How we got here, where we go next
For the contents of this post, please go to https://rochereau.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/how-we-got-here-where-we-go-next/
Perpetual Lab
Sunday 24 July 2016
Brexit dream #3: Sea Slug Soup in Brussels
I dreamt about Clive again, along with two other friends. We’ve been on a trip to Brussels (as I did with school friends in ’58): the headquarters of the European Union. Now it’s time to go back. Our Metro train has just arrived at Brussels Midi, the terminus for the Eurostar train to London. You can get off the train either side. Clive is about to get out on the Eurostar side, but I stop him in time. I tell him we’ve got two hours to spare, we can have some fun first. Clive correctly guesses I’m thinking of a bar. The others pretend they’ll indulge me in this, as if they aren’t thirsty themselves. Fair enough, I’m the eldest, I’ll show them how this is done.
So we get off the other side, leave the station and look for a place to get some half-liters of white Belgian beer from the tap, such as Hoegaarden. I don’t exactly like the stuff, but it’s fascinatingly weird. To my dismay, we arrive in a boring cheap diner with white laminate tables and bright lighting. Before we even sit down a waitress waylays us to take our orders. I find myself herded into a corner, deprived of an escape route. I want to tell my companions that surely we can find a better place than this, not an English pub obviously, but a friendly bar, the cheap kind not for tourists, where men come in their dusty workclothes, glad to see their pals, say what they like and feel completely at ease. But it’s too late, Clive and the others have succumbed to pressure from the waitress, and accepted her suggestions.
The first dish arrives for sharing, a big tureen of what looks like cold soup, with fresh leaves in it, or perhaps waterweed. As I gaze into the depths I see movement near the bottom. Before long I can see a dozen caterpillar-like creatures with protuberances. They must be live sea-slugs. am I supposed to spear them with a fork? Oh well, when in Brussels . . .
I’m glad at this point to wake up.
A Manhattan Odyssey
Battery Park, Lower Manhattan, c. 1929
[Written on July 16th, 2016. See also the version published on Amazon.com, which includes a review of an earlier version published here on September 6th, 2013.]
A reader of this blog has published a novel. I promised to submit a review for Amazon and then spent weeks agonizing about how to do it justice, instead of actually writing anything. This is part of my modus operandi, the other part being to dash something off in a frenzied finale of editing. It ended up like this:
“What intellectual colossus could claim to know and understand everything? The impossibility of these doomed projects soon becomes apparent to most of us. And a consideration of these complexities reminds me that there also exist a multitude of cities: for every citizen there exists a different city—yes of course there is a shared reality—but no one’s city ever entirely corresponds to any other, and will often diverge wildly. If a great city can boast of harboring ten million citizens, then the number of extant cities will also be ten million.”Perhaps I ought to say somewhere that I like it very much. Dunno, let the ink hang out to dry here for a while. It’s my party and I’ll dry if I want to.
What Späth’s narrator says in his novel can also to be applied to every review and every reading of its rich text. I could write a dozen reviews of it, each showing it in a different light. This is my second. The first was about an earlier draft, less than half the length*. Quirkily, I choose to compare his treatment of Manhattan with Joyce’s Dublin seen through the eyes of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and a host of incidental characters. Thus he builds a composite view of the Irish capital in a 24-hour vignette rooted in a series of incidents and interactions. The Sun Temple by contrast is almost free of plot, narrow and specific in its viewpoint and route between Cooper Square and the battery Its characters are the Sun, whose touch gives life to all, and the solitary narrator’s personal Manhattan. At the prospect of a random act of kindness, towards “the Chinese man and his wife”, he clumsily fails. Stung by retrospective guilt, he dedicates his novel to them.
His Manhattan is rooted in its own crumbling past: steeped in history and nostalgic atmosphere which only a sensitive pilgrim can uncover: not with archaeological tools but the antennae of a psychic: a sort of dowser who unearths powerful primitive realities. Their essence is encoded through visible remains, especially at the southern point of Manhattan Island known as the Battery, redolent with history, custodian of mysterious monuments and the burnt-out remnants of a structure known as the Concession, symbol of the narrator’s regret for the missed opportunities of youth.
Meanwhile, Manhattan is being constantly renewed—buildings torn down and replaced, old landmarks erased—abetting our narrator’s “debilitating Nostalgia that posits the past as always superior to the feeble and diluted present.” His remedy is to stand aloof from the crowds and the illusions that sustain their bad faith. Instead he offers worship to the Sun, for it reigns beyond our time, from where it creates, sustains and controls all the cycles of life.
The text is erudite at times but unlike Ulysses is easy to read. Thus:
“Bolstered by the Savage Hemp (the preferred suffumigation of the ancient, warlike Scythians), I fear no man, and could possess any woman, if I so desired. But the unsustainability of these God-like states is an unfortunate fact.”
His writing is suffused with an endearing candour, conveying an honesty that for all its flights of fancy strikes true in the heart and comes gracefully down to earth. He builds himself up, only to knock himself down again:
“Arising, I move languidly through this gold-coloured equation—as if following the dictates of an ancient sect—undoubtedly presenting a most strange appearance and perhaps causing certain members of the crowd to ask ‘Is he among the Prophets?’ However . . . another segment of the public . . . takes me for a skulking, heavy-lidded malingerer . . . the most dismaying aspect of all this that I do not entirely disagree with their opinion!”
As a user of psychedelic drugs whose habitat is the open air (his little apartment being too squalid, merely the place where he has nightmarish dreams), he compares himself to an Indian sadhu, despised by some, venerated by others.
There are hints that the novel derives in part from the journals of its author, covering a few weeks of his life long ago. But this is merely the base metal. In his sprightly prose (riddled as it is with unimportant typos that merit proper editing for the next edition) the raw material is smelted into gold in an alchemic crucible. The person and city are both thrown in. So here we have one out of at least ten million Manhattans, as real as any other; not static but like all of life constantly expanding and deepening, combining and being refined. First there is raw experience with its recognizable common features that we call reality. Add to this the quintessence of subjectivity. What do we get? Transported to an ordinary place beyond the reach of time, as we shall not discover until the final page.
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* See this post
The Cycle of Imperfection
Click to download a PDF sample (password below)
For months I’ve been working—which means mainly procrastinating—on a new book. Instead of me boring you with an essay on its structure, you can download a sample. Initially I titled it A Cycle of Days, reflecting the way that it reflects the changing months and seasons across the years. It’s been quite a slog. I reached the end of June a while ago, a sort of halfway point. July to December will be more challenging, for reasons I won’t bother explaining now. Challenge is more interesting than drudgery but can only be tackled when one is in the mood. The most dispiriting thing is a periodic loss of faith in undertaking such a demanding project. It can take the form “Why am I doing this, anyway? It’s not fun any more.” One tries to soldier on regardless.
There are puritans who’ll say it’s not supposed to be fun, as if any worthwhile endeavour should be sweat and pain, interspersed with despair and giving up. I think I don’t buy that any more. I wrote somewhere that I thought Van Gogh painted because it was the most fun he knew how to have.* It didn’t manage to put it so succinctly the first time round. That’s one good reason for producing the book at all: to give myself a second chance, and write better. I’m still getting value from Brian Spaeth’s words as quoted in my last:
... getting the hang of it, and am actually enjoying it—which is the true test of any endeavor ...That hits the nail on the head. The true test was applied: the endeavour hardly scraped through. I should write adventurously, more daring and loose, as also hinted by Bryan White (not to mention Ghetu over these years, who’s almost gone from youth to middle age in the meantime). The other day I thought of a more alluring title: The Cycle of Imperfection, as a reminder to hang loose. Imperfect Evolution begat imperfect Nature, Nature begat imperfect Man. God is clearly not perfect. It’s not that I’ve become slapdash. To sweat the small stuff is one of my prime imperfections, as is failing to see the big picture, and veering off on the wrong track. Never mind, let me persevere down those wrong tracks and bring back unexpected delights.
As the days, years and decades rush headlong like mountain streams, or meander like snakes across endless plains to that distant Ocean of mystery or nothingness (take your pick) I shall let things be, follow the impulse, apply the true test of endeavour: “Is it fun?”
That’s what The Cycle of Imperfection means to me, and perhaps to some future reader. Let this title take its place in the great parade of titles, between Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, standing in contrast to both—without claiming any status or rank at all. I do it because writing is fun, which is a fun word for “enjoyable”, “enjoyment”—the ultimate challenge for all of us in an imperfect world.†
So if you are interested, click on the graphic above for a PDF sample of the first 29 pages. You’ll need to paste in a password. If I know you, feel free to email and I’ll send it. All feedback welcome. You might wonder if each day, or some days, would be enhanced with titles and not just dates. Brian’s Sun Temple has 42 brilliant chapter headings, starting with the following: The Hieroglyph, The Old City, The Truant, The Ritual, The Sacrament, The Promenade.... They stand like neon signs flashing in the foggy night, drawing you in, delivering their promise....
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* I wrote this on 9th March 2008:
It’s true that Vincent van Gogh shot himself in a field near Auvers, where he was staying with Dr Gachet, and died a few days later. He’s often cited as the archetypal unhappy mad artist, but I think his mental anguish occurred only at the crises of his intermittent condition. Surely painting itself was his joy, a sensual ecstasy which communicates through his colours and brush-strokes. Art and literature aren’t easy. To develop the highest skill requires obsession. The goal is to communicate one’s experience to another. Joy is the only experience worthy of being translated via the painstaking treatment of art. It doesn’t matter what facilitates the obsession. Certain blues-singers honed their art when blindness and poverty had closed other avenues. They say birds sing sweeter in a cage. The young child is endlessly creative, with potential for anything, then life closes off one option after another.† Searching Google to see if anyone has written a book called The Cycle of Imperfection or anything similar, I came across The Gifts of Imperfection, by Brené Brown. Its subtitle is “Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are”, & appears to be written for success-driven high-flyers like herself, who compulsively read and thus help push up “#1 New York Times Bestsellers”. Not to be confused with anything I may publish.
Brexit dream #2 *: Fair Weather Friend
[Written on July 7th, 2016]
Yesterday I succumbed to a feeling of exhaustion, after the strain of the last few days, which got to me in spite of trying to detach from it, for I knew that the situation was not mine to untangle. So after breakfast I went back to bed and succumbed to a blessed emptiness. After a while I thought to scribble some thoughts, the kind which arrive of themselves since nature as they say abhors a vacuum. So I picked up a notebook which lay to hand, one I haven’t been using lately.
The most recent entry was June 12th, describing something I’d completely forgotten since. Note the date, twelve days before the Brexit result. (Only in hindsight did it convey the sense of being constricted by unwanted obligations; filled with a primitive urge to cut the umbilical cord, however disloyal it might seem.) My notes read as follows:
Awoke from a dream, in which I went with my friend to a distant town in the Eastern counties, perhaps Norwich. We’ve both made appointments to see a very good dentist there, a sole practitioner. We arrive early, to discover a tiny consulting room leading off a large waiting room with several other doors. Through these doors there’s a flow of functionaries having improptu discussions with one another and stopping to talk briefly with patients. It begins to feel more like the lobby of an important hotel than a dentist’s reception area, and enlarges accordingly. Clive goes in for his appointment. Mine is booked directly after his. A tall woman approaches, the receptionist I suppose, but she carries herself like the chief PA in a consultancy or lawyer’s office. She tells me that Clive is having serious problems and I should expect a delay. He’s lost some blood and is under a general anaesthetic. That’s all she has to say. I’m rather shocked, I ought to ask for more details, but am too stunned. Then she says brightly that I could wait if I want but I might get bored. The practice could find things for me to do, on a voluntary basis. For example, I could act as a run-around, ordering taxis for people. Or maybe I could chauffeur them myself? At this point she suggests I may need time to think about it, and goes off. I decide that when she comes back I’ll say if they want my services, they’ll be charged at my standard rate per hour.
But then she flits from one person or little group to another, never catching my eye, like a busy waitress in a restaurant. (This actually happened the day before, when we hadn’t booked a table, and were told there’d be one free soon.) Increasingly irritated, I realize I don’t want to keep my own appointment. I shall wait for Clive, of course: or should I? His next-of-kin should be informed, more like. I dread getting tangled up in this business. Yes, I’ve called him my friend, but that was when we worked together, nine years ago. We’ve inevitably got out of touch, he still working on full-time contracts, I almost fully retired. We don’t have so much in common now. I decide to stay till his case is handed over to responsible professionals and his family told.
First I must catch the woman’s eye, tell her my updated intentions. Meanwhile I have to go on sitting here, in this place I don’t trust, where I don’t want to be. So I daydream of freedom, remembering the days I lived in this town. I did live in Norwich once but dream towns are less specific. This one is an amalgam of Norwich, Paris, Lisbon, Chesham, Hastings, London and other places, the archetype of all my town dreams stretching back over the years. All the time sitting in the waiting-room, I dream a dream within a dream, itself a fragment of all the other dreams. I imagine walking out of here, finding the straight route that leads to the high ground on the horizon, those steep cobbled streets at the other end, that Montmartre of the soul, peopled with characters and curiosity shops from Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens.
Will I betray my friend in his hour of need? I’ll never know. I’m still in the waiting-room, waiting to catch the receptionist’s eye, when I wake up and realize none of it happened.
And as for yesterday’s scribbles, the effect on their author was magical. They helped me recover from the strain and exhaustion of the last few days, and see things in proportion again, and carry on. I meant to transcribe them and publish, but now when I read them back they hardly make much sense. Another time, perhaps. All I’ve managed so far is the title: “None but ourselves can free our minds”.
- - - - - -* “Brexit dream #1” is described here
Nake Nula Waun Welo
[Written on July 6th, 2016]
This thing called Brexit arouses across the globe a fascination which will endure for the rest of history. The perturbations it arouses are most strong at its epicentre, the district of London called Westminster, which gives its name to the seat of government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was an earthquake in the noösphere, a man-made accident.
Noösphere: The part of the biosphere occupied by thinking humanity; spec. (with reference to the writing of P. Teilhard de Chardin) a stage or sphere of evolutionary development characterized by (the emergence or dominance of) consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships, postulated as following the stage of the establishment of human life.I call it an accident in one of its everyday senses: not a clumsy slip so much as an unintended result, the culmination of a series of actions, millions of them, individually countable, each sincere and deliberate, whose combined outcome could not be predicted and whose result was unexpected and shocking. As cosmologists, physicists and evolutionary biologists will surely agree, we owe our very existence to accidents, without the intervention of Intelligent Design.
Something useful in the world
A dream [written June 4th, 2016]:
I’ve started a new contract job, so the environment and people are all new to me. The lead consultant explains my task. He’s very bright, one of those impressive all-rounders with a “first-class brain”. I find myself speaking intelligently to him, so I feel it will go OK, despite the task being at the boundary of my understanding, or a little beyond. I suppose that I will pick it up soon enough. As it goes on, I realise I am getting nowhere and understand nothing. All my colleagues have large maps on their desks, as do I; indeed, my work is based on the map. Except that I’ve lost mine.
A tall chest of drawers stands against the wall but it’s so unstable that it threatens its collapse if touched. It seems to have been standing there since the nineteenth century, when it was part of a workshop. Now I see that the walls are canvas: the office is a large tent, sectioned off. I wander back and forth in growing frustration, looking for my map. then I realize I’ve forgotten what to do when I find it. Why am I here at all? It’s a charade, a simulacrum of work.
Now I hear a baby’s pathetic cry, so I go round a partition and see a tiny baby lying on the ground, wrapped in swaddling clothes. It has no eyes and no nose, just a mouth. “Oh, no!” I exclaim. “This is not fair. People can’t just dump their unwanted babies on us.”
But then in the shadows I see a woman, sitting quietly, veiled and covered like a Muslim. She comes to me and speaks quite good English. It’s clear that she genuinely loves the baby and is not a professional beggar. I reach in my pocket, planning to give her £2. I only have some 50p pieces, and when I take them out they change into prettier coins, triangular and hinged like butterflies, made of the brightest silver. I hand them over and out of the shadows come more women, all of them ready to express their humble gratitude.
I see that I should continue giving for a while, perhaps daily for two weeks. Then they will organise themselves so that they can work instead of beg.
Comparing my useless “consultancy” job with their struggle for survival, I see clearly that these women are the ones doing something useful in the world.
Beggars and choosers
The Falcon pub, Guildhall, Market Square
[Written June 26th, 2016]
I tend to put my trust in the reality I see with my own eyes. . . . Here we have immigrants of every kind, including the odd terrorist, as we know from rare arrests on behalf of the security services. Is there much prejudice in our community? Yes of course, as much as anywhere, it’s fun to compare, make judgements, gossip as people do. But it’s done very consciously, compassionately, good-humouredly. We don’t risk falling out with neighbours. We make allowances, give one another space. We have more reason than most to be kind and peaceful with one another. Racism? Impossible here. The fights I see sometimes, from front or back windows, can be vicious but occur within the same ethnic group: their business, their culture.
Nobody can speak for everyone; and yet you have to have a government. What is the main purpose of the government? Traditionally it is to defend the realm from outside invaders; to make laws for the control of the citizens within its borders; to provide infrastructure and institutions for the benefit of the citizens. To stop anyone becoming too powerful and tyrannizing others in any way. It’s got much bigger than that. Like our National Health Service, it raises expectations faster than it could possibly satisfy them. Inequalities must be ironed out, then there will be less envy. Everybody must be looked after and kept alive, if necessary at the expense of generations as yet unborn.
I passed through the children’s playground, it’s my shortcut to town. At their regular spot sitting on a low wall, I saw two familiar faces, East Europeans, drinking Polish beer from cans. Sometimes there are three, four or more, out of perhaps a dozen for whom this is a meeting space. As usual I greeted them and they responded with equal warmth, glad to be accepted with no disapproval either of their drinking or their freedom of movement as of this moment enshrined within the EU. To me they are welcome because they so clearly like being in England, finding their niche, enjoying the freedom, warmth of welcome and opportunities which perhaps aren’t so good in their own country.
In the town centre I went through a pedestrian underpass, past a man sitting there, draped in quilts, as if this were his daytime residence and I an intruder. He greeted me warmly, a practised performance designed to slow my pace giving him time to request a pound towards a meal at McDonalds. I had nothing but cards on me, and told him so. He looked cheerful, healthy & well-fed. I could easily tell he was born within these shores, into an established Welfare State designed to prevent hand-to-mouth existence of the kind he was enacting. He proposed I might use my card to acquire some cash. He looked forward to seeing me again on my return trip. We parted on good terms and I took care to return by a different route.
Then the other evening, while the summer sun had still not set, I felt an urge for the open air. K couldn’t come, was waiting for a call on Skype from Jamaica. With the state of England still on my mind , I let my footsteps take me into town, in some vague idea of seeing how local people are reacting. I passed through the bus station and shopping mall, which is partly enclosed, partly open to the sky, and provides a direct corridor to the market square and Guildhall, whose cupola with Centaur atop provide this blog’s masthead. It suddenly occurred to me that I had enough cash in my pocket to buy a pint at The Falcon, the very hub of good fellowship and discussion on any topic under the sun. “Shall I or shan’t I?” It was an inner debate between Vincent, with his devil-may-care artistic temperament, and his obedient inner K, which told me to stay within the number of “units” recommended by the UK Chief Medical Officer. The options on my voting paper narrowed to the following: one pint or half a pint. After considering the available facts, I decided on the latter, quickly calculating that Vincent with the first half-pint inside him could outvote K and order another, if the company met in the pub justified prolonged tarrying. Perhaps my retelling has been in some way influenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses; leading Vincent to assume the role of Leopold Bloom & Stephen Dedalus at the same time. Not to mention the UK Government versus Merkel, Hollande, Juncker & Tusk.
I had reached precisely this point in my introspective negotiation when a young man approached me hesitantly, confessing straight away that he found this embarrassing. He was stranded, needed £9 for a train-fare to get home to Rickmansworth. He was of the English middle class, his smart-casual dress a little flushed and dishevelled. I asked him if he would object to an interrogation to establish his bona fides. It transpired he’d had a row with his girl-friend, in consequence of which she had stormed off in his car leaving him penniless, declaring it served him right. I may be a soft touch but I don’t like being fooled by beggars, so I asked him if he minded answering some further questions. Not that I wanted to pry in his business, of course, only to test the quickness of his reactions, as I imagine detectives do. “What is the name of your girl-friend?” was one. I became sorry for him, mindful of his recent trauma. We walked in the direction that serves both the railway station and the pub, leaving both options open. I told him I was on my way to the pub. He said in that case he could not take my change, it was OK, forget it. I said I was mainly going there to discuss what people thought of Brexit; but if he would tell me what he thought “of this mess we’ve got ourselves into” he could take my drink money towards his train fare. He started by assuming I was a Remain voter. Why? Do I look like one? No, he said, it was the way you put the question. Well, I said, I just don’t know if I made the right decision. So he said he had voted Leave, on the basis that he had no idea what was right, but reached his conclusion after discussing with his family, including parents and a grandfather who had experience of the War and its aftermath. So I gave him all the money I had in my pocket and suggested that a girl-friend who let him down like this wasn’t worth the effort. Let her go, get your freedom back! He brightened at the thought. We shook hands and parted.
I felt my mission on this summer evening was complete, a mission determined by Fate rather than calculation on my part, like my life in general. Like England, perhaps.
The unnamed road
I walked around The Pastures, a hillside north of our house, musing as follows.
The earth is poised and serene, showing through its balanced complexities how intelligently creative it is. Human beings are restless. Prejudice is inborn and entirely natural, though aspects of it are ugly. It is beneficial for us to live in accordance with nature, but not in our mean cunning ways, only when we embrace it wholeheartedly.
I am part of nature. What I have in me is human nature, which has evolved like every species in its own weird and highly specialized way. We have evolved to survive in accord to our environment. Evolutionary adaptation is slow. There isn’t the need for this rapid change, this overheated “development” that plagues the human race, but here it is anyway, no matter how we say what should happen and what should not happen.
Disasters are part of the pattern of earth’s evolution, which is to say its history. We are the products of disaster. Biological evolution via DNA (whose influence nobody really understands) is actually triggered by disaster to produce something new. Homo Sapiens is a new species, with more evolutionary history than the slug’s, which has stayed serenely unchanged, heedless of its vulnerability to birds and children who like to squash it when it crosses the sidewalk after rain. It does not flee from danger, merely retracts its eye-stalks and feelers. Unlike its cousin the snail, it doesn’t even carry its own portable shelter.
Human beings have evolved by a long process, quite rapidly compared with the age of the universe. Our intelligence has developed through hardships, and then, what are we? It’s hard to be human, hard to survive: feeble creatures lucky to survive childbirth, and that goes for the mother too.
I feel we’d be happier as a species if we accepted our lot in life, took a rest from the struggle to make things better, accepted inequality.
I’m on Telford Way. I recall a time before. How to explain it? Sometimes you have such big thoughts, you cannot really express them. Your consciousness spreads its attention over your entire life in a comprehensive swoop, like an eagle in the mountains with its far-seeing eye. Or if, closer to the ground, you were a bee, it’s as if the entire landscape held sources of nectar, here, there, beyond where the sense organs can reach. Or in your own human terms, as if in a single glace you could gather up all the things you didn’t succeed in doing, the places you never managed to go, the people who rebuffed your attempts at friendship, the people you might have been if you were not restricted to being just one person—all the things that didn’t happen, being beyond the reach of someone with the scars that you bear from long ago: all these are given to you, in an instant of indescribable gratitude. And what is Telford Way? Nothing special, except for the minor grandeur of its grassy slopes that separate the cheapish houses from the road. They are tall, they seem to slope at 45 degrees, too steep to walk up or down. No child would be tempted to roll down. They are kept mown, though, all except for a house-width swathe, where wild flowers grow among the long grass unchecked. Deliberately, or negligently? Never mind, it looks fine. I’ve stood here and photographed poles with telephone wires radiating in all directions, with a background of blue sky and white-grey fluffy clouds. They meant something to me at the time, I knew not what. Human connectedness below the sky’s majesty?
Let these words of mine remain formless and unpolished. I’ll just go on writing, indefinitely. The moment itself will define my purpose, Nature acting through me sweetly, with scant weeding and pruning.
I’m on an unnamed piece of road now, a concreted section one car wide between the backs of two rows of houses which have no frontage for vehicles. Here they keep their self-made garages, ad-hoc parking spaces and steps through to their back gardens and kitchen doors. As it’s on a hill, one side looks up, the other down. It catches the sun beautifully, so their retaining walls have populated themselves with plants escaped from the gardens: much red valerian, some fruiting shrubs, even a passion-flower vine. There’s nothing spectacular here, nothing to encourage taking snaps, nothing grand. I’d call it a “kept secret” as opposed to a “well-kept secret” which implies effort—and usually precedes someone blabbing the secret to the world.
Every gladdening place I go, I’m still gladder to live at my place. Now I discover why the road is nameless. It comes to a dead end. It’s just a service road for the houses on either side. Specifically what gladdens is the individual designs of their parking spaces, garages, gates, steps. They have creativeness rather than money to spare. Everything is honed down to practical utility, by people proud to own this little patch of Earth. Contrast this with low-rent social housing on other beautiful hillsides in this town: their private yards rampant with weeds, litter, discarded furniture, their fences collapsing. Not immediately gladdening. They could have worked together to make it beautiful but they never do. When the government behaves like a carelessly indulgent parent, the tenants remain stuck n childish irresponsibility, unmerited entitlement. And this is reflected in the difference between our two political parties.
I stop to talk to a black woman walking her dog. She says it is walking her. This is visibly true. She’s far from young, but it gets her out enjoying the sun. I like to see a place like this where nothing is standard or uniform; people make their own spaces. Elsewhere there are disasters, man-made more often than natural. People flee from them when their homes and infrastructure are destroyed. We piously express our concern for them, urge someone to do something. The more we can’t help personally, the more we insist on knowing all the answers and inhabiting the moral high ground. Governments intervene helpfully or otherwise, it’s hard to tell which. As for the rest of us, our opinions are like the bleating of sheep on a hillside, or the cawing of crows wheeling above. Sheep don’t listen to crows, and vice versa.
Democracy can be a dirty business, not just corruption but trivialization of the discourse, so that everyone can have an opinion on everything. So there is disagreement and hate. There might be less hate in Cuba and China, where they don’t have democracy. I don’t know that anybody could deny that there was less hate, misery and evil in Syria before the rebel movements, which demanded democracy. As if democracy is easy. It has taken hundreds of years to evolve, in those places where it works.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.That was Winston Churchill in a speech to the House of Commons, November 11, 1947.
Anyhow the mess in Syria came about through bad mistakes, I don’t know whose. There is too much oversimplification going on. That’s what I like about Hannah Arendt. She’s not interested in following the crowd, or in oversimplifying everything into soundbites. She makes the enormous effort required. I respect Sam Harris for the same reasons, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali too. I have certain personal objections to each of them, but that’s as it should be. We are not to look for idols who will spare us from thinking our own thoughts. We can engage them on their own terms, to the extent that we feel capable, and let ourselves be counted as “don’t knows” on a vast array of critical topics.
And for Heaven’s sake leave us to our prejudices. They are not to be justified nor refuted. They just are: part of our identity, neither good nor bad. I am not at all suggesting that prejudice should be expressed, promoted or acted upon. It is part of the complexity of being human, and infinitely better than hypocrisy. Let us have our opinions, and avoid hate: do nothing to encourage that. And so our behaviour and speech should be impeccable and always appropriate to the occasion. “Love thy neighbour”; “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
His face fell
[Written May 25th, 2006.]
A few weeks ago I started a new blog, not knowing where it would lead. Like a dog sniffing a trail and straining at the leash, it seems to have led towards questioning “spirituality”. Do I really want to use this word to describe the important stuff that happens deep inside us?
No matter how we try to redefine it, “spirituality” sits on the shoulders of religions, and they go back thousands of years. They all seem to involve sacrifice. In the Old Testament, Israelites slit the throats of lambs and goats and offered them to God. According to Christians, Jesus went a stage further and offered himself on the Cross, so that our sins would be forgiven. Spiritual seekers in more recent times take it as given that to “gain spiritually”, whatever that means, it is necessary to renounce something. Christians have Lent, Muslims have Ramadan, Buddhists have detachment etc. The New Age religion has all sorts of things to renounce, together with new reasons for it too: chauvinism, junk food, couch potatoism, polluting the planet, cruelty to animals, war, anything “gross” that they identify as the new evil. But just like the old religions, the New Age one doesn’t lead its followers into wisdom, peace and joy. It leaves them in a state of perpetual neurotic striving, or perpetual smug hypocrisy.
So I’ve given up spirituality, just as I gave up religion, meditation and God, on account of their divisiveness. They make their devotees feel superior to others. They divide us against ourselves and make us feel guilty.
I don’t really believe in “spirit” at all. Spirit for the ancients was that invisible substance which gives life when we breathe and leaves our body after our last breath. A potent image to be sure, but it has gone too far.
What’s left? I feel more connected than ever, but I don’t bother asking what I’m connected to. If I were pressed on the subject, I would say that my personal religion is “communing with Nature”. But that misses the point. There are depths in all of us, and it doesn’t matter what stirs those depths. The foolishness is to cherish beliefs without experience, because that is when the wars start.
The young man behind the counter at the petrol station is a born-again Muslim. By way of Muzak, he was playing a Koranic recitation. He spoke of his beard, Mohammed, going to Mecca, recognising holiness in all the prophets including Jesus. As he spoke, his eyes sparkled, his presence was almost angelic. “As long as you believe in God . . .” he said. I told him I had given up all beliefs including that one, and felt better for it. Poor fellow! His face fell.
Sunday 3 July 2016
. . . Until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse land at Heathrow
Peter Hennessy: June 23rd 2016 has been a breaker of careers and a breaker of hearts for some people. It has thrown the personnel question of the state high up in the air too. Whatever happens to Jeremy Corbyn, who knows, and what’s happened to Boris Johnson already, their salad days have been taken away from them.
Paddy O’Connell: So we start with the doubters. Should they be optimistic or pessimistic?
PH: It would help if we actually, without being excessively Pollyanna-ish about this, remember that we are a mature democracy. Not since wartime have we faced anything like this. This caesura, this guillotine, is going to leave big scars. It’s made the big scars already. We’ve been scoured by this. It’s an awful lot for any individual who cares about their country, as we pretty well all do, and has a sense of their past and the prospects of the future to be anything other than gloomy about the multiple overlapping uncertainties which might lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom—which would actually break my heart. And to all sorts of divisions within our society that we knew about, which have been shown up in even sharper relief because of this Referendum. Differences based on lack of life chances in many areas, inequalities of wealth and all the rest of it and attitudes—immigration and ethnicity and all that. It’s a moment when you look around and all you can see is a country looking for things to fall out over, rather than to fall in about. And so pessimism could be all too easily the mood of choice. But I refuse to actually, get pessimistic, because I think we do have these deep wells of civility and tolerance in our society, which we’ve got to draw deep on—and fast. We also have this genius we pride ourselves on called “muddling through”.
But the other reason is just straightforward cockeyed optimism, really, and I will refuse to get gloomy, unless and until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ask for landing permission at Heathrow—and not even then.
PO’C: You’re determined to be optimistic when I see so many people pessimistic. Listeners to Radio Four are furious at the tone of the debate. Also whatever message the public wanted to send the political elites, it is the elites who are going to decide who the Prime Minister is going to be, it is the elites who effectively are kicking out the Leader of the Opposition.
PH: Well this word elite is tricky. In many ways notions of elite and Establishment are very useful in open societies because they are there for cathartic purposes. You can rant about elites and establishment but you don’t know who they are, you can’t see them in the evening on the Victoria Line and be tempted to beat them up. So I’ve always thought the Establishment-elite notion was quite useful but it’s wildly imprecise, but the one thing we want to cling to, the ultimate thing that matters in an open society is the vote. This is a time for not being rigid about everything; but you’ve got to stick to the rules of the game. If you’ve lost something—and I was a Remainer, I’m quite open about that—you can’t say “The people were misled”. It’s rather like the Marxists used to say: “The masses have let us down yet again.” You’ve got to express the sovereign will, as expressed through a vote—and you’ve got to accept that. You’ve got to live with it, and make the best of it. The only possibility, if you really did want to reopen it, reasonably quickly, is to have a General Election on a single issue which is that, but General Elections can’t be on single issues, because General Elections are lightning conductors for a whole range of resentments, hopes and fears and possibilities. You can’t have a general election that really can be trusted to be on a single issue, can you? Hence the referendums.
Peter Hennessy
PO’C: But, if two or three main parties won a plurality of the vote, and they were all pro-EU membership parties, that would trump the Referendum?
PH: Well, some might argue that it would. But when you consider it, how many people would be left deeply resentful?
PO’C: —Oh, seventeen million!
PH: The vote that mattered to many of them in their lives above all other votes was that one, on the 23rd June. Nicholas Soames, who’s a friend of mine, I admire him very much, a member of the Churchill family, said to me last week, “This was about the end of the post-war settlement”. Ever since the Marshall Plan, when the Americans put up a dollar curtain against the Iron Curtain, and got the Western European nations to talk about how they should do it together, the grain has been towards European integration of some form or another. The Brits wanted a different form of it and were very reluctant to go down the Common Market version of it for a very long time, but the grain has been that way, plus the Brits’ desire to play on every playing field in the world that’s possible, to punch heavier than our weight in the world. What we’ve got to do now, Paddy, is to think heavier than our weight in the world.
But it’s a perilous old path, isn’t it. Because we’re in a very ratty mood at the moment. We’re not being nice to each other. And a large part of the rest of the world thinks that we’ve lost it. We’ve gone from being a great stabilizing nation in the world, whichever alliance we’ve been in or whichever organization we’ve belonged to, to being one of the world’s destabilizers, and they’re shocked rigid by it. And I’m not surprised.
