Look at this!” Like a little boy wanting to show off to anyone who’ll listen, I’m proud as punch. But I have to be patient. And I’m not good at being patient.
After finally extracting myself from London, wending my way to a beautiful little corner of rural Italy, being met by love and kindness and generosity all around, not to mention breathtaking scenery and a perfect cosy little home, I find I’m dying to report back, to connect with my friends and family, by phone and email.
My Luddite claim to want to be free of the trappings of the modern world, the consumerist gripe water of technological instant gratification, is being sorely tested. But this is a Big Deal. My mid-life crisis is happening, right here and now. Pay attention! I need to get some sort of response from my friends, to make this quixotic lunacy feel real. I need to show photographs, I need to hear voices. Is an adventure really an adventure, if the story isn’t told?
My hosts’ hard work and dogged perseverance (since August) eventually pays off, and the chaotic, contradictory, expensive, crazy-making monopolistic workings of the state telephone company are cajoled and finessed into installing a phone line and an internet connection to my one-roomed cottage, just over a week after I move in.
This, by Italian standards, is something to be grateful for. The social exchange around here goes something like this: utter pessimism at the beginning – it could never be done, impossible, certainly not. Gloom and doom. Then, after a period of time, a chink of light: perhaps, just this once, it might happen, but even then, it’s highly unlikely, don’t be foolish enough to get your hopes up. Then, mirabili dictu! It’s happening after all! Celebrate! Life is good!
The wonderful thing about this rhythm of manifestation is that the celebration is real, people really do make up for the earlier pessimism. Other cultures may not invest such dramatic tension into ordinary life, and prefer their daily lives to work prosaically, soberly, efficiently, without fuss. Where’s the fun in that?
So, here I am, communicating how good it is. Sharing it. Everyone has it, to some degree – a desire to report, to define, to name, to put words to our experience, in order to get it affirmed, acknowledged, noticed.
It works on so many levels – from nightly check-ins with a lover or friend, the “how has your day been?” Intimacy, to fire-side retellings of great epic journeys and endeavours. If we’ve done well, we seek praise, attention. If it’s not gone well, we seek sympathy, encouragement, a listening ear. The reaction to one’s action. Narcissus and his Echo.
There’s a toddler I once knew, now probably old enough to be reading this, who used to throw open a door and burst into a room full of people and go: “I’m great!”
Everyone would laugh at the grinning little scamp, and she’d scamper out and hurtle back in again, repeating her joyous announcement to even greater mirth. Her powerful personality had a curious symbolic resonance. Her mother, a teenager at the time, had kept her pregnancy a complete secret from everyone at home, dieting and slouching and wearing very baggy jumpers, right until the moment she gave birth to her, to everyone’s astonishment. It’s as if the little girl was determined to ensure she’d never be concealed again; or she had become accustomed to making dramatic entrances, and had acquired a taste for the frisson of the explosive arrival. I wonder what she’s doing now. Attention-seeking manifests itself in so many different ways.
But it’s not just about attention. There is a binary component to human nature, a duality, a polarity. Yang and yin, active and reactive, giver and receiver, positive and negative, goal-oriented and love-oriented, 1 and 0, Mars and Venus, Sun and Moon. All are aspects of the same psychological, archetypal principle. There was a time when this was readily understood as being the difference between a man and a woman. Those days are, happily, long gone, at least in the West. For such rigid sex-roles are oppressive, and damaging to those of us who do not fit the mould. Perhaps, though, I’m being nostalgic for the security of those roles, imagining that life would be easier if I knew my place, and if I had a partner who knew theirs. Perhaps we are all, men and women, in need of wives, of whatever sexes, now. Or am I just falling into the male trap of mistaking the nurturing support of a loving wife for that of Mother?
In order to achieve things, do I, as a man, need someone back there at home egging me on, telling me I can do it? And was that one of the reasons things were so hard for me in London – that I couldn’t find it, or wouldn’t let it in? The phone would ring in my flat in the centre of London and I’d flinch, my frigid isolation being threatened by a thaw.
Here, I’m eager to pick up the phone and have a natter to anyone who calls. I don’t understand it yet. But when I do, I’ll be sure to let you know.