Silly farts

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Farting is not a subject polite society ever considers.  It is one of those inconvenient little reminders - like death - that we are not gods, however smartly we may dress and talk.  As a result, farting has become a subject colonised by children - who are in any case rightly fascinated by all the mysteries of the human body - secure in the knowledge that no adults will come along and start asserting their superior experience in this field as they do in most others.

When the fart occurs - in life or in literature - there is always a shocked pause, as if leaving space for it to pass.  In society, the instinct to pretend that the unpleasant never happened manifests itself as usual.  With art, which habitually comes freighted with explanations and interpretations, this is not so easy.  For example, in the thirteenth century round 'Sumer is icumen in' - a virtuosic essay in double canon, one of the earliest in music - there occurs the line which is usually translated as "bulls leap and bucks fart."  Despite valiant attempts at emendation, the phrase still crops up in books on medieval music and poetry.  Because of the work's historical importance, its text must, of course, be glossed - a task which leaves the rigorous but prim scholar appalled and red-faced.  At moments like these, art seems to be blowing a raspberry at the world and its prudishness.  And aptly: raspberry in this phrase is short for raspberry tart - cockney rhyming slang for a fart.  

But imagine for a moment a world which does not have this rather queasy Victorian attitude to what is, after all, just another bodily activity.  In this world people would be free to fart in public without embarrassment just as they might at home.  There would be nothing unusual about entering an office to be greeted with a rich and overpowering melange of such odours which would linger in your clothes and hair for days.  Sometimes special rooms would be set aside specifically for those who wished to indulge themselves in this way, and areas allocated in restaurants for those who felt the need to fart during meals.  

Because of the social acceptability of farting, we can imagine that organisations dedicated to widening the constituency of farters would mount advertising campaigns in magazines and on hoardings to encourage more people - and especially the young - to fart in public as well as in private.  There might even be fads associated with the activity: for example young men might consider it particularly cool to fart in a loud and demonstrative way, while the most refined and soigne of women might take up farting not for the pleasure it gives them, but purely as a sign of sophistication.

The idea of such a world is plainly ridiculous.  And yet we live in that world.  Substitute the word 'smoke' for 'fart' in the above description, and the fit is perfect.  Or nearly.  It must be conceded that for all the superficial similarities, there is one crucial difference between farting and smoking: breathing in someone else's fart, unlike breathing in someone else's smoke, does not give you cancer.  It is an interesting question as to who are the sillier farts in this situation: those who selfishly inflict their loathsome and lethal smoke on others, or those who let them.

(1988)

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The oscillating universe

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When we are born, we are co-extensive with the universe.  The light, the food, the warmth, everything that happens is part of us, a manifestation of our being.  Although we cannot formulate what it is, we know without self-consciousness or mediation, that the sun is at one with us, and that its rising is as much our natural and unwilled movement as our breathing or the beating of our heart.

Gradually, though, through small and larger pains, through encountering strange obstacles which do not bend to our will, we learn that there is an Other out there, a Not-us.  With time and a honing of the treacherous senses, that Otherness grows like a black balloon, filling all the space around us, until the darkness seems infinite, and we, small and frightened children now, an insignificant speck within it.

As during childhood our mind begins to understand this vastness, to order it through intelligence, we start to re-claim our lost natal heritage.  First our immediate surroundings are rendered safe, moulded into an integral part of our world, a daily given; then more and more is added until as an adolescent we feel that the universe may still be vast, a worrying and threatening place, but that our powers too are vast.

This is the glorious overconfidence of youth.  Just as those who have never fallen deeply ill, crashed a car or been robbed secretly feel that they really are immune to troubles, so at this age we employ a false induction: since we have never failed, we can do anything.  This is the time of magnificent idealism, when we feel that we have a responsibility for the world, that we can - indeed must - change it for the better.  We embrace mankind and the globe like a benevolent giant.

We forget how infancy taught us the world wanted none of our hugs and kisses.  Slowly and with hurt, we re-learn this lesson.  Checked now physically, now mentally, now in work, now in love, we realise that we cannot storm the citadels of heaven; that we are mortal, that we will die, and probably without achievements.  So we begin to turn our glance away from the wider horizons; we turn inward to marriage, to a family.

In mature adulthood, our domain has shrunk to the confines of the home.  We have responsibilities enough without taking on the troubles of the world.  Perhaps we ought to care passionately about starving millions; but what with yet another pair of new shoes for little Joey, and the house needing a fresh coat of paint, it all seems so far away.  The older we get, the tireder we get, the more vulnerable we feel to the random and pointless ravages of fate.  We do not want to fight; we want a quiet life.

Finally, as old age asserts its dominion, we want even less.  All desires are past, incomprehensible memories.  Friends and family are dead or distant; nobody claims us out there.  Now, we are the world: our bodies become our pre-occupation - that ache, that stiffness, that weakness.  Our days become the measured and self-observed inhalation and exhalation of breath.  As our heartbeats slow, and the oblivion of sleep flees us, we become a silent watcher of our own being; nothing else exists.

(1989)

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Accidents and substance

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Some people seem to have aerodynamic souls.  They go through life causing barely an eddy in the great stream of the world.  After painless childhoods, they grow up, get a job, get married, get a family, get old and die - all as effortlessly as a fish moves through water.  Often, they are deeply content; but they never appear in history.  They are completely invisible, and live, if at all, only through their children who carry their name and perhaps a faint memory of endless summer holidays spent with a smiling, faceless couple.

Contrast them with those who travel through life with all the grace of a thrown brick.  Whatever smoothness existence requires at a particular moment for an easy passage, they proffer only corners and edges.  They have desperate, terrible childhoods which they carry around for the rest of their lives like criminal records.  Adolescence is a painful cosmic joke.  If they marry at all, it is always the wrong person; if they have children, they have too many or at the wrong time.  Their home is a disaster: constant repairs, burglaries, fires.  In old age they are plagued by illness, and are abandoned by their relatives.  Death, when it comes, comes too late, or at an embarrassing moment, or messily.  But these are people whose days are richly textured, and who wear life's scars like medals.  And you remember the look in their eyes for ever.

Most of us fall between the two, divided between a cowardly desire for an easy, painless path through this world, and a craving for incident.  As ever, we cheat and compromise: we seek comfort in reality and fulfilment in fantasy.  We may daydream about the ideal partner; imagine the success and riches of our own business; begin to think about planning that daring holiday; but we make do with a nice semi-detached, 2.4 kids and a dog.

To compensate, we turn to the great surrogates.  There is entertainment, whose constant, specious excitement fills temporarily the yawning gaps in your soul, without real engagement or risk; and there is art, whose basic premise is that its creators offer you their suffering and exaltation in return for honour, a little money, and absolution for their lives.

Absolution because the greatest artists have always failed, have always been social misfits, bad wives and husbands, spendthrifts, political dupes, cripples and emotional wrecks.  They were profound creators not just because they suffered, but because they were able to channel that anguish into art, to win from it self-knowledge, knowledge about life and death which we gratefully receive.  Genius is never enough; to create a masterpiece, a Mozartian facility must be married with a Mozartian misery.

When we envy unthinkingly the great writers, painters, composers and the rest, we should remember the price they paid - usually unwillingly - for their glory.  And when we are in pain, or robbed or beaten, when we are tricked by shysters, when we are burnt by deep and hopeless love, lacerated by loss of family, or ravaged by disease, we should remember that like those artists we too have the possibility of seizing from vicissitudes something other than raw despair, of gaining through these accidents of life a real and lasting inner substance.

(1989)

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The plane truth

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Air travel has become a symbol of late twentieth century life, of the triumph of technology, and of the latter's democratisation.  We therefore have a vested interest in acquiescing in its romantic mythologies.  We affect to believe that in entering this smooth and gleaming skybound vessel we somehow partake of the pioneering spirit of the Wright brothers, Spitfire pilots and astronauts.  Unfortunately, the airlines know better.

They know that they are dealing with a ridiculous situation: hundreds of people trapped in a flimsy metal hull, surrounded by thousands of gallons of explosive air fuel.  They know that, like overcrowded rats, passengers would probably go mad and run amok if they were fully cognisant of their condition and of its unnaturalness.  They know that their main business is to take our minds off imminent destruction by unremitting distraction.

To do this, airlines employ as their model the principal paradigm of control and deceit: childhood.  Adults habitually adopt artful ploys to keep children quiet, to keep them obedient, to keep them happy.  To make mass air travel possible, the operating companies have engaged in a thoroughgoing campaign of passenger infantilisation, reducing all the jetsetting executives and package tour holidaymakers to a group of boys and girls out on an educational day-trip's jaunt.

The process begins with boarding.  You are trooped on to the aircraft by class and number like a bunch of unruly schoolkids, shepherded by men and women dressed in uniforms and acting the bossy monitor; you are told to sit down in neatly-ordered rows - all of which face the front - and are then strapped into your chair to stop you fidgeting.  Before the plane can leave, you must pay attention to the day's lesson: the voice of the unseen teacher on the intercom explains the usual incomprehensible things about lifejackets and oxygen masks - serious, adult matters that seem boring and irrelevant like so much education; meanwhile, snooty prefects mime woodenly by rote.  Just as at school, nobody really listens.

Shortly after take-off, you are brought a drink - drugged, usually, to make you complaisant - and then, a meal.  It appears instantaneously, hot and from nowhere: it is a well-known fact that the food of childhood never needs preparation.  The packaging in particular seems calculated to appeal to young minds: lots of fascinating wrappings to remove, your own personal cutlery, condiments, bread and butter - and, of course, an individual towelette to wipe your fingers and face with afterwards.  At least the stewardess does not try to do this for you, as your mother often did.

Thus all of your time on the plane is spent like a baby: in eating, sleeping, or being amused - or in going to the toilet.  One of the mysteries of air travel is how hundreds of passengers with little to look at or think about manage to ignore what exactly is going on in those small square cubicles placed so centrally and visibly.  When people rush for the toilets as soon as a meal has ended, and those embarrassingly obvious queues start to snake down the aisles, everyone acts as they would in the presence of a child on a potty, who becomes invisible.  The romance of air travel, indeed.

(1989)

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