Each time I sit down—exhausted—to edit together another clip for Vimeo, the experience is humbling: most of our shots are unusable. Surrounded by talent and success (for if you measure success by one’s ability to meet one’s goals, many street performers are triumphant), I’m beginning to feel prosaic, clumsy, unreliable. Normally, I am fine with being inadequate; I have written about it often. But in a working environment of total immersion, finding the time to tackle intense self-doubt is impossible.
What consoles me—sorry, I mean what used to console me, is that I used to think I was a good guy, a good friend. Recently, however, I’m not so sure. Belle and I have quite different takes on life; hers is spiritual, emotional, conscientious and overwhelmingly positive. She will find the endearing and funny side of things (that I had been blind to), and find salvageable qualities to the footage we’ve taken; where I see an unsightly blight, she will find urban charm; an image I think is too dark, she will count as atmospheric.
Next to her, I am emotionless. She is a Southern USA passionate artist with a good heart who has found God. I am a South-of-England socialist “antitheist” (thank you, Hitchens) who dislikes the idea of Christmas. While I used to see my edits as “harsh but fair”, I now see “mean and often unnecessary”. My continual sarcasm is pitiless, and my impassioned rants are preachy and in bad taste. I don’t believe this to be true, generally. But Belle seems to bring this out in me. It has gotten to the point that she argues with me just to disagree with what I am saying—I have become literally disagreeable. For the first time in my life I think I might be willingly—or worse, irrepressibly—insensitive.
Chris is more reticent than us two, and acts as councillor after we have reached an impass: know when to stop, know where is too far, and voice only what is necessary. Do not bicker. That he has become the father is only to be expected of a trained guide, and he even has pithy maxims to describe what we’re going through: forming, storming, norming and performing.
Belle and I are certainly storming. And it will take a lot of soul searching (no pun intended) for us to “norm”. Although after each argument we find it (more and more) possible to make up—arguing is less new now than it was—we have yet to become good friends. Watch this space.