Fantasy and illusion are the factors that have driven the Irish economy for the past dozen years or so, writes John Waters
YOU MISS the drama of life if you elect to believe in coincidence. Thus, the news about Dundrum Town Centre celebrating its 50 millionth customer just when the papers are otherwise full of doom and gloom was an irony only bursting to enter stage right.
It seems like just a few months since this newspaper introduced a review of my book, Lapsed Agnostic, with the headline, "Forgive us, John, for we have become prosperous". Four months, as it happens, though admittedly dramatic ones.
The implication was that the book was hostile to prosperity. I wish I could say so and stake my claim to the coveted and keenly contested Jeremiah Of The Year Award. But, in as far as it broached the subject at all, Lapsed Agnostic merely in passing suggested that prosperity was something we needed to get out of our systems.
A secondary problem with any ambition of mine to become Jeremiah of the Year is that I did my bit to make that 50 million. I suspect this is not something an Irish Times columnist is expected to admit, but I find myself in "Dundrum" more often than I feel I should.
I wish I could claim that these trips were anthropological. But no: I too am a sinner. What draws me, I know, is fantasy, illusion, which is to say the same factors that have driven the Irish economy for the past dozen years or so.
There is something about being there, even without buying anything, that makes me feel in touch with some intangible possibilities that life still suggests itself as having to offer. I sit in Starbucks, trying to convey the impression of a man on a mission to buy a sensible pair of shoes, but really feeling at one with all the other searchers for whatever it is we think we can find there. It's personal and elusive, but quite real. Sometimes it can rinse itself down to a single white T-shirt, or fasten on an ostensibly nondescript black leather belt, but mostly it remains a lingering question, an anticipation, a hope. From time to time, sitting there, it occurs to me that there is no particular reason to be there unless you are actually buying something, so then I buy something. Economics isn't complicated, really.
When we say that shopping is "the new religion" we generally seem to mean that we have replaced the zeal we once displayed towards godliness with an attraction to materialism. Or we note in passing that the spaces in which we nowadays shop have come to resemble places of what we used to call worship. It certainly seems that, generally speaking, when people are poor they are more open to transcendent conceptions of meaning, and that when they become richer, this openness diminishes, at least while they figure out how far the material search can take them. We should call it worshop.
A man told me last week about a recent survey in the UK indicating that almost all sectors of the high street economy have declined in the past year, with the notable exception of the top end of the designer market. There might be a simple, prosaic explanation: that the very rich do not care whether there is a recession or not.
But the man telling me, an organic gardener, said that, if a fruit tree is terminally damaged, it will that year put out more and better fruit than ever before, as though in expectation of its impending death. I like this image so much that I refuse to try to confirm whether or not it is well-founded.
The upper end of the designer market is concerned not so much with discretionary purchases as forbidden fruit, things we buy knowing we shouldn't. I suspect that there is a middle range of luxury goods that will be jettisoned even before this top end, because some luxuries are not essential, and some, the most self-indulgent kind, can seem as vital as what we list as necessities.
To come across something in a shop that really speaks to me of the innermost earthly fantasies that sometimes sustain me is to encounter something literally breathtaking. I want it, I cannot afford it, I do not need it. I want it, I do not need it. I want it, I cannot afford it, I must, just this once, this one last time, indulge myself, because after all I'll be a long time dead and this phone/T-shirt/belt has come to represent in this mad moment everything of my earthly desires.
And so I shamefacedly indicate to the impassive Polish assistant that, yes, I will buy this belt, which I do not need and which nobody will ever notice when I wear it. I hurriedly pull out my credit card as though the speed of the transaction will somehow reduce the trauma to my conscience and my account. I guiltily gather up my purchase in its beautiful designer bag and scurry away from the gaze of the beautiful Polish psychologist who knows exactly what I am trying to do.