Prague

A long evening at P’s flat. Exactly as he was at Oxford 15 years ago. Over-eager to display his knowledge. I tried to communicate my experience of Prague, the sepulchral gravity and dark magic of the buildings above and behind the tourist chatter, but he countered with various facts about Prague, the Czech Republic, the Velvet Revolution and so on. “Why do men always know things?” Alice once said to me. It’s true, although I have always prided myself on knowing very little in this sense. These men, who know things, always want to refer any disagreements to the judicial body of Facts, and thus close down interpretation. They want to shut down debate and also ally themselves with the cold indifference of the factual, as they perceive it. They are like the facts, they identify with the facts. This is their fantasy. P was precisely such a man. Weighing me down with endless facts and statistics, until I could take no more and was bent forward, like some pale and crooked caryatid, under the countless units of information. I tried to put forward my theory about Men and Knowledge, as briefly adumbrated above, but he of course was not interested in Theories, or in Theory with a big T. It was futile. All this was exactly as it had been at Oxford. As was his face. His face had not developed and matured, only cracked a little, and greyed at the sides, as if done by a make-up artist. There had been no deep aging, which is to say living, precisely because he had sought refuge in facts and information in retreat from the riddles and ambiguities of existence. That at least was my thought. Anyway, I wondered how he felt, at the end of the evening, P, after performing this role as dispenser of facts, as spokesperson for the Facts, but then remaining behind empty handed, starved of human contact. I was looking forward to thinking about this on the way home.

In order to facilitate this thinking, I decided to get a cab. For sometimes there is nothing better than giving oneself the unexpected gift of a cab ride home, and a prime box seat from which to watch the city and its nocturnal personality. This, I imagine, is what Iggy Pop did when he wrote The Passenger, which is exactly the soundtrack to be played whilst travelling by cab through the city late at night, somehow both a spectator of the city but also its very essence. He is right, Mr Iggy Pop, that the sky above the city is derealised or made “hollow” by the cupola of orange and red and silver lights from cars and buildings. You contemplate this great cupola from under glass, or of course you can slide the window down and hear the rush of the wind and the drunken voices it catches and discards like litter. None of this of course would mean anything to P, who would doubtless know Iggy Pop’s real name, and when and where the song was written.

In any case, I had prepared to contemplate P and the role of “facts” in the Male imagination. But as the cab journey began, all I could think of, suddenly, was that time in Prague, walking home along Karlova, after going to the Jazz club, when I was nearly knocked down by a man on a bicycle, skinny with a black cap and goggles. What he was doing, racing late at night along that bone-shaking cobbled street I have no idea. I hardly had time to register the near collision than he’d disappeared, and the receding whirr of the wheels died in the whorl of my ear. Silence closed in once more. I took this, at the time, this cyclist, to be some kind of herald of Death, some kind of minatory herald sent by bony and nocturnal Death. For our imagination seizes on phenomenon and turns them into metaphors almost before we have time to perceive them in their literal state. This was all I could think about for the cab journey home, and in fact I asked the driver to stop early, about half a mile from the flat, so that I could walk and get some cool air and clear my head of this demon from Prague.