Moody: the works

A list of links to all my non-tech writings:

Essays

Glanglish - with audio versions - new post

Travel writings

Moody's Black Notebook Travels - new post

Walks with Lorenzetti

A Partial India

Novels

Doing the Business

Egyptian Romance

Glanglish - Contents

The weekly essay - with audio

Chiral asymmetries - with audio
Wallpaper - with audio
The knife's deity - with audio
Ludwig van who? - with audio
Rubbish - with audio
The new Jesuits - with audio
Systemic dis-ease - with audio
Weird messages - with audio
Looking at glass - with audio
Placing words in English - with audio
The plane truth - with audio
Meta-physicality - with audio
Accidents and substance - with audio
Colonising names - with audio
The crown in the jewel - with audio
The Turing point - with audio
Thoughts for your pennies - with audio
Repeatability - with audio
Intraviewing - with audio
Socratic wisdom - with audio
Invisible royalty - with audio
The oscillating universe - with audio
Digital reality - with audio
Forever Eden - with audio
Pravda - with audio
Glanglish - with audio
Scarlatti's cat - with audio

The check-out - with audio
The finite brain - with audio
8.8.88 - with audio
Silly farts - with audio
The contingent apple - with audio
The profit of the beard - with audio
What masterpiece? - with audio
Spot the similarity - with audio
Cacography - with audio
Windy city - with audio
Corporeal integrity - with audio
Counting the cost - with audio
Dire diary - with audio
Three sciences - with audio
Antics - with audio
God in the body - with audio
The insolence of the inanimate - with audio
Hoardings - with audio
Stargazing - with audio
Truckling on - with audio
Nostalgia for Brezhnev - with audio
Dalliance - with audio
Booting up - with audio
Getting the idea - with audio

Getting the idea

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

You may already be infected; if not, you will be once you get to the end of this paragraph.  If you wish to remain uninfected, there is still time to stop, but by reading on you will certainly catch it.  I caught it from Richard Dawkins' book 'The Selfish Gene', where the idea first originated, where the infection first started.  The idea was that of a 'meme', or an idea viewed as a general class of mental objects.  When you grasp an idea, you can be said to be infected by that meme; passing that idea on spreads the infection.  By reading to the end of this paragraph you are now infected with the idea, or meme, of a meme.

It may seem a trivial redefinition.  But viewing ideas as something like independent entities which can spread and be passed on like viruses, say, emphasises their vitality and hints at their power.  Ideas are a fundamental, dynamic component of the world in which we live.  They can change it in dramatic ways.  A great idea, infecting or inhabiting the right people, can drive them to great actions with far-reaching implications.  They are the visionaries, the religious and political leaders whose single-mindedness is a by-product of an idea's force.

Not all ideas are so grand.  But even the humblest of them is worthy of admiration and gratitude.  We all know the experience of the sudden revelation brought about by an encounter with a new and hitherto undreamt-of - unthought-of - idea.  It is as if a door or window has opened, or a light has been turned on.  Somehow we see and understand something which before was a mystery, or perhaps was simply not present in our mental universe.

The relation between the meme and the memed is therefore a symbiotic one.  Without the mind in which it can live, an idea has no active existence. In a book or a play or a film, it lies dormant like those viruses that can survive in the most hostile conditions until a suitable host comes along, when they are suddenly activated.  For the carrier of the meme, the world is a different place.  It is as if the meme were an organism which secreted some subtle substance, a perception-enhancing drug perhaps; harbouring an idea we vivify it, but we also drink its intangible nectar.

Sometimes that nectar is poisoned: a meme may be an epiphany of the sadness and badness in this world.  Ideas are irresponsible and morally neutral in themselves; only the mind they inhabit can judge them, choose amongst them, act on them and manifest them.  But it can rarely destroy them, just as we cannot will to forget, though time and age may eventually achieve this.  There is, however, a kind of natural selection which favours the more beneficent memes.  For example, someone infected with the meme of random violence is likely to be destroyed themselves; with them dies the instigating meme and the possibility of further direct infection.

Ideas are precious things; and rare enough too.  How often have we read a book, talked with a person, listened to music, and experienced no new thought, no sudden illumination?  It is like eating cardboard.  So the next time you encounter a fine, wholesome meme, savour it; enjoy the infection as it grips you; pass it on.

(1989)

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Booting up

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The blank page has always been the writer's foe.  It lies there, supine, flaunting its passivity so shamelessly that it gradually assumes the character of a challenge.  Today, however, the author has an alternative which not only avoids these traditional pitfalls, but even counters them with corresponding benefits: the word processor.

The blank page is replaced by a blank screen, but one which is vivified by the business of loading up the word processing software.  The preliminary acts alone bespeak a new, more dynamic approach.  First you place the floppy disc in the disc drive; it is like a key inserted into a lock: it promises to release you from the writer's prison of wordlessness.  Then you power up - a gloriously apt phrase for that heady sense of artistic potentiation, of the incipient forging of words into worlds.

Upon switching on the machine, it already starts reacting, coming to meet you halfway - no mere tool, but an accomplice.  It purrs like a sleek and thoroughbred animal, and the screen flickers into action, awaking from its silent silicon dreams.  Words appear - the machine is giving you words before it attempts to take them, encouraging you by its example.  Sometimes the initial messages greet with an easy familiarity, sometimes they are reassuringly business-like.  Either way, they spring into life with an ease which begins to imply that all succeeding words will follow as fluently and as effortlessly.  The blank screen becomes now a taut-stretched canvas, straining for your marks, the tiny blinking cursor in the top left-hand corner an eager child signalling for you to join the game.

Compare all this to the typewriter - which is revealed now as a kind of decerebrated word processor, inert and unable to respond, a purely mechanical assemblage of levers.  The pen and pencil are seen for the wicked, pointed weapons that they are; no wonder that the blank page is so recalcitrant - paper is not used but abused: you attack it, applying an unremitting pressure with your mad surgeon's word scalpel.

By contrast the computer's keyboard is like that of a piano - or, better, like that of some infinitely delicate and subtle instrument such as a clavichord.  As the fingers wander gracefully over its keys, they seem to be tapping out an intricate prelude of Bach.  More than that, as you type, the gentle and flowing movements gain a rhythm of their own; the tactile sensation passes from mere sensuousness to sensuality, until the act of writing is transmuted into a constant loving caress.

Switching on a computer is sometimes called booting up, a reference to the process of bootstrapping, or pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.  The phrase is a neat metaphor for how the machine manages to load a program before it has loaded a program which tells it how to load a program.  This marvellous act of self-creation is a gift such machines offer their users every time they are turned on.  Booting up stands as a constant reminder to the writer who is about to construct without scaffolding some bridge of words across a chasm of non-existence that such miracles are indeed possible.

(1989)

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Dalliance

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As we came out of the theatre after a performance of Schnitzler's Dalliance we wondered out loud whether we would ever see again the strange lights we had noticed some months previously.  As we walked back across Waterloo bridge, we looked up into the area of the sky where they had appeared before.  To our mingled horror and delight, there was the same quivering brightness.

We slowed our steps, our hearts in our mouths and our stomachs in our boots.  We were half-pleased that what we had seen had really been there, that it was reproducible.  But we were also slightly disappointed that, being reproducible, the phenomenon might have a mundane explanation, that we had not been privileged spectators of the dawn of a new age.  It seemed unlikely that UFOs should choose to hover over exactly the same spot of the Thames during a period of some months - and never be noticed.

We walked along the bridge, our straining eyes riveted upon the same indistinct watery light we had seen before.  Again there was no sound of helicopters, just the wind blowing on this slightly cloudy night.  As we stood by the parapet, we noticed a woman who was talking to a man next to her.  Occasionally she glanced in the same general direction as we were looking.  We went up to them.  I made some non-committal remark about the sight and she replied unperturbedly, then went on talking with her companion.  We looked at this man; he too was gazing up at the sky.  And he seemed to have something in his hands.

It was clearly a reel, though the cord was too fine to be seen in the dark.  Simulating a greater sang-froid than I felt, I asked him if he were responsible.  He said yes.  I restrained myself from hurling him into the river there and then, and asked for more details.

He was American, and an inventor.  His brainchild was a kind of kite with a rotor which he claimed could stay aloft with even the merest hint of wind.  It was effectively self-supporting.  It glistened and glimmered as it spun in a light which shone skyward from Somerset House - the reason he had chosen this spot.  I quizzed him on the double occurrence we had seen, and the rapid movement.  He said he sometimes flew two, and that slight movements on the ground could bring about deceptively large ones in the sky.  He was doing this as a publicity stunt prior to the publication of his book on the subject.  So now we knew.

I left very chastened.  I had learnt that however improbable or even impossible it may seem at the time, there is always an explanation.  Those two shocking and cancelling experiences produced by their mixing a kind of vaccine that has inoculated me against all further heretical anti-scientific thoughts.  As a re-confirmed rationalist I am prepared to chant with the rest of the adepts the creed of logical positivism.  But one day something will be discovered that does genuinely lie outside the present boundaries of science.  The latter will then be expanded just far enough to include the new phenomenon.  This leaves us seekers after certitude with a rather elastic kind of dogma, one still with a frightening leeway for perfectly reasonable flirtation with the perfectly unreasonable.

(1986)

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Nostalgia for Brezhnev

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In 1982, I was trapped in Tashkent.  I had stopped over there after sightseeing in Samarkand, and was due to fly back to Moscow.  Instead, Intourist whisked off the few foreign travellers present in the city on a curious and palpably fake tour.  After driving around the centre, rebuilt without character after the devastating earthquake which presumably destroyed any original Uzbeki architecture, we were shown the spotless - and theoretically quake-proof - underground railway system.  It was almost as grand as that in Moscow, but without the chandeliers.  Then we were driven to the outskirts of the city which ended in a dusty and squalid shanty town; clearly Intourist had run out of things to show us.

The reason for this surreal non-tour of a non-city was that all Aeroflot planes had been commandeered for the day.  They were needed to fly politicians from the Soviet Republics to Moscow for an urgent session of the country's ruling body.  It was no ordinary gathering: they were meeting to choose a new President.  Brezhnev was dead.

Everywhere in Moscow you came across his portrait, raven-haired, white-skinned, always against a garish red background.  Like some Slav King Kong, his huge, craggy face peeked from walls and billboards between gaps in buildings.  Blown up to huge proportions, the Neanderthal cast of his features - the lower bony ridge of the forehead sprouting feral, bushy eyebrows, the deep-set eyes, the massive jowls - was truly frightening.  It seemed irrefutable evidence that physiognomy did indeed reveal the inner man.

It was some while before the world realised that this was the end of an era.  Even when Gorbachev was chosen after Andropov, it was assumed that, progressive and relative youngster that he was, his attempts at reforms would be circumscribed and cautious.  As we now know, nothing could have been further from the truth.  Each day has brought us new, ever more audacious acts of dismantling, of liberalisation, of risk-taking.  

But amidst all these enormous potential gains, I feel - totally selfishly - that there has been a loss.  As the communist world rushes to embrace much of our capitalism, our materialism, and our culture, the USSR is no longer the great, mysterious Russian bear, the Cold War behemoth, mapping out a unique destiny.  It has lost its old specialness.

The Brehznev era epitomised that lost world.  Russia was a barely open land; it was ruled by fear and bullying; its people eked out secret lives, fighting the state with magnificent tiny defiances.  When I had visited Moscow at this time, the sub-zero temperatures, the clogging drifts of snow, seemed climatic correlates of the iciness and inertia which gripped the country.  Today they are just weather.

In a world where you can hear the latest Rick Astley single within weeks of its appearance as you walk through the ancient bazaar in Kathmandu, there are few places which remain truly alien, truly elsewhere.  Even Romania has fallen.  Nobody wants Gorbachev's reforms to fail; but some of us are glad that we saw the Brezhnev era before it vanished.

(1989)

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Truckling on

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'Truckling' is one of those words that become odder and odder the more you say or ponder them.  'Truckling' now means to yield meanly or obsequiously.  It is a reasonable and intriguing question to ask why this particular word in this particular form has acquired this sense.  Fortunately we have a number of lexicographical snapshots of its earlier incarnations which, like those unbelievable and embarrassing photographs taken so many years ago showing us with weird haircuts and in outmoded fashions, map out quite clearly the sometimes startling shifts of meaning and - further back - of morphology.

Before it acquired its present pejorative sense, 'truckling' meant to place yourself beneath someone else.  It derived from the truckle bed, which was habitually stored under an ordinary bed, and so was necessarily lower.  It was therefore a fairly natural jump to talk of someone 'truckling' - taking the truckle bed - in other situations.  But it was also an inspired one, born of people's love of analogy, of finding shapes in life that match, of fleshing out the one-dimensional literalism of a word with a multi-dimensional panoply of sly and sideways meanings.

The truckle bed was named for the truckles - small wheels or castors - which it employed.  It was therefore once the bed with the truckles; the English language's powerful compacting ability - where nouns can be rammed together in these pithy, descriptive combinations with an ease denied many other great languages, for example the Romance family - created a new concept out of two old ones.  Time and habit soon did the rest, until the truckle bed became a single idea apprehended without any sense of bifurcation.

The truckle as castor had its origin in an earlier meaning of the word: in medieval times it was a small, grooved wheel used as a pulley for a rope.  Again, our innate ability to spot similarities encouraged the transfer: when people started using small wheels as castors, they clearly looked like truckles, even though they were different in purpose; so truckles they became - or rather the world of the truckle was extended to embrace them.  Linguistic dynamics and the society which drove them then saw to it that the centre of gravity of the word shifted from its original usage to the later, apparently more common and useful one.

The truckle as pulley can be traced back centuries more.  There is a Norman-French word 'trocle' with the same meaning; truckle is merely its Anglicisation.  'Trocle' in turn derives from a simplification of the Latin word 'trochlea', itself a honing of the Ancient Greek 'trochilia'; both mean a pulley wheel.  What is remarkable is not that we can follow the word back so far, but that down the years such myriad tugs and turns have been inflicted on its form and function.  What we do not know are who the people were who caused these shifts.  For every one of them was instituted by someone, at a certain moment, who had the requisite insight or indolence or ignorance.  Nor is this process at an end; who knows what 'truckling' may mean tomorrow?  Perhaps you do: perhaps you will make the next great semantic leap for the world and language to follow.  After all, someone has got to do it.  Keep on truckling.

(1990)

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Stargazing

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A flat earth implies edges, and beyond the edge lies the unknown and the abyss.  We hold ourselves superior cartographers: our world is a safe, unending sphere.  But we ignore the facts of geometry.  The surface of a globe is all edge; naively we seek the abyss at our feet: it lies above us.

When we look up at the sky we do not see this yawning infinity.  First our eyes rest on the comforting pillows of the clouds - but these are poor comfort.  As insubstantial as air, they serve best as lowering backgrounds to Dutch landscapes, or as prompts to our histrionic imaginations - in a solitary cloud we may see a mighty whale, and in a blazing sunset we can feel the sadness of great aerial cities in final conflagration.  

Beyond the clouds there are the aeroplanes, shining symbols of technology's prowess.  Unlike the passive floating hazes which hang like veils before our eyes, the aeroplane determines its own course, and seems to have cut the earth's heavy leading strings.  But they only skirt the world's new edge, staying in sight of land like timid galleons before the sextant.

At least from the plane our perspective begins to change.  As we rise with it, through the great blue dome which seems to shield us, we find the sky turns black, the blackness of absence.  We begin to realise that there is nothing there, that it is all literally a trick of the light.

Yet when, of a clear summer's evening, we contemplate the stars, we still wilfully misapprehend them.  The recidivist poet within us says they are tiny sequins embroidered on a huge tent roof; they are a thousand glow worms on a great cave's ceiling.

We ignore the awesome generosity of the sky: we do not see the stars as billions of fiery spheres wheeling through space unimaginable distances away in an ungraspable structure.  We ignore the message of their patterns: we do not see the waving speckled band of the Milky Way as the cross-section of the galaxy's spiral in which our sun forms such an insignificant part.  We ignore the imperious laws of physics and the arduous journey the stars' light has made to reach us: we do not see the night sky as the cosmic Daguerreotype it is, an ancient image of other suns which died perhaps before the earth was born.

We ignore all these things because they put us in the ultimate context.  They beg the terrible questions: how was the universe created?  By what?  What came before it?  What comes after?  - all the questions which have nothing to do with the world that was once flat and the centre of all creation, all the questions which seem to negate the point of every quotidian act or thought.  Confronted by the reality of the stars we are confronted by the galactic irrelevance of our lives.

Which is why we turn the sky into a protective carapace, a hemisphere of Blue Wedgewood, cushioned by amiable clouds, the playground of the proud arching aeroplanes, and the stars into baubles.  And who dares see more?

(1989)

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Hoardings

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Advertisements offer the best and fastest sociology.  The extreme economic Darwinism of the industry - where accounts, even the most successful, are rarely kept for long - ensures a constant scrabbling after the very latest in ideas and trends.  Furthermore, the format of advertisements demands that concepts be simple, striking and memorable; tapping into society's deepest fears and desires - particularly if hitherto unarticulated - has proved to be one of the most effective ways to achieve this.

This sociological aspect of advertising is well-known; what is recognised less widely is the industry's assumption of the Church's mantle of unending textual exegesis.

Once the place of Christianity at the heart of medieval society was assured, expansionary proselytism was replaced by consolidating interpretation, and action by thought.  The rich and powerful monasteries were filled with the best minds of the day, with little to do but read the unchanging word of God.  As a result, with time and through a natural desire to surpass predecessors and teachers, simple commentaries blossomed into ever more recondite investigations of meanings and patterns.  

A single phrase, of little import in itself, might, in the obsessive mind of a monk, attain through brilliant if empty explication some pivotal significance.  And pondered long enough, most sequences of events or sets of relationships can be mapped on to any other; hence the Bible was found to be an endlessly echoing, self-referential book of inexhaustible complexity.

And so it is within the domain of advertising.  Latter-day monks in the form of account executives are similarly closeted with a fixed text - that of the product - which they must then expound to the world, and find new ways of explaining.  Like their medieval forebears, they are burdened and constrained by all previous interpretations - that is, all previous campaigns.  Sometimes they will react against them; sometimes they will build on them, extending an idea by a series of elaborate mental tropes and toccatas.

Advertisements provide the most detailed, most ingenious examination of our lives that there is.  Just when we thought that every nuance, every angle, every possible allusive joke had been dug out of the baked bean, the latest young advertising star pushes an idea further, notices another avenue, produces another pun.  This frenetic investigation proceeds on several fronts: the basic concept and its gamut of cultural, intellectual, economic, sociological and sexual references; the name of the product, and all its associations, rhymes, similes, homonyms and homophones; and visual elements, be it in terms of the shape of the product, its colour, a typeface or simply a design associated with the brand.  

The net effect is that we are amazed that our world even in its most trivial aspects is so rich; we are grateful that each day we gain a fresh and exciting perspective on everything in it.  And if we buy the concept, we might even buy the product.

(1989)

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The insolence of the inanimate

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Amidst the urban hubbub, the watchword for survival is serenity.

I am stuck in a gridlock traffic jam, an insignificant element in a huge matrix of static cars and frustrated drivers: what of it?  Things will wait, and if they will not, there is little point fretting: never regret what cannot be amended.  I am swamped by shipfuls of fools whose every act seems calculated to cross me.  But these are simply more of those amusing impediments, part of the burden we bear in living.  Besides, who is to say that in other's eyes I too am not that obstructive fool?  

So in the world of impersonal forces and of all-too personal men and women I contrive to pass my days without infusions of adrenaline to fray the fabric of the heart, grind down the molars or teach the creases of my face new lines of ugly anger.  But there is another, co-incident world where, in an instant, by a nothing, I am effortlessly reduced to insensate tantrums of volitional apoplexy.

I close the door on a kitchen cupboard.  I listen appreciatively to the faint click as the catch engages.  Then watch with annoyance as the door swings back.  I push it closed again, with more forcefulness; the door swings back again, only more rapidly.  Now I am slamming the door.  Not once but repeatedly.  I know full well why this door will not close: some object inside is pressing against it, forcing it open.  But I will not give in; I continue smashing the door against the lock until the contents are sufficiently disturbed to allow the catch to hold.

I need a wire coat hanger.  I remove one from my wardrobe.  It is surrounded by tens of other coat hangers, all suspended at slightly different angles.  As I withdraw the coat hanger, its hook snags on one of the others.  I shake it, which produces a pleasant tintinnabulation; but no coat hanger.  I shake it more manically, and in more directions.  Still no coat hanger.  By now I am pulling and tugging insanely; coat hangers cascade over the floor of the wardrobe, until enough have been dislodged to free the one I hold.

Why do I do it?  In every case I know what the problem is and how to solve it.  Instead, I am determined to continue as I began; I shall not be defeated.  It becomes a matter of honour: I refuse to let a mere object thwart my will.  If necessary I resort to violence to teach it a lesson it will never forget.

But it does.  Because there is an obstinacy to the inanimate which is not to be tamed.  It is almost as if objects conspired to act in this way to remind us that although we appear to have dominion over the visible world, it is a poor and superficial thing.  When doors stick, locks jam, and bow ties don't, they are like rebellious slaves proving that their spirit is unbroken, and unnerving us with the thought that one day they may rise up against us and cast off their servitude.  We feel as sadistic torturers must feel when confronted by glorious indomitable heroism - hollow, pathetic stooges.  The insolence of the inanimate ought to be a salutary reminder that violence is never a solution.

(1989)

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God in the body

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To say that a musician's style is cantabile is one of the highest forms of praise.  We mean by this 'singable' that it is as if the instrument were an extension of the player, another voice through which can be expressed plangency or exultation as directly as human sobs or shouts of joy might.

At the root of this phrase is a recognition of the primacy of the voice, that all music continues to aspire to its original condition of singing.  And rightly: if playing any instrument is a marvellous undertaking - producing infinitely subtle gradations of sound from mere wood and metal - how much more miraculous is the process whereby the singer's body itself becomes the instrument, both player and played.

The vocalist's pre-eminence is hard-won.  Unlike flutes or pianos, no two bodies are the same; learning to sing means gaining intimate knowledge of the body's deepest recesses and cavities, for it is these - in the chest and the head - that lend the weak vibrations of the throat their character and their impact.  The situation is complicated by the fact that singers rarely hear an accurate representation of this sound: conduction through the skull to the ear means that in singing as in speaking we are always listening to an internal impostor.  Hence the perennial disbelief we feel upon hearing our unfamiliar external voice relayed by a recording.

The coincidence of the vocalist's body and instrument means that in our inevitable identification with a singer - as with any artist - we feel the notes doubly within us: both metaphorically as the ersatz performer and literally as a physical object responding to the waves of varying pressure we call sound.  No wonder, then, that the voice dominates every musical culture - ethnic or eclectic, from the most cravenly populist to the most disdainfully high-brow: all are hopelessly and helplessly swept up by the imperious power of the the singing body and its resonance.

This explains in part the pull of grand opera, even for those who are otherwise quite unmusical.  Aside from its seductive glister, its residual social cachet and its blatant display of privilege, the real draw of this deeply implausible form is the concentration of good voices singing music designed specifically to show them off to the best advantage and to move us as directly and shamelessly as possible.  And just as the voice seems to be a stage past that of any mere instrument, so there are singers whose vocal gifts seem to exceed all human norms.  These are the voices the sheer sound of which send deep, delicious shivers down the spine, the voices everyone recognises as supremely great simply as voices.  They are the names which are exempt from ordinary fashion; they are the Carusos, the Callases, the Pavarottis.

We worship them not just for this frisson; we recognise something beyond their artistry or our pleasure.  In their singing they transcend their mortality because they are living triumphs over their bodies.  They have turned muscle and bone and sinew into a divine machine that seems to deny the brutish facts of life.  In the sublime sound they produce we sense something that surpasses the mundane: we hear the god in the body.  In this greatest of singing we bear witness to a redeeming theophany.  

(1990)

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Antics

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As objects age and break, we throw them out.  In most cases, the decision is unequivocal: nobody thinks twice about discarding a blown light bulb, or smashed plates.  But some classes of objects can survive everyday knocks to win through to a new lease of life.  Furniture, for example.  A broken chair may be repaired, a scratched table re-polished.  Eventually they cease to be old and broken, and become instead, in some mysterious way and at some ill-defined point, loved and lived-in antiques.

The antique is a relatively new concept, and is still in a state of flux.  For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, antiques meant the same as antics: something odd and ridiculous.  In England's Augustan age, old objects were prized if they were Classical - that is, thousands of years old.  The later, Gothic craze made medieval fashionable, and with the Victorians came a delight in collecting anything older than a century or two.  As the decades of the modern era have rolled by, so has the temporal margin required to elevate an object to the status of antique shrunk.  Today we teeter on the brink of finding last month acceptably ancient.

This increasingly frenzied rush to canonise the past seems to be a result of the accelerating pace of life, of the sense that nothing is fixed and stable anymore - and hence that history, even of the most recent vintage, is a rock worth clinging to.  What is also remarkable is that almost anything is potentially a venerable antique, even the most ephemeral of bygone objects - everything, that is, except people.

People never become antiques; instead they just become old.  As a result, we never accord them the spurious honours that even the tawdriest and tackiest light-fitting of twenty years ago receives.  At best, we offer the previous generation indifference, and at worst outright contempt.

There may once have been some justification for this rejection of an unwanted burden.  If every day was a continual struggle for survival, exposing on mountaintops those too old to work had a certain callous logic: it was them or the tribe.  For a society characterised by gross overproduction and shameless overconsumption, there is no such excuse.

Why are we not appalled by the shuffling old men swaddled in their multiple layers of jumble sale cardigans, by the hump-backed and skeletal old women picking among the leftover vegetables?  How can we allow their last experiences of life to be so bitter?  How can we forget that in a very few years, though cardinal now, we too shall be an abandoned people?

We forget because we have to; because to remember would be to acknowledge that our short era of power and plenty will inevitably end, that we also will age, and will one day perish.  We ignore the old because they are our mirror of tomorrow.  The irony is that we all come to realise the shabbiness of their treatment - but only when we ourselves become cast-off and impotent.  By then it is too late to stop the antics of the succeeding generation to whom we set such a pathetic example, who have mislearnt too well - and now proceeds to pay us in the same coin, and to store up for their own sad and unthought-of future.

(1989)

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Three sciences

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For many, science is the central achievement of the twentieth century, displacing the arts as the primary expression of mankind's creativity.  As a result, we tend to believe science's myths, notably those about its essential unity.  We are told that science proceeds by consensus, and as a result offers a uniquely integrated and unified domain.  But this view, written by the mental victors, conveniently ignores the fact that there are really three sciences, not one.

The first is what we normally mean by the term, and what might be more exactly called universal science, if only because of its pretensions.  It is Big Science, embracing the crowd-pleaser theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology; it is the root of all our treasured modern technologies - computers, non-invasive surgery, space travel; it is the defining cultural influence of our epoch, and informs not just the rhythms of our daily lives, but our whole world-view.

Universal science is a construct of the last three or four hundred years.  It supplanted two earlier kinds of science, one a historical relict, now rightly defunct, the other a tradition which endures.  The former was based on Aristotelian physics, and represented the sclerotic legacy of the Middle Age's Scholasticism.  The latter is often called folk science, but is more truly parochial.

It embodies the tribe's knowledge about the larger forces in life - the weather, the tides, the movement of animals.  Today its quaint vaguenesses have been largely superseded by the apparent certainties of its brash younger sibling, universal science.  But it persists in those areas, notably the weather, where modern science flounders hopelessly when confronted by a system whose complexity defies simplistic analysis.  Lore such as 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight, red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning' clearly proclaims its pastoral origins; it also offers an empirical truth still beyond modern science's ken.

The last of the trinity of sciences might be called personal.  It is the solipsistic knowledge that we all have about ourselves, but which has no claim to validity beyond that arena.  This science embraces our specialist cures for colds, requirements for a sound night's sleep, ways to avoid hangovers, and combinations of foods and circumstances that are guaranteed to give us indigestion.  Just as parochial science is almost exclusively concerned with the local external world, so personal science is about our body, that most intimate internal space.

The progression from personal to parochial to universal therefore represents a constant expansion of knowledge's ambition, from the body, to the village, to all creation.  It thus also tracks science's historical rise to power, and its claim to increasing sovereignty.  The reverse movement from universal to personal also defines science's limitations.  Its theories of sub-nuclear matter and galactic cosmogony are so deep and abstract as to be scarcely refutable; but its feeble and flawed explanation of the weather is a constant reproach; and its ignorance about our purely subjective body-knowledge is near-total.

(1989)

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Dire diary

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Outsiders labour under a basic misapprehension about corporate hierarchies.  Their image is of poor drudges at the bottom engaged in the mindless repetition of boring, meaningless tasks, with no scope for initiative or independent action.  Top executives, so this wisdom goes, are epitomes of free-booting free will, deciding on a whim the fate of thousands as they lounge around in boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany, or glide silently and effortlessly in their chauffeur-driven tinted-window limousines.  Nothing could be further from reality.

It is true that the ordinary office worker has a circumscribed range of functions - but also a concomitant freedom of when and how to carry them out.  An essentially undifferentiated role has no natural time-scales, no unique, imperative pattern: jobs can be moved around, substituted, lost even, with little overall effect.  However pressurised the situation, repose can easily be found - and kept: for into the vacuums and interstices which are created between tasks, there is nothing to flow.

Middle managers enjoy no such luxury.  Theirs is a constant battle between running the business and organising others.  The latter involves meetings, time's weeds which sprout in every available diary gap.  Arranged by a secretary or personal assistant, they are huge milestones mapping out the manager's week, obstacles dumped on the road to real work.  Where office staff paddle docilely in a business's routine backwaters, middle managers must swim hard against buffeting waves of problems simply to remain where they are.  Meetings soon pass from milestones to millstones, threatening to drag them under.  But through them, managers have the first inkling of a truth that will blaze all the more brightly the higher they ascend: that it is the diary which rules them, not the other way round.

Top executives live and breathe this axiom.  All of the week is meetings, meetings involving so many other people, and so complex to set up, that the most senior managers find themselves totally impotent in the face of their day's hijacking.  Now, they can only flow with the overmastering tide, and join the corporate flotsam.  Because top bosses are meta-managers - they run a business not by managing it directly, but by managing those who do - they find themselves in thrall not only to the clashing diaries of their immediate juniors, but through the corporation's pyramidal structure to those of their underlings' underlings too.  

The enmeshing diary becomes a prescriptive book of their entire lives.  Such are the demands on their limited time that business appointments spill over into evenings and weekends - the company functions, the client outings, the overseas travel.  Far from being mighty corporate warriors cutting a swathe through the financial thickets, they are huge pin-striped puppets without a puppet-master, slaves of the system which they sustain and which sustains them.  Trapped as they are by the very power that they wield, many a senior executive must have snatched a precious moment during yet another meeting in those boring boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany to envy the simple, untrammelled life of the worker; just as kings and queens have ever envied the uncomplicated, idealised bucolic existence of shepherds and shepherdesses; and just as forlornly.

(1989)

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Counting the cost

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Life is full of strange numbers.  But mostly we ignore the subtle groupings and structures that shape the way we think our world.  How many of us are aware of the effort of putting 60 individual seconds into each minute, or of the seven-dayness of the week?  Has no one noticed that four always seems to divide into 12 but never 13?  As our daily acquiescence in the world's fictive homogeneity shows, by learning to count so glibly we have lost the rich granularity of existence.  We are numb to numbers.

Anthropology lets us retrace the gradual erosion in awareness which took place as civilisation evolved.  The simplest societies count one, two, many.  Earliest humans probably found only one.  Each object in their world was unique: it did not surrender its specialness by being rudely classed as like another.  The pebbles on a seashore were not numberless; instead, they were individual components of an immense experience we have now forgone.  Instead, we see only a beach.

As society progressed, the successful warriors and rising merchant classes demanded bigger numbers to cope with more cattle, more bags of wheat.  Already the sense of what five or fifty entailed was bleeding out of the words: fifty became a rich man's flock.  By the time a hundred thousand Persians marched against Greece, the concept of a soldier, a man, one, had been hopelessly damaged.

The loss of the purity of numbers went hand in hand with the rise of money.  Objects were converted to values which soon had only a weak and arbitrary sense of quantity:  one shilling was twelve pence, but how many is a penny?  With money came the need to manipulate figures by themselves; hitherto they had been regarded as incommensurable entities rooted in real things.  Mathematics was born the day six sheep first equalled six goats.

The Roman number system proved hopelessly inadequate: you cannot multiply DCIII by XLIV.  The logic of the Arabic system which supplanted it led to  revolutionary concepts like zero and negative numbers.  With the arrival of a notation for less than an absence of cattle, the last links between numbers and their origins in the external world had been cut.

Commerce was quick to seize the opportunities opened up by this untethered arithmetic.  Freed from any grounding in physical objects, numbers became amoral.  The abstract intricacies of double-entry book-keeping allowed ingenious frauds - literally unthinkable for the Sumerian clerks drawing up their inventories in cuneiform.  Present-day trading in currency futures is only the latest manifestation of counting's promiscuity and perversion.

In the computer, the neutral number attains its acme.  The whole world - its sights and sounds, our thoughts and emotions - can be reduced to a seamless string of 0s and 1s.  Paradoxically, there is now no sense of number in anything, even though everything is a number.  And ironically, the hidden figure that lies at the heart of all experience is 1, just as it was at the very beginning.  But on the way back we have lost entirely the richness of that original, particular vision.

(1987)

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Corporeal integrity

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In Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement' in the Sistine chapel, the damned fall to the left while the saved rise to the right.  Amongst the latter is St. Bartholomew who, following the ancient iconography, bears his identifying emblem - in this case the flayed skin of his martyrdom.  In a sardonic touch, the features the artist has given the slack skin are his own.

Death by being flayed alive seems particularly horrific.  Not just because it must be slow, lingering, and presumably excruciatingly painful, but also on account of its metaphorical stripping away of a protective outer layer that we take so much for granted - indeed, that we mostly take to be nothing less than ourselves.  Doing so reveals the truth about our bodies: that we are not the neat flesh and blood we call ourselves, a sturdy frame of bone swathed in a substantial and homogeneous muscular wadding, but rather a thin sack of skin in which myriad organs and mechanisms knock about in an uneasy and fragile equilibrium.

Medicine acknowledges this explicitly in its treatment of the skin as a single organ in itself.  But we do not like to think of an organ on the outside; in fact we do not like to think of organs at all.  The kidneys and livers and hearts of animals that we eat seem gross and disturbing when raw, their bloody details exposed.  Once the body loses its undifferentiated consistency, and begins to be perceived as made up of disparate entities, with functions like parts of a machine, we begin to feel ourselves the ragbag of offal and lights that we truly are.

Most of the time we contrive to ignore this fact with the ready connivance of society.  The images of bodies that greet us everywhere emphasise their hardness and compactness - the slim, svelte figure of the athlete and model - or their smoothness and evenness of colour.  Human nakedness is disturbing partly because it confronts us with the reality - that most bodies are nothing like these idealised images from magazines and hoardings, that they sag and droop and bulge, that they are blotchy and rucked; in a word, that they are just so many lumps of stinking meat.

Nakedness we can ignore.  But there is a more brutal revelation of our body's terrible secret.  The horror of physical violence is born of its power to tear open the bag of our body, to show us with shocking explicitness the seemingly random mess that lies within.  This is partly why blood is so disturbing: spilt, it is a gory emblem of the body's lost closure, of the fact that far from being firm flesh we are mostly liquid - by definition, a state of matter that can offer no resistance to force. The irruption of violence into our lives frightens us because it says we are weak and helpless in our circumstances - superior numbers will always overcome us; worse, it says that we are weak and helpless in essence - that our very structure is irremediably flawed.

Violence leads to wounds, damages to the system.  Wounds are illness, the negation of health.  And health means literally wholeness.  Corporeal integrity is a kind of health beyond the absence of sickness, one we desperately need to hold in not just those bloody, squirming organs, but our entire sense of being.

(1989)

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Windy City

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Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips.  Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power.  With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done.  An enormous silence hung over the whole building.  Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong.  The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead.  Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack.  No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity.  Everywhere there were scenes of destruction:  huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road.  Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement.  People milled around, some taking photographs.  There were no trains and few buses.  An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said.  And the radio itself was strangely different.  Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes.  The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped.  Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee.  A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave.  It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87.  'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'.  The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature.  Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable.  But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable.  A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London.  No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power.  Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently.  Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death.  After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave.  That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable.  In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze.  Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

(1987)

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Cacography

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Although writing is an ancient invention, the Western tradition of personalised handwriting is essentially another product of the Renaissance's implicit agenda of subversive individualism.  Before that time, the main writing establishments, the medieval scriptoria, allowed no latitude in letter forms: to learn how to write meant to learn how to reproduce exactly the local variant of the uncial script, for example.  Variations were errors, not expressions of personality.  For this reason palaeographers typically talk of schools of writing, centred around a particular monastery, rather than of scribes.

Gradually, as writing became more widespread through an increasingly secularised Europe, the Church's grip on literacy - hitherto one of its jealously-guarded mysteries and sources of power - weakened.  With this centralised orthodoxy gone, personal writing styles began to evolve.

The teaching of writing in present-day schools mirrors this process.  At first, we are shown precisely how to produce each letter: there is a premium on exactitude.  Once the basic shapes have been learnt, though, there is a shift away from studying letters to using them.  Thereafter, provided the handwriting style is reasonably unobtrusive children are judged on what they write, not how they write it.

Through constant practice we can bypass the mental mechanics of writing.  Because the focus is on content not form, the latter evolves almost spontaneously and according to deep personal laws.  Mostly the process is a gradual evolution, but it can change quite dramatically and disjunctively.  One day as I was writing I watched with horror as I formed an 'x' not from a 'c' and its mirror image, placed back to back, but from two straight diagonal lines slashing through each other.  I have never relapsed, and I often wonder what terrible psychic shift occurred then.

The Surrealists were therefore almost correct when they saw in automatic writing - words written without thought - a revelation of the soul's innermost nature, but they erred in regarding what was written as important; in fact, the shapes of the letters tell all.

People's handwriting, considered purely graphologically, seems so revealing in its diversity; the big, brassy letters of the extrovert, the tiny, self-effacing embroidery of the recluse; the extravagant curlicues, the vertiginous slants - both forwards and backwards - the bizarre open dots of 'i's - all seem to be such manifest and true expressions of their writers' personalities.

Frightening, then, those handwritings that seem almost typeset, with effortless and sensuous curves, balanced shapes and a neatness which suggests obsession.  Such calligraphy bespeaks a perfection outside humanity, either angelic, or demonic.  Frightening, too, those hands that look the product of a deranged mind, illegible, ill-formed, spastic in their irregularities, now a series of jagged edges, now meaningless waves.  And doubly frightening for me who writes in just this way, exposing to the world the terrible implications of that blatant cacography.

(1989)

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Spot the similarity

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It has happened to all of us.  From a distance we see the back of someone's head; it looks familiar.  Unsure, though, we move closer, trying to take a better look.  They walk with a gait we know so well; we see their body with all its characteristic rhythms and tics.  We catch a glimpse of their face: yes, it is them, that old lover we have not seen for years.  The electricity is still there, the faint trembling, the ache in the pit of the stomach.  And yet...is the shape quite right?  And surely they never had that mole...?  Or: we see a face across a room; is that old Johnnie?  We stare, half-indiscreetly, half-covertly, caught between a desire to make contact and fear of the mistake.  The eyes and the mouth are the same, the way he lifts his glass identical; and yet...

It is disconcerting to see these impostors - doubly disconcerting because they are so good.  We were right to be wrong: they do look almost identical.  Our confidence is shaken, not only in our ability to recognise - old age and fading memories alone would account for that loss - but also in the uniqueness of the people we have met.  

When we see these simulacra, especially if we encounter more than one of them, we begin to realise that perhaps there are only a limited number of permutations of eyes and noses and chins, the results of a genetic Identikit.  The details may differ, but then so have the details of their lives to this point; the underlying bone-structure, flesh cover, and colouring are in essence the same.

Physical repetition is worrying enough, but what if this circumscribed range of possibilities extended to the mental sphere too?  The characters of friends, family and lovers - those wonderful qualities that seemed so unique and so uniquely given to us - they too may be closely matched by other look- and think-alikes.  What then of our special relationships - special with respect to what?  To an entire class of matching people?

Worse follows.  When we spot these coincidences of form in other people, we concede readily that sometimes the resemblances are startling; but if for a moment a friend or colleague suggests a similar correspondence of a third party - an acquaintance, a stranger even - with ourselves, the defences go up.  The suggestion is preposterous, the proponent is clearly a fool or a knave.  We protest overmuch because what applied to our loved ones applies equally to us: that we might not be unique in outward form or even in what, or in who, we are.

We can truthfully deny these parallels because we better than anyone know our superficial details: no one else has seen us so often, gazed at us in the mirror so much.  For the same reason we spot supposed likenesses between friends and passers-by: we know the one reasonably well, the other not at all; we are ready to note the points of contact, and are blind to the tinier clashes.  In its most extreme form, this knowledge mismatch accounts for the Westerner's inability to tell some Chinamen apart: to do so, the language of their faces must first be learnt.  In other words, whether we or our friends really are duplicated by others comes down to a question of degree.  How similar does similar have to be to matter?

(1989)

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What masterpiece?

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On December 22, 1808, a small private concert was held in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna.  It was bitterly cold, and as the under-rehearsed musicians sat in front of the sparse audience they rubbed their hands together and blew on their numb fingers.  The concert that was about to begin consisted of the following programme: the sixth symphony in F, the recitative and aria 'Ah! perfido', the Gloria from the Mass in C, the fourth piano concerto, the fifth symphony, the sanctus from the Mass in C and the Fantasia for piano, chorus and orchestra.  All of them were conducted and performed by the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.  All the works were receiving their first public performance.  It would be the greatest concert in the history of western music.

Did that audience know this as they sat shivering through the long and gruelling programme?  It seems hard to believe that they could have failed to be overwhelmed by works such as the fifth symphony, whose opening unison challenge has now burnt itself into the collective memory of the world.  And what of the first performance of the ninth symphony, some years later?  Surely the audience then realised they were listening to the zenith of orchestral and symphonic music?

It is too easy for us naively to imagine ourselves at those first nights, and too difficult to appreciate the music's full pristine impact.  For we would come with our ecstasy and adulation ready prepared; our ears would not be innocent.  As a guide to what those early audiences heard and felt, we have to look for analogues in our own experience.  How often, for example, have we attended the first performance of a modern work, and known - as certainly as we know now that the ninth symphony is a towering achievement - that we are part of a unique and important occasion, one -  like that day in 1808 - that will go down in history?

I have attended at least one such historic occasion.  It was at a Promenade concert, during a long hot summer several years ago.  It was the first British performance of Tippett's 'Mask of Time', a work he had been labouring over for many years, and one which promised to be the summation of all that he had attempted in his richly creative life.  I had assumed that since it was a contemporary work I would be able to turn up just before the start and buy a good seat.  In fact, the concert was sold out when I arrived, so I went to the back of the long queue of promenaders. 

Eventually I reached the ticket desk; by now, even the arena was full, and so I was forced up to the gallery.  There promenaders wandered like lost souls across the echoing floors and through the deep gloom.  Down below me in the auditorium the choir and orchestra looked like toys.  At last the music began.  The sounds seemed to reach us minutes later.  My feet soon ached, it was hot and stuffy, my head hurt; the music was clearly the work of a madman.  I left after about a quarter of an hour.

A couple of years later, I listened to the work on records.  From the first chords it gripped me: I knew it instantly for one of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces.  I also knew how that audience of 1808 had probably felt.

(1988)

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