Thursdays At The Meeting House Aren't Usually This Eventful

 I fell asleep in the Meeting for Worship. Only briefly because Ailz had noticed and woke me with a cough. Alan confided afterwards that he was afraid I'd died.

There was some low-key drama with the straight-arrow business people next door. They want the rubbish cleared from the gully between the Meeting House and their premises. The tenants of the upstairs flat dumped it there- not the present tenants who love plants and give us cake- but an earlier set of tenants who left in a hurry after the police began to take an interest in their doings, leaving behind boxes of condoms and panties.

After the shared lunch Ailz found a guy sheltering from the driving rain in the porch. He was on route from a domestic disaster, involving the police, to a hostel round the corner. He had a brandy bottle in his hip pocket, he apologised continually, he wept. We fed him and charged his phones for him.  I thought afterwards, when I was considering how to write about him, that the phrase "scattered wits" exactly described his condition. The dog he had with him was called Charlie Watts.

Meanwhile Jim was moving the big TV screen from one end of the Meeting Room to the other- where it will sit next to the sound system we thought was bust but has just been found to be in working order. Alan was walking up and down with the portable mic going "George Fox 1650" and I was going to one loudspeaker and then the other and saying, "Yup, we've got you in stereo..."

Haecceitas (Don't Ask Me To Pronounce It)

 Haecceitas is the quality in a thing that makes it individual, unique, recognisably itself and not something else that is similar. The word- which tracks back to the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus- usually gets translated as "thisness". It was introduced to me- and it's application to story-telling explained- in a video by someone I cannot now identify. (Sorry, unidentified video-person!) 

Every so often I'll take the idea out and polish it on a shirt tail.  What is it exactly that distinguishes person A from person B and every other person in the alphabet?  How does a mother inerringly pick her own child out of a teeming creche? How when we step off the train  in Edinburgh do we know without asking it's not Glasgow? We can feel the thisness of people and places and all manner of other things- but how? Can we identify the markers? Can we explain?  Artists have haecceitas at their fingertips. Good artists that is. They can give us the quiddity of a thing in flick of a brush or  the turn of a phrase. How do they do it? They just do....

 You don't have to understand a power to wield it. 

Last  night I interrupted my cough, cough, coughing to drink a shot of port and distract myself with a chapter of a detective story that was lying on the desk- and encountered a piece of writing almost entirely lacking in haecceitas. A woman who could be anyone gets on an underground train that could be anywhere and visits a cafe that was every cafe. The author's plotting may be excellent but I'm unlikely to read far enough to find out because the colourlessness of the writing is so uninviting. I don't want to navigate this featureless world full of featureless people. Indulge me with some quirks for pity's sake!

Haeccecity may be impossible to pin down but you miss it like a pulse-beat when it isn't there...