Waiting for Noddy

 I’ve spent my life waiting to wait properly.  

This may sound unnecessarily obtuse, but I’ll tell you what I mean. For I was recently sitting in a café opposite a dilapidated bus stop, condemned to sip on an espresso that I hadn’t ordered but mutely accepted, hoping that the trace of disappointment in my smile would be enough for the barista to realise their mistake. It wasn’t. Whilst I was chewing on the bitterness, contemplating whether this was an act of exceptional politeness or exceptional cowardice, I noticed a man sitting and waiting for the bus. There was nothing exceptional about him at first glance, other than perhaps a pronounced stoop that made sitting look difficult; a bulky backpack upon each shoulder that continually threatened to conspire with a gust of wind and topple him forward onto the pavement. As I continued to watch, silently entertained by the morbid possibility that he would tumble, I was drawn to the way that he was waiting. He didn’t fidget; he didn’t glance at a watch; he didn’t recourse to a book. This was a man sitting outside of time; a man sitting outside of the world.  

I’ve spent my life waiting to wait like this.  

After a few minutes, the bus arrived and I was left alone with my cold espresso, caught in that brutal bind between shot and sip. I chose the former, resigned to the pleasureless brute-forcing of caffeine into my system, but there was slightly too much liquid and I loudly spluttered; a thin layer of espresso hermetically sealing my lips and karmically reinforcing the maxim: stop romanticising old people. Since then, a few weeks have passed and I’ve continually held off from writing, as though allowing the thoughts to mature – to rich and ripen into something tangible, something worth our time together. Predictably though, I’ve forgotten most of the initial curiosities that brought me to the page. Nonetheless, I have the man and I have the title; I’m sure that’ll be enough for something or rather to unfold. 

We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Noddy, waiting for . . . waiting. All evening, we have struggled, unassisted. Now it's over. It's already tomorrow.  

The problem of time has set on the pen of every writer and in the mind of every reader; the inevitability of growing older and passing through, of failing and regretting and delicately reconciling everything that we aren’t. And then dying incomplete, but necessarily so. I promise that this isn’t a desperate recourse to pessimism, but rather the opposite. For it calls to mind a novel that seems to continually resurface throughout my life and has thus become an old favourite of mine, Mount Analogue, by Rene Daumal. It details a group of young explorers who set out for a mythical mountain, attempting to locate the door to the invisible that will unite heaven and earth as one, a quest for the absolute.

The specifics of the story aren't particularly relevant, for whilst the prose themselves are poetic and engaging, my rather macabre fascination lies in the circumstances surrounding the ending, as Daumal died of tuberculosis before he finished the novel. He left his writing desk mid-way through a sentence and never returned, leaving it suspended in time, destined to remain incomplete. The relevance of this lies in the power that it grants the work. It isn’t a failure or anything lesser because it remained unfinished, because it could have taken numerous alternative narrative paths, but rather it is precisely the ambiguity of this incompleteness that captivates the mind. The frayed ends of the cable, as John Berryman writes, are revealed to us in all their messy contingency. We must simply learn to accept the fraying.  

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.  

Whenever I decide on a refrain to write around, I initially have a dig through the old favourites; a necessary recourse to my trusty arsenal of philosophers and psychoanalysts, the heavy hitters with which I can obfuscate and dance around any stable truths. I’m always captivated by Emerson’s assertion that the purpose of his essay writing wasn’t to arrive anywhere or convince anyone of anything, but to unsettle and trouble the waters of the mind. A thinker who embodies this sentiment and has (conveniently) written about the phenomenon of waiting is French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot.  

As for Blanchot, the experience of waiting is to enter a peculiar form of temporal paradox. We are simultaneously deprived of time whilst grappling with it in the form of pure excess – an image of non-being is inserted into being present – meaning that the waiter isn’t fully existing in their place of waiting. There is a movement of separation, or alienation, from the conditions of selfhood. To wait is thus to enter into the margins of time, outside of ourselves. In a sense, this entails an escape from life. We wait for our relationships to improve; we wait to start living; we wait for the barista to realise their mistake.  

The ways in which we attempt to escape from the confines of material time are numerous; Schopenhauer preached the virtues of internal ascetic retreat, Camus the leap into action and vigour, and then the majority of ourselves, a necessary skate along our phone screens as we enter temporally into the eternal scroll. This is how my last hour or so has passed, or perhaps hasn't really passed at all. And as for Samuel Beckett, whose words have cut through and vitalised this short piece, the act of waiting is both the ultimate means of escape (as expressed by Blanchot) as well as the perfect metaphor for our lives as human beings.  

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Noddy to come. 

The esoteric lead singer of Current 93, David Tibet, once had a vision of Noddy being crucified. He was laying atop of a house in East London, LSD coursing through his system whilst he gazed at the sky with its varying psychedelic permutations. He patiently waited for his visuals to concretise into something tangible; to grant him anything at all and eventually it was a tattered visage of Noddy that he saw, nailed to the cross and bleeding profusely. He treated this vision akin to a revelation, taking to the streets of London in an amphetamine induced frenzy, buying up every Noddy related item that he could find. And thus, the first acolyte of Noddy was born.  

He even had the hat.  

This is the sort of seismic life event that I’ve been searching for; that I’ve been waiting for. The dream of escaping the responsibilities of living through a necessary recourse to something greater than myself. I’ve pored over mystical texts to no avail, forcing prophecies into dreams and dreams into prophecies. Anything to take me outside. Of course, the process of my writing this piece has made me aware of the crushing irony inherent in this mode of desiring. In that true escape doesn't arise from the eventual arrival of the desired experience, of Noddy, but rather through the process of waiting for it. The time spent desiring there whilst being here.  

I think that if we wait too long for something, that thing will never arrive. It will be clouded by the brutal confines of expectation and projections of fantasy; it will be doomed from the outset. Therefore, Noddy will never arrive, at least in the form that I want, as long as I continue wanting. Perhaps that’s been the point all along, the maxim that has hovered over my fingers as I’ve gotten this far. To wait without expectation; to wait for nothing.

I’ve come to the end and realise that I should have entitled this: The Noddyssey.  

Unfortunately, it’s too late for that now.