Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 27
the syntax of their hollow laugh; they have one letter, that is all,
and look alike: ghastly fruits grown in the garden of our most gruesome thoughts.
To stare at their staring orbs is to intrude on others’ holy grief
and to turn away is turning from what should never be forgot,
into oblivion’s unfeeling want of nothing but the comfort of the self,
blinder than these dear blinded and hurted discards of souls
whose silence is their loudest roar.
This
Conscience and its failures.
To this and all the sadness of this world
I write these words of happy oblivion
desired and almost gained! I felt
and feared that at some future date
I would feel no more.
No more hear the cries of pain that sear the night
and invade my dreams. But then I felt and always feared
that I would never cease to feel those pointless wounds
that never brought a balm to those who scream
and doubtless suffer out of sight.
Memory and the struggle to retain it. We live in history but cannot see it. Our will is feeble but essential in its feebleness
This is a struggle to retain – to re-evoke those moments
of the past that could slip away like leaves scattered by a gust
or simply rotting where they lie, losing all the colours they displayed
on the branch or brightened and nuanced during early stages
of their desiccation.
Memories take on bright golds, yellows and reddish browns
burnished by their retelling. And then they too rot or carry
far off in rushing time so they can come back blasting
into our brains heavy with new meanings. These joys
and bitter blows lift or shatter hopes and tell us truths
of what this is – the crazy thing that we all know well
and yet cannot define.
I try to recall what I witnessed standing safely at a hotel window,
while the smallest cogs of history turned and ground another people’s
hopes to dust, as they always do. I saws the crowd of sans-culottes,
then full of faces but faceless now the image fades – a crowd of Bengalis
in their lungis and singlets marching by the million to the racetrack,
hemmed in on every side by soldiers wielding batons lethargically,
beating without passion, without zest, because they had to.
And these same soldiers, Bengalis too, some months from then
would fight and die for a nation they would never see,
forgotten in history’s unforgiving flood.
The image fades but not what I have learnt: there are
few wholly good or evil men, only individuals swept along
and now and then resisting – vainly – all the vicious power
of that amorphous flood.
We live through the experience of our senses
This is to feel with all our senses sharpened by the will to be –
to be in the moment and forget
for once the weight of years to come or drawn behind
that drags us down or will.
This moment sweet – to lie within another’s arms and feel
the smoothness of her skin, the involucre of her warm
and naked soul. This moment when the wind comes in
and bites the cheeks with unrelenting force – the force of nature
that cohabits still this manufactured land. This lunch
when food plays long and vibrant on our budding nerves
and slips forgotten into the abyss of our unending needs.
And how we shout and turn upon each other with our cares,
our thoughts, our strong beliefs of all the things we cannot know
with any certitude. We fret and manipulate our words,
wanting to win – but what? And will they understand those words
in a century, in a decade’s time or even in ten days from now?
We have the now. We stand in it and declare our truths.
And now those vinous moments of the now are in the past
and mainly inhabit my memories of Italy, a land where
they know how to talk and did. The flasks of wine, the grated cheese
that smelt, the oil so new it stings upon the tongue, all those heady,
heady words that melt within the brain and touch those nerves
that, for too long, have not had anything to feel or grasp.
Inferno here on earth. Suffering teaches but also destroys.
This hell, this hole: how many times do we return to the darkness
of the past? This earthly hell is surely not followed by unearthly one.
This feeling trapped within the self, a bag of nerves that jangle
not just with our own pain, but also with compassion.
Our own pain, if it does not break us, makes us strong and therefore
serves a purpose. If ever you foolishly dwell on the your pains of the past,
then take a look at the pompous prick who pampered all his life
now smugly observes from his position of great or petty power
his secure kingdom of unappreciated delights and honours granted
for his acceptance of hierarchy’s chain into which he so snugly fits.
Such people at the slightest slight react with anger or self-pity.
They do not know, success locks the cell
in which the self is caught
and makes a prison of a tight abode.
Where my arts council grant? I need to express myself – my inner message surely everyone must want to hear.
This is also made of raptures, those moments of escape
when mind pinpoints one thing and distils its pleasure
from some problematic of a kind our passions can delight in.
A sport, a broke-down car, a mountain face, a place unknown,
a book, a canvass stabbed with paint, these all suppress the self,
throw wide the cell door and reveal a limitless plain of ways
and ways of doing, seeing, moving, searching, calling, expressing
to others and to oneself the permutations of how we can consume
this, this elusive thing we never notice until it is at risk.
The artist measured up his work with steady eyes and critically
calculated all those marks of paint: the colours, contrast, composition
brushwork, pose, poise, expression of the hurt, pathos
of the suffering saint – a noose loosely fitted round his scraggy neck.
Then he leapt, large brush in hand heavy with black paint. And how
he laboured with that destructive arm, which spread a night across
the surface of his work. No dawn would resurrect the fearsome portrayal
of a martyred end. But still he paints a lonely figure
whose afflicted corpse-to-be stands free of ground, of time, of pain perhaps,
levitated by the energy of sacrifice. The hooded hangman’s noose is gone,
so has the crowd that gleeful jostled and stretched forward to enjoy the show.
The light of the heavens triumphant has been dulled, so loneliness remains.
Microcosm and macrocosm
This contains those civic moments
by which we measure out the passing years:
birth, pair-bonding of some kind, birth of children,
the repeating cycle of their this, and then death.
This, rather grandly, also posits such events within
the timeline history dictates: “two years before the war”,
“just after the recession”, “when they landed on the moon”.
This is how the micro- and the macrocosm
should relate: their unequal trajectories are not
&nbs
p; mechanic things – the individual can rebel and should.
This belongs beyond oneself and beyond the triteness
of one’s age and its conformist certitudes.
What this is. You haven’t guessed?
This is this little thing that seems so big, this life we share
this tangle of shattered nerves, this string of thoughts
that lonely twist and turn, fly up into the airless light
where ideas are born and the gods sing, or sink into the deep,
depressing water that presses on our lungs
and cruel clears away all hope,
where drags us down the leaden weight
of that elusive thing we call the real.
Like all small things, this life’s capable of endless
variegations, and the stack of stuff
of which it’s made can be shuffled in so many ways.
In one backyard behind a block of flats,
a history of lives can be played out,
and more happens in one small child’s brain
than in several light-years of space.
This is a divine gift we have to please ourselves,
to please others and to waste,
and of course regret.
When life’s end comes, it’s a book that’s writ and left unread.
No chance to correct and polish here –
the pages turning yellow. It’s a story
randomly told and what it lacks and incoheres
is made up for
in tragicomic commerce of traducements
and prodigal human passions.
Endnotes
Cats and Dogs, and Other Things We Cannot Understand
1 Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Touchstone, 1970), new translation and introduction by Walter Kaufmann, p. 145.
2 Luigi Blasucci’s introduction to Niccolo Machiavelli, Opere letterarie, ed. by L. Blasucci, (Milan: Adelphi, 1964).
3 I and Thou …, p. 14.
On Aphorisms
1 I have to write, “in the West” because of Mao Zedong and his Little Red Book. Arguably Marcus Aurelius can be excluded because he wrote as a philosopher rather than a politician or theologian. No doubt someone could find some names to prove me wrong, but none spring to my mind.
2 R. Llorente, Beyond the Pale. Exercises in Provocation (Sulaisiadar: Vagabond Voices, 2010).
Did My Father Have Free Will?
1 By our parents, says Dr. Swaab, and most people would hope not, but they will find it increasingly difficult to avoid being like their parents as they get older, and to succeed in avoiding this, they will need an effort of will.
2 Continuum have published a splendid, well-translated and well-annotated edition, which has all the drama we associate with an Elizabethan play: Erasmus and Luther, Discourse on Free Will (London: Continuum, 2006).
3 Discourse on Free Will, …, p. 39.
4 Discourse on Free Will, …, p. 33.
5 Discourse on Free Will, …, p. 37.
6 Discourse on Free Will, …, p. 94.
7 Discourse on Free Will, …, p. 17 (my italics).
8 Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, ed. by Vere Chappell (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 5-6.
9 Hobbes and Bramhall on…, p. 23.
10 Hobbes and Bramhall on…, pp. 20-21.
11 Hobbes and Bramhall on…, p. 21.
12 Hobbes and Bramhall on…, p. 11.
13 When lunch was placed before the free spirit, he declined pointing out that he had already mentioned his vegetarianism. As inevitably happens in this situation, an omelette was hurriedly made as a substitute. When he was about to leave, my father asked him if he wanted anything but the English ascetic said that he didn’t – even money was refused. My father insisted, so possibly to placate his need, the young man said that he was short of underpants and wouldn’t mind a few old ones. Underpants were provided. My mother told the story while my father interjected with these mirabilia which added to his fascination. I, on the other hand, could understand the journey overland with little or no money, but lonely meditation close to the murky waters of a tank I could not. I would have preferred the bazaar.
Nations and Nationalism
1 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p.1.
2 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary vaguely defines “nation” as Middle English, while “nationalism” is very specifically dated from 1844.
3 Because humans hate impermanency, another kind of mortality, they long to believe that their nations and languages are permanent.
4 Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002?), p. 14.
5 See Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne, p. 106: “the Franks of Neustria, who spoke the ‘Roman language’, were no less Franks than their compatriots in Austrasia”.
6 Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne, p. 106.
7 Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History. Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 3.
8 Nationalism, in the specific sense of Gellner’s useful definition, did not exist before the rise of democratic pressures, but nationalism as intolerance of others outside a large political unit has probably existed for as long as there have been complex political structures uniting definable cultures. Let one example suffice given that there are so many: Castilians objected to Charles V granting a monopoly over postal services in his empire, and demanded that “foreigners should not be granted employment, posts, high office, governorships or naturalization papers”. See Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 55.
9 Gellner goes some way to admitting this, but comes up with the idea that tribes are unsuccessful nations and nations are successful tribes. Again, if Gellner wants to give these values to the words, who are we to argue with him. But if we start applying these definitions to Europe, it immediately becomes clear how absurd they are. The Cornish are presumably a tribe and the Welsh a nation. The Prussians (that is the original Baltic people and not the German settlers who took their name) must have been a tribe and the neighbouring Lithuanians a nation. Besides, many of today’s successful nations could be tomorrow’s dead nations. See Nations and Nationalism, p. 87: “Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism”.
10 Pierluigi Valsecchi, Power and State Formation in West Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
11 I find this aspect rather obnoxious, but Gellner would presumably admire it as it is all part of the rationalising and homogenising affect of modern nationalism. Gellner’s somewhat Marxian analysis implies that nationalism is subjectively irrational but objectively rational in that it conforms to the requirement of the modern industrial economy.
12 Dauvit Broun, “Defining Scotland and the Scots Before the Wars of Independence”, in Image and Identity. The Making and Re-making of Scotland Through the Ages (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998), pp. 4-17.
13 Christians were banned from wearing brightly coloured clothing and from riding horses. Turkish functionaries wore embroidered green silk and turbans. Nations and religious communities were called millets. See Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804-1999. Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 9, 18 and 72.
14 Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (London: Fontana, 1988).
15 Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 9-14, Chapter I, “Home and Family: Things Fall Apart”.
16 Quoted by Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1775).
17 The popular republics were the first to succumb, Florence in 1530 and Siena 1555. Two of the oligarchic republics, Venice and Lucca, survived much longer until the Napoleonic invasion of 1799. There is some irony in the fact that a country that had recently been attempting to resurrect republican values was now annihilating the last vestiges of Renaissance republicanism, which was never t
o return. With the Restoration, Venice remained under the Hapsburgs and Lucca became a duchy.
18 Ernesto Sestan has claimed, “a nation is a human grouping that believes it is a nation”. But it has to be stressed that it does so for good historical and cultural reasons. See Stefano Gasparri, Prima delle nazioni. Popoli, etnie e regni fra Antichità e Medioevo (Rome: Carocci, 1998), p. 14. Gasparri does not provide exact bibliographical information for the quotation.
19 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism …, pp. 58-62. The section under the title “The course of true nationalism never did run smooth”.
20 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism …, p. 50. This is the most outrageous of Gellner’s remarks. The greater complexity of “peasant” languages implies that peasants had great linguistic control of their own particular “dialects”. “Peasant” languages, often with ancient written vernaculars, tend to retain more complex grammar. Slovene is alone in retaining the “dual” (which goes alongside the singular and the plural). Gaelic retains the vocative. In conversation with a Welsh speaker, I was disappointed to hear that their complex but very elegant possessive pronouns are no longer used. This oldest written living language in Western Europe retained these possessives through well over a millennium of peasant culture. Modern culture, deskilled as it is, failed after little more than a century. Nor should we think that “peasant” languages are short on vocabulary. Gaelic distinguishes between the tiredness of hard work and the tiredness experienced in the early morning. They may not have known about low blood sugars, but they made a distinction that most “modern” languages do not. Gellner, who is absolutely certain that “modern” language is more complex than the “peasant” one, does feel a little perplexed about human development: “It is very puzzling that an institution, namely human language, should have this potential for being used as an ‘elaborate code’,…, as a formal and fairly context-free instrument, given that it had evolved in a milieu which in no way called for this development” (p. 33). Peasants probably appeared silent and diffident to city-dwellers, precisely because they were silent and diffident in the presence of city-dwellers. It should also be remembered that our image of peasant society is very much coloured by its lifestyle in the last two or three centuries of the second millennium, when it suffered from over-population, terrible diet (usually restricted to a single staple), endemic diseases (such as tuberculosis) and oppressive landowners (themselves coming to terms with a capitalist economy and often failing). Such conditions were clearly not conducive to artistic production, but in spite of the flippant superiority of such writers as Gellner, peasant society even then retained remarkable talents in song and poetry (the favourite art forms of pre-industrial society).