Rather than the prohibition being out of our hands (as it usually is with people we desire), here – with our accepting partner – it can by contrast be willed: one is in control of what was previously painfully out of one’s grasp. Prudishness is invited into the game as a way of exorcising the difficulties it once caused us. Now, appropriated into sex, it is stripped of its sting and used to reaffirm a fresh confidence about being acceptable.
Once we are used to being undressed around someone, the wonder that they’ve allowed us into their lives is liable to get lost and taken for granted. We might end up watching TV naked after a shower, with no one caring to note how special our unclothed selves still really are. The game of keeping one’s clothes on tries to keep the interest of nakedness alive for a little longer by drawing attention to the privileges of permission. The game symbolises a poignant desire fully to savour the beauty of being, at last, allowed…
20
Kissing
Of course, we know already how nice kissing is. The point of dwelling on it isn’t to guide attention freshly to something we’d hardly realised could be so nice. Rather, it’s to renew and deepen our appreciation of a familiar enjoyment.
Mutual desire is normally signalled by a pretty weird act: two organs otherwise used for eating and speaking are rubbed and pressed against one another with increasing force, accompanied by the secretion of saliva. A tongue normally precisely manipulated to articulate vowel sounds, or to push mashed potato or broccoli to the rear of the palate, now moves forward to meet its counterpart, whose tip it might touch in repeated staccato movements. One would have to carefully explain to an alien visitor from Kepler-9b what is going on. These people, one would reassure the interstellar visitor, are not about to bite chunks out of each other’s cheeks; they are not attempting to inflate one another (‘please try to forget for a moment everything we were saying earlier about party balloons; there’s no connection’).
Reminding ourselves of the inherently bizarre nature of the act helps us to be usefully puzzled by, and newly curious about, why kissing is so significant and potentially so exciting. If it’s so strange, why do we really love doing it?
Sexual excitement is psychological. It’s not so much what our bodies happen to be doing that is getting us so turned on. It’s what’s happening in our brains that matters.
Partly, the excitement of kissing is the result of social codes. It’s not purely natural or intrinsic that pinioning your lips to those of another person is so significant. We could imagine a society where it was very important for two people to rub the gap between the index finger and thumb together. You’d thrust forward and get very turned on by the mutual friction of the abductor pollicis transversus muscles. You’d lie awake at night dreaming of doing this to someone but really unsure about how they would react. The first time you did it would be something you’d remember all your life. The huge meaning of kissing is something we’ve built up by social agreement, and its fundamental definition is: I accept you – accept you so much that I will take a big risk with you. It is on this basis that kissing isn’t merely physically nice, but psychologically delightful.
Kissing is exciting because it could so easily be revolting. The inside of a mouth is deeply private. No one usually goes there outside of the dentist. It’s yours alone. The thought of the mouth of someone you don’t like is properly creepy. Ordinarily it would be utterly nauseating to have a stranger poke their tongue into your face; the idea of their saliva lubricating your lips is horrendous. So to allow someone to do these things signals a huge level of acceptance. There’s a special joy of touching someone’s back teeth with your tongue which has nothing to do with the appeal of licking enamel. All of us suffer from strong feelings of unacceptability and shame, which another’s kiss starts to work on overcoming.
Apart from the publicly overt person, everyone has a more elusive, deeper self, which is kept in reserve as far as other people are concerned and yet is hugely familiar from the inside. This deeper, private self is active in a serious kiss, which is what you feel you are getting and giving access to. In the kiss, our mouth becomes a privileged place in which we surrender our defences and gift ourselves to another. We are properly exposed and raw. Kissing is a pleasure, ultimately, because it signals something more exciting even than sex: a brief respite from loneliness.
There’s a tradition of thought – which can be usefully labelled Romanticism – which is averse to analysing pleasures. It fears that to analyse a joy is to kill it. It’s the fear that knowledge punctures the mystery on which the happy experience depends – as a conjuring trick loses its charm when the secret of how it is done is revealed. We are impressed by another, contrary, more Classical attitude that regards insight as a route to enhancing the sweetness of the moment. A small pleasure, such as kissing, frequently turns out to be connected to meeting a large need. The satisfaction we feel is our recognition of getting something that is truly important to us, even if we don’t usually have a very explicit sense of what this is. So, investigating a pleasure – teasing out its meaning – yields a greater sense of appreciation. The pleasure becomes keener and more significant when we grasp why we feel it.
21
Children’s Drawings
Today we tend to take it for granted that a child’s drawing or painting can be very charming indeed. But unless we happen to be the parents of a 6-year-old or a fond grandparent, we probably don’t think much about it. As frequently happens, we don’t deny that such things can be very pleasing, it’s just that we don’t make a deliberate place for them in our lives – we leave it to chance. And years might go by in which the particular small pleasure of looking at a child’s drawing is missing from one’s existence.
Historically speaking, it’s actually very odd that we have this pleasure at all. Until comparatively recently it was unthinkable that someone could lay claim to maturity, sanity and reliability by pinning a picture by a 6-year-old to the walls of their office, or throne room – or that any adult could be charmed by an image of someone with a wonky grin, their arms emerging horizontally from mid torso, with three stubby fingers to each hand and with, apparently, no feet. Until late into the twentieth century, few people were ready to admire any kind of art that lacked a conspicuous command of technical skills and was sensitively faithful to the real appearance of things. The works of children seemed merely the clumsy efforts of complete beginners.
We’ve become much more willing to be pleased. But what is it about the artworks of the under-sevens that we now see special merit in? What needs in ourselves do we now begin to recognise that explains the delight we feel? (Pleasure, often, can be understood as the satisfaction of a need.) If we say that a child’s drawing is sweet – what are we really getting at with that word ‘sweet’ and why do we seem to need this quality of sweetness so much at this point in history?
What often touches us in the art of children is a host of qualities that are deeply under threat in adult lives and yet which we unconsciously recognise as precious to a sense of inner balance and psychological well-being. The sweet is a vital part of ourselves – currently in exile.
One of the most recurring features of children’s art is evidence of trust. So long as things have gone reasonably well, children can believe in surfaces: if mummy smiles, she must be OK. There is, at a young age, blessedly little room for ambiguity. Children are not always trying to peer below the surface and discover the compromises and evasions that belong to maturity. Their art functions as a highly necessary corrective to cynicism.
Adult lives seldom allow us not to be wary and suspicious. We grow to expect trouble to come from any direction. We are aware of the fragility of things, and how easily safety and hope can be crushed. It is rare to have 15 minutes without being submerged by a new wave of anxiety. It is therefore understandable if we turn with relief to the trusting attitude of those great diminutive artists, as brilliant at lifting our spirits as they are hopeless at delivering correct representat
ions of an oak tree or a human face.
Another endearing and psychologically necessary quality of children’s art is quite how inaccurate it tends to be. A traditional assumption of drawing is that being ‘good’ at it requires one to lay aside the demands of one’s own ego in order to pay precise attention to what is actually out there. The artist must learn how to observe the world, and in order to do so must put a lot of themselves to one side.
Rather than being in any way painstaking or faithful, the child is gleefully unconcerned as to the true facts of the world. What is sweet is this daring lack of interest in ‘getting it right’ which symbolises a delightful freedom from concern about whether others will think it right or not either. Again, the term sweetness is our way of acknowledging that this is something we need to do a little more of in our own lives but find very hard to ask for directly. It’s totally understandable that we learn, as adults, to accommodate ourselves to the needs of reality and of other people. But we can devote ourselves to this goal with so much zeal that our souls dry up.
It is not, in fact, strange that it is this period of human history that has been the first to get really interested in the sweetness of children. Societies get sensitive to things that they are missing. We live in a world of highly complex technology, extreme precision in science, massive bureaucracies, insecurity and intense meritocratic competition. To survive with any degree of success in these conditions, we have to be exceptionally controlled, forward-thinking, reasonable and cautious creatures. However, we tend not to identify what has grown in short supply in our lives head on. It would be rare to say: we need more flights of fancy, more innocent trust, more gleeful disregard of expectations … We have forgotten that this is what we even want. Instead, we simply find it moving – in fact, sweet – to encounter these things in symbolic forms in the scribblings of a child.
Children’s art provides an opportunity to start to get to know our own needs. They are, in their own way, political demands, compact manifestos for some of the things we urgently need a little more of in the anxious, compromised conditions of contemporary adult life.
22
Crimes in the Newspaper
You’ve had an argument with the children. Later you’ll have to go to work and bite your tongue around your boss. Now you’re in the bath, reading the newspaper. There’s a big story on the front page. A Californian chef, on becoming convinced that his wife was having an affair, dismembered her and boiled her body parts for four days. Only a few bits of her skull were left – it was from these fragments that she was identified. Then you read that a couple living near Luton, claiming to offer financial advice, befriended and then poisoned a sequence of elderly clients. Another story informs you about a woman in Spain who stabbed her neighbour 13 times: for months the woman’s dog had been barking during the day while she was at work (she was a dental hygienist); the neighbour complained repeatedly, left threatening notes, had called the police on multiple occasions and once kicked the dog in the street. Then the dog disappeared and was never found. Two days later the neighbour’s body was discovered. Or you get intrigued by the story of a mid-ranking administrator in the Australian health service who turns out to have forged numerous contracts for the supply of medical equipment and to have spent the money on luxury shopping – in the last two years before he was caught, his purchases included 47 Louis Vuitton suitcases and 11 Patek Philippe watches.
From a distance, it hardly makes sense at all that we should find these things a source of pleasure. The stories deal with obviously horrible, horrendous things. But, strangely, it is reassuring, and even (though we don’t relish saying so) enjoyable to hear about them. We perhaps worry that by taking pleasure in reading of them we are endorsing the crimes themselves. But the truth is we’re not actively egging on criminals, we’re not glad these things happened. On the contrary, it’s the very fact that they are clearly so wrong that generates our moments of satisfaction.
One source of our pleasure is that in many ways these people look so normal. The chef reminds you of a cheeky boy in the classroom when you were a kid. The woman with the dog is like someone you just saw at the supermarket. We mostly encounter the edited versions of other people. While we are continually exposed to the unedited version of ourselves. The unfair comparison means we inevitably feel much weirder than we really are. There’s that strange sexual thing that excites you. You feel like crying when you get stuck in traffic. In groups, you have the strange sense that everyone is normal except you. At work, you feel the need to laugh at a remark which, in all honesty, strikes you as entirely unamusing.
This is where the newspaper criminals come in. They have redrawn the scale of strangeness. By being exposed as 50 times more strange, they reposition our own lonely peculiarities squarely back in the realm of the humdrum and average. It has absolutely never even crossed your mind to cook your partner. You have lived a life free of the desire to collect designer luggage via defrauding hospitals; in the realm of poisoning and stabbing your neighbours, you are a snow-white innocent.
This is surely one of the hidden reasons middle-aged men turn in such numbers to reading books about Adolf Hitler. His catastrophic levels of insane rage, delusion, destructiveness and cruelty make pretty much everyone else look lovely by comparison. One may have spent the evening drinking beer, made three vaguely insulting remarks and omitted to brush one’s teeth before coming to bed. But by the standards of Berchtesgaden, you are revealed as really rather nice.
It’s not like you haven’t had your share of challenges. You too have been deeply hurt by betrayal; you have wished for easy money and luxury possessions; you’ve had sour disputes with neighbours. But by comparison you have reacted with grace. You’ve felt furious, suffered from envy and had periods of money worries – but you never did what they did. You absorbed your pain rather than committed crimes. Their villainy reveals your quiet moral heroism.
23
Driving on the Motorway at Night
It’s 10.15 pm. Usually, you’d be watching television, pottering in the kitchen in your socks, nibbling a biscuit, thinking about heading to bed. But instead you are behind the wheel, looking at the tail lights of cars comfortably far ahead, and with the occasional headlights slipping by on the other side; 117 miles to go at the last sign. We feel powerful and purposive. With only a tiny push the car surges forward along the wide, smooth lanes, past an HGV, round an expansive, lightly rising curve and into a long, even stretch under the comfortable pale glow of the road lighting. A blue sign invites others home to Nuneaton, and you feel a ripple of friendly goodwill to a place you’ve never visited and perhaps never will.
It’s cosy in the car. Your craft is vigilantly monitoring its own well-being: the small lights on the display quietly indicate that all is well with the brake fluid, that the engine is happy with its temperature and that you are currently proceeding at 72 miles an hour. You are pleasantly contained, returned to a mobile womb able to roam safely across the darkened surface of the late-night world.
The pleasure one feels, though, isn’t just to do with the cocooning environment. You are registering another kind of satisfaction as well – connected to what’s going on inside your head. You are experiencing an underappreciated but important satisfaction that deserves a special name: driving therapy.
It’s a strange, disturbing fact that the mind hates thinking. It’s not something we much like admitting. But we’re always dodging, jumping around, putting off turning a suspicion into a developed case; we withdraw from tricky mental confrontations with the failings of our preferred ideas and with troubling evidence. The monks of Buddhism took this difficulty very seriously – and they devised special environments to help themselves overcome these failings. They built remote monasteries and constructed gardens of moss and raked gravel; they investigated whether special ways of sitting would make a difference.
But they didn’t have cars. Culturally, it’s a long time since we’ve addressed the ideal preconditions for
thinking. We deserve to integrate the car as a place for thought. And it’s this pleasure – a pleasure of the mind – that we’re registering as we cruise past the elegant curving exit ramp.
For thinking, surprisingly, complete stillness is not always the best environment for coaxing the mind towards its best efforts. Often a more helpful set-up is quiet plus motion plus something else not too taxing to be done. Driving provides multiple minor routines: checking the rear mirror, micro adjustments on the accelerator, the automatic scanning of the speedometer and the constant interplay of the hands on the wheel and the road ahead. In these circumstances, provided by the car, the nervous, censorious part of the mind is shut off. We’re not so worried in advance about where a line of thought might go. We let the mind drift, helped along by the rhythmical passing of the overhead lamps. It can sound unproductive, but there’s a hidden benefit when the mind wanders around a topic. We get out of mental ruts that are so familiar we don’t even realise they are there. A possibility that gets closed off gets an airing – suppose one has been wrong? What if there’s another strategy? What, in fact, is the big goal one is aiming at? Is there one? Perhaps one has been too critical, or too passive? New ways of seeing things come into view. And they do precisely because we’re not trying too hard. We’re entering the strange and highly useful territory in which we can entertain a thought without rushing quickly to endorse or condemn it – where we can wonder if something might be the case, without reaching too fast to decide. The car at night creates a benign mental climate in which some important thoughts get the chance to grow.
It’s strangely attractive, at night in the middle of a long solo drive, to stop at a service station. Ordinarily that’s got close to zero appeal. But now it’s pleasing to change tempo, to sit silently amongst other human beings and have a coffee. Everyone is really a pilgrim, however well disguised they may seem to be. We are still far from home, but it’s a helpful distance – from which we can for a while view more clearly the bigger outlines of existence.
Small Pleasures Page 5
