The Contemptus Mundi Beat
By Wendy Erskine.
Many years ago, back when smoking was allowed on public transport, I got on a particular bus. From the back, as if through a cloud of grey dry ice, came the voices of three teenage girls, singing over and over again the words, ‘Life is just a piss in the air, Life is just a piss in the air! ‘ as the bus made its way along the Antrim Road. I watched them when they eventually got off, laughing and pushing each other, making faces at the dreary passengers who had stared at their tatted hair and ripped fishnets. The words they were singing haven’t ever really left me.
Periodic internet lyrics searches over the years have never come up with a song they were from and maybe that allows for a more thrilling conclusion. These fourteen, fifteen year olds — just as effectively as any painters who, with their fading flowers and withering leaves, walked the vanitas or contemptus mundi beat — managed to capture the essential precariousness and brevity of human life. While wearing Miss Selfridge bondage gear lite.
The other week I wrote a story where, as is usual in my stuff, someone thinks about dying, or dies. Like I said, those lyrics have never left me. Plus, as dispositions go, I’m doomy. I was asked to remove a sentence where a man notices the giant clock outside an undertaker’s. I was happy to do so. It was clumsy. It was memento mori writ large, underlined and italicised, although in real life such outsize clocks do exist, bracketed to the walls of funeral directors’ facades.
We really need no more reminders of mortality. Each day the statistics, unreliable and partial as they might be, break down the numbers dead in different countries and immediate localities. Put in your postcode for the latest info on Covid-19 in your area. The daily death tolls appall, frighten, shock, anger. Life was there and is gone.
But those girls, they also conveyed something that I understood even though I was just a kid myself, and one with no preternatural perspicacity. Viewed against the sweep of historical time, life may well be just a piss in the air, but for just a little while that piss is a glorious golden arc. And those lippy, cheeky kids, dreaming themselves up, were probably, hopefully, in the ascendant trajectory of it.
Catch that streak of piss glinting in the sunlight! Beautiful really, if you look at it. Just as a red jumper seems saturated with colour on a grey day, so lockdown and all this hanging around imbues ordinary things with such consequence. You’ll have seen plenty documented: the way the light plays on a rug; the crystalline freshness of a morning run; the crust of a loaf; certain guitar solos; melting butter; a family around a table; a line of poetry; a message from a friend; a kid’s drawing; a shoot; an old photo; your three favourite books, your five, your eight, your ten by novelists whose names begin with B.
Writers, maybe somebody like me who is beasting the hell out of a piss metaphor, don’t have more interesting experiences day to day than anyone else or more interesting thoughts, but just a greater inclination to write about them. So I also want to know just how the people still having to visit hospitals three times weekly for kidney dialysis are doing. What’s it like for postal workers? (Thank you Kevin Boniface!) How’s it going on the farm, when you have to pour your milk away? What’s it like to work on the checkout? How are you managing in the Chapel of Rest?
And here’s a recipe for caramel ice-cream and a good tune from Khana Bierbood:
225g castor sugar
4 egg yolks
large pot of double cream (600g)
Put the sugar with 100ml cold water in a saucepan. Heat slowly, stirring until the sugar has dissolved then boil until it starts to turn caramel coloured. Let it go really dark if you want a strong caramel taste. Keep your nerve.
Remove from the heat. Add another 200ml cold water, slowly. Bring to the boil again, then leave it to cool.
Whisk the egg yolks until they’re pale and thick. Slowly stir in the caramel.
Whip up the cream to floppy kind of peaks, then gently fold into the caramel custard. Take your time. Pour into a container and freeze it overnight.
@WednesdayErskin
