Blog, books, stories.
I can’t resist posting a link to this song which has recently been posted on Spotify, written and performed a few years ago by my son-in-law Dupé (the singer), and my son Dom (who played most of the instruments). I’m very proud of them both!
I gather the title literally translates from Yoruba as ‘I have said my own’ – as in, ‘I’ve said my piece [so now it’s up to you.]’
This word, used in a political sense, grates on my nerves in the same kind of way as the word ‘problematic.’ They are both smug words. If someone calls themself a progressive, they are implying that they’re on the ‘right side of history,’ that they can see how things not only ought to be, but how they ultimately will be. And they are implying that people who see things differently, if not actually in bad faith, must be ignorant, or deceived – and certainly can’t possibly be seeing something real that that the ‘progressive’ has failed to take into account.
This seems to me not only rather arrogant but extremely unlikely to be true. The 19th century term ‘Manifest Destiny,’ used by those who argued for white settlement of the whole of America, is another example of a claim being made that a certain set of values is the most advanced, is worthy to supercede all others, and is bound to defeat all others sooner or later. Calling yourself a progressive is, to my mind, a bit like that.
It’s true that it’s often reasonable to assume, in the absence of other information, that things tomorrow will be similar to how they are today. And, in the same way, it often makes sense to think that, in the short-run, history will carry on in the direction it has been following in the recent past. In the 20th century in Western countries, the franchise was extended, material prosperity increased for most of the population, the state took on a wider role in looking after citizens who couldn’t look after themselves, and rights for many minorities were enshrined in law. It wasn’t unreasonable to believe that, in the short run, that sort of thing would continue to expand.
But to assume things will carry on forever in that direction, and do so everywhere, would be to over-centre both our own particular patch of time and our own particular patch of space. It’s analogous to thinking, on the basis of the weather in Britain one autumn, that the weather in general is going to continue to get cooler and cooler indefinitely, all over the world.
If you lived in Britain in the heyday of the British Empire, you might quite plausibly have thought that British civilisation was the most successful civilisation in history and that there was no reason why it shouldn’t grow greater and greater over time (‘God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’), and in the short run you’d have been right – but only in the short run.
I often hear people these days saying how awful the news is just now, and I do wonder about that, because, though terrible and scary things are certainly happening, terrible and scary things have happened throughout history. (In my childhood, nuclear war seemed imminent, there were many, bloody post-imperial wars, there was even -and this now seems very strange and shocking- a brutal civil war going on in part of the UK.) And this makes me wonder if what distresses people so much about the ways things are right now is, not simply that things aren’t going in the direction they wanted them to, which is how I feel too, but that they’re not going in the direction they believed they were destined to go.
I haven’t believed that part for some time. I’m more inclined to the idea that history is a natural process, a biological process even, which we’re part of but can never fully understand or master – not least because the values we use to guide us are not absolute things, but are themselves a product of that same process. And this is why, though I consider myself on the left side of politics (insofar as it is even meaningful to arrange political views on a single line), and though, in many respects, I have socially liberal views, I don’t consider myself to be a ‘progressive.’ A number of my books are set in the future, but I don’t think anyone can really say for sure which way history will go, or even which way it should go. I can see many possible futures, but none of them is just more of the same.
I was playing some music while I ate my breakfast. It was a playlist of the songs I’d listened to most often this year and it happened that ‘Wild is the Wind’ by David Bowie came up (here it is on Youtube, here on Spotify). It’s a lush, extravagant, love song, originally recorded by Johnny Mathis in the fifties:
…Give me more than one caress
Satisfy this hungriness
Let the wind blow through your heart
For wild is the wind
Wild is the wind
You touch me
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins… etc etc
(I think the mandolins line is terrible by the way! It really jars. But I like the rest of it.)
Many people have covered this song, including, memorably, Nina Simone, but it’s well suited to Bowie, whose powerful voice and sense of theatre seemed to enable him (often, if not always) to get away with melodrama without seeming tongue-in-cheek. I know the song well and was only half-listening. I left the room to do something, closing the door behind me, and forgot about the music.
A minute later, I noticed a strange muffled sound from behind the door, a kind of agonised cry or moan, which for a moment I couldn’t place. But it was the song still playing. Stripped of its words, its melody, its elegant theatricality, it sounded like an animal, far off in the distance, howling with longing into the darkness.
I started reading this book -and I can no longer remember why I did – with some quite strong prejudices about Sally Rooney’s work, which, I fear, may have largely been based on the envy of an only very modestly successful writer for a very successful writer indeed. I would sum up my prejudices by saying that my impression, from reading reviews etc, was that she wrote about very attractive, very intelligent people having very exciting, if complicated, sex lives – and that her books were a kind of posh, elegant fantasy world for folk who’d love to imagine themselves as part of a sophisticated elite.
Well this is a book about very attractive, very intelligent people having very exciting, if complicated, sex lives, but, as it turned out, I came to like it a lot. I thought it a bit sugary (that was the word that came to mind), but I ended up forgiving it even that.
To deal with the ‘sugariness’ first. What I meant by that is that the book presented what seemed to me a very idealised view of romantic and sexual love. The characters are not only good looking and intelligent, but also exceptionally emotionally intelligent: extremely honest with one another about their own feelings, extremely willing to accomodate the feelings of others. Things happen which seemed unlikely, and sometimes the book read to me like a sexual fantasy (and a male sexual fantasty at that) rather than a depiction of the real complications and ambivalences of sexual/romantic relationships between men and woman.
For instance, Peter, the older of the two brothers round whom the story is built, has a girlfriend, Naomi, nine years younger than himself, who says things to him like ‘do whatever you like to me.’ (I’m not aware of the reception this book has received but I’m willing to bet that people have found this ‘problematic’). Also, Peter agonises throughout the book about being torn between the very beautiful, intelligent and extremely sexually available Naomi and his very beautiful and intelligent ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who he still loves deeply, and is still loved by, but who ended the relationship with him after a mysterious accident which prevents her from having penetrative sex (though she does still give him a blow job) – but in the end (spoiler alert), he ends up being able to maintain his relationship with them both, the two of them having become friends. This seemed quite generous on their part, though certainly nice for him.
Meanwhile Ivan, the younger brother, who is a 22-year old semi-professional chess player, very handsome, very smart, but shy, naive, gentle, and sexually very inexperienced, manages to seduce Margaret, the very nice and extremely beautiful 36-year-old director of an arts centre where he’s been booked to play ten simultaneous exhibition games. And he does so a matter of hours after meeting her – which, speaking as a recovering shy, naive, sexually inexperienced young man, feels rather unlikely, though it is, to my inner naive young man, without doubt a very alluring fantasy.
So by sugary I mean, I suppose, idealised, simpler than reality, a fantasy… But I forgave the book this because I decided that in one way or another, a novel has to be simpler than reality. However long and complex, a novel is a truly tiny thing compared to the real world, and it is, in a way, like a scientific experiment which holds some factors constant, in order to isolate and explore others. Movies have to simplify life in the same sort of way, and the protagonists of any cinematic love story are invariably much better looking than the average human being, and usually much more graceful and charming in their manners also (if only we all had scriptwriters to prepare our romantic encounters for us!). But this may actually be necessary (or so I thought) because a film, which is much shorter than a novel, has only a brief time in which to tell the story. We need to understand the attraction pretty much from the off, and a good way of achieving this is to cast very beautiful and charming men and women actors, since we can all immediately see the attraction of good-looking and charming people. (I’m almost 70, and I’m still instantly moved -disturbed even, sometimes- by female beauty.)
Also ‘sugary’ is a synonym of ‘sweet’ – and sexual love between men and women is sweet. It just is (for biological reasons, of course, as Rooney herself notes, but then all love has a biological basis), as is the trace of it that exists, I think, at least to some small degree, in most warm relationships between heterosexual men and women, even when these relationships aren’t, and will never be, sexual. It can go badly wrong, it can lead to all kinds of misunderstandings and even to horrible abuses, but it is, in itself, sweet -and even the horrible things that happen are often due to people craving that sweetness and not knowing how to get it, or not knowing how to hold onto it.
What I ended up liking about this book is this. Books about sexual love are of course two a penny -it is probably the single most common driver of human stories – but usually they take sexual attraction and sexual love as a given, a thing that everyone understands and recognises. In this book, it seems to me, Sally Rooney doesn’t do that. She attempts to unpack sexual love, and look at it in an almost naive way, as if encountering it for the first time, even though her prose is itself polished and sophisticated. I think that’s what writers should do with human experience: make us see things we think we already know as if they were new and fresh. What’s more- and this is something that I think is relatively unusual for a woman writer- she does this as much from a male point of view as a female one, both with equal sympathy.
Continue reading “A Certain Captivated Feeling”I mentioned in my last post that I like talking to fellow passengers on trains. There’s a particular kind of intimacy in conversations with people you’ll never meet again. (I do always make sure I give them a get out if they don’t feel like talking!) In recent weeks, it so happens, I have had two long conversations with young Chinese people, one a young woman graduate with a background in mainland China (this was an extra-long chat because we were in a train that stood in the station for a whole hour waiting for a driver who never showed up, and eventually moved together to another train), the other a young male first-year student with a Hong Kong background. They were both very intelligent, thoughtful people and I liked them very much. Neither of them was a fan of the totalitarian government of the PRC, but both had the same criticism of Western society, as compared to Chinese society. It is too individualistic. Too soft.
The young woman spoke about the rights of individuals being elevated above duties and responsibilities to the family, the community and society. The young man raised the issue in the following interesting way:
‘There is something that troubles me about Western society, but I don’t like to criticise it because it’s basically a nice thing.’
He really was reluctant to even name the thing that bothered him, but, after he’d circled around it a bit, I put it to him that what he meant was that we were too preoccupied in our contemporary culture by people’s feelings and vulnerabilities. Yes, he said, that was roughly what he meant – and then he repeated that he wasn’t saying that being sensitive to people’s vulnerabilities was a bad thing —it obviously wasn’t— but that… he hesitated again and I suggested that, nice thing though it was, an overemphasis on vulnerabilities might place a society at a disadvantage when it came to competing in a tough world. What’s good for individuals in the short run, may not in the long run be best for their society’s long term survival – a certain toughness is necessary for that. He agreed that this was broadly his point.
I’ve heard, or sensed, a similar critique before from other people from developing countries and it connects with the point I made in a recent post about ours being an old society. And I guess I’ve heard it too from people politically on the right when they talk about ‘snowflakes’ and oversensitivity.
A further question is whether actually it is even in the interests of individuals themselves to make too much allowance for their sensitivities. For instance, a teacher wishing to avoid hurting the feelings of students might be overgenerous in praise and sparing in criticism, and award high marks for work that really wasn’t all that good, but would this actually be fair or helpful in the long run for the students themselves? Wouldn’t it actually help them more to give them an honest appraisal, or even a harsh one if their work is poor, even if it does upset them? At least that way they are given the opportunity to learn and grow on the basis of genuine feedback, and can prepare for a world which will want to know their real abilities and won’t, just to be nice, give them jobs they aren’t equipped for.
A long time ago, I wrote a short story called ‘Valour’ (not one of my best to be honest) which described an alien race that saw the world in threes rather than, as we tend to do, in binary opposites (good/bad, right/wrong, left/right etc). These beings had three sexes, their bodies were based on a three-way symmetry, and they had a three-way morality which did not simply involve good versus evil, but had two rival, but equally valid, alternatives to evil – gentleness and valour – meaning that valour, gentleness and evil were three separate poles. To defeat evil, valour and gentleness would need to form some kind of alliance in spite of their incompatibilities, but often valour allied with evil against gentleness, which created heartless, hyper-‘masculine’ militaristic societies, or gentleness allied with evil against valour, which created flabby, overindulgent societies that would ultimately decay and fall apart. The idea wasn’t fully developed, I must admit, but you get the idea.
I will turn 70 in less than 2 months time, which feels to me like quite a big milestone. I’m old enough that people sometimes give up their seat to me. The other day a woman in her thirties or forties even offered to help me carry my case, which was kindly meant no doubt, but not at all pleasing to me. I can still carry a fucking suitcase thank you very much!
Old people often say that they don’t feel old, by which, I take it, we don’t mean that we are unaware of the physical changes taking place inside us – people my age talk about their health a lot – but that the spirit that looks out of our eyes feels like the same spirit it always has been.
I don’t see how we can know this is true, actually, since our memories of being young are filtered through our consciousness as it now exists -maybe it’s only in retrospect that being young isn’t so different from being old? – but anyway, that’s how it feels. Perhaps what we really mean is that, when we were young, old people seemed to us to be a very different kind of being, driven by entirely different needs, but now we are old we see that our needs are essentially the same: love, sex, comfort, stimulation, the esteem of others, a sense of purpose… etc etc
I’m less driven though in many respects. Retirement, a pension, society’s expectations of older people – all of these things make it much easier for me to do nothing in particular without feeling bad about it. I hope I have some more books in me, but it doesn’t matter to me so much as it once did. I had an ambition to be a writer when I was young and I am very proud of having achieved it – proud and relieved, because writing, more than almost anything else, has given me a sense of being someone, which I completely lacked as a young man – but I feel I have achieved it and writing now is simply something I like doing.
And I am more interested just in the experience of being alive. I can’t be bothered with bucket lists and cycling up Mount Kilimanjaro and so on – to be frank that all seems a bit desperate to me – but I can happily spend whole mornings just thinking and dreaming. Thus, for instance, I travel on trains frequently but where once I might have used the time to read books or write, what I mostly do these days is listen to music and think or, if the opportunity presents itself, get into a conversation with other travellers. I do love talking with people I meet by chance.
I had the protagonist of my novel Tomorrow say that, if you had the choice between telling a story and being a character in a story, then being a character was the way to go, and I feel that more and more. I guess this is partly because society doesn’t expect me to be productive any more (how great is that!) and partly because I’m conscious that the story of me is now in its third and final act.
I listen to music a lot. As I’ve observed before, I actually think that’s part of the ‘being a character in the story’ thing. A few generations ago, no one would think that listening to music was a thing you did while travelling from A to B, but films and TV have trained us to think of characters in stories having music in the background and, beginning with radios in cars, technology has made this a possibility for all of us, and not just a privilege reserved for fictional beings. I like intense, emotional music, but I’m particularly fond these days of Cuban jazz – sharp, cool, instrumental music with a salsa-esque rhythm – because it makes me want to dance. (If you have Spotify, try keeping still while listening to this.)
I do dance when I get the opportunity – it’s another way of being a character in a story, I suppose – and will even do a few discreet steps as I wait on station platforms for the trains that take me to my beautiful grandchildren.
At some point, most likely in well under twenty years, I’ll be dead. I’m fine with that, but I’m not looking forward to the decrepit bit that usually comes first.
My dear son, Dom, has written a theme for Dark Eden, such as might be used at the beginning of each episode if the book was a series. I really love it. It truly captures for me the combination of beauty, melancholy, alienness and darkness I envisaged for Eden, with that steady deep pulse running through it to evoke the most constant and characteristic sound of the luminous forests of Eden: the hmmph – hmmmph – hmmmph of geothermal ‘trees’ pumping their sap down to the hot rocks below, and pumping it back up again. To get the full effect you need to listen to it loud, with plenty of bass. I absolutely love it.
Dark Eden theme, by Dominic Beckett
See also:
The Holy Machine, by Edinburgh-based band, The Southern Tenant Folk Union
I said in my previous post that you have to risk sentimentality to be real. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of looking after children.
We have lived for so many millenia in cultures dominated by the idea of ‘masculinity’ as the supreme virtue that we have come to value ‘masculine’ qualities much more highly than ‘feminine’ ones: gentle Mother Mary is subordinate to stern God the Father, weak and emotional women who look after children are subordinate to strong and rational men who run things and make war, etc etc etc. (Even women fall into the trap of thinking this way, if they equate liberation with being more like men.) And in such a culture, it’s easy to confuse soft and gentle feelings with weakness and sentimentality for, after all, such feelings are associated with low status work.
Looking after children is for me one of life’s sweetest and most profound pleasures. (Easy to say that as a grandparent, I know, when childcare is not a constant daily task, but I would have said it as a parent too, even though it did often exhaust me). It’s also very hard and difficult work, and one of the most important things that anyone can do. But the pleasures of being with children are hard to write about because you worry about sounding sugary and sentimental.
So when I say that we need to risk sentimentality, what I mean is that we should reclaim the tender feelings we have for children (and for people generally, and for other living things), and be willing to express them even if some people do find it sentimental. Sentimentality is a real thing of course, a form of false feeling, but the fear of seeming ‘sentimental’ often has the effect of shutting down the expression of gentle feelings, so as to bring the subject back to proper important grownup things like war and money and power.
There was a time when gentlemen used to discuss these grownup matters over cigars and port, after the ladies, bless their soft little hearts, had left the room to chatter (at least in the minds of the gentlemen) about children and love and puppies. Obviously women should stay in that room and talk about money and power too (boring topics though they ultimately are, they do need to be talked about), but it would be good if the overall conversation became one in which children, love and tenderness were given the weight they merit. Money and power are, at best, necessary evils, means to an end. Love, like beauty, is an end in itself.
One person who writes very well about his feelings for his children, without a trace of sentimentality, is my own dear son Dom, who is a songwriter. Here is a lovely song of his about watching his children play – specially poignant for me of course because I know and love those children too.
Why did God make the radio? The answer, obviously, is so that we could cruise along a coastal road with the windows down and the blue sea in the distance, listening to the sweet harmonies of The Beach Boys singing the music of Brian Wilson.
Which is exactly what I did the day after he died (though it wasn’t strictly a radio). I even shed tears – and I’m the man who didn’t weep for his own mother! Insofar as you can love someone you only know through his work, I loved that guy.
So he wasn’t always very nice in his personal life? I don’t care. So his politics were conservative? I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a shit. This was a very wounded man who had a rotten, abusive childhood and who, instead of making the bitter, angry, miserable music one might expect from someone with that history, chose instead to express the love and mercy that every child from a rotten family longs for.
You might say that I’m being sentimental but I would strongly dispute that. We are so frightened of being sentimental these days that we overemphasize the hard emotions – lust, anger, the will to power – just to show how sophisticated and liberated we are. But that’s all nonsense. Being hard-boiled and cynical is just being sentimental in reverse. Sometimes you have to be prepared to risk sentimentality if you are to be to be real.
In one or other of the tributes to Wilson, someone referred to ‘Good Vibrations’ as a song about lust. But listen to it! It’s a man thinking about a woman who seems to him utterly lovely in every way. And yes, okay, it would be naive to pretend this feeling has nothing to do to do with sex, but to my mind it’s not so very different to other non-sexual kinds of tenderness, such as the way my heart melts when my 6 year old granddaughter comes running cheerfully out of school. To just call it ‘lust’ is ludicrously reductive. Gentle and tender feelings are also real, and they’re what comes pouring out in Brian Wilson’s lovely music.
Here is one more beautiful little fragment.
A friend made herself watch footage taken by the Palestinian perpetrators of the massacre that took place on October 17th 2023. I don’t fully understand why she put herself through this, but the scenes she witnessed were absolutely hideous in their savagery.
But if the Israeli government had ever been serious about coming to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians, it would not have deliberately neutered, humiliated and discredited the Palestinian partner that was available to it to deal with – the Palestinian Authority, a partner which accepts Israel’s existence as a fact – by, among other things, allowing settlements to continue to mushroom all over the West Bank, and by protecting the settlers with soldiers, even when they roam about with guns and terrorise their Palestinian neighbours.
Indeed, as Israeli politicians openly admit (see this article in the Times of Israel), Israel quite deliberately built up Hamas in order to further weaken the Palestinian Authority (thus also helpfully building up a Palestinian enemy too fanatical for people in the West to feel much sympathy for). So Israel’s official justification for destroying Gaza is to eliminate an organisation which Israel itself helped to bring to power.
When Israel became independent, Palestinian Arabs were the majority in the area that is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians still constitute about half the population of the area. If any of them claim that the whole area belongs to them ‘from the river to the sea’, there are howls of outrage – and yes, whatever the history, it’s not reasonable now to claim more than half of it. Yet many Israelis, including members of the current government, also claim everything from the river to the sea.
What’s worse is that, even when Israeli politicians did pay lip service to a two-state solution, they were in fact making that impossible by colonising the land all the way to the river. They must have known this. It’s been obvious for half a century.
And we’re all complicit because, though we could see perfectly well what was going on- it’s not difficult: you do not colonise territory you intend to give back – we allowed our leaders to pretend not to see it. We are like the man who makes friends with an affable neighbour and pretends, when he calls round to take him to the pub, that he doesn’t notice the bruises on the face of his affable new friend’s wife.
(To continue the analogy, the neighbour has now taken a hammer, smashed all his wife’s things, and is chasing her screaming round the house – and we’re just beginning to mutter embarrassedly, ‘Oh mate! We know she’s a nightmare, but don’t you think you’ve gone a bit far?’)
