Labels

I think I know why humans are bad.

Humans are bad because we need to label things.

We cannot leave anything unnamed. If there is no word for something then we make one, or calque it from another language. If no language has a word for it then it mustn't exist at all.

We need to label each other. Each one of us is stamped at birth with a name, usually two, often three, sometimes four or more. Branded like cattle. And that name becomes our identity. I am not just named Isobelle. I am Isobelle. That is my name, that is who I am. I will carry it with me until death, when it will be carved onto my gravestone to describe me forever. It is all that will be left of me. Bleached bones and silent letters, chipped into mossy stone.

We label ourselves and we label each other. Brother, sister, mother, friend. Doctor, builder, teacher, beggar. British, Bangladeshi, Brazilian, Bulgarian. Black, White, Asian. Muslim, Christian, Jewish. Labels we're born with. Labels we are raised with. Labels we choose and labels we'd rather reject. But they stick to us, all these labels. They cover us with them, and we cover others, in their turn. We dispense them from our tongues like the hand held gadgets at corner shops. Tinned Lychees £1.65. Immigrant Construction Worker £0.87. And the labels stick to our fingers, and glue our lips and eyelids shut. We need them, they say. We need them. To classify. To mark our own kind, to unify. To separate ourselves from others. To vilify. To quantify and qualify. How much are we worth?

Not much, say the labels. 

Not much.

A day may come when we won't need these libellous labels, marring our beautiful bodies with commercial ugliness. A day may come when the only labels we'll need are our names. Silent letters, inked onto cream card. Thumbed into phone books. Chipped into mossy stone.

Love Thy Neighbour III

She sometimes wondered how much sound traversed the building's dark stone walls. She frequently invited friends to her place for dinner and drinks, and their conversation often grew rather raucous. However, she seldom heard any of her neighbours, and never got any complaints, so she didn't worry too much. Only, late at night she heard footsteps above her head. Pacing, slowly, on wooden floorboards. Then stopping.

It didn't really disturb her much, she just wondered what he was doing, walking about his apartment, so late at night. That was all. Other than that, the apartment was as perfect as ever. She had noticed, though, how scatterbrained she had been of late. For instance, she once left her keys in her front door, though she didn't remember doing it. She just found them there, after a panicked twenty minutes looking for them. After that she would put things down and not be able to find where she'd left them. Her USB stick. A Kodak receipt she needed to pick up some photos. Just little things like that - small enough to be of little physical significance, yet important enough to feel their loss. But she didn't blame it on the apartment. It was otherwise perfect. It was just a small series of unfortunate coincidences.

She replaced the USB (had nothing important on it anyway) and forgot about the photos for a few days. When she remembered, she headed over to the shop where she'd left them in to be developed. But the woman behind the desk couldn't find any package with her name on on the shelf. Was she sure she hadn't collected them already? Yes, she was sure.

But was she? Yes. Yes? What was happening to her at the moment? Perhaps it was the paint fumes. She didn't feel any different. But she wasn't normally one to lose things. Or to not remember doing them. How strange.

Back at the apartment, she decided to make herself pancakes to take her mind off things. A sure-fire solution. Of course, she had no eggs, nor any flour. She could easily have popped back out to the shop. But then she thought about the kind man upstairs and his offer to help whenever she needed it. He might have eggs, or flour. Maybe she could even invite him down to have pancakes with her. Why not! She didn't often see him with guests. Perhaps he was lonely. So she left her apartment and climbed, for the first time, up the stairs to the fourth floor.

The door was slightly ajar. She knocked, and called his name. No answer. She knocked again. She heard a muffled sound, which she took to be an invitation to come in, though it could easily have been the television. She pushed open the door to a darkened room. A darkened, bare room with sparse, grubby furniture and dirty plates scattered around like detritus on a cinema carpet. It shocked her, slightly, to find out that he had been living in such squalor. But the next thing she saw shocked her three-thousandfold, and sickened her to her very core.

A wall of photographs. Photographs of her. Sprawled out over the wall like rising damp. Darkly glossy. Her face, over and over. Photos of her from years ago. Photos of her from yesterday, leaving the building. Photos from her USB stick. Photos from the Kodak shop. And photos, most disturbingly, of her sleeping. She couldn't breathe. Her heart was pounding sickly, like the marching a faraway army from a strange land, coming to rape and plunder. It filled her ears with its dizzying, disturbing iambs.

Then she heard another sound, separate from her body, and she'd have jumped out of her skin, were it physically possible. Were she not frozen. It was a sound she'd heard before, only closer, more palpable.

The sound of pacing, slowly. On wooden floor boards.

Then stopping.

Love Thy Neighbour II

The man upstairs was friendly. She didn't know him at all, of course. Not really. But she just got a good feeling about him. He'd introduced himself when she moved in. He was a man in his late thirties, quiet but polite. He let her know he was always there if she ever needed anything. He gave her his wi-fi password and refused her offers to pay him to use his internet connection. And that was it. He didn't impose, he didn't knock on her door or accost her when she wasn't in the mood. He was just a nice neighbour, reliably present, reliably quiet. Reliably in the periphery, as any good neighbour should be.

She settled in, and her life recommenced. She worked, relaxed, socialised, all in this new sphere of existence, this new central locus where she cooked and entertained and showered and read and quietly slept. The new apartment became her apartment, its newness overridden by new-found familiarity. Though it was never any less perfect. Everything seemed to go right. No-one put annoying flyers through her letterbox. Someone kept the hallway floor clean and often, when she'd left her bin bags outside her door, someone brought them down for her. The neighbours were truly nice people, it seemed. She had landed on her feet. Especially her upstairs neighbour, who continued to say hello to her on the stairs, and sometimes stopped to chat, but never stayed too long. Once he fixed a leaky tap for her. Another time he lent her a step ladder. But he never crossed that neighbourly barrier; their worlds, whilst parallel, never collided, never converged.

Sometimes she did wonder about him. She'd confided a fair amount about her life, here and there. What she did for a living. Where she'd grown up. It seemed as if it were always he who asked the questions. But what did he do? Where did he come from? Perhaps he just liked to keep to himself. Sometimes she caught his face at his window, when she came back to the apartment after work. Glazed over with the sky's white reflection. Not quite smiling.


(To be continued.)

Love Thy Neighbour

She loved the place from the moment she first saw it. She moved in right away. Up until then, she'd had terrible luck with apartments. Rising damp, mysterious noises, odious neighbours, dishonest, conniving landlords. Why should her luck change now? But here she knew - from the moment she set eyes upon the freshly painted walls, the dark wood floorboards, the wide windows filtering in golden light - that this was the place she'd been looking for. She knew she would be happy here. Her luck had well and truly changed. Good things were headed her way.

She moved in and instantly made the place a home. The paint fumes melted away slowly into the scents of flowers, candles, incense. Walking in from the hallway set her heart at rest, no matter what her day had been like. She preferred this part of the neighbourhood. She even had friendly neighbours. 

Take the man upstairs for example...


(To be continued)

Colour Blindness

When I was younger I would sometimes close my eyes tight shut to try and see what it would be like to be blind. Sometimes I would try and walk from the kitchen to the living room, or from the bathroom to my bedroom. Sometimes I'd try to brush my teeth, or find a particular object just using my memory and my finger tips. Sometimes I'd just lie there, staring at the back of my eyelids.

What astounded me was the diversity of colours that danced there, in the dark. Strange polygons dissolved and morphed in pea green and ultraviolet. Bright sparks rained in the periphery; forms divided and multiplied like a kaleidoscope. When I gazed at a light, or the sun, it would shine through the thin skin and explode in blossoms of burnt orange, rich red and billowing curtains of beige. If I pressed gently on my eyes the colours would burst and dazzle me, circling in a hypnotic storm of lights. When I opened my eyes again everything would look grey and cold. I said to myself, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad after all, being blind. If you could see colours like that.

Years later, looking back, I think about how terribly sad my young self would have found it, to know that to be truly blind is to see nothing. Nothing at all.

Tuppence, tuppence

Today I opened all the windows in our new apartment to exorcise the paint fumes that had haunted us for the last week. Sun and wind poured in, carrying with them the sounds of the streets below. I made a cup of tea, took a biscuit and went over to look out. People went to and fro, some hurried, some meandering between shop windows or waiting for dawdling progeny. I watched them from above and revelled in the new freeness gifted by these tall, wood-framed windows, for in my last apartment I had no such thing. The evening air was fresh; it smelt of melting snow blown down from Puy-de-Dome, whose smoke blue head rose up to look down onto the city, on a clear day like this one. Below me, water burbled from the tarnished mouths of three lions, carved in volcanic stone.

On the windowsills around me, plentiful in the little alleys shrouded by tall buildings, pigeons sat, the wind ruffling their feathers. I broke my biscuit into crumbs and spread them on my window sills for them to eat. After a while, one flew over. Mottled white and grey, like a car covered in bird droppings. Its eye, however, glowed in the sunshine like a beautiful red bead. I watched it for a while, until it flew away with that rushing sound particular only to a pigeon in flight. As the sun dimmed, I watched more pigeons, coming and going from my windowsill, eating the crumbs I'd left them. My heart filled with joy, then sank again, each time they came and left. I noticed a man, smoking at his window, not far across the street, was looking at me with a smirk on his face. It was then that I realised I had become a mad old pigeon lady and promptly called it all off; I swept the remainder of the crumbs off the sill and, slightly red faced, closed the window.

How sad! I look forward with relish to being 80 years old so I can carry out my pigeon fancying activities without fear of social stigma.

On Beauty

The razor scores its lines of bareness up my legs, grazing where the soap has rinsed off. Tweezers leave my brows neat and pink and sore. Concealer doesn’t quite cover anything. My hair hangs in dry tresses like bushels of hay; the brush shreds through it like a thresher.  Nails break and dry skin flakes and that’s going to scar, and where did that bruise come from? Mascara’d eyes water. Are my teeth white enough? This shirt is creased. These jeans are dirty. And tighter.  Have I put on weight? Am I ugly? 

Beauty is tiresome. We bend and bend to ideals until our backs break like split ends. With hot wax we tear off layer after layer of our integrity. We wax and wane in cycles of gluttony and starvation. We reward and punish. We tint and bleach. Wrap ourselves around curling irons, and little fingers. We perform for the crowd like dancing bears, stripped bare of hair and dignity. We fear your gaze; we also yearn for it.

Beauty is that which we incessantly seek. Beauty is the Goddess to whom we all prostrate ourselves, to whom we offer sacrifices of silver pieces and our souls. Beauty is the glorious light to which we turn our faces, to which we are drawn like drab moths. And what does it give us in return? Skin cancer and singed edges. Self-hatred and subjugation. 

Sometimes I just want to stop. I don't want to strive for beauty any more. I do not want to be beautiful. I only want to be a vessel for it. I want to fill myself up with beauty. Like the sun pouring in through a window and filling a room with light. Fill my eyes with beautiful sights, my ears with beautiful music, my nostrils with the most beautiful scents. I want to think only the most beautiful thoughts. When I open my mouth, I want nothing but beauty to come out. And when I dream at night I want the darkness inside me to be vanquished by beauty. 

What a beautiful thought! Let us smash all the mirrors and use the pieces to make beautiful mirror balls to dance our beautiful dances to beautiful sounds! Let us take our lipsticks and paint white walls with beautiful pictures! 

If only. My ugliness is ingrained far too deeply; it lurks in my ventricles like dark silt in a brackish lake.   I'm going to go and wash it out with Neutrogena grapefruit face scrub, and gently smooth on make up,  layer after layer, until you can't even see its traces.