I saw a couple come into the cafe out of the sun, I have seen them before. One woman has a sour aspect and it is difficult to get her to return a smile. Her smile, when it comes, has a difficult, painful quality as though vouchsafing it hurts her in some way. The other is blonde, plump, pliant and yielding. When the dominant woman sits down, the other goes up immediately to order, turning back to ask or ascertain some aspect of the other’s wishes. “You are always the waitress in your relationship,” I thought, watching the woman pay, collect her change, and sit smilingly down. Her partner, who had already had the opportunity to become absorbed in the paper, and whose choice of cafe, I imagine, this might be, got up to go to the bathroom and it was fascinating to watch the blonder partner change. She lost her smile and drew out her phone and became absorbed in something of her own choice, seeming altogether a more serious person. This is her moment with her feet up once they’ve all been fed. We both heard the bathroom door click and she glanced up quickly, putting her phone guiltily away. As the dourer partner reappeared her beloved was waiting, alert, already producing her wallet and opening it, saying something I couldn’t catch, ready as ever to cater to this grumpy child she has settled for to satisfy her cravings for love for the rest of her life.
Tag: power
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Jared Diamond
Picked up the most marvellous book, it’s by Jared Diamond & it’s about traditional societies (which, he points out, survive in partial form in even the most harried industrialized landscape and were universal to us until 11,000 years ago: a blip). He says how some things ‘modernity’ does better and some things, tradition. Like a bolt of cloth falling from a high shelf it struck me when he pointed out that all of psychology is based on a very narrow sample: mostly, undergraduate American psychology students, who were the ones most available to undergo tests and to fill out questionnaires. He cites the acronym WEIRD: Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.
The name of this book is The World Until Yesterday. How people picked up their babies and carried them upright with lots of body contact. Babies learned the world at eye level. How your chances of being killed by falling out of a tree or by having a tree fall on you were rather high. When I was a child in Jakarta we heard about a tribal man to the north, coming home from the village meeting through the familiar jungle who was eaten, whole, by a large snake. His body was cut out of its belly entire after the animal was captured.
