SCISSORS...STONE...PAPER

THE PLEASURES OF THE PARCEL

This piece was written some years ago for the late lamented Paris Mens Salon of Charles DeGroot. In classic fashion, Charles nominated a topic for discussion at each session. In this case he proposed “What do you want out of life?” I’m not sure I’d change this response

A friend in Australia – another writer – wrote me the other day to describe how he got up each morning at 4am and cycled to a newspaper shop in suburban Melbourne. There he spent a few hours sorting out and wrapping newspapers and magazines for delivery to various sub-agents. It earned him a little extra money for the small pleasures of life – in his case betting on the horses.

It struck me, on reading his letter, that in one respect we were alike – since I too rise at 4am one or two days a week and spend some time wrapping brown paper parcels. In my case, it’s books I’ve sold on eBay and which I am despatching to buyers. Odd, wasn’t it, that here we were: men of the same age, in the same business, performing the same actions on opposite sides of the world?

Is it possible that we both find in the particular discipline of wrapping and creasing paper, working with glue and string and corrugated cardboard, folding the corners and sealing them just so, something that satisfies a fundamental need? the great eroticist and scholar of the limerick Gershon Legman was also partly responsible for introducing into Europe the Japanese paper-folding art, origami. W.H.Auden and Stephen Spender printed their own poetry booklets on a hand press. I used to produce science fiction fanzines, and so did many friends, now also writers.

An artist once proudly showed me a painting he’d just hung. I began to praise it, but he brushed that aside.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “but look at the frame. I made that.”

(That same artist was the first person to point out to me how what happened at the edges of the picture was just as important as what took place at the centre. The way in which a roof line is cut off by the frame can matter just as much as what’s happening in the middle.)

What does this have to do with what’s worth wanting? Well, I think that what I have really enjoyed in life has often been a sense of conclusion, of finishing a job – and of starting a job with the knowledge that it can be completed, and that one has the necessary skills and materials to do so.

I’m sure that why Stephen Sondheim’s song Finishing the Hat from Sunday In the Park With George has such a personal significance. In the obvious way, it relates to my emotional life, but there’s also the verse about the pleasure of making a picture.

Certain pieces of music and works of art mean so much more because of the way they end, or the way in which they end the careers of the persons who wrote them; Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, “I have lost touch with the world” – is so poignant because it is so accepting of conclusions. It’s as long as it needs to be, and no longer. Which is about all one can hope for from life, I think.

There’s a short story - I forget by whom - in which the religion of the future is carpentry. The devout visit church not to pray but to plane wood and cut dovetails - and why not? After all, that was Jesus’s day job. Being Messiah was just his hobby.

I would feel comfortable with carpentry as a creed, were it not for an inability to hammer a nail without hitting my thumb first. In its place, I propose Parcelism. As I run down the standard list of possible aims for one’s life - acquiring knowledge, money, wisdom, fame, insight, enlightenment, leaving the world a better place - none carries the power to motivate me that I find in handling and wrapping. As long as I can find books, clean then up, pack, wrap and send them out - let Armageddon come.