The Stem Broke First

From Vincent Wine to Long Chim: on attention, self-possession, and what closes in us when the feed never stops.

On Wednesday night I was at Vincent Wine on the fringes of Perth CBD.

It wasn't long after arriving when one of their bartenders swung around too fast knocking a few clean wine glasses over with her forearm. Most of them survived. One didn't. The stem broke first, and she was left holding the goblet with a jagged spur where the base should have been, now useless, she looked at it for about a second. Then she threw it across the bar into the bin. Crash.

No apology to the room. No small pantomime of embarrassment performed for strangers who had already gone back to their own conversations. The glass broke, she binned it, the night carried on. I have thought about that moment, I mean, imagine if that was you? What would you do? In that mistake, she did the hardest thing a person can do in a room full of watchers, which is nothing. She did not reach for a mask. She did not check whether the two of us who were sitting up at the bar cared. She knew exactly who she was and where she was, and a broken glass did not need her to become someone else for our benefit.

That is rarer than it sounds now.

As the lazy reading is she just happens to be a 'strong personality'. Nobody carries that much composure by private effort, not reliably anyway, especially on a 'Steak night Wednesday' shift with a bar full of people wanting to order. She had it because the room had it first. You catch this kind of ease off a place the way a child catches an accent, never deciding to, standing month after month beside people who already carry it, until it is in your hands before it is anywhere near your head. So the bartender is not quite the story. She is what the story grows. The story is the room.

The room around her was steeped in culture. You could sit in Vincent Wine on that rainy Wednesday and believe you were in a back lane in San Sebastian, or some Bistrot à vin in Paris where the list is longer than the menu. Staff and regulars talked to each other like they have met before, someone taking the piss, someone laughing before the joke lands because it's been heard before. Vincent Wine has survived as it knows what it is. It is not chasing you. It has the enormous confidence of not needing your approval, and that's the entire product, more than the wine and the ambiance...

And it is draining out of every place that isn't a room like this. The settled self, the ease that runs under a bar like Vincent, has gone not only from venues but from the ordinary lives that settled nature sat in...

Twenty-five years ago we had a handful of friends, a rented new release DVD or VHS from Blockbuster/Video Ezy, and a genuinely tiny sample of other lives to measure our own against. That was a poverty and little do we know, as we reflect now, it was also a wealth. Our comparisons were local, they had faces, they came with the friction of actually knowing the person, so you could never quite pretend their life was as clean as the instagram highlight reel, as you had seen them cry in a car park. You had seen the awkward, long interaction in the front-yard of a friend’s house when there was a relationship break-down. Now though, the sample is infinite and none of it has a face. We are turning to our devices and the content we consume for advice, even for a sense of who we are, which is akin to drinking from a fire hydrant. If you think about it, there is no time between the water (information) hitting you and you swallowing it, no gap in which a person might have asked, do I even want this? is this mine? did I choose it or did it arrive? The gap is where that 'settled self' used to live. The gap is gone.

Here is the machinery under that. A person cannot help sizing themselves up against other people. It is not vanity, it is how the animal locates itself and works out where it stands in the pack, and for almost the whole of human history you did that against the dozen or so faces you actually knew. Some were ahead of you in life, some behind. The social media feed tears the account up. Everyone on it is having their best day or doing a convincing impression of one, so every comparison you make now runs uphill, and it runs toward a standard, which is not even a person, it is a composite, ten thousand strangers' finest hours sewn into one life you are somehow supposed to be living. You cannot get there. Nobody can get there, as there is no there.

Normally, a voice in you would say “hang on, whose measure is this? did I agree to it?” But the voice needs the gap to speak in, and we just watched the gap close. So the algorithmic standard walks in with nothing to stop it and goes hunting (predatorily, I might add, after all, daily active users provide shareholder returns) for something to work on, and it settles on the one thing still in reach.

Not the soul. You gave that over around the time we could take the perfect selfie. But the body. You start watching yourself from outside, the way the feed watches you, pricing your own flesh with a stranger's cold eye, and once a person is out there appraising themselves they will do almost anything to fix what they find...

So what do we do? We optimise. We turn the body into an altar and lay ourselves across it, and the offering is always the same, the hope that if we get yoked (fit) enough or liked enough we will finally be wanted, finally belong, finally be enough. It is the oldest hunger wearing new LSKD activewear, and there is a very old blueprint for how you farm it out of a people...

Twenty-six centuries ago the armies of Neo-Babylonian empire came down on countless nations and did not just overthrow them, they unmade them (bare with me, we'll get back to the restaurants soon). They destroyed temples, the one building that sat at the centre of a people's entire idea of who they were, they dragged the city walls down into rubble, and they marched their captives the long way north and east along the rivers, out of the country that had told them what their names meant and into the heart of Babylonia.

I want you to think about walking in their sandals for a moment (as they didn't really have shoes back then). 

You have watched your house burn, everything you knew to be true burning with it. You come in after weeks on the road to a city, walls of glazed blue brick with bulls and dragons moulded into them, a tower stepped up into the sky as though the builders had set out to embarrass heaven, avenues laid wider than your whole home town was long. You sit down by a canal in the richest city on earth and you cry, not because you are beaten, you are used to being beaten, but you have caught yourself forgetting the tune of a song from home, and you understand in your stomach that your grandchildren will never know that true home existed…

Then comes the most subtle, quiet, yet psychologically damaging part. The empire did not waste its energy on the old, they were always going to die. It went for the young and the gifted. Officials came through the resettlements and took the clever children, the ones without blemish (the influencers of the day) and gave them new names with Babylonian gods folded into them, and fed them from the king's own kitchen, and put them through three years of the language and the literature of the Chaldeans, until children who had walked out of their own burning nations were polished courtiers running the machine that had swallowed their fathers. This is not an ancient history lesson, it is in the ground.

Archaeologists have pulled up clay tablets from a settlement the scribes themselves called the town of Jerusalem, and they are not laments, they are invoices, and within two generations the exiles on them are farming, signing contracts, lending at interest, all of it in the Babylonian tongue under Babylonian names. Nobody needed to hold a sword to them by then. The captivity had become a career.

That is the mechanism, whole and intact, and we have subscribed to it in our pockets. We handed over the calendar. We let a few companies run the assimilation program and we thanked them for the convenience, and now the clever children answer to names the machine minted for them, IYKYK, and many have forgotten the stories their parents told them…

And the thing we are starving in ourselves while we do it is the exact thing that bartender had. The thing you cannot fake and cannot buy and cannot post. Knowing who you are when the glass breaks…

I met up with Food influencer this week, real audience. We talked for a while and I kept waiting for "the tell", that flicker, that second face of those who live on social-media, that runs underneath the first one, monitoring. She doesn’t have it. 

She uses her platform like a trades-person uses a tool. Picks it up, does the job, puts it down. She told me the main things she uses it for and when she stops. She was formed by something before the platform ever arrived, her parents, her culture/belief system, she knew what she was before she knew what she wanted, identity came down the generational stairs before ambition did. She has a solid foundation under her feet, and the foundation is what lets the door stay open. Most of us are standing on the sinking sand.

Halfway through she glanced at her phone. Just once, a reflex, the animal twitch we all have now, and she caught herself and put it face down. That was the tell. Not that she is free of the pull. Nobody is free of the pull. But she knows it is a pull and she has decided which way she is walking anyway. That is how we navigate it. Not with some Amish purity, but with direction.

There will come a time though, it’s probably already happening, where we are going to overcorrect on this. We always do. Like a pendulum. As I think there is a version of the next ten years where everyone discovers boundaries all at once and the word gets so swollen it means nothing, where people wall themselves in and call the wall a value, where no one "takes a run" at anything as the risk might disturb their carefully curated peace. And this is really just the same fear we have already been talking about. The bartender did not have boundaries. She had a self, which is a different and older state, and a self can afford to be careless with a glass since it is not made of glass.

The trick (if there is one) is not tightening the rules. It is going down a level below the rules and asking what belief they are protecting? And whether the belief is even yours or just something the fire hydrant left in you? Most people never go down to this level. They adjust the behaviour and leave the belief untouched, and then wonder why the same shape of trouble keeps finding them in new rooms. The ‘self-possessed’ have simply done the harder audit. They have looked at what they assumed and asked where it came from, and thrown out the ones that came from strangers.

Friday I went to Long Chim, a Thai restaurant in the State Buildings, and this is a slightly different review, to what we have been talking about.

As at Vincent Wine the test is front of house, the read of the room, the welcome, the glass. Whereas, at Long Chim the room does its job beautifully, the Friday hum, staff who float in to your table exactly when you need another glass of wine and then are gone, service that feels less like something forced. Shannon Bennett, the famed chef of Vue De Monde, even he was enjoying a meal that night, which tells you the cooks in the back know they are being watched by people who can taste. But that’s not my point. As with Thai food the room is the overture. The verdict is on the plate.

The roast Wagin duck, the skin gone properly to lacquer, the flesh under it still holding, choy sum with the bitterness left in on purpose so it had somewhere to push against, and a pickled ginger and plum sauce doing the sour-sweet argument, which if you know good Thai cooking the balance is to perfection. Then the charred beef noodles, star anise low underneath, onions taken far enough to sweeten, sriracha not as heat but as the thing that made the star anise sing. Balance like that is not a recipe. A recipe cannot do it alone. Balance like that comes out of a person who has stood at that wok ten thousand times and stopped needing to be told they are good, who cooks from a settled place instead of an anxious one, who is not trying to impress you and by that very nature then does. You can taste ‘self-possession’. It has a flavour. It tastes like a cook who shut the voices off years ago, stopped caring what others thought, judged or critiqued.

Not everything was perfect though. The stir-fried cabbage was the one, which was ‘ho humm’ and it is almost funny that it was the cabbage, as cabbage is the most honest thing on any menu, the vegetable with nothing to prove and nowhere to hide. The whole trick of that dish is to trust it. You let the wok scorch the cabbage until it keeps its bite and sweetens at the burnt edges, and then you give space to the dried prawns and the garlic to stand around it and frame it instead of burying it. This plate did not trust the cabbage. The dried prawn had been let off the leash and it salted and funked the whole bowl down into one flat brown note, the garlic had been pushed a shade past sweet and into bitter, and the cabbage underneath it had good crunch, yet was wet, plenty of its nerve had been cooked out of it. Somebody in the kitchen was overwhelmed by a busy service, leaving the cabbage as an after thought and you could taste exactly that. Which is the whole essay, when you think about it. The first thing a person loses when they are underwater and over-working themselves is their attention to the thing in front of them, which inevitably becomes the least interesting thing on the table.

Honestly though, none of this was ever really about restaurants. Restaurants are just where I get to observe. It is whether you are fully present to the moments you live in. Are you all the way in the room, or whether some part of you has backed out to the doorway to watch how you are coming across?

That question is easy enough to pass at a table. It gets hard where it actually counts, in a room with one other person and the phones down, nothing to adjudicate the silence. A plate of food can only ask so much of you. A person asks for all of it. And a person needs two things from you that sound as though they should cancel each other out. To be safe, to know they will not be dropped. To be wanted, to know they are craved and not merely put up with. Nearly everything we call love hands over one of those and quietly starves the other. The rare thing, which almost nobody reaches for now, is not a careful balance struck between the two. It is both of them, at full strength, the safety gone all the way to protection, the wanting gone all the way to hunger.

The most perfect way to say it (in the romantic sense) is to be emotionally protected and yet sexually devoured by someone. That is the apex. 

That is the thing the whole circus of optimising is a stand-in for, the thing every lonely upgrade is trying and failing to buy, and it is vanishing for the same reason the self is vanishing, as it asks for two people who each know who they are before they walk in the door. You cannot be safely devoured by someone who is not sure why they exist. Protection and hunger in the one body, held at once and neither of them faked, is not a truce between two settings on a dial. It is what becomes possible only when nobody at the table is auditioning.

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's, The Little Prince. Something I read on a French school exchange in Year 10. I was the one boy, with twenty-seven girls, on that trip. It is a a time remember warmly for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the set text....Anyway, in the story, the Fox tells the boy “that to tame something is to become answerable for it forever”, that the taming is the whole tenderness and also the whole cost, and we have built a world that wants the devouring without the answering for it, the heat with none of the terrifying stillness of choosing one person and staying in the room. So they chase the wanting and neglect the wanted, hooked less on anyone in particular than on the sensation of the hunt, on the rumour that wholeness is one more acquisition away, out there, never here, never this. It is a full-time job and it pays in emptiness. You can actually notice in people, and it looks exhausting because it is.

The alternative is not romance, or not only. It is the thing that grows in the space between two settled people. You stop trying to be enough for the other one, as the enough was always a con. Instead you make a space, and you tend to it, and it grows the way you would a veggie patch or an orchard, from being what it is and not needing your approval to continue existing. Protected and passionately alive at the same time. Safe enough to be careless. That is what the bartender had with her broken glass and it is the same thing two people can build with a whole life, the freedom to smash something, to be seen at your worst and know things will simply carry on...

I paid the bill. This week I had spent two nights and however many words admiring people who are in the tension where this distraction is rife.

I keep wanting to end this by telling you to choose yourself, and that is the wrong ending, as choosing yourself is only another optimisation strategy, the 'self' hauled back onto the altar. The self is not the prize. Knowing who you are, your values, what you believe, that is the floor, firm enough underneath your feet so you can stop checking whether it is still there, and only when you stop checking does your attention come loose and go where it was always meant to go, out, into a slightly helpless fascination with the person across the table, present to the time you're in. And keeping it there and not pulled to the next bright thing the feed floats past is what you keep choosing. But the screen only rules you while you are unsure of who you are, and the surer you get, the less it can reach you, until you can turn it face down on a Friday night and feel nothing pulling at you at all. That is the whole of it. The boundary and the presence turn out to be the same act, and knowing who you are is what fuses them. You end up all the way in, at a table in no hurry to leave, across from someone you met and no longer have to chase, and there it is, the apex, the one thing nobody can buy, to be emotionally protected and yet devoured by the person you have started keeping. The only work left is to keep choosing to walk back into the room…

--TK