Maybe not, maybe Bim will just be in the midst of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beer was of course what he will want Bim to order (and not because of the money). It will give Bim all the more encouragement to order the most elaborate cocktail on the menu which Henrik will register blankly. Bim will see that although Henrik’s first language is Swedish it is not just a word he’s innocently picked up. He is going to be meeting Henrik, a semi-muscular, handsome Utopian, who will come in soon with a shopping bag and say, He will have just failed again by choosing this hotel and then fantasising about it, but these will only be lapses, he will tell himself. That is why he will have been trying, for the past few weeks, to be Utopian. Bim will know again sitting there that to be an Arcadian, hung up on fantasised pasts, but born in a historically impermissible body, is a kind of punishment. Arcadian Personality Types therefore tend to have a general fondness for old things and buildings, such as this hotel things which shall forever push Bim down mental avenues of history not conducive to constituting the grand ahistorical mythical paradise which is the ultimate Arcadian project (a collaboration with the Utopian Personality Types). To be born an Arcadian is to crave a paradise knit out of visions of the past just as a Utopian does with the future. Leading him down half-lit glittering corridors before slamming him against concrete walls. His Arcadian impulse will have always been doing this to him. Surely any one of them might have been invited by the hostess? The child of a Yoruba noble perhaps? This will get him a little further, but then he meets the hostess and her husband and they scream abuse at him, inform him the reason he was invited was as an exotic specimen, like the zebras, and his vision ends. Today, like whenever he comes, he will sit in the baroque alcove and fantasise about visiting the house in the 1890s, until he gets violently ejected from his own vision, recalling, with a shock, that he would probably not be invited to such a house in such a period.Įven his fantasies will not contain his Blackness, which will sometimes seem to keep him out of Arcadia however many loopholes he finds, like the presence of Black students living in Edinburgh since the 1850s, at least. And it will be an old hotel painted wall panels and a tinted glass dome, apparently once the house of a society hostess who was conveyed around Edinburgh in a coach pulled by zebras towards the end of the 19th Century.

Shola von reinhold