, in a steam filled bathroom, lying in a bath that is neither too hot not too cold, I sometimes imagine myself in the role of an interior decorator. (Quite an admission there, I suppose, if one wants to examine it closely.) Nor am I just any old interior decorator, but one with several clients continuously on the go. They range from the fabulously wealthy to the perfectly ordinary: their only common denominator is that they all, willingly, place their interiors in my hands.
Now the thing about interior decorators, I have always imagined, is that they tend to be employed by people who A) have a lot of money but who are B) completely insecure when it comes to their own taste. (Wherein, perhaps, lies a slight, but by no means insignificant, pathological element in this fantasy, for these clients place unquestioning trust in their decorator, i.e., me. A hint, perhaps, of the will to power, a glimpse of something dictatorial, a power exercised, tellingly, in other people's homes. But enough of the less savoury aspects of the daydream. Enough self-flagellation.)
I wander pointedly through room after room, closely followed by my clients. They hang on every word, though often, even to me, and I am the one making the utterances, the words themselves make little sense. My approach to the job is perhaps best described as Sibylline. Gnomic utterances are accompanied by florid gestures: "This will be flat," I say, indicating four walls, and the clients nod.
"It will all be flat." With a more sweeping gesture the entire apartment is implicated. The clients nod. "I mean the colour. The colour will be flat." No further attempt at elucidation. I know they are floundering. And still it goes on, from room to room to room.
In my approach to other people's domestic spaces consultation is hardly a two-way process. The aim, in the end, is to provide them with an interior that will consistently scream design. There will be vast expanses of colour, juxtaposed with other colours. The experience will be like living in a painting, to the extent that the client will be utterly conscious of having placed his or her green cup of coffee on this particular table in a room with walls of these particular colours. Or else the space will be drained, bleached, bone-like, as unforgiving to a sloppy gesture as it is to a sloppy thought. In the ideal world of the fantasy, however, these will be places people want to inhabit: whether Fauvist exercises in chromatic saturation, or contemplative, Zen complexes, they will brook no argument. And they will be loved. However unpromising the start. At which point, wrinkled, one emerges from the bath, looking not at all like Venus being born.
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