How did I do at that social event. How do you measure a flock of geese in flight?

                     Measuring our Performance

Druscilla opened the door of her West London, bachelor flat. She had been ruminating ever since she left 'that family' an hour ago. She saw them every six months, she would say, and as ever they were bursting with life; full of ideas; plans; projects. Those four children, although not saying much, you just know their minds are just bursting with ideas, like pocket, bloody Sartre’s.

 

She pressed the answering machine, no messages to disturb the continuing inquisition she had been carrying on ever since she left them. How she had done. What did they think of her? Was that the right thing to say and so on in a circular post mortem of her performance.

For God’s sake, she chided, it wasn’t an audition. Yes she had done enough of those in her times. Yes, she reflected proudly, Twelfth Night, remember? she played Olivia’s nurse. Oh that was a fun production. Still that was many, many years ago.

Wonder what those two really thought of her...wonder what those children really thought of her. Stop it!

She had only been to afternoon tea with friends. For goodness sake. Now sitting on her postage stamp lawn, with tea cradled in hands increasingly arthritic she was more calm. Yet, despite herself, soon she found herself back in the inquisitorial dock. How had she really done?  Still...she had always done a spot check after a social engagement. The life not examined is not worth...who said that?

But how do you measure a flock of geese in flight, no one said to her. We can’t measure our performance because a measuring device must have stability, yet any measuring devise must be measured against another measuring device and so on into infinitude. It was as if the ghost of Heisenberg was sitting on her shoulder. 

OK...she was aware she was being mechanistic, none the less, she returned to the comfort and reassurance of her measuring. Was she pleased with any thing she did? She would not be denied this taking of her emotional pulse. Well they seemed to greet the creamy fudge she had brought as a gift with some glee.

OK, she did well selecting the fudge, she told herself.  But who was she telling? She was telling herself. She was indulging herself in the grammatically reflexive. Yet for the first time in her life the contradictions in this frightened her. Was she telling some other part of  herself. Really what she was trying to do was please this other, this other part of herself. Schizophrenia frightened her, it was a taboo word. Living alone as she did, her mind did tend to swirl. Still, she reflected, she had some friends, and making compensatory measuring she felt her self eminently sane by comparison when she thought of their individual foibles. Yet living alone, the mind did wander. Then like some obsessed hornet she returned to how she had fared with 'that family'. 

She recalled him animating.‘... you may measure your performance by placing it at the altar of that other, that all knowing Buddha in your head, who you are dying to please..,but there is no Buddha, there is no one there to prostrate yourself in front of, no little man, no little homunculus to defer to. For who would the homunculus defer to? ...another little man, and so and so on, into bureaucratic infinitude.'

But she had always offered herself up to this Buddha in her head. This self, this oh too solid self, who would arbitrate and nod sagely approval or disapproval; who would tick her performances off for her.  But where did this Buddha get its set of rules from? Society, norms, family values, discourses? If there was no one there then...at that moment she felt bereft as if she had lost a companion, a friend.

Thinking of it all she felt a bit queasy. He had mentioned something about vertigo when thinking of such things. ‘Ontological vertigo’, is that what he said?  She had never grasped what 'ontological' meant, even thought she had looked it up in the dictionary several times.

She thought of reading a book so she walked the few steps to her fussy living room and picked up the bound copy with the protruding velveteen page marker. Had they been impressed by her reading since she last saw them? Yes, something confirmed in her head. Thank you, friend. “What about the ‘performance’ in reading?” Passive reading, active reading and so on, there is a whole performance around reading...” the eldest child had exasperated. 

By God, that family had a lot to say for themselves. She picked up a book and returned to the garden about to sit down she recalled the eldest child again... talking about the tyranny of narrative. How passive one is in the face of this authorial device.

She put he book down. What was that other thing her father was going on about? Oh yes, conscience. “Consciousness cannot function without memory.”  Sometime she worried about her memory, the ageing process and all that. She surveyed her minute garden. The peas were growing.  “But you don’t splay your consciousness on anything it is not a tool you use to survey the world, it is the world, you don’t choose to use it or not. You are it.” What did he say, “...if the music is playing (consciousness) you are the music. There is no point of 'nowhere', where we stand on our battlements and survey the world through our consciousness – our consciousness is the world. All this straining”, he said, “...after cool dispassionate objectivity is a nonsense.”

At this juncture she felt a tad queasy. Something she ate while she was there. No, for the fare, as always, had been delicious. That woman was a cordon bleu cook. So hard to be better than them at anything! Damn

And then she felt dizzy. Yes, he had said that, at first this new thinking is like “riding a carousel” he had said it would be “vertigo inducing.” So she bent over and placed her head between her legs. For this crouched posture she regarded the upside down nature of her petunias like a line up of quantum soldiers against her upside down fence. And from this vantage point on the world she reflected.

Anyway, what does he offer in its place? Yes, what does he recommend in lieu of her former certainties. “Stop straining after meaning,” his voice echoed into her upside down world. “Stop looking for the essence. Bricolage, jouissance, ludic  collage, pastiche, parody,” even the irony he advocated as a way of looking at the world was delivered in a French lilt.  

She raised her head from its ridiculous position. “Of course be political,” she recalled him saying, “and do what you can, but essentially realise the surface nature of this.  Once you do this you travel with a lighter load, you are a more sleek performer, not weighted down by archaic humanism; not burdened by attesting to the Buddha in your head. Travel light.”
“Surf the wave” one of the younger children hesitantly offered. Sometimes she felt it was all California speak. 

The eldest child was deciding on a University. She had asked her what was she expecting when she got there and she had sweetly replied that she would not be seeking out the grand recits; the great ideas. No, like her Dad she was incredulous towards the metanarratives in books.  Books yes and lots of them but no deifying them as ‘greats’.

Ok, very well, young missy, that may as well may be. She put her book down and picked up the weighty tome of a travel brochure.
Full of exotics places. She thumbed the pages, been to most of these ...she mused. I know where I will go this year and she dogeared the page. I may be childless, but I have travel, my travels are my children.
Then like some woodpecker she was at it again; should I have said that?  Oh that part was alright, still, I shouldn't have said that.


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