I'm a vessel of pure experience

A discussion elsewhere has reminded me of the pleasure to be had in simply observing everyone around you. The context was writing - as in, the hours one has beguiled in crowded buses or waiting rooms, simply writing down what one sees.

This was something I learned to do early on, no doubt heavily - and I mean heavily - influenced by Harriet the Spy (which I still maintain is one of the great books EVER), who used to go around a self-designated' spy route' every day after school peering in the windows and skylights (and lift shafts) of strangers, and recording their lives.

It's also, of course, a common or garden writing exercise.

It's also fun.

The catalyst was a poem called "In the Atrium," by the New York poet Kathleen Ossip, which begins, "Ha! I'm a vessel of pure experience..." Here is a bit of it:

...and another group of women, bussed downstate
for a bargain matinee, want never to rise
from hunter green leatherette club chairs and I note
that I was brought up to dress like them - plaid shirts,
stickpins, ski jackets, oxfords - but that was before
I became a vessel of pure experience
and I note the fringed jazz-age torchères and the flower
arrangements afflicted with gigantism and verisimilitude,
Nile green and fuchsia silk dendrobiums
wilting even before their uppermost petals
relax into fullness, and one of the upstate women -
the youngest one, with the cockscomb bangs and the niecelike
impassive aspect - undramatically lets a mouthful
of tea dribble back into the white stoneware mug
and the maitre d' shuffles over and switches on
the electronic player piano which begins to ring
'Matchmaker, Matchmaker' and the man and woman behind me
drawl and balk in a lazy dialogue
about the meeting they've just left and territory
review and we should meet Ted tomorrow, okay?...

This is well-timed, because just last night when I finally got to the checkout at Morrisons, I suddenly because aware that the young woman at the next aisle was hissing into her phone while she put the food on the conveyor belt. "You're a fucking bastard!" she said. I looked over to see if it was a joke. It wasn't. "Something else I couldn't hear and then - it's because you're sitting in the fucking CAR while I'm in here buying all YOUR CRAP! Fuck you." She shut the phone and kept unloading her trolley, more and more vociferously, till she was slamming things down, looking really upset. Suddenly she just lost it and started crying, big crying, only in public, and she was unloading her trolley - it was a big shop. He really was a bastard. (The question of why she didn't just storm out, leave all the food lying on the checkout and go home on the bus, is another issue. It's complicated. You know how it never even occurs to you - and she had a pound in the trolley.)

She suddenly looked at me. I hope she saw solidarity. When I turned around once to see how big the queue was - the guy in front was very slow - I saw an infinitesimal but unmistakable flicker on the face of the girl behind me. We were all in it together. Poor thing.

And this morning there was a huge black guy with a pencil moustache and a pinstripe suit sitting right next to me, snoring. The guy opposite, in a yellow sports top, kept looking - strangely, at me, though I wasn't the one snoring. He was reading a book open to a page of drawings illustrating how to deflect a violent assault.