The Passengers, page 21
The dreams are weird and disturbing. I don’t know if it’s a by-product of being locked down or my mental health problems or anything else. Sometimes it’s very prosaic stuff that takes on a sinister, disturbing aspect. I was living in a shared house, renting a room in a house, I think. The people I lived with were at times familiar, at times complete strangers. There was a very sinister atmosphere. At times, the kids were there with me and I must have been my age. Other times, I’m perhaps nineteen, twenty, and living in a shared house like I did back in the old days. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details now, like I always do. And I wanted to be able to give you more detail. All I know is that things like this leave me feeling really off-kilter for a big part of the day, if not the whole day, and I really need to drag myself out of it. It’s very strange. I will try and get you some more at some point. At the moment this is all I’ve got. I’ve only just managed to open my eyes. I’m looking around at the room [laughs]—I know I’m awake now. Eurgh.
132.
I went out to Holland—we had a promotional cup which had a little tear-off thing on it and you could win prizes, and I needed this sorting. I was in mid-conversation with one of the Dutch guys about this promotion. Probably I was five minutes away from finishing. And he went, Excuse me. I went, Sorry? He went, Five o’clock. I’m going. What’s going on? What’s going on? Where’s he going?! He went, I finish at five. Nobody pays me after five. I start at nine, I finish at five. I do nothing before or after. And that wasn’t just him. They all went! They all went.
At the time, if I’m absolutely honest, I thought they were not particularly conscientious about the business that paid them their wage. And that’s changed. Over the years I’ve thought, Do you know what, they absolutely had it perfect. They’re right. Why would you work for nothing? Why would you work so many hours that you become effectively non-productive—or less productive? If you give a person ten units of work to do and they can do ten units of work, and they can do it well, you’ll get ten good hours of work out of them. If you give them twelve units of work, not only will they not do ten, they’ll probably be lucky to do eight. And the eight that they do will not be as good as the ten that they previously used to do. You overload people and you end up putting them under stress, you end up making them chase their tail, because they’re trying to cover their tracks, they’re trying to pick up on mistakes, they’ve lost their timetable, and they end up delivering a poorer performance. So it is a false economy.
Don’t fall foul of living to work. You work to live. Don’t live to work. It’s advice that I don’t think I’ve particularly taken on board for most of my life. Age is an enlightener. People have different perceptions of what old is, but for me, when you start to get round about mid-fifties onwards, you start thinking about your mortality a little bit more. It’s then that you look back and you think to yourself, God blimey, I made so many sacrifices for a career that actually didn’t deliver any tangible benefit. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to suggest that it’s all woe, doom and gloom and everything else. However, however—whoever lies on their deathbed saying, God, I wish I’d spent more time at the office?
133.
There’s all sorts of cheesy aphorisms about doing things—you know, Feel the fear and do it anyway, or whatever, all those things. It’s not very helpful, cos you don’t know whether it was useful until afterwards, so you can make mistakes and you can have regrets. I really hate that whole idea of no regrets. How can you not regret things? How would you ever learn anything if you didn’t regret stuff? It can make you feel more of a failure. I don’t have that kind of simplicity available to me. I don’t even know how to think in that way.
It’s feeling a little bit scary at the moment. I’m unemployed and I’m trying to move into a new field, and I’m older and I’ve just done some studies and, you know, just feeling like I did when I was twenty-four or whatever. I’m like, Oh my god, I’m here again, except I’m forty-three this time. It feels like people aren’t gonna give me the benefit of the doubt so I’m quite afraid of what’s gonna happen to me, career-wise. I was trying to be a musician for years, so I always had part-time jobs, quite nice ones. I ended up having really nice ones towards the end. Then I got made redundant. There’s lots of reasons I didn’t do that well as a musician, and I can simply just say that I wasn’t quite good enough. Which is fair enough, but there’s lots of people who aren’t that amazing who still manage to do something. I think I was afraid of fully committing, of really going hard for it, and I think that’s what I’m trying not to do now. Not compromise too much, because there’s no point. You might as well go for it.
There’s this Frank Ocean tune that I’ve been listening to a lot, and there’s quite a cheesy bit, I don’t know if it’s his mum or an aunty giving him a bit of a lecture about being himself. I’ve never really understood what that meant, Be yourself. I’m like, Pfft, who knows what I am? What you on about? What is that? But it’s been going round and round in my head. Sometimes those cheesy phrases make sense. I’ve started to think that is the key to not being afraid, in some contexts—accept that this is the kind of person you are and that’s what you’re gonna have to try and be.
134.
This took place some time in the mid-to-late eighties, with my family in ________ , over Christmas. My brother was there without his partner/wife—don’t know which she was at that point. Because before they had kids, he came to us and she went to her family. Made sense. My grandfather was there, who was quite a distinguished, important man, but also a bit of a shit. As my father used to say, or still says, He didn’t believe in family. Anyway, he was sitting there in the first-floor drawing room of this beautiful house in the golden yellow armchair. I was in there with him, just him and me. And he said, in a rather annoyed [voice], I didn’t realise ____ wasn’t coming for Christmas. I’ve bought her a present. Rather than saying, Why don’t you give it to [my brother] and he can take it to her when he leaves? I said, I’ll have it.
So he handed it over, and it was something I coveted, cos there were a couple of others in the family. It was this beautiful wooden chopping board made by a proper craftsperson. My grandfather was very into crafts, particularly the potters but also the wood people. It’s quite a thick board. I don’t know what wood it’s made from but between the slats that make up the board there’s a beautiful inlay of a blue strip of wood and it was a very fine object. So I took it. I took it home [laughs]. And it’s still there in my kitchen.
It’s not what it was. It’s very battered up, the little blue inlays are very faded, it’s blackened at one end. It suffers pretty much every night from the massive brown slugs that somehow crawl into our kitchen in the early hours of the morning. And they just go for the wooden boards, so when you come down in the morning they’re covered in slug trails. My brother and his wife ______ had three children. But when the youngest was ten, ______ died of breast cancer. That was nearly twenty years ago. And so every time I use this board, which is pretty much on a daily basis, I think of _____ . And it’s good to think of ______ , but I think of ______ with a massive wallop of, What a shitty thing to do. And I hope that I’m not that person anymore.
135.
I am afraid of getting old, I’m afraid of dying, I’m afraid of getting an illness and dying, I’m afraid of getting a diagnosis [laughs]. I’m afraid of how I would react if I got a diagnosis. Would I be brave and deal with it? Would I suddenly really appreciate my life as it is and each day as it is? Or would I just hate everybody? And then how would I approach death? Would I like to find a nice rabbi?
I’m paying for my funeral costs [laughs]. I have this plan. My mum said to me, before she got Alzheimer’s, she said to me, I’ll pay for the funeral. And I just thought, it’s really wrong that your mother should start paying for your funeral. There’s something just not right about that. So I did, because I didn’t know where I wanted to be buried and I thought I’d want the Jewish burial. I’ve been paying into this funeral plan that costs quite a significant amount of money but I don’t go to the synagogue. Cos I don’t really want to go there. But if I leave the synagogue, then I don’t have the funeral plan because you can’t take that package and apply it to a Reform synagogue, where I’d probably much rather be. Maybe it’s like gym membership? You pay for gym membership and you don’t go, you think, Okay, I didn’t do it, then start with something else.
I feel that I’ve got to a point in my life where it’s towards the end [laughs]. Kids moving out, everybody’s parents are either dead or dying or old. I suppose the thing with Alzheimer’s is that it’s such a visible process of decay. And that whole thing of turning back into a child again, like a baby. That kind of helplessness. Loss, I suppose. I think maybe loss. Maybe it’s loss. Loss of opportunity, loss of fulfilment, of being somebody or leaving a mark or a trace or something. How important is that? I guess it must be important because I’m talking about it. And then I think, What’s next? In between what’s next and death is the thing I’m at. This thing where suddenly years seem short. What am I going to be like as an older person? I don’t know. I don’t know.
I don’t know.
136.
I believe in total predictability in the way things manifest, at least in my life, in the sense that some occurrences and re-occurrences seem to have a pattern. I don’t really understand if it’s me trying to find a narrative or if the pattern actually exists. Or if it’s just me trying to pick out certain elements that might have a correlation with each other. That would be my answer at the moment.
As soon as I graduated from secondary school, well, before graduating from secondary school, about three months before, from one day to the next, my life came crashing—in the sense that I could not fathom anything anymore. Words had emptied out. I’ve never understood the clinical word for it, but I think it was like dissociations and psychotic beliefs or something, whereby I could not fathom certain concepts. It was very strange but I don’t think it’s incidental that these doubts aggressively came into my mind. They were entering my mind so violently. I could not stop them. I remember at some point I was not even going to the toilet because I thought that if I was going to the toilet it was not me going to the toilet but only a physical figment of me. It was very confusing.
But then, when I studied my degree, I learned that all these things that were bothering me and were stopping me from living life in the ordinary world have actually served as a basis for anthropology and cultural studies. The things we were studying could be used as a framework to analyse the crisis. I was able to recognise them by reading them. I understood that it is this unknown that is being studied, is being speculated on. I realised that it’s not like I’m disconnected from the world—actually it kind of proves that I am connected to the world and that I perceive all the forces that draw me into the world. Although I didn’t feel alive at that point, I realised that was the confirmation that I was alive. I try to use different perceptions and put them all into one flux. Like a stream, a flux in a philosophical sense, something that is going forward despite all of the contingencies.
137.
It’s okay, but in the moment now, England, everything’s crap. Because everything change. No work. So we can’t sort it, our life. We struggle in the life. Everything is crap. Like myself, I lost my job, yeah? I’ve been in the company twelve years? And after that they’ve found out in my body I have a problem for operation. I been in operation for valve replacement so I can’t sort it, my life, myself. So I’m happy about this, but the problem is we are not working. We are struggling. We’re struggling for the life. Everything’s no good. In the moment just we try to find some work. Very, very hard now. Very, very hard. Is no job. Just if you see something, you see the board say they look for the people, when you going there is no work. So we don’t know what’s going on now in England. Before it’s not like this. Very, very difficult.
You know, I have two brothers and one sisters. We are here in the UK. All of them, they are struggling as well, the same problem. No work. Only one is working now. The one in Glasgow. For London is no working as well. But everything now in England it change, so we don’t know the next generation what they are do. We pray God we can save this country as well. England’s like our country. We pray God this country everything be fine. Give more work, more good people, good people in the Parliament, you know? And make people happy and the next generation they’ll be happy as well.
My wife here sometime when we’re walking on the streets, we see some people and they try to ask maybe some penny to buy some drink, you know? If she have it she give. Because we don’t know. We don’t know. Because the world is too short. Everybody in this world, we are like the [speaks French] passagers, you know. We passagers. We’re going, we just don’t know the place we stop. Like today it’s me, I can drop in there or die. Everybody in the world like that. If you see something you need to try to help. Because you never know tomorrow.
138.
For the last two years I’ve had cancer and I’ve still got it. I’ve got Hodgkinson’s. I got the all-clear in January, that’s why we went on holiday, cos they said they’ve found more now and I’ve got treatment from next week. That place there is where they do all the electrical, electronic—not chemo, when you have chemo you go to hospital—but there you can have radio treatment. That’s where I went first of all, I spent three months in there having radio treatment. Which is amazing—I thought it would be done in hospital, but it isn’t, it’s done in an office block in the middle of town.
It’s been hectic. I started off with bowel cancer and then we got Hodgkinson’s, but to the end. But I’m sixty-odd. You expect things to go wrong. I’ve had a good life. I’m back on the chemo next week. I had twelve sessions before I went on holiday. You lose your hair, obviously, but it’s growing back a bit. You have your chemo, you go home, you feel sick, you’re tired, you’re not well. Next day you’re okay. And you’ve normally got two week, two or three week, before your next session. And you just live a normal life, you’re just on tablets.
I think you make your own luck. I think if you’re sitting on the bench waiting for the lottery to come in every week, that’s not gonna happen. But you can make your own luck. You can go and work hard, earn money and you can have your holidays, have your flash car or whatever you want. You know what I mean? As for fate, I don’t know where that stands. I think, wrong place wrong time, most of it, isn’t it? If something happens, it’s like the wall falling on you—one minute earlier I hadn’t’ve been there. I go through life thinking I owe nobody nothing, nobody owes me nothing, I pay for everything I get, and that’s how I look at it. Nah, I don’t believe in luck, not at all. I think you make your own luck.
139.
This is gonna sound really wacky [laughs], but it feels like our entire universe and us as beings is an act of creation. And that ongoing, unfolding act of creation has a—is purpose the right word? There’s a teleology, that’s probably a better phrase. There’s something teleological about the way the universe unfolds and the way that we unfold and our role within all of that. I’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced altered states—if that’s the right word—of compassion and presence with another, and [with] nature. It’s not just brain chemicals and the wiring of the brain. It’s almost like the brain’s a TV set and the consciousness—or whatever it is—is actually all around us. I get those moments when I’m in nature—and that could just be in my backyard planting my potatoes or tending to the flowers—or when I’m writing music or listening to music or writing. I just get into contact with something much greater than me.
There’s a real richness to living in the minutiae of simply eating a meal or looking at something, and it’s enriched my life. Just by being, I think. And it’s moved me politically to a much more conscious position, environmentally. And also it’s made me a bit more relaxed about stuff [laughs]. I don’t know whether that’s just getting older? Probably it’s a bit of both. That’s actually a good example. I’m turning fifty in a few weeks and I’m actually enjoying getting older. I’ve put weight on and all that kinda stuff, and I can’t do the things that I used to when I was younger, but actually I’m enjoying [it], and I think maybe that’s part of it as well. Am I enjoying life more? Cos it’s really fucking hard, actually [laughs]. So am I enjoying it more? Yes, yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah. That’s probably true. I think I’m enjoying it a bit more because I’m a bit more at peace with what happens, if that makes sense. Cos it’s still really fucking hard [laughs].
140.
It was a really trouble. A really trouble for her, accommodation to the new situation. When she coming for example to first day at school. We don’t learn English a lot in Poland. We are first communists as you should be know so, just like myself—I learn only Russian. That’s it. And exactly when I come in UK I still try learning English every day with some books etcetera. Most of the time we spend in college. The college really helped for us. But for my daughter it’s really hard for her going here when she can’t speak to all the children in her school. And for now she really is great speaking English. She got a great job like me—more money like me, so that is fine. I’m really happy. She’s for now really independent girl so I’m really proud from her and really happy.
