CLOTHE AS IF CULTIVATION NEVERTHELESS EARNS THE EFFORT
The foremost aspect one observes about a truly refined bloke is not his tailoring but his insolence. The garment is hardly the notarised affidavit of a deeper rebellion. One may purchase tweed from Savile Row and per contra resemble a petrified assistant manager at a Midlands insurance firm. Savoir-faire, in its purest incarnation, is not fabric but audacity pressed into cloth.
I attended a funeral in Belgravia where the departed—a financier of outrageous wealth and even lewder appetites—emplaced in a walnut casket below an avalanche of pearly lilies that smelt somewhat of hospitals and old money. The mourners appeared draped in hackneyed charcoal melancholia, seeming like a congregation of crestfallen ravens.
And then came Sebastian.
He wore a cream double-breasted suit.
Cream. To a funeral.
A chiffon carnation the colour of fresh arterial blood bloomed from his lapel. His shoon shone with the cold menace of lustrous mahogany. Worthy women gaped albeit they might faint directly into their canapés.
“Christ,” whispered a viscountess, clutching her pearls as if they were rosary beads against Satan himself, “the fella looms positively immoral.”
Sebastian heard her and smiled slightly. “That,” he murmured, “is because morality is so frequently clad by cowards.”
And there it was.
The unalloyed soddy thesis.
Spiff up not because the universe deserves allure, but because it so repeatedly deserves none and receives it anyway. Civility itself is smidgen extra than barbarism sporting cufflinks. The cutting-edge world wishes everybody to match accountants queuing for tax audits—grey geniuses in grey trousers carrying grey opinions underneath supermarket sconces.
To dress sensationally is hence an act of war.
A brocade blazer asserts: I refuse your drab diminutive fucking surrender.
A silk scarf states: Your ugliness has not conquered me yet.
And shiny shoes? Ah. Burnished shoes are the final courtesy extended to a collapsing courteousness.
DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN WITHOUT SOUNDING MAD
There are lads who spend their plenary presence pursuing to become palatable. They shave away every eccentricity until they are socially edible unimportant cubes of beige. They articulate in white-collar dialects. They titter precisely when expected. Their disposition duplicate airport carpeting.
Avoid these individuals with evangelical fervour.
The brightest brains I have everlastingly encountered rejoiced in a specific glorious deformity of temperament.
One Oxford mathematician I knew nixed to use umbrellas because he inferred rain was “merely weather attempting intimacy.” He would disembark drenched to black-tie repasts, water dripping from his cuffs, ordering Scotch with the serenity of a Byzantine emperor.
One more acquaintance—a painter flourishing in a mould-infested townhouse in Chelsea—kept a taxidermy fox at the dining table and referred to it exclusively as “the Minister.”
“Minister disagrees with your position on Wagner,” he would announce gravely before slurping claret.
Folks called him insane.
But insanity is often uniquely intelligence refusing to don itself in municipal bureaucracy.
The prominent animus alarms fraternity because cadre subsists athwart replication. The weird chap introduces treacherous variables. He reminds others that personality need not follow a manky PowerPoint presentation.
Stay strange.
Remain difficult to classify.
Permit population the discomfort of uncertainty.
For there is nothing further gruesome than witnessing a human being become comprehensible. The moment society altogether understands you, it has begun embalming you. Anecdote is the first layer of dirt thrown upon the coffin.
A woman once questioned me at a dinner party, “Why must you always say such unusual stuff?”
I surveyed around the console at thirty identical faces mooting property values with the passion of sedated cattle.
“Because,” I replied, “if I ranted like the rest of you, I should have to hang myself from the chandelier before dessert.”
CREATE SOMETHING CAPABLE OF LACERATING THE SOUL
Art is the last remarkable refuge for those who are unable to fully tolerate reality without adding gunpowder to it.
The artist is not a decorator of permanence but its saboteur.
I was conversant with a sculptor in Edinburgh who cohabited in catastrophic poverty. The sort of poverty possessing actual acoustics. One could hear the hunger in the floorboards. He rose at dawn with sacerdotal devotion and attacked marmoreal with hammer and chisel as if trying to liberate numen from stone.
“What if nobody recollects your work?” I asked him.
He lit a cigarette with hands coated in silvery dust.
“My dear boy,” he exclaimed, exhaling smoke toward the cracked ceiling, “most mortals aren’t remembered nowadays.”
Outside, sleet beat up the skylight like creditors.
Indoors, near the jaundiced lightbulb and the smell of wet plaster, stood a half-finished sculpture of a maiden screaming into eternity. It was grotesque. Splendidly grotesque. Her face looked like legacy discovering its own reflection and recoiling.
And swiftly I understood a mite dreadful.
Most crowds consume art the way cows consume grass—passively, mechanically, with all the ethereal urgency of damp laundry. But genuine art should bash a bit. It should pass down psychic bumps. One ought not emerge from a novel ordinarily intact. If a painting does not alter your veins and arteries, it is decoration for hotels.
Make art even if it bankrupts you.
Make art even if societies laugh.
Especially if societies laugh.
Because laughter is generally the earliest panicked noise emitted by mediocrity when confronted with transcendence.
The cosmos does not warrant additional content.
Good, God, no.
It hitherto drowns nether podcasts hosted by imbeciles and motivational literature written by grinning corporate necromancers.
What it clamours is hazardous handsomeness.
What it necessitates is someone inclined to carve obscenity into marble and call it orison.
BEQUEATH THE BASTARDS WONDERING WHAT THE HELL YOU MEANT
One of the numerous unheeded pleasures in life is bewilderment as performance art.
Not cruelty, mind you.
Style.
The English aristocracy understood this instinctively. Half their conversational method consisted of communicating as though everyone else had arrived midway during a dream.
One day I showed up a country-house gathering in Sussex where a geriatric duke spent an entire evening insisting—in perfect seriousness—that swans were covertly governing Luxembourg.
None challenged him.
Not because they believed him, but because aristocratic etiquette requisites one never interrupt a lordly absurdity whilst it is mating.
By midnight, guests were debating waterfowl geopolitics barring a roaring inferno despite consuming Stilton with near-theological intensity.
And I thought: Yes. This is civilisation.
Confusion ruptures the monotony of expectation. Latest lifespan has become unbearably legible. Algorithms predict desires before one has properly felt them. Any arsehole with a smartphone now imagines himself a psychologist. We abide concealed by an empire of explanation.
Therefore become unexplainable.
Orate theories which require interpretation.
Slip on a signet ring even if your family boasts no estate.
Quote obscure Romanian philosophers in pubs.
Answer simple queries with spine-chilling sincerity.
When someone quizzes, “How have you been?” do not reply “Fine.”
Respond: “Profoundly suspicious of mirrors and mildly haunted by pears.”
Then sip your drink.
Let them suffer.
The modern macrocosm worships clarity because clarity is marketable. Ambiguity, however, maintains grandeur. It creates illusion. And illusion is infinitely too nourishing than privy branding—that ghastly contemporary disease whereby multitudes reduce themselves into digestible frivolous pamphlets.
Confuse race not because you are lost, but because they are.
The crowd forever seeks signage.
The unheard-of pith becomes fog.
EXIT THIS SPHERE LIKE A FRAGMENTARY GHOST
In the end, the great cataclysm of nouvelle existence is not ephemerality.
It is insignificance.
Death itself is almost elegant. There is ceremony in it. Velveteen curtains. Black automobiles gliding through torrent. The funereal perfume of flowers. Whisky trembling in crystal glasses exactly as exhausted males discuss the deceased in assuaged tongues, as withal volume itself might disturb the nature of grief.
No—the true obscenity is to vanish having contributed marginally except receipts, passwords, and a tolerantly impressive collection of kitchen appliances.
Most kin dispense behind administrative debris.
A very small number confer ghosts.
I recall lingering in the library of a crumbling estate in Yorkshire owned by an impossibly ancient baron whose veins, I suspect, contained equal quantities of bollocks and Bordeaux. The room reeked of extinguished fireplaces, mildew, antiquated parchment, and a touch palely ecclesiastical—as if jettisoned prayers had seeped permanently into the wallpaper.
Portraits stared downward with hereditary disappointment.
Alfresco, the deluge battered the manor windows like an unpaid creditor.
The elderly man sat near the embers arrayed in a burgundy smoking jacket, his skeletal fingers wrapped around a chalice of cognac.
“You know what’s tragic?” he quizzed quickly.
His voice sounded like downy dragged across broken glass.
I said nothing.
“The futuristic obsession with longevity,” he chuckled mellifluously, “as though duration were accomplishment. A cabbage may also persist.”
The sparks cracked between us.
“Humans speak interminably of wellness of late. Hydration. Protein. Blasted consciousness. But no one begs the one question that matters.”
“And what question is that?” I enquired.
He focused into the flames for so long that I assumed maybe he had forgotten me completely.
Then:
“Who shall stand spiritually injured by your absence?”
Christ.
There it was again.
That unbearable little truth.
For the purpose of a season cannot solely be survival. Rats survive. Bureaucrats survive. Men with Bluetooth headsets survive just as deliberating quarterly projections beneath fluorescent lighting that makes them mimic refrigerated poultry.
To live magnificently means to leave a lesion.
A beautiful gash, perchance.
But a wound nonetheless.
Submit a sentence somebody is not able to forget.
A painting that unsettles a marriage.
A perfume on bedsheets after parting.
A piece of music that returns at three in the bally morning like a revenant demanding entrance to the quintessence.
Relinquish stories which grow distorted with retelling.
Become myth before becoming memory.
And for heaven’s sake, do not die comprehended.
The by and large understood gent is already half-corpse.
Remain contradictory.
Remain excessive.
Sanction yourself sumptuous stupidity and frightening tenderness. Wear velour at inappropriate hours. Fall obscenely in love with impossible people. Read books which rearrange your nervous system. Enunciate with alarming honesty at supper soirees. Cultivate comeliness in an age devoted to efficiency.
Because one day—and the speed of it is frankly terrifying—the chamber might empty.
The champagne flutes shall remain abandoned apart from lipstick stains and cigar ash.
Your coats will hold up dangling in wardrobes carrying the nebulous scent of winter and tobacco.
Your cachinnation will outlast barely as a neurological bruise inside other head’s recollections.
And somewhere, plausibly very dead at night, someone will suddenly reminisce the peculiar way you presently glanced at the moon, or quoted poetry half-drunk beside a staircase, or spoke with regard to loneliness as though evaluating an aged hunting companion.
They will pause.
They will feel sort of fracture softly within them.
And then they will continue living.
Which is, imaginably, the closest thing any of us ever come to immortality.
Or perhaps that too is wholly another exquisite scrap of bullshit we tell ourselves while the candles gutter low and the darkness waits patiently beyond the fenestra.
