Dancing in the Fog

I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh, London! My sin! I promised to many of you I would write regularly. London has consumed my soul. I cannot be expected to write to you consistently. How could I? To write, love—I know: It is a promise to myself as much as it is to any of you. What do I as a writer owe after making an oath to share and express the poetics of my experience?

This journal entry is about my employment at Rotunda Bar and Restaurant in London. Work, yes, I know; such a topic risks dreadful boredom. However, it seems all I do is work. Rotunda is my poetics. Its place and its people help me glide through the fog of London. If you have never walked through London fog then you don’t really know what life is all about. I hope that came off as more honest than it did judgemental—after all, life is never fully lucid, and nothing is as blurry as the haze of London.

Some maintain that art deludes. Young Marx, an avid scholar of pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and a lover of Italian Renaissance literature, grew into a man who mocked the arts with his metaphor of dancing tables.

Others insist “the play’s the thing.” Just ask Hamlet.

Of course, Voltaire and Flaubert did not see eye to eye about London. Both Frenchmen, London took the exiled Volatire in, much to the writer’s delight. The constant fog of London, its dreary sense of constitutionalism, commerce, and civility warmed his spirits. Flaubert detested the fog. What good are constitutionalism, commerce, and civility if everything is so fucking dreary? Voltaire tried to romanticize the fog; Flaubert saw it for what it was—yet he still wrote. Fog is hazy, yes, but walking through it is how life happens.

I think writing is like sailing a ship through a patch of fog. We’re constantly trying to look through the telescope towards the coastline, the past, but the image is always out of focus. The ship, however, keeps sailing. Voltaire wasn’t smart enough to realize what the fog was; Marx did but foolishly wished for only sunny days. Flaubert…well, he just wrote incessantly.

The restaurant, Rotunda, is on the main floor of a building called Kings Place, about a two-minute walk from the famous King’s Cross St. Pancras station. One morning, some years ago, a very wealthy and artistically inclined individual, Peter Millican, woke out of his bed and decided that he wanted to build his own concert venue. A performance space for classical, folk, and jazz musicians to gather, pontificate, and, of course, play their music for the public. Throw in an art gallery outside the concert halls, add tasteful comedy and theatre to the mix, a fine-dining restaurant, and lease the upper-floor offices to companies of significant cultural importance, and you’ve got a deal, Peter Millican said, speaking to himself while brewing his morning coffee.

In the past couple weeks alone, I have served entrée meals of fancy French names I embarrassingly mispronounce to everyone from the director of communications for Nick Clegg, U.K.’s deputy prime minister, to the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The former was delightfully outgoing; the latter a little bit more reserved yet still polite, the kind of quiet dignity you get for having your own Wikipedia page because you are in charge of the U.K.’s most respected newspaper, I suppose. I served him for a second time tonight actually, and despite my charming best he still didn’t give me a job. I served two other senior reporters from The Guardian tonight as well. I see a lot of Guardian employees actually, because they lease the majority of the upper-floor office spaces in Kings Place. The hub of U.K. and international media is at my fingertips. I serve at least two or three VIP tables a night, mostly CEOs of large companies and shit like that. Kings Place is currently preparing for an upcoming visit from Princess Anne, the older sister of Prince Charles. All the while, gondolas float by the Regent’s Canal that borders the restaurant’s terrace.

The building hosts public lectures and discussions every Monday night on art, culture, politics, and science, and there is a forthcoming themed tribute to Mozart in regards to some of the classical performances. “I only have to think about music and Mozart comes to mind,” writes Peter in the brochure scattered around the lobby. (Would you be surprised to find out Kings Place publishes their own magazine too?) Whenever I think of music I think of melody. If he wants to be specific with just one guy…I don’t know, go for it I guess. That’s like saying “Whenever I think of movies, I think of Cary Grant.” Okay, sure.

I experience the meanderings daily of London’s rich and famous. They are the people who run the city and Western Europe; some of them have a hand in running the world. I provide the fuel, the distraction—the guilt-killing subconsciously narcissistic good deed of their bland courtesy. Everything is beautiful…too beautiful. Did I mention the fucking gondolas? Fifty hours a week they dock within an arm’s reach of where I’m trying to take an order for a red wine I would never be able to afford with my own money. My daily fear is falling in as I stand on the edge, trying to recommend the Australian shiraz only to get a pompous “hmm…I feel as if the Chilean would better suit the palate of the afternoon—do haste please because we are quite eager for our wine”; then they talk about why the Middle East and North Africa are so fucked up. Beautiful people, eating beautiful food in a beautiful environment, talking about art, politics, and history to such a degree that I feel worthless. I wonder if any of them have ever set foot in Whitechapel.

It must be a fog, all of it. But then they leave, and when the lights go out strangers fall in love and we make life happen. I’ll tell you why I’ve never had a better job—despite many of these wankers. I’ve never had a job where the managers give you a beer to drink while you’re closing up shop—not just now and then but ritually—or a bottle of wine to take home with you or heck, in Europe, to drink on the street on your way to the Tube or bus station. Shit, I’ve never had a job where my bosses give me a beer while I’m still working and some fucking rich snob is complaining about his millefeuille, all the while I’m getting buzzed in the storage room. I’ve never had a job where I work with people from all walks of life. My French is laughable and I’m the only one who can’t speak at least two languages fluently. I’ve never had a job where after work we walk to the nearby club at least three or four times a week. Me, the Canadian, the sociable Swedish girl, the flamboyant Italian, the hilarious Pole, the suave Lithuanian, and the charmingly feuding New Zealander and Aussie, where we meet up with other employees already drunk and dancing. People here are much more gregarious, personal, and so much more willing to buy everyone else a round of drinks, and especially more liberal towards going out on an almost nightly basis, even if they are your boss.

I had promised to write more regularly but the truth is, fulfilling a promise is like a death sentence, killing the dancing—there’s nothing left to fulfil, nothing left to promise, nothing left to do. If we ever did get to the shoreline, past the fog to sunny days, we wouldn’t need the telescope, yet alone the ship.

I can only write sporadically but I fight on. It’s the best I can hope for, and it’s all I can do to navigate my way through the fog, to deal with the debilitating life of my too beautiful workplace for the hope of an aesthetic experience in which the play is the thing. The guests and the culture of Kings Place is a world of its own—the real art is what happens when the lights go out, where the conscience of the king is exposed on the dance floor somewhere in Angel in North London. When the lights go out and all we have is fog, I carry on, mostly too fleetingly to reflect adequately on the situation, but I write what I can to make sense of it nonetheless.

Now all that’s left to do is ponder the amusing coincidence that Marx’s daughter Eleanor was and continues to be Flaubert’s most celebrated translator. Are the tables winking at us when they dance? Marx, to raise such a girl, must have known that the tables dance, always dance in the fog, that life happens beyond the jejune. Oh, jejune, jejune, jejune…

Despite what some asshole may have told you, hell is not other people. It’s the fog I walk through daily. Only I deal with it.