# 49. Humourless Little Prig. (How Not To Be One.)
With love and Hux.
Dear Readers,
If you’ve lived long enough, you know that crossing to the sunny side of the street is a choice we (try to) make over and over and over to avoid the shit sandwiches that block our path. This seems to be true whether we are being exterminated for being born on the wrong slice of land or being snubbed by the Uber driver when we’re already late for the dinner party.
I was quite young when I figured out that the purpose of art (making it and consuming it) was alchemy. To take the shit sandwiches and turn them into a cornucopia. To help us attend the Movable Feast, aka Life. We never know what we are going to get. Or when. Or why. So we may as well just dig in! Because the option - not going to the party at all - sucks eggs.
I don’t publish everything I write, and this piece was destined for purdah, but then I met an old friend for dinner last night who felt much as I do about the whole business of the Pursuit of Happiness at this point in history.
So here it is, on the table, my latest pudding.
Buon appetito!
Sincerely,
TS.
It’s dark because you are trying too hard…
I am learning to love the bomb.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Okay.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Simone de Beauvoir said: “At night I would climb the steps to the Sacré-Cœur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.” Should we not weep, Hux? For beauty? For futility?
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
The world is burning, though. Baby genocides. Mass extinction of species. Things are heavy, Hux.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig…
Can you hear me, Hux? Of course, you can’t. You’re dead.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
You already said that. Also, you’re dead.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
Ah, so you can hear me.
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Oscar Wilde said that. Shall we laugh at the mess we made on this planet, Hux? Push dear old Dickens under the rug? Seems like that attitude might come (is coming?) back to bite us in the ass. No free lunch! Even if lunch is a shit sandwich.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Okay, that I can get behind. God has left the building. The godmen know this, but flog the dead horse for its pound of flesh. Nothing new.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
Death clarifies Life, true. Makes it shine like a diamond. But must we also decay?
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
Where to? A Brave New World? Mars?
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
🙄
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
👍🏽
Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag…
Oh, shush, Hux. There are things you don’t know. For example, we don’t say ‘sponge bag’ anymore. It’s ‘toilet bag’. Also, I had to look up ’sponge bag’. I love sponge bags. Especially the ones they give you on flights, the ones with the tiny tubes of toothpaste and earplugs you will never use, adding insult to injury about the waste of it all! But can we talk about me for a minute? I am trying to remember when I most felt ‘on tip toes with no luggage’.
It was when I was a child.
As a child, I was less interested in you and more interested in the outfit taking shape at the tailor’s for the impending Grease-themed school social (Go, Rizzo!). Or tweezing ticks from my dog’s fuzzy paws. Or going with my big sister to Melody, a music store down the road where serious-looking men would steal songs from LP records and put them on mix tapes for us in exchange for a pocket-money-sized fee. Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice. They stole too. But we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know much. And it was nice.
A teenager in India in the 80s and 90s, I was Hux. Back when my friends and I lived in a Sovereign-Socialist-Secular-Democratic-Republic. Or so they told us at school. No Internet. No Spotify. No Coca-Cola. No live stream of grizzly geopolitics to gag on. No nothing. Just the looming school social where the ones we loved didn’t love us back, and our best friends held our hands through the heartbreak, and the DJ was stupidly good-looking and if you “phone-fooled” or “blank-called” your crush from a landline after the party they’d never find out who it was because there was no caller ID and no CCTVs and no credit cards and no car loans - all tiptoes and no luggage.
The evenings after school were for a stroll (no wallet, no money, no ATM card, no 12-digit individual identification number). To just walk and walk and talk and talk (no malls, no McDonald’s, no Roblox, no global pandemic). In huge gangs of girls, we would amble aimlessly, in the sea breeze in Bombay before Mumbai. Or with my dog-brother and grass growing in the middle of the road and Fine Young Cannibals on a mixtape of stolen music playing scratchily through a bright yellow Sony Sports Walkman, I would sit by the sea… and just watch it. Shapes may have been swirling in the shadows, unseen forces birthing the world we would inherit in a minute, but to Us of Then, it smelled… fine. It smelled harmless. It smelled like Teen Spirit.
In frayed denim shorts and a pink sweatshirt, a good dog by my side and Billy Ocean in my earphones. Get out of my dreams, get into my car! Everything was perfect and exactly as it should be, and both of us, dog and girl, feeling so very cool and so… satisfied. A temple elephant would go by. Followed by a red double-decker bus. Then that crazy guy on a horse, full-tilt, weaving drunk amongst a smattering of boxy-looking homegrown cars.
But things changed. As they do.
And so now, when shards of the Before Times pierce the moment I live in, I catch them and make them crystallise on my computer screen. It’s like seeding clouds. Or climbing the steps to the Sacré-Cœur to watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. So beautiful. So useless!
But I don’t weep. I just wonder, Hux, what you are trying to say I should do with it. I think it is to remember that if Rome does fall, we will always have Paris. And if it doesn’t fall, or is rebuilt in a day, someone will need to teach the children how not to be Humourless Little Prigs! To remind them how to be ~
completely unencumbered.
I’ve probably misread your poem, Hux. Forgive me, I did the best I could under the circumstances. Or rather, I took what I needed to transmogrify the shit sandwich du jour. Also, I had to look up ‘prig’.
Prig /prɪɡ/ noun: a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if they are superior to others.
Prig is a great word, and I have added it to my vocabulary. Take that, AI! I know a lot of prigs and am probably a prig myself about some things. Such as AI.
I think what I am trying to say is - thank you, Hux. Despite your deadness, you still counsel me. Scratchily through a bright yellow Sony Sports Walkman.
I Need You Tonite.
Tara .. this, in my opinion, is one of your best ... you've made it all so tangible and vivid ... as always ... and it makes ME want to weep .. with gratitude and a sense of loss ... for the times we were lucky enough to experience ... thanks for engraining these memories in my mind and in print.
Thank you!