A Nohemian Lifestyle
When a friend offered up his couch in the south of the city and I accepted faute de mieux, I had braced up for certain inconveniences in the way of spare amenities or faulty ones. Temperature, lighting, noise, would not be set at the volumes or levels that I, as sole proprietor and exclusive guest of a private hotel, would have set them. This was to be expected going in, and accepted a-priori. I had neither expected nor prepared for, however, a veritable heavy metal recording studio to occupy the ground floor of his three-floor walk-up.
Now, when one offers another lodging, even under the assumption that any accommodation would be better than the park and that the lodger would only be grateful for the fact, it appears logical, if one's building so chances to serve as a recording chamber for death metal music, to mention this slight but not irrelevant fact. It might do to forewarn the prospective lodger that a troupe of aspiring suicidals would be broadcasting moribund howls late into the grim night like squawking buzzards. I so happen to enjoy metal. But, as they ask, really? Sounds something out of a play of cheap comedy: the turned out tramp, done a good turn, weary and wanting only to turn in, meets with a raucous band of devil-inspired headbangers. I was being rocked to sleep, as it were. I was banging my head, though not to the music.
Barking dogs I had expected (this was in TLV after all, where quadrapeds outnumber the bipedals who walk them); that the barks were augmented by an echo-chamber hallway apparently made of tin only added some pique to an anticipated irritation. The "small couch", if only slightly smaller, might have been mistaken for its cousin, the chair. My legs draped over the edge, body splayed like a felled victim of domestic violence. The rolled-up towel in lieu of a pillow, the coughing air conditioning dripping, the rusticated toilet encrusted with grime, the neighbours who were practically roommates in everything but physical presence: these were inconveniences but not altogether surprising ones, and must perforce be accepted stoically by the freeloading loafer.
For ultimately I brought this upon myself. He who undertakes to live by his pen alone has his world defined, indefinitely, by unpredictable hours and a certain degree of vagrancy. The idea of the itinerant scribbler, the sonnet-singing flaneur, is usually more romantic in mind than it is in practice. The exigencies of living often gainsays ideology, and the artistic idealist who abjures the 9-5 soon learns that living life often gets in the way of writing about it. The writer of such a mode of living preambles while he rambles. He learns to improvise, adapt, acclimate. Some of those ebbing hours are perched up by charity, the favors of others, eleemosynary meals. “Making the best” of what is nearly always bad may make a bad thing better but does not make it any good.
But here was a comedy of errors. Too cheap for fiction but funny enough in fact. A screaming death metal band, screaming death? The park does appear ever so lovely verdant at this midnight hour…
I booked a hostel for the morrow’s morn and wrote this piece. Goodnight, to you all, for what this moon’s worth.
My next host (patron, patronus) was dispositionally different, emotional antipode to my former benefactor.
An acquaintance of the ol' sort, a fellow Anglo working in Israel, a friend from home made abroad, we sat for dinner the evening after my return from gallivanting East Central Europe. Perusing the wine list we each discovered in the other a passion for Piedmonte, each of us turning directly if not instinctively to the page representing that region; settling with confidence on a bottle of Barolo, stained velvet, which wine, for me, feels as though composed not of liquid, but of wisps, of spirit, like ghostly eddies of mysterious vapour.
Nothing secures like a mutual eclectic passion a human bond. Explaining the personal posish as pensioned vagrant over starters of loquat and green almond salad and goat cheese gnudi (Tuscan word, "naked"; Think: gnudi = "nude"), he swiftly pronounced the timing fortuitous and the situation solved, as he was flying for a business conference and would be gone a week, leaving a vacant apartment and an ideal space for the scribbling squatter. Thus he became the Deus ex machina of my little tragicomedy.
The following afternoon I was at his threshold to be vouchsafed the keys to his personal city. As most home-showers do before showing their home to a guest dropped-in unscheduled, he pronounced the the state of the house "a bit messy at the moment". The offhand remark was more than off the mark.
A fabulous chaos; a sophisticated playpen for the monied adult. Things were scattered with a nigh deliberate randomness. Wonderfully eclectic; manically, maniacally. Entropic, maximalist, a hotch-potch of a single man's life and all the minds interests either deeply set or ephemeral—books, drawings, lithographs, objets d'art, plaques, certificates, maps, stickers, tins of delicacies, bags of every material, knapsacks, havre-sacs, satchels, valises, walking stick, joss stick, match boxes, incense, cigarette holders, candles, carpets, chocolates (from Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden), all manner of cups and bowls, porcelain wabi-sabi dominating; vials, cruets, mason jars, bottles filled with strange liquids—aperitifs, vermouths, aperos, rice beers—or home-brewed concoctions: old fashioneds (label: "Caution: Strong!!"), negronis, white and red variety ("Careful when mixing that with cold-brew, you'll never be as tanked," was the head mixologist's warning to me); a porron for decanting, a wine fridge for chilling red (set at 61 degrees), glasses for quaffing; mechanical apparatuses—blenders, spice grinders, coffee grinders, kettles, espresso makers, ice-cream maker, scales for weighing a coffee bean to weighing a human, radio, record player, speakers, soda streamer, steamers, pressure-cookers, sous vide; topical creams, sprays, gels, skin foods, astringents, lotions, cosmetics; candles, incense; ash-trays, humidors; tablets, pellets, pastilles, lozenges, drops; unidentifiables, indescribables—what we shall slate under the genus potpourri, bric-à-brac—baubles, bibelots, gewgaws, trinkets, knicnacks, keepsakes, souvenirs. Stuff and things and stuff.
Things were stacked, things were piled, things were heaped: things were anything but laid out in a neat geometrical proportion, with equal measured spaces between. Everything, every thing, was a-scatter and a-straggle. One did not walk through self-leading vestibules so much as navigated happenstance pathways over the exposed parquet. Here was a house of curios; one's apartment, when it is one's own and fully embraced as one's own, is the exterior projection, an embodied mapping of the mind; an apartment is a museum dedicated to the anonymous individual. In that sense it is becomes as much a metaphysical space as a physical habitat. The empty room is a 3-D canvass to be filled; interior design is the means by which we "paint" the space in the image of its maker.
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