In my town I am the acquaintance of a skilled compulsive. Experience tells me that they are rare people, so I'll set this down in writing here, before he is lost. These are creative or analytical people who have, for instance, locked on to just one piece of music they must listen to every day; or people who have to perform some musical work every day; or ones who must daily paint the same image; or people who contemplate the one building each day. Every day - that is the 'frame' to their compulsion. These men and women know that they must reach their death-bed aware that not one day was missed, including the penultimate day. They would of course have you accept that theirs is a compulsion that is worthy of notice. No pratty hand-washing compulsion, no checking the front-door is shut seven times, swivelling anticlockwise and urinating. No, no, this is quite different (so they assert, and perhaps I agree with them), these are no functional actions, the tedious waste parts of a life: they are a few of the creative minutes of fairly smart minds.
The compulsive I am acquainted with is an old man now, confined to one room and almost friendless, a terminus which I think was by no means inevitable. His compulsion is to perform the same piece of music each day, and now that he is coming to the end of his life, I can see in him a fear that he won't be able to get to his instrument or to sing his piece on the penultimate day, a fear which lives in his mind like a low flame. It started when he was a teenager with his first electric guitar and he bought a record which he at first harmlessly copied, not knowing that soon his interpretations would turn obsessive.
He worries each word in his song. He says he can perform the phrase 'root there no more' over 400 different ways. He's even tried singing his piece with an obstruction clenched between his teeth (it changes almost everything). He's had days, in earlier times when he had a job, when he had to ding the tune out of his head so that he could focus on some other task; I've seen the small nickel toffee-hammer (gathering dust on a shelf now) he'd carry around to tap his skull with.
Driven out of various bedsits by neighbours annoyed by the repeated song, he found a job for a few years where he could arrive before the others, plug in his guitar and work out his song in a distant corner of the factory. One day, of course, he found that his instrument and amplifier had been stolen from its place, and seized with panic he ran straight away into town and waited in the cold dawn until the musical instrument store would open and let him buy replacements. He never returned to work after that.
He told me he'd had one girlfriend when he was young. She had persuaded him to take her on a holiday, and he'd got a silly idea in his head that he could plug in at some roadside café during the long journey. He grew more and more quiet as the day wore on, then without ever pulling in at any place, quickly turned back shortly before the point of no return. A few days after the trip, when the girl went out for a walk as the song began (as was her habit), just like he and the factory job, she did not return.
Anyway, it has come to a rather sorry pass now. My acquaintance never leaves his room decorated with its framed portrait of a negro musician, where he's sometimes startled by a thumping on the walls, and where he sustains himself on fig-roll biscuits which I bring to him. I knock and let myself in, and usually I find him sitting hollow-eyed with his arm around the neck of the guitar, his back against the wall.
I note that this sort of behaviour only becomes interesting when it's old. When a man first niggles away at something every day, it's viewed by the rest in this town as something mildly curious but not worth bothering with very much. But after a man has held this 'performance', every single day, for fifty years say, then we do indeed register it in some way. Though where the point is at which we find this 'work' interesting, on what exact day after how many exact years of persistence, none of us have any clear idea.
I muse. If we in the town decided to raise the spirits of these compulsives in some way, to bring them together for social gatherings perhaps - would there be a punch-up? . . . Or would there be romance perhaps, and would my old compulsive acquaintance omit to mention that after his obsessive musical work, he is obsessively in the habit of climbing up to the obsessive attic and playing with his old childhood train-set obsessively; and would the new-found romantic interest obsessively slam doors loudly while he was upstairs with his trains? I am being frivolous and I am ashamed of myself now. My acquaintance deserves more than this and so I fall silent.
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