What’s more I’ve got no intention of changing. This is my idea of contentment.
You see I’ve decided to butch it out, to go in the opposite direction to that suggested by yoga and meditation. The yoga-meditation-zen path leads to peace with the world and oneness with the infinite. Petty annoyances fade into insignificance, the ego dissolves, and you are left in a state of unruffled serenity and calm. Or so I gather. It’s never worked for me. Faced with the thousands of petty annoyances and grievances encountered in the course of a week I’ve often tried to respond with a shrugged ‘Who cares?’ I’ve said it over and over to myself like a mantra, ‘Who cares? Who cares?’ until I was practically screaming ‘Who cares? Who cares?’ Before you know it you are reproaching the world for not caring, shaking your fist at the heavens, demanding to know why no one cares.
That’s what I’m doing: shaking my fist at the world. I won’t let even the smallest grievance escape me. I’m going to seize on the most insignificant inconvenience, annoyance, hindrance, setback, disappointment and am going to focus all my rage, anger, bitterness and frustration on it. ‘I shall turn my head away,’ wrote Nietzsche. ‘Henceforth that will be my sole negation.’ Not me. I’m going to glare right back at it. It? Anything that gets my goat or pisses me off. Nothing will escape me.
Travelling by coach, for example, the zen thing to do, obviously, is to relax into passenger-limbo, empty your head of all worries about traffic hold-ups and roadworks and accept your fate. Not me. I monitor each second of the journey, looking out for seconds saved and lost. I sit at the front so that I can see the road ahead, monitor the speedometer and check that the driver is pushing the bus as hard as he can, so that I can check out traffic lights and sigh with relief when the driver gambles on the amber, or silently curse him when he is too cautiously obedient. If a passenger gets on and fumbles through his wallet for the right change, finds none and then pays by cheque I don’t even attempt to read my book and think of something else: I glare and rage and inwardly curse, I mutter beneath my breath and imagine myself getting up, bawling him out and throwing him off the bus. If I’m stuck in traffic I mutter and curse beneath my breath. If I am kept waiting at a shop or supermarket I curse and mutter beneath my breath. Whatever happens I curse and mutter beneath my breath. When I am not reacting to some immediate cause of anger I am rehearsing what I am going to say to X or Y the next time I see them, thinking how I’m really going to give them an earful so that beneath my breath there is a constant rumble of abuse. You fucking stupid twat, you slow-witted mother-fucking asshole, you fucking piece of shit. . That’s it, that’s what’s going on in my head. Laura has said that it is obvious I am a writer because as I walk along my lips move, as if I’m talking or thinking to myself, as if I’m inventing dialogue for a book or am mentally going over some passage I’ve written. Yes, that’s it exactly, I say, except this particular book consists entirely of variations on ‘you fucking stupid cunt, I’m going to smash your fucking head in if you don’t hurry up’. If anything goes wrong, anything at all, then I over-react terribly — in my head. On the surface I may grin and bear it but in my head I am thinking of wreaking a hideous vengeance on whoever it is that seems responsible for whatever small inconvenience I have suffered. A few days ago the local delicatessen had run out of the luxury doughnuts which I have for my elevenses and on which I depend utterly, just as I depend on my cornetti integrali from the Farnese when I am in Rome. Right, I thought to myself, turning on my heel and walking out, grim-faced and tight-lipped, I will return later in the day and burn the place to the ground with all the staff in it — friendly, charming staff, incidentally, who have often let me owe them money — so that they could experience a fraction of the pain that I had suffered by not being able to have my morning doughnut. It’s the same at the Caffè Farnese when I am in Rome. I never do these terrible things and so they are kept chained up in my head, causing untold wear and tear. All the damage I dream of inflicting on the various pastry-related premises where I have experienced disappointment is actually inflicting terrible damage on my head. Sometimes I think of explaining my situation to the staff at the Farnese or at my local delicatessen. ‘What you have to understand,’ I imagine myself saying, ‘is that I am allergic to disappointment. I have had so much disappointment in my life that the tiniest amount of it is now enough to drive me to despair. I am so brimful of disappointment that even one more tiny drop will send me spilling over the edge.’ But I don’t say that, of course, any more than I do go back and burn down the delicatessen or the Farnese. I keep all this rage in my head.
Who knows, though: I may hate disappointment but perhaps I also long for it. Perhaps it is not luxury doughnuts and cornetti integrali I want but the experience of being denied these things I think I want. Would I be so determined to have my luxury doughnut or my cornetto integrale every day if I knew there would always be a surplus of luxury doughnuts and cornetti integrali? Or have I made up my mind that I must have one of these luxury doughnuts (exceptional value, incidentally, at 35p) or cornetti integrali each day precisely because there is a good chance that they will not be available? Perhaps what I want, in other words, is actually not a luxury doughnut or a cornetto integrale but the chance to consummate my disappointment, to experience what I most dread which is actually not going doughnut-and cornetto-less through the day but which is, precisely, experiencing disappointment. Who knows? How can one know these things? All I do know is that for whatever reason I must have a doughnut or a cornetto integrale for elevenses and very frequently there are no doughnuts or cornetti integrali left and at those moments I would gladly take my head and dash my brains out on the shop window just to gain a brief respite from the pain that is exploding within it.
The idea behind this obsessive monitoring of all the things that enrage me is that eventually I’ll become punch-drunk with annoyance. At the moment I’m in a state of exasperated exasperation, self-generating irritation, ever-increasing anger. Things annoy me now which I wouldn’t even be aware of were it not for the fact that I’ve decided to keep a tab of things so strictly. I’m currently in a hyper-volatile condition but at some point there must come an exhaustion which is very like peace. I’ll wear myself out, be so depleted by anger that I won’t even have the energy to get agitated. My rage will blow itself out and I’ll never raise my voice again. I’ll be serene as a windless afternoon — and I got this idea, sort of, from Lawrence.
Jam-making, book-keeping and debt-paying aside, you see, what I like most about Lawrence is his temper. Not the famous, record-breaking rucks with Frieda but his day-to-day capacity for annoyance, his inexhaustible irritability. His masterpiece in this respect is a letter to Earl Brewster of 1921. ‘No, I don’t understand a bit what you mean about rightness and about relationships and about the world,’ he begins. ‘Damn the world, anyhow. And I hate “understanding” people, and I hate more still to be understood. Damn understanding more than anything. I refuse to understand you. Therefore you can say what you like, without a qualm, and never bother to alter it. I shan’t understand.’
From this mild beginning Lawrence proceeds to work himself up into a fury about anything and everything. He has, we learn, ‘been in a hell of a temper for three weeks’. In that time he has ‘written such very spiteful letters to everybody that now the postman never comes’. It is as if the contents of the letter were so spiteful that the postman himself took offence. Now even Larkin didn’t get that grouchy! And Van Gogh, he had the postman to keep him company at Arles!