Tipping Points

Me, Martin Amis, Me Again, Martin Amis Again: musings on the reversible self in irreversible time written during a weekend trip to Normandy

When I was but a snot-nosed brat – my sister, who is visiting us in Paris, just yesterday reminded me that I often wore tartan shorts with suspenders over a buttoned white shirt, a clip-on bowtie and tiny, shiny black oxfords with tassels – a snowflake’s “uniqueness” was considered something to be celebrated, not criticised. Yet if you believe in the existence of infinitely many different sizes of infinite sets, therefore unimaginably many infinities, so many that they can’t be assigned a number, not even an infinite number, and that there is no set of all sets, and that the Absolute can only be acknowledged and admitted, never known, not even approximately – you therefore “know” then that both of these positions are well off the mark. They tip away in the wrong directions, like defense missiles following air-launched decoys. This makes me think of Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, who died yesterday. “I moved forward,” is how he started that book, which moves backwards, in defiance of entropy’s increase in a closed system, the arrow of time’s irreversible direction, and the destructive force of disorder and randomness. And now he moves no more. Moreover, most snowflakes are dendrites – six-sided branched structures known as hexagonal plates, as opposed to this, which is a hexagonal post. Other snowflakes are shaped like needles or columns; if conditions are right, these fall from the clouds and land on the ground intact. Some individuals insist that these are snow “crystals”, not snow “flakes”. This, too, imho, is ridiculous. A flake is a flake, whether on the ground, in the air, in a parallel dimension, or on Substack. I would gladly substantiate this further. But I am not going to look anything up. I’ll explain why later but first, if you’re interested, and have a few more minutes to spare, I’d like you to participate in the following experiment. Not actually participate, the experiment will not require you to take part or “engage” in anything, just observe, and not in some double-path double-slit sense in which your observing will somehow magically alter the thing being observed, which, in this case, as I will explain, is me. Mainly me. The state of me. You’re not a thermometer, I’m not a pot of boiling water. You’re not a tire pressure gauge, I’m not a bicycle tire leaking air when you clamp onto my valve. At least I don’t think that is what I have in mind with this experiment, though I could be wrong: I haven’t given such matters much focussed thought since a first-year “interdisciplinary” course called “The Age of Uncertainty” in which we read snippets of Werner Heisenberg – and Robert Smithson, of all people, the earthworks sculptor who made that giant spiral out of rock and dirt in a salt lake in Utah – along with books by Adam Smith, Aeschylus, Beckett, Montaigne, Hobbes, Malthus, Freud, Machiavelli, Conrad, Nietzsche, Marx and Rousseau. Not necessarily in that order. This was in 1979. Every work on the list was by a man cut from the cloth of the Western canon (as was Kingsley’s son, who once described himself as “the only hereditary novelist in the canon”, or something like that) and nobody, as far as I can remember, questioned this. Perhaps we read Things Fall Apart? A Jane Austen novel? Maybe some Margaret Atwood poetry. I don’t remember. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that Heisenberg’s position-momentum uncertainty principle and his observer effect – the disturbance of an observed system by the “very” act of observation – have nothing to tell us about our perceptions or the limits of our knowledge. So if you’re ready we will begin. Keep in mind as you read that the Universe is boundless. Now picture me with a GoPro camera strapped to my forehead, lying in a very comfortable bed, in need of a cup of very strong coffee. I’m trying not to use the word very but sometimes I must. I’m in Normandy for the Ascension of Jesus (or the Assumption of Mary?) weekend, staying in a friend’s house a pleasant, seven-kilometre bicycle ride from the town of Pont-l’Evèque, the home of the cheese and the setting of my favourite story by Flaubert. It is morning, we arrived yesterday after a two-and-a-half-hour train ride in which, following a ticketing mishap, we were forced to sit in extremely uncomfortable strapontins next to very smelly toilets. Very smelly. This was followed by a lunch next to a very well circulated traffic circle in the very centre of Pont-l’Evèque – beer, andouillette (similar smell), frites and green salad for me, the andouillette unnecessarily slathered with melted Pont-l’Evèque cheese; beer, tripes de pays d’Auge (ditto) and frites for C., followed by a tarte fine aux pommes with vanilla ice cream and caramel (me) and teurgoule, a slow-baked rice pudding (C.). All very serviceable. I paid at the bar with a debit card but did not leave a tip, as the establishment was run by a husband-and-wife team; and, besides, neither I nor C. had any change in our pockets. I never seem to have coins in my pockets, much to the chagrin of Fred and Muhammed, two men who some of you might have met here. Shopping next, wine, bread, pâté en croute, and then the pleasant ride through the bocage landscape along a quiet holloway, a chemin creux either formed by erosion or dug with ancient shovels and picks to hem in ancient cattle. No one knows for sure. I’ll find a photograph.

Negronis in the garden. Dinner next to the fire.

Now, as mentioned, it is morning. The bedroom is on the second floor. The window volets are closed but I can see that the sun is out. The birds are singing. High tide is at noon and roughly ten kilometres away: I intended to run there in just over an hour, swim in the surf with the household, get a lift back, have a shower, then return to this bed and to this. And this is indeed what I have done. The water was cold. The waves were high. My laptop is out of power and the plug is in my backpack downstairs. Retrieving it would put an end to this writing. I would have to interact with the voices I can hear, drink coffee, which I crave, eat the pain brioché I bought yesterday and crave even more – buttered, with good Normand butter, maybe some local preserves, May’s apricots having just arrived at market – and the pull of the garden, where the lilacs are about to pop in the back near the stone wall, and where L. has set up her easel, on the edge of the walkway, would be too strong to resist. So I’m jotting these phrases down with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad. My hand balks at this task. I haven’t written anything longhand, other than cheques, very few, and a couple that bounced, and a handful of journal entries – moleskin notebook started, two pages later abandoned – since that first year of Uncertainty at university. Is it a proprioception issue? Or am I just out of practice? I can slice radishes on a razor-sharp mandoline without losing fingertips – though I did do precisely this a decade ago, a slip with a carrot, the tips of three. Not lost, displaced: a chatty surgeon at the hospital next to Gare du Nord glued them back on. I was in and out of the emergency ward in under 45 minutes. According to the surgeon, who was from Algeria, crazy-glue (I’m not sure what the actual name is) was invented by or for the US military and first used in field hospitals during the Vietnam War. And I’m thinking about Maya Angelou and her yellow legal pads, and Obama and his, and who else, Elmore Leonard if I recall correctly, and Truman Capote, and maybe Philip Roth, and definitely Susan Sontag, who used felt pens and pencils, which for some reason steers me towards Robert Walker and his pencil method – shrunken medieval German script that he used to write very short, very beautiful texts on scraps and strips of found paper: postcards, business cards, envelopes, book jackets, whatever he could find in the asylum, and which went unnoticed – the warden and the handlers of his “estate” dismissed them as indecipherable gibberish, but thankfully didn’t throw them away – for almost half a century. I’m thinking that I will flesh these ideas out when I return to writing on my laptop this afternoon, add some photographs, do some research on poor Robert Walser, who I haven’t read or thought about for years, but not in any way “alter” or “disturb” the writing, this is part of the experiment, and I'm also thinking, or re-thinking – perhaps “wondering” might be more accurate – about when was the last time that I filled a piece of paper with handwriting? The texts I wrote in university were all handwritten. Early days in Paris? I suppose, moleskin notebooks like Van Gogh’s, like Bruce Chatwin’s, like Picasso’s, which fires me off to the Johnny Depp screening last week in Cannes, with Maiwenn (sp?), the actress and director, who inexplicably got up from her table after lunch a few weeks ago in Paris, walked to the table of an editor at Mediapart, and, for reasons that are not yet known, but probably related to accusations of rape levelled at her first husband Luc Besson (they married when she was 16 and he at least double that), grabbed him roughly by the hair, pulled his head back and spat in his face. This reminds me of the story of the San Francisco writer Harry Larkyns, whose affair with the photographer Eadward Muybridge’s wife cost him his life – Muybridge hunted him down and shot him three times – but before that, a year before, Larkyns – Muybridge’s daughter’s real father – was stripped of his post as drama critic of the San Francisco Post or Chronicle because of the lies spread by a man named Coppinger – a man Larkyns had, I recall, “pulled from the gutter”. From then on, every time Larkyns met Coppinger on the street, he would grab Coppinger’s nose with one hand and his lower jaw with the other, pry open his mouth, and spit down his throat. Cuspidor Coppinger, they called him. After Larkyns’ death Coppinger was one of the first to make his way to the undertakers, where he gazed long and maliciously at the dead man’s ashen features.

Where is Roman Polanski? Is Gerard Depardieu in Belgium, France or Russia What was Flaubert’s writing practice?

“Practice”.

Why do quotation marks convey such contempt?

Muybridge was acquitted by a jury of his peers. He later invented the washing machine, which, many have stated, women for the most part, is the single most important technological advancement of the modern era. What I remember of Un cœur simple is this: a servant girl, cruelly abandoned by her social-climbing boyfriend, leaves the family farm and takes a job in Pont-l’Evèque as a servant. She devotes her entire life to the family, a widow and two children who take advantage of her, but mainly just ignore her. She does not care: she has “a simple heart”; she is content to live without being loved in return, except by the Lord who rose two days ago and is seated at the right hand of God. I’ll find a picture. And at the end of her “pointless” life, alone on her deathbed, accompanied only by a pet parrot – this is where the Julian Barnes book comes from, Flaubert’s Parrot, written well before Time’s Arrow, back when Barnes and Amis were still on friendly terms – she sees the bird, which I think might have been dead and stuffed by then, floating above her eyes just before they emptied of life, and she takes it to be the Holy Spirit itself. Himself. Himself? Anyway, as you can probably tell by now, this is an unedited piece of writing, and an experiment in alternative form – longhand, unassisted by Google, and filmed by GoPro, to prove that it is thus. I’m proposing this as a live performance – a spectator sport worthy of being included in next year’s Olympic Games in Paris – and as a way to “save” writing from artificial intelligence which, for the time being at least, I am refusing to dignify with either capitals or an abbreviation. In fact, let’s envelope it thus: “artificial intelligence”. There. So low is my present estimation.

It’s starting. C. brought me a coffee and a slice of toasted brioche with some sort of berry jam on it. No butter. She couldn’t find the butter.

The other night, upon asking for the bill after a nice-enough dinner in a pop-up restaurant in Paris, our waiter approached, told us the sum we owed and, as we produced our debit cards, asked if we would like to leave a gratuity. This had never happened before. Astonished, we froze. Then one of our party, a chef, muttered something about leaving some cash. Which we did. Ten euros. The dinner, with wine, cost somewhere around 200. Which means we left a 5% tip.

A few days later, at the cocktail bar across the street from where I live, I presented my debit card to the barman. He punched the total into his handheld machine. I lowered my card onto it. Nothing happened. “Permettez-moi,” he said, punching a button. The screen changed. I did not have my glasses on, but I knew what I was not seeing on the screen was something I see ubiquitously in North America: tipping options. This, again, had never happened before in all my 30+ years in France. Without knowing what amount I selected, I pushed the third button on the right. The bill was 12 euros. The button pushed, it turned out, was 5 euros. That is a 41.6666666667% tip. I used the calculator on my phone to determine this.

When I first moved to this country, 30-plus-size years ago, tips were rounding ups. Or roundings up. If a bill was 270 francs, you left 300. If it was 290 francs, you left 300 francs, and maybe a few loose coins, whatever was in your pockets, within reason, minus the litter. If you paid by cheque, which was very common back then, you left a few coins. This was because a 15% service charge was and is already included. And because the person serving you was and is paid a salary that, while not perhaps a “living” wage, definitely not a dead one, either – 1,500€ to 8,000€ a month and backed by the usual bouquet of benefits that the French system then, as, more-or-less, now, provided workers: sick leave, maternity and paternity coverage, old-age pension, life and death insurance, disability protection, and unemployment benefits. Not healthcare, as everyone – absolutely, universally everyone – here gets healthcare. No one, from the extreme left to the extreme right, talks about taking a slash at healthcare. Yet.

Back then, we tipped waiters but only nominally. A few coins at the bar, because there was no service charge at the bar. Less in the salle. Unless we were in a large group, and the staff had been remarkable. This is still the case.

A tip was a token of appreciation – enough to buy drink, hence the name, pourboire.

Taxi drivers were not tipped, but you rounded up with them too. Within reason. Ushers in theatres, cinemas and concert halls were tipped, not lavishly, but without fail, at least in private theatres, cinemas and concert halls, as they were often unpaid workers whose only income came from tips. I once taught English to a roomful of placeuses at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Many of whom had worked there, unpaid, except for the benefit bouquet, for decades. They did well. Very well. They weren’t supposed to put out their hand or say anything, but they did. I taught them phrases: “Would you like to leave a small token of your appreciation?”; “You are too generous”; “Yes of course I can change that for you”; “No, I do not receive a salary”; “Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Nowadays, in North America, customers are guilted into coughing up a bit of baksheesh when they buy a takeout coffee or a pack of chewing gum. Or after using a self check-out in a supermarket, scanning each product, filling the bag themselves, not interacting with a single human being. This is worrisome. This is taking advantage. This is a way to shift the burden of paying employees onto consumers rather than raising wages. This is not baksheesh, this is blackmail. Emotional blackmail.

This is probably not a good time to ask readers for paid subscriptions.

In France, restaurant owners often don’t distribute the 15% to their service staff. So the next time you order a beer, remember the axiom of choice, and that you will pay for it three times: at the bar, on your tax form, and in the public debt. Perhaps, more logically, the customer should get a tip.

Tennessee Williams wrote on a typewriter. So does Don Delillo. Martin Amis used a computer.

My chef friend just chimed in on WhatsApp. He doesn’t tip beyond a very minuscule rounding up. If he pays with a card, nada. If he pays with a card in New York, 20%, because the wait staff there gets paid as little as $2.13. I have another friend, a Brit, who leaves at least 10% everywhere he goes in France. I hold him, and the guilt-ridden, emotionally blackmailed American tourist, responsible for messing everything up pourboire-wise.

Another friend, a long-time Paris restaurateur, tips “around 3 euros for a meal, sometimes 2 euros at the coffee place, but only once a week. Otherwise 10/20/30 cents for a coffee at the bar. It seems to please. Because the French don’t tip.”

Anyone else? I would love to figure this out. I don’t want to be a chiseller, but neither do I want to be a chump. I want to do the right thing, and leave the right amount, and be observed doing so, and so “alter” everything.

Finally, the extreme right. Neo-Nazis. Scary, torch-lit marches in Paris. Concerts in churches cancelled. “Back, Satan!” hissed at the organ recital of a nice young woman from Colorado. Plays picketed. Storytime in public libraries in Toulouse, Paris and Rennes by men dressed as women aggressively protested. But maybe this is a subject for next week. There is a cow in the garden. And a woodpecker. And drunken, drowsy bees, dizzied by nectar. And I have fish to fry.

I’ll type this up later. I forgot to turn on the GoPro. The lilacs have not yet popped. Thanks for reading. And for supporting. A last line, the final phrase of Time’s Arrow: “I within, who came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late.” 

He ascended into heaven: believe. He sits at the right hand of the Father: believe. By sitting, understand dwelling: as [in Latin] we say of any person, In that country he dwelt (sedit) three years. The Scripture also has that expression, that such a one dwelt (sedisse) in a city for such a time. Not meaning that he sat and never rose up? On this account the dwellings of men are called seats (sedes). Where people are seated (in this sense), are they always sitting? Is there no rising, no walking, no lying down? And yet they are called seats (sedes). In this way, then, believe an inhabiting of Christ on the right hand of God the Father: He is there. And let not your heart say to you, What is He doing? Do not want to seek what is not permitted to find: He is there; it suffices you. He is blessed, and from blessedness which is called the right hand of the Father, of very blessedness the name is, right hand of the Father. For if we shall take it carnally, then because He sits on the right hand of the Father, the Father will be on His left hand. Is it consistent with piety so to put Them together, the Son on the right, the Father on the left? There it is all right-hand, because no misery is there.

– Saint Augustine’s “A Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed”