It is all here now in the café Buenos Aires.
The young fresh faced lad being supervised by his tutor and setting the older man’s heart on wings. The two students at another table in T-shirts facing each other in earnest conversation over their open and green-pen highlighted copies of the Bible. The couple in their thirties with anxious faces unable to find words for each other so that the silence stretches towards a minute, between his devouring eyes and her reluctant sideways glance. The two older women with their dark, sad eyes and thinning hair, who only whisper to each other. The barking voice of the thin, young dark-haired woman, as if she has to shout to prove the continuing existence of her friend sitting opposite who happens to be hidden from view, and the curiosity that her almond eyes, which have beauty in their form, are made unattractive by the thinness of her mouth. And sat about and alone, the solitary staring figures with their laptops open on tables, or mobile telephones pressed to their ears.
All these “tolerably well-defined objects” – I am here quoting a famous phrase of Darwin (The Origin of Species. Ch V1. Difficulties on Theory) – as if I, I am and I am not here at this given time, and in a position to speak for them.
To sum up, I believe that species come to be tolerably well-defined objects, and do not at any one period present an inextricable chaos of varying and intermediate links…
Except for the above forensically observed environmental classification – the eroticised, the ecologised, the biblicised, the monologised, the sentimentalised, as well as of course the lonely technologised – the opposite appears to be the case in a constantly shifting scene of metamorphosis between different human orders, a process in a field from which I am also unable ethically speaking to stand apart, at one and the same moment informed decision-maker considering what words to write down, threat-exposed organism primed for fight, flight or freeze, and beneficiary of the social conventions and contracts at work in this building which houses the café Buenos Aires.
In a word – it is all here now - politicised.
In walkingtalkingwriting politics out in the world my friend habitually takes bigger risks than I, and skirts the fringes of despair and his own destruction (see last published post!) because, while we are politicised, we are not partisan. And the satire invoked here by us – remember; It is a joke and it is serious! – has ‘word slayer’ power in all directions, including our own.
So for the well-being of all human orders (and since it is less than four weeks to Christmas… and like everyone else we need to get ourselves out into the shopping streets), we paint the letters of this conjoined phrase in capitals on to the cloth of our green and red (“walk” / “don’t walk”) flag –
TRAGIC LOSS & COMIC HOPE