What do I want to do?
Sitges, the little beach town down the coast from Barcelona, is designed for desires: I want to go to the beach, I want to eat dinner. I want muscat grapes, I want fideuá, I want hazelnuts in honey. I want to walk through narrow streets, I want to see the Festa Major, I want to see the fireworks, I want to follow the crowds, I want to get away from the crowds. I want to buy a shirt, I want to buy a book, I want to buy spices, I want to buy expensive chocolates. I want to go out, I want to go out and drink, I want to go out and dance, I want to go out and meet somebody cute. I want to get laid... I want to go to bed, I want to sleep....
The trouble is, my relationship to so many of these desires is either too simple (all right, I’ve bought the grapes, now eat them) or too impossible (I’m just too out of shape to expect getting laid in a major, pretentious, gay holiday destination). As one gets older, certain desires are either too absurdly easy to fulfill (you can just buy what you want, except if you haven’t been very financially sensible like me, that has a limit to it – you can’t buy an apartment in a city you love, you can’t buy a place to live that might, maybe, make you happy) or increasingly impossible (passion, sex, love, change, new adventures, new challenges that haven’t already littered the horizon for years). Desire itself is shown to be mechanical, and you can see that the mechanism is awfully creaky and rather badly designed – the parts wear out, the replacements aren’t very good, and the whole thing clatters along to produce a ridiculously small result.
Yesterday, I finished rereading Angela Carter’s The War of Dreams (it was originally called The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, but I prefer the short title). It was the first book of hers that I ever read, and I still think it’s the best; however, it is many years since I read the whole thing through – which resulted in an eye-opener; there are whole passages I didn’t really understand when I read them first many years ago. In fact, what had once seemed a too-tortuous journey leading to an almost too obvious climax now seems, on the contrary, astoundingly imaginative – and the almost painfully didactic lectures made by Albertina and her mad father now seem, not boring, but perfect illustrations of certain innate aspects of desire. The whole pattern of the book seems in fact to be the exposure of exactly what bothers me tonight – the discovery that desire, carnival, sensual chaos, which may seem at first so fascinating and delightful, barely covers up a machinery that is pathetically dry and lifeless, that in fact sucks the life out of anyone who is caught in it.
I know that a week in Sitges, with Barcelona on the side, always makes me happier and more relaxed. But that is mostly because it gives me a week of being steeped in another culture, one where people are generally more aware of their desires, more willing to fulfill them, and less interested in pseudo-Protestant tangles of conscience when they don’t get fulfilled (or when they do). (Michael N., who specializes in Spanish music, was the first to alert me that, even when you think you’re being completely secular, you might still be responding out of strong Protestant roots – and that those roots carry as much nonsensical baggage as Catholic ones. Even if Protestant baggage seems more innately modern, less dated, it’s still baggage without meaning, ideas and responses that don’t actually make any sense, because they’re responses to things that are not actually present when you’re deciding your way through your life.)
So: what a ‘vacation’ entails, what this vacation entails anyway, is a brief visit to a cultural/geographical locus where I think I would be happier. Good, fine, that’s clear: but then the obvious answer becomes, then why the hell am I not moving heaven and earth [sic?] to move to this place?
Well, because I can’t. Academic jobs aren’t available for me in non-Anglophone countries, at least not for the most part; and I haven’t got the savings or even the lack of debt to save up and someday move to a place like this. Or a place like Barcelona, or Amsterdam, Palermo, Sydney, even San Francisco....
So now it’s three in the morning, the Festa parade is at 6 am, I could go to the Trailer, a rather good gay club, or I could go walking, I could stay here in bed, I could sleep... But what do I want to do?
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