The Wrong Beach

Where the deranged Pied Piper lures us all

We emerged from the edges, the fringes, the margins. Neither forest nor savanna, neither ocean nor shore. We emerged from the great volcanic scar that tore the world apart and threw us to the brink. Mirror neurons and new projectile points churning around in the melee of tectonic dynamism in the Rift Valley where we stood hand in hand gawping toward the far horizon, ever reliant on each other, and ever hungry.

Credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

She wore a charcoal grey sweater, cream jeans and black Birkenstocks on her tanned feet. An uniform of sorts, conveying membership of the privileged and perpetually unsatisfied classes.

There was something of a calmness before the storm about her, a serenity above fathoms of who knew what. She sat in the aisle seat with her legs crossed serenely reading a paperback whilst all around were plugged into their devices.

Her face rested in a half haughty, half frowning expression which broke into layers of studied charm when she paid attention, which she did as I motioned I’d need to clamber past to reach the window seat. There was an absence of something indecipherable and vibrant in her gaze. A course of pharmaceuticals softening the hard edges of life perhaps?

I recognised her immediately, she lived in our neighbourhood. I’m sure she recognised me too, but chose to feign obliviousness, or perhaps genuine disinterest. After I sat down the pilot announced that due to weather conditions in Barcelona the flight would be delayed for an hour, so there we sat, side by side, like two actors in an opening scene pretending to be strangers. 

Her children, in the row behind, were casually kicking my seat and orchestrating a cacophony of clicks by opening and snapping shut the seat belt clasp over and over again. Lost in her book she radiated unconcern. But suddenly she hopped up and pirouetted into the aisle, where speaking in subdued pants of quiet desperation she ran through an inaudible gambit of threats and pleas and promises until the clicking ceased and a tantrum of tray table slamming began. 

Her husband, who sat across the aisle, had abandoned her to these mere trivialities as he peered around, avoiding acknowledgement of anything, especially his potential to help.

Over the next hour I came to know they had recently discovered Cadaqués on the Costa Brava, where shoals of equally uniformed families were floating about, reflecting each other’s social status along the narrow alleyways of the once pretty fishing village that now bestowed Mediterranean authenticity on those who could pay.

I was beyond the scope of her social gaze, not invisible, more like an oncoming pedestrian, something to be negotiated, avoided, bypassed, some oncoming tiresome obligation that must be reluctantly fulfilled. As she looked through me I felt as ghosts must feel, wailing and shaking their chains just to be seen and remembered.

I have always known that my poise is subject to the gaze of others, which is surely true of all über social animals with our boundaries that are porous and ever fluctuating. I’m suddenly chuckling at the idea of social class as some deranged pied piper luring us further from the root’s of humanity’s intimacy and mutual dependence.

When people say stop worrying what other people think, there seems to be some wisdom there, but I still feel the chill of the barren desolation and breakdown behind that advice, for surely there is nothing more in life than what we think and feel?

Are we not in fact all interdependent and overlapping? Each one of us a kaleidoscope of butterflies that perpetually flutter through one another, alighting upon each other, birthing dreams and memories and love, forever affecting and altering those we pass through, forever being altered by those who pass through us.

Are we not each an ocean current of microscopically different temperatures, that imperceptibly affect each other, warming and cooling as we flow through one another within the oneness of the indissoluble Great Ocean?

And yet here am I evaporating into insignificance as my existence is belittled with the least effort by the mirage of class and power that chokes our shared humanity like thick smoke as we all turn our backs on each other.

And then it dawns on me, as so often it does, that she is drowning in deep and painful boredom, struggling to stay afloat in waves of self loathing. I feel her radiating disdain. I become immersed in her deeper field of helplessness, inadequacy and guilt, a vicious cocktail that faces always outwards, always on the attack, always ready to point the finger at anyone but themselves.

A restlessness grew throughout the plane, inconvenienced by the greater forces of climate breakdown and bureaucracy, people engaged in frustrated conversations. Talk of unfairness and blame. There’s no time for this. Someone has fucked up somewhere. She says nothing, seeming to plunge deeper into her book. Her husband watching a violent film, occasionally flinching at the grotesque imagination of humans dehumanising humans. Their children began punching each other with an increasing force. 

2.

On the beach the sunbed/parasol guy came from Senegal and spoke 7 languages. He was in his 50’s with an handsome open face and a quick wit. He wore a straw trilby and flip flops that clapped as he padded through the heavy sand.

The shore was full of Spanish and French and English and Dutch families sizzling themselves on sunbeds as East Asian and African hawkers sang songs of selling sunglasses and football tops and massages and watermelon slices and ice cold beer. The same sparkling Mediterranean that carried the Phoenicians and Roman galleys rolled out to the horizon as the exploited and exhausted enacted the 21st century’s version of leisure on its scorching sands and the sixth mass extinction silently gathered pace in the background.

And yet not a single emergency broadcast. Just a cacophony of Euro-pop blowing in the wind as one young couple full of love stared toward the horizon as they reached over from their sunbeds and held hands. 

People batted hard rubber balls in arcs above the overweight burnt bodies smoking and drinking and eating as laughter and arguments and gigantic blowup hotdogs and unicorns blew past down the beach. 

And then I see her, reading a paperback on a sunbed, as her husband in a straw hat huddles under a parasol with towels wrapped around his legs and chest like a ancient and decrepit mummy, and their children fight over who owns the iPad. They are a long way from Cadaqués, like a alien species washed up in a storm as the background horror of planetary breakdown goes unseen and unheard around them. And the shame they felt as they sunned themselves on the wrong beach shone from them and I am overcome with the feeling that trivialities are now deadly serious and deadly serious things are now mere trivialities.

The sunbed/parasol guy flip flops toward them and warmly laughs and tells them the price in Swedish and I make a mental note, eight languages, as he slowly turns his back on them and lifts a crying child from the lap of her exhausted mother and smiles like a dream.

3.

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity