Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The old man must resort to the poker

Klaus Eckstein, all-round man that he was, was always going on about the essays of Montaigne, writing Que scais-je? , his motto, on the blackboard for us to ponder. What do I know? Not a bad slogan, though I was more interested in the question of who wanted to do the knowing in the first place. Still, according to Eckstein, Michel de Montaigne had known himself as well as anyone ever had. I told him how much I disliked French as a language, and he told me there was a famous early translation, enjoyable in its own right. John Florio, contemporary of Shakespeare. Eckstein was probably thinking of my essay on Lorca when he added that strangely enough, this nobleman with a wife and family had in his writings expressed the deepest feelings not for them, but for another man. His best friend Etienne de La Boétie.

Grudgingly I got hold of the book, through Mrs Pavey of course. Almost the first thing that my eyes fell on was this marvellous sentence: ‘One should (saieth Aristotle) touch his wife soberly, discreetly and severely, lest that tickling-too-deliciously pleasure transport her beyond the bounds of reason.’ There was plenty more in that vein, but what struck me with great force was something that Montaigne expounds elsewhere, viz. that the ideal of moderation should work in both directions, not only lessening what is excessive but amplifying what is insufficient. Moderation should be both curb and whip, as circumstances dictate. Montaigne could be very matter-of-fact about sexual activity, defining it as the ‘tickling delight of emptying one’s seminary vessels’ which becomes faulty only by immoderation. He was very big on the tickling, was dear old Montaigne, but also on the moderation.

So what was my position in his scheme? Well, I didn’t need to push suitors away with my crutch and my cane. If as Montaigne suggested, An unattempted Lady could not vaunt of her chastitie , then nor could I. If I wasn’t an unattempted Lady, then I was pretty much an unattempted Lad.

Montaigne was particularly eloquent when addressing the subject of old age and the waning of the powers. The young man should damp down the blaze of his ardour, the old man must resort to the poker to get a blaze going. Young men should control their desires, old men should cultivate them. The imperative of moderation, though, underlies both cases. It is just as much a virtue for an old man to ginger up his appetites as it is for a young man to rein them in.

In this context, I was at twenty an honorary codger. Youth was no part of my portfolio. My birth year was relatively recent, but that wasn’t enough by itself to make me young. As a man in a wheelchair my desires were everywhere an embarrassment and an inconvenience. I was expected to behave decorously, miming impotence, tactfully impersonating a pensioner in glandular terms, passions safely in the past. But moderation required the opposite. Moderation required excess for the proper balance.

So I took the opposite vow from the one I had taken before I visited India, the vow of celibacy that had ended with such a disconcerting burst of imagery. I vowed non-celibacy, sexual exploration in any direction that opened itself to me. Systematic debauchery on principle, whether I felt like it or not. This was at least a vow that might yield some fun along the way. The times were right for exploration rather than for abstinence. People had a new dread of being thought to be narrow-minded, which might serve my purpose. I had more to fear from not trying than from taking every chance that was offered, and making chances where there were none.

At Cambridge I saw more films than ever before or since. There were many cinemas, and most colleges had a film society of some sort. It may even be that my cinema-going in those years had a spiritual dimension, though it was hidden from me at the time. I was struggling with a sense of spiritual dryness, and it seemed ridiculous that I had ever thought of being on a Quest. That capital letter had suffered a dwindling along the way. The word itself had lost its vivid promise, the sense of illumination being just around the corner. My sense of discipleship often seemed to be unravelling, though the guru never let me go.

In his teachings Ramana Maharshi used the cinema as a source of images even more than the radio. The spectators of a film, for instance, attend to the images which replace themselves on the screen with such deceptive smoothness. No one gives a thought to the screen, although without it there could be no projection of the film. The screen is the same whether or not a film is being shown, just as the self is the same in sleep and waking. It is unchanged by what flickers across it — a filmed flood has no power to wet it. A filmed conflagration does not scorch.

A few years later, as if going out of their way to contradict this strain of Hindu mystical thought, the makers of Earthquake came up with a film about an earthquake which actually shook its spectators, at least in cinemas equipped with the Sensurround system, whose speakers emitted low-frequency vibrations so as to produce real tremors. But that was just showing off.

Of course when I had paid my money to get into the Arts Cinema, or the Victoria or the ABC, I was watching the projected pictures like everyone else, letting my mind be ruled by images and ignoring the screen itself. But at some level I was keeping faith with the idea of self-enquiry, even so.

It was important for me to make it a habit of going out, not to surrender to blank evenings in A6. As a schoolboy I had gone to films as part of a group, coasting along with the social momentum. Now I had to plan expeditions on my own, but I was nevertheless drawn to the cinema.

The leather belt of office

One evening I went to see Wild Strawberries at the Arts Cinema with a boy I knew slightly from German lectures. Noel was an angelic little blond, if angels can have snub noses. His was a type I don’t much care for but he was presentable, undeniably.

He seemed very young, even for those days, when freshers arrived with their mothers’ kisses still evaporating from their cheeks, and the scarves their aunts had knitted wound tightly round their necks.

I liked the way that, after a lecture, he just watched with amusement as our fellow students either made themselves scarce or squared up to volunteering to help me, as if they were signing up for years of military service. Noel seemed to find this comical, which was very much the perspective I aspired to myself.

There was no real significance to our going out together. We just arranged, after a lecture, to meet at the cinema. The choice of film was an accident from my point of view — Noel had mentioned in conversation that he would be going, and I had asked to tag along. I knew that without a definite social obligation I would back out of the expedition and all its uncertainties.

I had the sneaky feeling that our arrangement was asymmetrical. If I didn’t turn up Noel would have no difficulty proceeding with his evening, but if he didn’t turn up I was stymied. Before I set out I did what students so often did at the time, when puzzled over questions great or small. I would consult the Book of Changes, the yarrow-stalk oracle — the I Ching . I used the Westernised coin-throwing option rather than the traditional version with the yarrow stalks, although with my contacts at the Bot I should have been able to come up with the authentic flora. My question, of course, was ‘How am I to dissolve myself into the life of this indifferent city while continuing to ask “Who am I?”?’ The reading that came up always seemed to be The leather belt of office will be given and taken away three times in one day . Lovely, poetic, highly suggestive, but what I wanted was more along the lines of Go to the flicks with someone you hardly know — make it something arty .