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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Placing words in English

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Words are like pebbles.  In thousands of years of sliding through our throats they have lost their edges, become smooth and effortless.  Now we are hardly conscious we use them; speech has become an exchange of signifiers - so easy that at times it may even seem to be a direct communication of signifieds.

This is a measure of language's success: it has lost its strangeness, it has passed from being something in itself, to being diaphanous, a means to an end.  And necessarily: everyone has experienced the horror of a familiar word - 'from', say - disintegrating into incomprehensible shards as language reverts to its primitive roots of arbitrary concatenations of sound.  But what we have gained in facility through familiarity we have lost in linguistic racination: with our anaesthesia to the grain and surface of words, we have forfeited the possibility of holding on to their Englishness.  And a land without a tongue is a people without a heart, as every invader bent on subduing utterly a conquered nation knows.

To be sure, the Englishness of the English language is problematic.  More than any other tongue, English has gladly accepted linguistic immigrants: from Latin and Anglo-Norman, from many European languages and finally from the speech of the rest of the world, its embrace of foreign cultures and ideas growing as the British Empire grew.  As a result, some words remain barely assimilated: 'gnosticism' will never be an English word, if only because it is a rare rock whose angular edges are never likely to be smoothed.  And even coinages like 'prestidigitation' - each of whose elements is English enough - will never truly be part of the language because of their factitious polysyllabicity.

This is not to doom the non Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to some kind of chauvinist limbo; many thousands of Romance words have entered the language so deeply, and taken on the native colouring so naturally, that it comes as a shock to discover that they are later invaders - just like the Normans who brought them - words like 'beef' and 'boon'.

Nonetheless it seems clear that the most English of English words do have a recognisable look and sound.  As foreigners still relatively unfamiliar with languages such as French or Italian or German, and with their inflections and orthography, we Anglophones retain a fresh ear and eye for their characteristic forms, for their Frenchness and Germanness.  If we have lost this for the English of everyday speech, where can we hope to find new English words that are paradoxically both unknown to us - and therefore uncommon - and yet which offer the quintessence of the language, the very heart of commonness?

The answer lies in words that swim quietly about in the great sea of English like coelocanths: the place-names.  In Spridlington, Bawdrip, Moze and Lulsley, we feel simultaneously the shock of the unknown and the shock of recognition; names like Wawne, Yackleton, Hodsock and Themelthorpe are clearly totally English, and miraculously we can perceive them as such; in the breathing fossils of Whaplode, Ible, Appledram and Kexbrough, the dead elements of speech come back to life, and we reclaim our linguistic roots.

(1989)

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Looking at glass

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An old stand-by in the realm of science fiction is that of the force field.  It keeps things in - or out - by exerting a pure restraining force in space, and yet is invisible to the eye.  It might seem strange that this futuristic technology is fact, not fantasy; stranger still that its realisation is no breakthrough of our nuclear age, but has been available to civilisations for millennia: it is called glass.

Glass is a daily miracle.  The transparency that allows us to take it for granted defies the laws of physics.  We know that gases and liquids may be translucent, while solids, as their name suggests, generally have a visual inscrutability as well as a structural obduracy.  But not glass.  It is indeed a force field, able to hold objects in a fixed and demarcated space despite its invisibility.  Equally miraculously, it is chemically transparent too: the test-tube and the whole modern investigative apparatus of physical and biological sciences is only possible because of glass's near-inertness to almost every reagent.

We have lost our sense of wonder in the presence of this anomaly.  That wonder must have been immense when glass was first discovered; here, at last, people may have thought, was true alchemy - the transmutation of worthless, common sand into an awesome substance far more precious than mere vulgar gold.  We can still glimpse some of that sense of bafflement when we see animals confronting glass.  For them it is there and not there, incomprehensible and running counter to all their intuitions.

We have not entirely squandered our reverence for glass, although it manifests itself in a curious way.  If the fact of the substance is no longer cause for amazement, its destruction still carries a heavy and atavistic charge.  The sound of breaking glass is one of the most frightening: in its sudden, shattered chime there is a suggestion of some music of the spheres being lost, of a disorder entering the world.

In part this arises from the immediate disappearance of glass's restraining function: its magic is necessarily holistic.  Slivvers of glass are also a betrayal by their lethal sharpness of the implicit vitreous promise of control and smoothness.  And broken glass suggests intrusion: most glass that we encounter is in the form of windows.  Smashed panes are synonymous with the rupture of a building's protective shell, a penetration of our inner sanctum.

Perhaps, too, glass derives an associative power from its use in the special 'looking glasses' - mirrors.  The broken mirror has always been a potent symbol of a wrecked world.  Yet clearly to break a mirror means in fact to break its glass: earlier mirrors were made from polished metal, and so would never have broken, only faded or become scratched.  The tabooed breaking of a mirror, with its seven-year curse of ill-fortune, must refer to the smashing of the glass through which we see ourselves.  It is as if the glass were a boundary separating us from that reversed world.  Cracking the glass is to crack open the barrier which kept them asunder, unleashing the counterfactuality we see there.  In the mirror we retain our deepest if occulted sense of the power of glass.

(1989)

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Weird messages

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The first time I visited New York I stayed at the Vanderbilt YMCA on East 47th Street.  At $35 a day it was the cheapest place in town, and I needed that: the pound had reached near parity with the dollar, its all-time low, and I found myself paying £2 for a cup of coffee in some of the swankier locations like the Guggenheim.  The Y was well-situated in mid-town, but the accommodation was basic: rooms bare except for a bunk bed, a sink and a television; fairly primitive communal bathrooms, and a depressing, institutional dining room serving institutional food.  The presence of a gym and a sauna did little to dispel a faint air of seedy malodorousness. 

Nonetheless, the trip was deeply stimulating - it would have required a blinkered churlishness bordering on genius to have made New York otherwise.  My stay included many memorable experiences - a helicopter flight over the skyscrapers at dusk, night rides on the stinking subway, circumnavigating Manhattan Island on the Circle Line, and a walk through Harlem; but one superficially insignificant event sticks out, unassimilated to the overall pattern of my first encounter with the city. 

One evening, I returned to pick up my key after visiting various sights during the day.  As I did so, I was given a telephone message.  It said that Sheila had called and asked me to give her a ring, but that she would in any case call back.  She never did.  That did not worry me; the fact that I knew literally nobody called Sheila, did.  However, I assumed that somebody had mistaken the number, and that the front desk had confused the message.  It seemed unimportant, if curious. 

The next time I went to New York was for business.  I stayed at the Dorset Hotel on West 54th, an altogether grander establishment than my first.  Day rates were $150 and up.  My room was spacious, the en suite bathroom luxurious, and the inevitable television bigger and better and with more channels than the one in the Y.  My stay was short, and mostly occupied with work.  One night, when I came back reception told me that somebody had called.  I thought that perhaps my company had tried to contact me.  But instead I was handed a message which was even more disconcerting than Sheila's. 

The caller's name was indecipherable.  Not simply illegible: it was more that it was written in such a way that it could have been several - Dydio, Difao, Dixio, Dajaio, Dqeio - all of them strange, all of them unknown to me.  The message was unambiguous enough, at least in terms of what it said; what it meant, I had no idea.  There were just two words: "Please Duvox".  It was as if a huge rent had opened up in the fabric of reality, and a hand had reached through from another world, and passed me a message.  A message written on an ordinary piece of notepaper, perhaps an ordinary message, too - but not in this universe. 

Now I visit New York with a sense of trepidation, of expectation.  A part of me is waiting for that third weird message to be left, the one that will tell me something even more inexplicable, something even more disturbing, than the last two.  For I know now that these things happen in New York; in the meantime, I try to understand the city which spawns them.

(1989)

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Systemic dis-ease

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One day disease will no longer exist.  Bodily dysfunctions will be treated by replacing the faulty part, and infections will be eradicated - either by destroying all harmful bacteria and viruses, or, safer and more likely, by rendering the population immune to them.  Those who live in these edenic times to come will look back at ours and its constant battle against sickness and ill-health with disbelief and a sense of superiority - just as we arrogantly regard with condescension the Middle Ages and its ineffectual medical technology.  

In one respect in particular, the spectacle today's civilisation will present to posterity is certainly extraordinary.  Leaving aside the terrible suffering born of serious diseases, there is a whole class of infections that are essentially trivial, and yet that cause great, cumulative wretchedness.  Despite this misery, people are strangely inured to them: every year, almost everyone accepts that they will catch a bout of debilitating flu once, perhaps twice, and that they will suffer from food poisoning several times.  They submit to them as they submit to the seasons, to the tides, to the sun's rising.

It is true that there is little that we can yet do about influenza, despite first attempts at inoculations.  But what is remarkable is the disease's invisibility in our culture; it is as if as a common factor to everyone's life it simply drops out of people's reckoning.  Remarkable because for the sufferers this simple, boring, tiny infection seems to strike at the very root of their being.  In the space of a day or two our body's subtle equilibrium is knocked violently out of kilter; we ache, we shake, we shiver with cold while our head burns; the whole world seems to have narrowed down to a body which itself feels crushed to a fragile sliver by the burden of its miserable existence.

Just as common and even more dramatic are the symptoms of what doctors annoyingly call mild food poisoning.  There the sense of systemic suffering - where every act is purgatory, where existence itself seems tainted with an ineradicable biliousness and bitterness - is overmastering.  It is at such moments that weakly we dare to form the beginnings of a desire for a quick death.  Not that we specifically want to die: we simply crave non-being, nirvana, an absence of this total body sensation of literal ill-ness and dis-ease.

In the case of such non-life-threatening attacks, it is a pity we cannot remain sufficiently objective to savour it all - for example, the act and mechanics of projectile vomiting, as our wracked frame reverts to pure, clenching musculature, and as we threaten to defy topology and turn ourselves inside out like a glove.  In doing so we would experience with a unique vividness the full corporeality of our flesh - a corporeality which normally remains invisible to us, cloaked by our health.

But of course no such notions occur to us, we merely groan and luxuriate in our suffering.  Nor, surprisingly enough, do we draw any comfort from the thought that all these fascinating experiences will be denied to those poor, infectionless future generations.

(1989)

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The new Jesuits

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As an elite, the Jesuits have always been aloof and a mystery to outsiders.  Founded in 1534 by St Ignatius Loyola, the Society of Jesus was intended as a kind of spiritual SAS to help lead the fight against the heretical Protestants.  Soon the qualities of intelligence and ambition demanded of their members meant that they found themselves as confidants of kings and confessors to queens.  From these positions they were able to exercise an enormous influence by applying a tiny force to a mighty lever.  An intense dedication to their order was both their greatest strength and weakness: actions co-ordinated centrally by the Society gave them an unmatched global power; it also called into question their ultimate loyalties, and made them hated and despised by those whose influence they had eclipsed.

Now, the sites of authority have moved.  The baroque and classical palaces have become tourist attractions, while true power is wielded from the glistening post-modern castles of the giant multi-national corporations.  And there, just as in the state rooms of yore, you find latter-day Jesuits behind the ample leather thrones of the new royalty, the Managing Directors and Chief Executives.

They are the accountants.  Like the Jesuits, they are a breed apart from their peers, the other senior managers.  Usually brought in from outside rather than promoted internally, they follow their own track and destiny.  They are the company's father or mother confessor, but now it is economic rather than spiritual rigour that they apply.  Where before they would insist that you bared your soul to them, confessing every last heinous sin, now they will probe every last budget, every invoice, every forecast.

Like the stern priests, they are unmoved by sentiment: figures alone speak to them just as they seem to speak only in figures, their personal cabbalistic language.  And the absolution they offer is through figures, to be won by painful repentance in the form of the cut-back budget's abnegation, and through the public recantation of a scaled-down forecast.

As the Jesuits were, the accountants too are figures of fear in their kingdoms, hated for their disproportionate power, their incorruptibility, for their ambiguous loyalties, for their sober-garbed otherness, and for their indifference to all this hate.

Today's Jesuits represent a movement from the spiritual to the material, mirroring society's own shift in pre-occupations.  We are beginning to enter a third epoch, that of the mental, where information becomes the primary resource, and where the world, its contents and every experience within it are reduced to data.  As this shift continues we might expect to see the evolution of a third Jesuit class, one whose power is predicated on the audit of that information.  Perhaps they will be descendants of the present data processing managers; perhaps they will be the attendants of the mighty, thinking computers that one day may seize power; perhaps they will work alongside third millennium data barons who will control the world's population through its addiction to synthetic, digital experience.  One thing is for sure: the Jesuits will be there.

(1989)

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Rubbish

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There is a received image of archaeologists as lean, snowy-haired old men who spend their time on distant Anatolian hillsides, caressing the earth with a toothbrush in a narrow trench marked out by twine strung between small pegs, uncovering great, lost civilisations.  Just as Michelangelo said he saw within the rough-hewn marble block a statue, complete and fully-formed, which he then liberated with his mallet and chisel, so the archaeologists seem to be hunting for entire Atlantises drowned not by the surf but the sand, to be freed with a trowel and a bucket.  According to this view, archaeology is the combination of a recondite skill, an upmarket academic dowsing, with a kind of genteel, Surrey-garden delving such as you might apply to the cultivation of delicate orchids.

This is total rubbish.   For archaeology is actually about sifting through the detritus of ages, wading into the refuse tips of history, digging past all the old fish bones and rubble and pulling out an ancient - broken - bottle once used for storing horse embrocation fluid.

The past, as the word itself suggests, is to do with things which are finished with.  By definition, everything that is not being employed or kept for a purpose is either intentionally thrown away, lost or destroyed.  The archaeologist is concerned, therefore, with a class of objects conjugate to those which survive in use.  If they are not sorting through the successive layers of broken pots at the bottom of a well - a rich mine of old, dropped junk - then they are scrabbling for coins among the foundations of burnt cities like a posse of latter-day looters.

Certainly, there are finds which transcend these activities.  The hidden tombs of the Pharaohs, the great heroic ship burials, the vast ossuaries - all these may offer the archaeologist richer treasures than the base rubbish dumps.  Skeletons are often undisturbed; perhaps even the skin and hair remain where embalming has been carried out.  They will probably be adorned with dazzling jewels, and alongside there may fine furniture, earthenware, a comprehensive array of domestic items for the next world.  Understandable indeed is the archaeologists' joy when they happen upon such troves and cart them off to a museum.  It is unfortunate, then, that in doing so they act no better than the other grave-robbers they curse.

Whatever our feelings about the archaeologists' activities in despoiling graves or rooting around in old ordure, there is an interesting implication.  For ancient history emerges as predominantly the study of rubbish, supplemented perhaps by an odd document here or there - itself thrown away and preserved only as hidden backing to a later book.  A civilisation is known not by its ephemeral artistic achievements, but by the perdurable pile of leftovers from the great feast of its daily activities.

On this basis, then, ours will be a deathless civilisation; our fame - and our rubbish - will live for ever.  In our huge though blind generosity, we have donated to posterity unimaginable tons of the stuff, sitting there in the earth, buried like a dragon's hoard, waiting for future archaeologists to stumble across it, to enjoy and appreciate as only they can.

(1989)

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