The Metropolis and Me
An inner-city psychotic episode
This was inspired in part by reading the Georg Simmel essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, quotes from which appear throughout.
Read or download a PDF of the essay here.
“The deepest problems of modern life flow from the individual’s struggle to preserve their own existence in the face of overwhelming social forces …”
It’s the first Monday of the year; the January blues have set in and denial is no longer a defence. Christmas and NYE are over. All the money’s been spent, all the leave’s been taken.
Tonight the city should be dead as a coffin nail, but there are still people in this pub, mourning festive freedoms lost, still trying to drown those sorrows.
Inside, on the ground floor, a couple of groups have pushed tables together. What milestones are they celebrating? A success, commiserations, a birthday?
My guess is a birthday. (There’s an odd little uptick in births in the first week of January.) A foil balloon bobs just out of my line of sight as I walk past; I can’t read what’s written on it, but I fervently hope it’s not Life Begins At 40.
Upstairs there’s a mezzanine floor with a second bar. In another life, aeons ago, we’d all congregate up here. Uni students; cool kids drinking cheap beer, though this place has never been cool.
I try to remember when I was last here as part of a group, and can’t.
There’s a smattering of students in tonight. While at uni, we’d joke that the collective noun for a group of students was “a disappointment”… Not many leave the comforts of the festive family household this early, but these guys are slumming it just like we used to. Half-shaved heads, plaid work shirts, black jeans, hats and glasses. The rockabilly look never dies, does it?
Some old couples are dotted about too — blue rinse and brown corduroy, taking advantage of the pub-grub meal deals and free newspapers. Very reasonably priced food you know, and they always have the Daily Mail.
“Money hollows out the cores of things — their peculiarities, their values, their uniqueness. They all float with the same gravity in a constantly moving stream of capital …”
I sit by the balcony rail, where I can see across the room and down onto the ground floor. My hands are still blue and stiff from the cold outside. They fail to open my bag of peanuts, so I bite and tear at it like an animal.
There’s another group below, different from the birthday crew. I hear them before I see them, they’re making so much racket. Smartly dolled-up in suits and dresses. They look like they’re out-out.
But it’s not prom season and they’re too old to be students. Professional colleagues perhaps. Their faces and shoulders have rounded edges, planed off by years of comfortable, dull, office work.
“Through taking advantage of sensitivity to difference, the attention of the social world can, in some way, be won for oneself …”
One of them is not like the others. She’s clad in a tiny playsuit dress with straps like liquorice bootlaces over the shoulders, and black killer heels on her feet, all in sharp contrast to her pale skin.
Blackwork tattoos complete the two-tone look, one on her thigh and the other on her arm. I’m too far away to make out details, they’re just patches. Black and white, black and white.
My brain loves patterns, of all kinds. Sometimes if it doesn’t have any, it’ll create its own. This person is an optical illusion — it looks like she’s moving even when she’s not. I lose focus and stare through things, seeing only bichromatic shapes. Black and white, black and white.
I don’t know how long this continues. Long enough for distance to distort and the scene to telescope away from me, shrinking to a diorama in an empty black room. My balcony is now an opera box overlooking a chasm, at the bottom of which a tiny and very busy harlequin is at a burlesque chess-set tea party.
“The psychological foundation upon which metropolitan individuality is erected is intense emotion, due to swift and continuous shifting of external and internal stimuli …”
I become aware I’ve stopped breathing, so I force myself to. Reality floods back in with the breath, as if the air is infused with it.
I sip my neglected pint of beer.
The rest of the group sit around the other tables, arranged like Olympic rings when seen from above. It’s a attention-grabbing outfit but not unusual, even for this time of year. It’s fascinating is its incongruity. All the other outfits say “work do”. Smart, but understated. Polished, but relaxed. All calculated and coordinated, chosen from the same dress code.
Was the choice a miscommunication, an accident, or fully intentional? I try to ground my flyaway psyche by fixating on why this scenario has come to pass.
“For many people, the only means of saving some self-esteem for themselves is through the attention gained from others …”
There’s probably no logic behind it, and almost certainly no mystery. Some people are just extroverts.
Talking loud and laughing louder, always moving, sitting, standing, swishing GHD-straight hair. One moment, luxuriating in someone’s lap like Dita Von Teese in a Martini glass. Another, melodramatically coughing until someone brings a glass of water.
I feel a bit “Phantom of the Opera” but an extra step removed. I’m its author, Gaston Leroux, sitting in the rafters above, watching his Fantôme (also me) crouching on the lighting rig catwalk, watching the players on stage.
People rarely notice me. A nobody with a notepad, a pint and a packet of dry roasted peanuts. Or maybe I don’t notice them. When I’m not scribbling frantically on a page, I tend to stare into the middle distance a lot. Staring at people freaks me out more than it does them.
“People do not end with the limits of their physical bodies, rather they embrace the totality of effect that emanates from them temporally and spatially …”
Alcohol-fuelled or not, the kind of exhibitionism going on below tends to be met with frosty or awkward energy. But there is none of that. Everyone’s cool. It seems natural. On evenings and weekends, this mannequin becomes a superhero ringmaster, a circus that winks out of existence if people stop looking.
The tables are now in two separate grooves — those carrying on their conversations, and those in thrall.
Eventually, the whole troupe stands; previously separate acts now an ensemble revue led by their ringmaster. Off they go, to whatever decadent adventures await a dozen or so people who’ll be god-damned if they’re going to let trivialities like January, the freezing wind, or suicide Tuesday put an end to their end of days carnival.
The round tables are no longer circus rings, but empty black holes, and bear the detritus left when the house lights come up and and the theatre empties.
Watching the bar staff pick up dead glasses, my reverie is overtaken by a lurching wave of melancholy.
The girl has left behind a scarf.
A worker picks it up from behind the chair where she was sitting and holds it aloft, looking for marks of identification before draping it on the backrest.
It’s just a black shawl with black sequins, but the melancholy that rushed in following the departure of the has been raised to what feels like a tragedy.
“Humans are creatures whose existence depends on difference — their minds are stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those that have gone before …”
This, I realise, is all in my head. I’ve concocted a lead character, a melodrama complete with backstories and a supporting cast, out of virtually nothing.
They were probably just a group of colleagues at a daytime work do, perhaps a late Christmas dinner, who ducked into a pub to have one for the road and escape the bad weather. They ended up having one too many, and are now off to their respective homes. Tomorrow morning in the office it will amount to less than three minutes of intrigue over coffee and a biscuit before being forgotten:
…Kathy from Accounts wore next to nothing again last night but then again she always does and if I had legs like that I probably would too but did you see the way Jeremy from Sales was looking at her I tell you what if I was his wife I’d want to be careful especially after that incident on the team-building away day with you-know-who…
Off I go again. It’s not that story, it’s this one.
On top of all this, I’m still anthropomorphising that poor scarf. I wince, feeling foolish. But then again, what harm does all this do? No harm. I don’t need my own pity. Save that for the scarf.
My brain does this with everything. I can stop it no more than I can change the colour of my eyes. My mind pounces on anything that comes within range: people and objects, animal, vegetable, mineral, fluid, inert. It subjects things to scrutiny and dissects them beyond repair.
If its standards are met, so begins a wild flight of fancy. If not, the thing is deemed unfit for Mr Toad’s Wild Ride and it’s discarded immediatelyfo, forgotten even sooner.
Or — maybe it’s just my brain’s way of passing gas. The pressure that builds must be released. Better out than in…
Pity is pointless. So I grin instead and button my coat, preparing to leave and face the outside elements myself.
My brain tries to fill the emptiness and blot out melancholy by imagining how the group’s night continues:
She doesn’t miss the scarf, despite the weather. A warm and expensive woollen overcoat is draped over her shoulders. It smells of rosemary and agarwood. It reminds her of a deep brown bottle with a silver band around it, that was on her father’s bathroom shelf. They’re walking towards the nondescript door of an impossibly decadent nightclub in Berlin. A side entrance will open that night it will open for them alone.
It works, sort-of, but not for long. It’s always like this. Like waking up from a dream and trying to get back to it.
“From Nietzsche to Socialism, the same fundamental motive is at work: the individual’s resistance to being swallowed up by a social-technological mechanism …”
The sadness attaches itself to everything. It is heavy, thick and pervasive. Resistance, to emptiness, to absence, to what happens when the machines we inhabit grind to a halt, is ultimately futile.
I constantly feel personal loss, mourning my younger self, whom I fool myself into believing never suffered mental illness.
The empty tables. Lost property. Ghosts. The Nothing: apathy, cynicism, the denial of childish dreams.
“The sphere of indifference is not as great as it seems superficially … Our minds respond with some definite feeling to almost every impression emanating from another person.”
