To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Sunday, August 25, 2019
 
I visited Liverpool for the first time yesterday. I don’t know if it is my imagination or something more to it but every time I visit a new city or town I can’t help noticing a family resemblance with another city or town that I have visited in the UK. For example, I feel that Manchester and Edinburgh have a strong family resemblance. Today it seemed to me that Liverpool has a strong family resemblance to London. Note that when I say ‘family resemblance’ I don’t mean that they are identical, just as a pair of siblings may strike us as having similar features without looking the same at all and we would be hard pressed to point out what exactly about them seems to create this impression of resemblance.

Now, the one aspect on which I found London and Liverpool to strike me with similarity—though this isn’t the most notable point of similarity: the waterfront in the middle of the city, the giant wheel, the Tate are the more obvious ones—but the one aspect about which I couldn’t help pondering upon is the sensation I had in both cities as of being a spectator in some giant circus. Not a mute spectator sitting in the audience but an interactive one, one involved in the spectacle. People wearing costumes (not the glittery shiny variety but designed for more sophisticated effect) and masks (both outer and inner with such mastery that you couldn’t tell where one merges with the other) seem engaged in various acts of consumption. They may be consuming clothes, consuming food, consuming entertainment, consuming any number of things…but that is the inner logic of the circus or what keeps it going. I try to observe the actors closely sometimes and their faces seem hard, immobile, almost like that of statues, with neither a hair out of place nor a gesture. I can’t detect any signs of emotion, and even when they are there, they again seem geared for some calculated effect rather than spontaneous. Both in the thick of the city of London and in Liverpool (and perhaps one would feel this in all the big cities in the world today?) I most missed humanness in the sea of humanity.
For some strange reason I am reminded of a scene in the British sitcom Miranda (which I love) where Miranda talks about becoming a ‘new woman’ describing what type of woman that is. Well, I myself wish people would aspire less to be like that type of woman (or the male version of it) and more like the natural, clumsy, earnest, happy-in-one’s-own skin Miranda... the demands of the roles in the big city circus perhaps makes it difficult?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 7:41 pm 0 comments
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