Elsewhere and you

Elsewhere considered in the light of you, yes you.

It’s all in the Larkin poem really, the one you’ll find on the “how to read this blog” page. After expressing the clear sense of being alien that he felt in Ireland he writes:

“Living in England has no such excuse:

These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.”

Once you get past the usual irritation that Larkin has taken a profound insight you have just had, jumped into a time machine and gone back thirty years to write beautifully about it, you start to wonder how it applies to you.

 For me working class 1980s England didn’t really work, because I liked poetry and Tchaikovsky and solitude and not many of my friends did. I once got hit in the face for buying a Duran Duran single and so betraying the Saxon/Judas Priest/Black Sabbath orthodoxy that dominated our 13 year old intellectual milieu. Imagine if I had suggested reading Sylvia Plath together. Then, later, I took the “local college leading to University” path, where I read Marx and Swinburne and became an angry young man 40 years after there was any point in being an angry young anything.

What was worse was that having has the class transplant operation it turned out to be only a partial success, and I found that my friends who had been to private school, and were perfectly decent people didn’t fancy watching the United game and were unnerved when I started singing the red flag and speaking of Molotov cocktails.

  Finally, to complete the mess I had a love life that was essentially a performance art interpretation of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INgXzChwipY

  And then I arrived in Moscow, and suddenly none of this had any relevance any longer. There’s a primitive and egotistical notion of this that appears in self help books and is about “remaking the self” or “becoming a new you” but that’s all bullshit because there is no one “self” that could be remade nor any “you” that exists independently of what others think you are. The self/selves are formed out of the interaction between you and everything that makes up the “not you”. And, really, all that the self help people have grasped is that a hometown is full of people who think they know who you are and what they can expect from you, and you can end up trapped in that, most of us do at times, and for most it’s ok, a comfort zone.

 But move to Moscow and suddenly the “not you” thinks England is Agatha Christie or Oasis or The King’s Speech, and that’s all so vague and contradictory that you can live in the spaces without having to do or be anything that doesn’t suit you. And if there is someone in England with Iron Maiden albums and a sense that you should have known your fucking place, well they are in England and you are not. And is there any reason why this would be different had I gone to Istanbul or Sao Paulo? Not that I can see.

 Talking with a young woman about this recently, a woman who is tired of here and is looking to get out, we ended up concluding that, for some, the question of whether you stay or leave, and the further question of whether you will find happiness “there” depends hardly at all on the place you go to, and almost entirely on what you need to find a way of being that doesn’t make you feel like every day is a misery to be endured. Do you want to go to America, or just to … well... elsewhere?

 So maybe it’s wise to think hard about whether this might be the case, because if it isn’t you could just be planning a long and very expensive holiday for that bad feeling you’ve had these last few years, or you could be one of those people who are happy anywhere, which would be awful.