The crown in the jewel

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'The Lay of Havelok the Dane' is a thirteenth century Middle English poem written in the transitional language between the inflected Germanic of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer's more modern tongue.  It is an engaging if unremarkable tale of a young Danish prince who discovers his royal origins and claims his stolen birthright - a kind of fairy-tale Hamlet - written in the period's characteristically fast-paced short rhyming couplets of four stresses.  For the antiquarian the main point of interest is that the step-father of the eponymous hero is called Grimsby, and the Lay purports to explain how he came to found the town of the same name.

More intriguing for the general reader is the plot device used to reveal Havelok's princely birth.  As he lies sleeping, a blinding ray of light issues from his mouth.  This unprepared irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise naturalistic tale may be surprising but it is by no means unique: a more famous and rather better poem in Middle English, 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', has a knight who is not only literally green, but who calmly submits to a beheading, then picks up his head and walks off with it.  The link with folklore's figure of the Green Man who dies and rises again - itself based on myths surrounding the cycle of planting and reaping crops - seems patent, as is the thoroughgoing permeation of the Arthurian cycle concerning the Quest for the Holy Grail with references to other pre-Christian vegetation rites.

Havelok's royal light is proof that he, like all kings and queens, is an extraordinary being, endowed with an angelic radiance.  It is an idea that has been part of the iconography of royalty since the very first representations, albeit in a sublimated form: the crown.  Those blinding rays may come from the head not the mouth, but in essence they are the same.  The gleaming crown is a physical embodiment of the halo of semi-divinity which has always clung to kinghood.

To reinforce this idea, the gold and silver of crowns have habitually been embellished with jewels.  Though the initial impulse may have been vanity and a love of manifest pomp, this development was no simple mindless display of the monarch's wealth.  These otherwise useless lumps of mineral were held precious when cut because they radiated another royal light, one that amplified the luminescence of the crown they adorned.

The imagery of gems is so faded, and our perception of them so dulled, that we forget too easily the tremendous presence of a fine jewel.  And if we can lose touch with the simple primitive awe owed to a single stone, how much greater is our need to be reminded of the humbling presence of a magnificent crown?  A useful corrective is a visit to the Jewel House at the Tower of London.  To see close up the Imperial State Crown with its thousands of brilliants, rubies and sapphires, or the noble and ancient St Edward's Crown, to witness the glinting prismatic rays of the Koh-i-noor diamond or of the Sceptre's huge Star of Africa is to experience afresh the raw power of the precious stone, to regain the sense of the mysterious and the transcendental in a true crown, and to reach back to the ancient knowledge that lay behind Havelok's strange but veridical proof of royalty.

(1990)

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Colonising names

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In all taxonomies there is a tension between brevity and limpidity.  At one end of the scale you could simply number every object in a class, a compact but unhelpful approach.  At the other end, you could attach a full, descriptive name, which aids understanding but negates classification's purpose, concision.

One problem common to all labelling systems is coping with the addition of new members.  As more and more are added, so the labelling must become more complex to encompass them.  A case in point is the allocation of telephone numbers.  Demand in London became so great that the capital was split into an inner and outer zone, with respective prefixes 071 and 081 replacing the old 01 code.  An alternative would have been to add an extra digit to every telephone number in the country, preserving London's single 01 prefix.  As usual, people have opted for the easier, though less logical, implementation.

The same growth in complexity has occurred with personal names.  Look at any long list of past incumbents in an ancient parish church, and it is striking how the names start off simply, perhaps just a Hugh or a Peter, and gradually blossom into John of Wykeham, before becoming full-blown first names and surnames.  Today we find that process taken even further, with middle names a crucial distinguishing factor in certain circumstances, especially bureaucratic ones.

Our hankering after older, simpler schemes manifests itself in social situations.  If we know someone well enough, we tend to think of them by their first name;  any confusion between similarly-named people is usually resolved by context.  This works well enough for business and casual acquaintances, but with names of our dearly beloved it is not so simple.

The closer we get to someone, the more we imbue their name with our feelings for them.  It is perhaps significant that we address our parents not by name, but call them instead by neutral descriptions - 'mother' and 'father'.  Given the strength of this emotional attachment we would probably find it impossible ever to apply their names to anyone else: in effect, that name would become our personal word for 'mother'.

But we have no such linguistic buffer with friends and lovers.  If we know John very well, or love Jane to madness, our reactions to those with the same name will never again be normal: the burden of the past, called up by that incantatory set of sounds, will obtrude between us and the person.  Similarly, once we have hated a Jim, we will find ourselves uncomfortably constrained in the presence of a new, quite blameless Jim.

It is as if each name can carry only one experience for us: once charged, it is used up, set, a mental landmark we must live with and move around.  The people we know and love circumscribe our future acts and relations: we may rebuff the perfect mate for her wrong name, or find ourselves unable to christen our child as we wish without making him a revenant.  In a world of colonised names, we wander poor and dispossessed.  Perhaps it would be easier if we were called by our telephone numbers.

(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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Meta-physicality

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The social dimension of health clubs is well recognised.  Nobody pretends they join one just to become fit: for that, street-running and working out at home easily suffice.  Instead, they function as our time's equivalent of the nineteenth-century gentlemen's clubs, primary sites for meeting like-minded people.  But now the differentiating specialisations of the Garrick, the Athenaeum or the Reform have been replaced in the health industry by a commonality of preoccupations which together might stand as our era's epitaph: the post-modern trinity of youth, beauty and money.

The basic premise of health clubs - energetic physical exercise by the nearly-naked - determines the first two.  It is something of an irony that such clubs are attended only by those whose bodies are reasonably fit and good-looking to start with: the constant appraisal by hypercritical peers - encouraged by the unforgiving mirrors placed everywhere - is enough to enforce this aesthetic with all but the most self-confident or oblivious of bodily offenders.

The third element of the health club's defining triad arises from unsubtly elitist pricing.  In a rebuff to naive economic theories of demand, upmarket health clubs prosper and gain more members as their annual fee rises: in doing so, an implicitly better - that is, richer - class of person is selected, and the perceived quality and attractiveness of the membership increases.  It is the mitigated, incremental version of not wanting to join any club that would have you as a member.

But health clubs are not all crass superficiality and snobbish materialism; there is a strong moral dimension too.  It stems from the very nature of the physical work-out.  Because there is no alternative to enduring the full grind and hell of exercise to achieve its end-results, you cannot cheat.  Working out offers the all-too literal embodiment of getting only what you pay for, with the added twist that money alone cannot buy you fitness - even in a health club: you have to earn it through your personal, sweaty endeavours.  Most extremely, the gym's apothegm is 'no pain, no gain': not only must you work for your achievements, you must pay with suffering.  The reward of the resultant sense of smug self-satisfaction is almost greater than that of fitness.

One consequence of meting out this punishment is that you become intensely alive to the fact and technology of your body.  As you push harder against the flesh and its limits, your attention focuses on the battle between body and mind.  In this apparent dualism, the extraordinary nature of will manifests itself: you are forcing yourself to do something you both want and do not want to do.  But once the exercise has finished, and you begin in the tranquillity of your endorphins to reap its benefits, it is the negation of that dualism you are most aware of.  Just as those who are grossly fat seem to move their bodies as if they were huge imposed barrels of being that must be rolled awkwardly along, so those who are trim and fit have paradoxically no sense of the physicality of their bodies at all.  Instead, they become pure mind, their erstwhile limbs weightless and perfect mediators of the will.  Ultimately the health club's work-out proves to be not so much physical as metaphysical.

(1990)

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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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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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