Holidays are the Practice of Indulgence without Direction

or: How Neesha and I used Dialectics to Disprove Frank O’Hara With This One Cool Trick

Here's the piece I read and wrote for Paul Jonathan’s event last night:

August, five nights in Barcelona. I’d needed it more than any other break (well, since my last). But my new job is fine, fine, I keep telling myself. Not hard, not like cleaning toilets or washing dishes or building walls – I just sit at a silly little computer all day writing silly little words for silly little global recruitment campaigns. I’m an office guy now. I can do office guy things like, errrm, eat free office pizza but only on Thursdays, but it’s Domino’s and while I eat it I have to listen to my colleagues talk about Marvel movies. At least, I get paid holiday now

In the taxi from the airport it’s so hot that my shirt sticks between the leather seat and my back – comfortingly bad soft rock plays on the radio in the way that it always seems to so that you know you’re on holiday. The driver tells me how beautiful the Gothic quarter is – and by a stroke of fate that’s where I’m staying. Neesha has been here half the summer in Marie’s beautiful apartment that she shares with her partner Max, and their little monster Ivo.

Apparently where we’re staying is the Barcelona equivalent of Leicester Square. And, presented with a vista of cafes in car-free squares, six story blocks of actually lived-in flats reaching to the sky, people relaxed and having a nice time in whatever clothes help with the heat, the comparison, I have to say, I find a little confusing. Ah, the continent, the existence of a place that seems designed to tell you that the pain of your London life is expensive. Are we masochists?

On my first full day in the city, we attempt the self-exploitation of remote working, having no other choice: I lounge on my beach towel and tug my lips at my watermelon flavoured vape, occasionally writing things like “page 154, bad question mark” in my notebook, to prepare for a book review. Neesha is on the phone every five minutes directing someone in London things like where they can be a very specific shade of tights or top. Then, we give up on working.

Our primary activity for the next few days is drinking. From lunch time until the day’s end. Not in a binge, we tell ourselves. But with the commitment of French bohemians who have to write a treatise on war-gaming the class struggle or their erotic novel and merely have to gee themselves up.

The way it starts is we have a small glass of wine or two at lunch, a few hours of bathing in the sun and sea on the beach, and then a quick vermouth before dinner, and by the end of the day we have neither develop strategies for class warfare nor written any erotic novels. But we feel ourselves to be the kind of people who could have done that, rested, full, our faces fresh with the vibrancy of sun and wine.

It’s the mood the luxury of leisure affords, and the excesses seemingly have no noticeable cause of dereliction inside me: my smile as wide as the curvature of the blazing sun, and as stupid as the concept of infinity.

After a night of drinking the finest wines in Catalunya, the mornings mix the intensity of our cotton-wool hangovers with the joyful wails of the now returned baby Ivo. In practice, what this means is that the first life-saving post-hangover coffee involves traversing an apartment covered with wooden duplo blocks and a smiling creature whose drool has left baby-snail tracks across the wooden panelling, an assault course to greet adults whose minds fail to make sense of space. We escape the flat with all the glamour of a defeated foreign legion unit and make our way back out the house.

The only way to resolve anything is by throwing oneself in the sea. I try other methods to satisfy myself, such as walking around aimlessly without knowing where I am going in the name of ‘sightseeing’, even though I don’t know what sights I might want to see. I’ve gone somewhere precisely so I don’t have to go anywhere else when I’m there. But throwing myself in the sea provides me with the most complete feeling of satisfaction without any need for structure or shape. Indulgence is best when it lacks direction.

“Being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona,” it wasn’t until I left the city, and with a deep pang of upset, that I realised I’d forgotten to pay homage to one of my favourite poets.

If you don’t recognise the line, it’s one of the things that Frank O’Hara lists in his ode to loving, ‘Having A Coke With You’ as ‘less fun’ than the action of the poem’s title. It is a love poem, opening with a travel itinerary, taking in: San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, and Bayonne. It seems somewhat contradictory that the poems claim, in a comparative form, that drinking with your lover is more fun than going on holiday.

Neesha and I, I think, have disproven the poem’s ridiculous thesis through the dialectics of antithesis, by showing, as I hope I have demonstrated, that the two items are perfectly capable of being synthesised: having a wine with you, getting too drunk in Barcelona.

But all is not lost. “Being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona,” You’ll note O’Hara’s indulgences happen not along the travesera, nor along, nor up, nor down: just merely on, directionless, indulgent, indifferent, joyful. When I realised I had missed my moment to promenade along the named street and sip too many vermouths, I knew that summer and my indulgences were over. It was September and I was facing forward, looking the death of December straight in the face. Life was not for having or being sick to my stomach. It required direction again.

But of course ‘Having a coke with you is even more fun than going on holiday or being sick to my stomach’, the purpose of Frank’s comparative is to square off a competition he doesn’t really believe in, it’s like saying Beyonce is better than Beethoven, it’s an act of rhetorical indifference that raises brashness to an aesthetic principle, like the excessive stupidity of eating and drinking so much on holiday that you make yourself sick.

Orlando often reminds me that William Blake once wrote that “Exuberance is beauty.” O’Hara’s poetry is the crystallised expression of what that sentiment means for our lives right now.

In its ardency O’Hara’s poetry is a celebration of entanglement with accumulation: its imperative measure is to persevere toward happiness. This is undertaken not merely in celebration of accumulation or its end goals as such, but more as an aesthetic honesty about our desire to cram things inside us. That it’s this cramming inside where pleasure is really found in this world here. Everything else is spiritual.

Holidays are like poetry because they’re grotesquely compressed acts of exuberance. They’re everything that going to work is not (I’m thinking here about that Eileen Myles poem ‘Greece’: “I will go to Greece” as a will to anticipate the moment of exception from rule). That makes them intensified and heightened spaces of desire, defined by their surplus and our attempts to aggressively consume those excesses, like Frank O’Hara line endings that gobble up everything after them.

We cram our experiences into the margins of our existence.