Calm

On Tuesday I helped G. move. He hired a van and at one point was panicking about manoeuvring the vehicle, which he was unaccustomed to driving. His cheeks were very red. I suggested he pull over. I talked to him about the time my father hired a van and we moved from that house opposite the fields to the estate, and how I sat in the back of the van with all our possessions. G was okay to drive the van after that. But he was puzzled that I was so unflustered.

Several people tell me that I have a calm and calming presence. This is, i take it, supposed to be a good thing. Perhaps it is for them. But it struck me last night that this calmness, this serenity even, may be a way of impeding or assuaging real life, the anxiety and energy that we feel when we are really involved in the world. I had felt this anxiety and energy early in the new year, partly under pressure of fear, financial fear. I was visited by the man from the benefits office, assessing my application. I was in fact up all night thinking about this visit, for I had been doing some undeclared cash in hand work at the college. “What have you been doing for the past 6 months?”, he asked, a man in his early twenties. I told him I’d been writing a novel, which was not entirely false, and living off savings, which was laughably false. The application went through and my calmness came back. 

Writing too, exists much of the time at least, to placate the spirits, to redistribute a focused energy and anxiety among manifold inscriptions. Yet sometime, but too rarely, the spirits themselves grasp the pen and drag me into ambushes of terror or exhilaration. If such occasions have become far rarer, then this is because the counter-force – habitual calm - has grown stronger and stronger. But it has only grown stronger to stop the spirits tearing me apart. This counter force, that claims to act on my behalf, does not see that I would rather be torn apart than assuaged and finally closed down by my calmness.