The Bulk of the Evening

In the ensuing conversation about social-realism I got a bit heated myself actually and as a result had no idea as to his whereabouts or his what-he-was-doing-abouts. I reflected later, after everyone had gone home, that not paying attention and instead getting bogged down in defence of an Art for the People had been my second mistake of the evening, the first having been to invite him.

"I think that's cynical. The fuel tank of capitalism will not sustain the overheating of its fuel, namely the labour-force, and this will eventually destroy it. Marx said so."

"What's that got to do with art? What has L.S. Lowry got to do with art?" [At this stage he was probably turning the front door knob very slowly and quietly.]

"I think that in the context of the social alienation which results from the character of the exploitative economic relations in the first stages of industrialization, art is the inevitable refuge of the imagination, and should therefore be the podium of the proletariat."

"Soap-box, more like." [By now he had probably got the door open.]

"That's cynical too. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." [He was almost certainly half way up the drive at this point. I still don't know where he got the tool-kit.]

"Whatever."

"Well I don't know about you but I don't believe all that crap about commodity fetishization. I like owning books and records and cds. I don't feel impoverished or alienated in the slightest. And my car, I love my car, I love driving it - call me bourgeois I don't care - and I love washing it and waxing it and messing about with the engine on Saturday afternoons. What's wrong with that? [Nothing. But that sentiment later came to take on a poignancy nobody could have anticipated when we emerged from the house having said our goodbyes, to learn that the same car was, no not missing or stolen, but still there and yet not really there at all but actually in several hundred places and indeed in several hundred pieces, having been painstakingly dismantled and the parts all layed end-to-end along the double-yellow line on which the whole (when it was still greater than the sum of its parts) had been parked, so that we had to walk about fifty yards to find the stainless-steel seat-belt clip, about another two-hundred yards to find the exhaust pipe and nearly three-quarters of a mile to find the chassis. There, we watched as my friend stood at the end of the line of debris, quietly pulling the tape out of an Eric Clapton cassette in order that the unfortunate vehicle might yet be stretched a little further, that is to say down the garden path, in the porch-door and through the letter-box of the house belonging to the same person who had once been a guest of mine, the house outside of which we now stood in absolute and respectful silence for the bulk of the evening.]