On Losing Your Nerve

Nerve does not fail at the beginning. At the beginning everything is hypothetical and a man can be remarkably bold about a thing that is not yet happening. It fails at the point where it stops being hypothetical, which is usually the point he has been working towards for months.

It looks like a sudden change of subject. Sometimes it looks like a joke, deployed with slightly too much force. Occasionally it looks like an argument about something irrelevant, which is the most transparent version, because a man who picks a fight on the doorstep is asking to be sent home without having to say so.

I do not argue with it. That is the whole of my policy and it has never let me down. A man who is retreating has not changed his mind about what he wants, he has arrived at the edge of it and found that wanting a thing and being in it are different experiences. Pushing him over that edge produces compliance, and compliance obtained that way is worth nothing to me and considerably less than nothing to him afterwards.

So it stops. Without commentary, and without the small punishing note that would tell him he has disappointed me, because he has not. He has done something quite difficult, which is to signal a limit in real time rather than discovering it in the middle and having to endure the rest.

What interests me is what happens next, and it is nearly always the same. He apologises far too much. Then he explains, at length, in a way that makes clear he is more frightened of having seemed unserious than of the thing itself. And then, some days later, he comes back to it, and the second approach is entirely different in character. Slower. Less performed. Actually his.

The first attempt was an idea he had about himself. The second is the real appetite, and it only became available because the first one was allowed to fail without cost.

Men who have never been permitted to lose their nerve tend to be the most brittle. They have learned to push through every hesitation, which sounds like courage and is closer to not being able to hear yourself. By the time such a man notices he did not want something, he is well past the moment when saying so would have been simple.

I would rather be stopped ten times than proceed once with a man who is no longer there. It is not kindness. It is that the alternative is theatre, and I have no interest in performing with someone who has left.