Outlook. Charles William Johns

and embrace the little things in life because all of your brain cells have gone or because you are slowly training yourself to accept the fact that the world will soon cease to assist you? Or perhaps you have filled such a large quota of experience that you slowly learn to adapt to the circadian rhythm of an indifferent universe? Or maybe you really do just wake up one day and want to take a trip to the shops and buy a low maintenance miniature garden for your windowsill?

      I sent each email to the desired recipient individually, with exactly the same content. I had to make some guesswork as to their full names; some were easy: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. Some were verging on downright weird; [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. In the event of such addresses I either decided on their gender and wrote Sir or Madam, or, gave up and put both.

      Nothing more to do now but wait. I flirted with the idea of staying in the hotel next to the service station, maybe grabbing some food at this restaurant I could see near the truck stop. I would order a steak, a few sangrias, move to the bar, talk to a barman that graduated at Oxford, he would tell me why he packed it all in, the academic opportunities, the money, the success, just so he could quietly clean glasses, make cocktails and talk to ‘normal’ people. Doesn’t that all sound fun?! I glanced at the storage compartment on the inside of my car door and scanned the spines of the C.D.’s I had brought with me: Brouwer: Guitar Music Vol. 1, Boccherini: String Quintets, George Bizet’s Carmen, Essential Purcell and Bartok’s Six Quartets.

      As my eyes skimmed the environment around me I felt them glazing over a little. Evening was coming, and its blacks, yellows, blues and purples were filling up the world, starting with my car. In a world full of so much obscurity and chaos sleeping seems like an almost too simple phenomenon. I quickly realise that everyone has once been sleepy like a child; Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Napoleon, Hitler . . . all yawning and ready for bed. My eyes returned to the electronically lit screen on my mobile phone and to my surprise I had received an email. “Already?!” I thought to myself. This filled me with genuine excitement; what will this lead to? What will happen next? It was as if I were making my own story with the help of a few email addresses. I was to become quickly disappointed however. The message read:

      Many thanks for your email. I am on annual leave on Monday 10th April and on a research trip on Tuesday 11th April. I will respond to your email on or soon after Wednesday 12th April. If it is an urgent Postgraduate Research matter please contact Lynn Johnson at [email protected].

      Regards,

      Prof James Macauley

      I strongly believed at that moment that whoever invented the auto-reply message was a twit. Who is too important and busy to check their emails once a day? It is always some poncey professor, writer or academic that uses these types of automated messages to make them appear too engrossed in the celestial world for mere correspondences through a computer.

      I was about to give up and go for that sangria but then it struck me. Surely, I have everything I need to find Professor James Macauley; he is away for a few days, but he will soon be back at the university ( . . . Park Courts College? University?). It is not urgent enough nor formal enough to contact this Lynn Johnson lady so maybe I could just pop in. I typed Park Courts Postgraduate Research into my phone and found a university near Boston. I checked the staff directory and found a Professor James Macauley.

      His resume came up and that was the first time I saw his face. Mr. Macauley seemed like a pleasant man from his first digital appearance. He appeared to be smiling in his photograph which is always a good sign (shows that one does not take oneself too seriously). He was wearing a suit that didn’t seem to fit him right (he looked more student than teacher). His face was somewhere between oval and square, he was clean shaven, eyes black, small and deep-set with thick, black but well-shaped brows. He looked totally unpretentious, verging on naive.

      His subject specialism was on Carl Jung and the theory of synchronicity. He had graduated at Warwick University (First Class Honours) and was writing a book called Meaningful Coincidences: On Walking and Acausality. I decided to set course for Park Courts University immediately. Images of meeting James flowed through my mind; shaking hands, speaking of Benjamin, burrowing deeper into the lives and times of his friendship group and ‘how things were back then’. I bought one more coffee from the service station and an egg-salad sandwich tipping the adolescent waitress on my way out. I secured my seat belt, inserted George Bizet’s Carmen into my C.D. player and smiled to myself; tonight, I will be conquering the Great British motorway system similar to how Bellini’s Norma conquered the whole of Europe.

      Georges Bizet

      Was it really by chance that Georges Bizet completed his first draft of Carmen in the summer of 1874? Did the summer not make it so?! Georges could smell the oranges of Seville from his study just outside of Paris, perhaps even deeper primordial callings from the Chinese grapefruit of South-East Asia (the Oriental tones of the ‘other’ in Carmen). Yet the Parisian suburbs of the 19th century, along with Bizet’s decision to never write religious music again (1858), filled his scents of Spain with wine, tobacco, blood and lust. Georges used his eyes and ears as eagerly as he would his nose, tracing the iron piping of the Parisian sewage system, spanning miles and miles, until one could hear the scurrying of rats. But then a few meters farther and his senses would enter the marketplace: the sound of a woman’s heels, the new dresses being worn; beauty parading itself through the advent of the sewing machine and the new mechanical shoe makers.

      But the world just beyond Western Europe, this was what Bizet could sense too. Bizet, sitting in his study, let the whole world in; the exotic, the mystery, the fantasy, the danger, the travelling, the sexual licence. A middle eastern woman somewhere in a dank tavern, with her veils, jewels, bronzed beauty and alluring dancing, the gypsies, the fishermen. On returning back to France from across the Mediterranean Sea via a leaping mullet his senses continue. He is stunned by the many chunks of grass and soil that shoot out from the ground due to a kicking bull in distress slain by a sudden estocada (the thrust of the bullfighter’s sword). All this in one moment, one breath; the un-approximated distance and presence of experience. Between the satellite image and the microscope, man was never endowed with the capacity to know how close or how far he was in relation to the universe, he would never be able to measure it but only ever be able to record it.

      The two main characters in Carmen are stuck so intimately together that they cannot discern where one begins and where one ends, but the outside is always calling; Don Jose draws back from his embrace, he hears the trumpets calling the soldiers back to work . . . everyone sooner or later hears the trumpets.

      Bizet’s experience was never articulated, only perhaps expressed in the rising and falling of his notes. Influence may be charted, documented and historicized but inspiration is impossible to pin down. Our Western civilization has the profoundly banal ability to quantify the purely qualitative experience of life, into galleries, museums, the paraphernalia of a culture that is always one step behind true experience.

      In the ‘real’ world Bizet died without true recognition, with an abscess in the windpipe, preoccupied by bouts of mental depression, doomed to become one of those indifferent, static objects included in the grand museum of life. We should remember the leaping mullet, the estocada, and if you cannot remember, take a listen on your record player for yourself.