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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The profit of the beard

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Why do men grow beards? 

Passive acquiescence apart, we have at the very least the Everest explanation: because it is there.  Growing a beard is unanswerable proof that you can grow a beard; until then, however hirsute you may be, your beard is only potential, and therefore possibly feeble and risible.  And since time immemorial weak beards have by association been equated with those unable to grow them at all - the eunuchs, whose smoothness, that terrible facial absence, is their sad badge of manly dishonour.  To grow a beard is to wear a blazon, to throw in the world's face your face with its manifest masculinity.

Beards are not pure machismo.  On the contrary, there is a strong element of coquetry to them, a concern with the minutiae of appearance that in other contexts would be tagged dismissively as effeminate.  Men affect to despise such pre-occupations, but in reality they simply have less scope for them than women.  Given that make-up for Western men remains without social sanction, there are only two elements of the male visage that allow any latitude for acceptable personal flamboyance: cranial and facial hair.

  
Ordinary hair theoretically offers endless possibilities, and a wide range of tonsures is indeed found.  But here Nature plays a cruel trick on millions of men: their very masculinity, as measured by the hormonal rush of testosterone which courses through their veins every adult moment, undermines the premise and promise of the proud mane with a dreaded condition sometimes hidden under that terminological toupee, alopecia.  Or, to put it baldly, baldness.  Where women may express themselves with awe-inspiring concoctions of hair until late dotage, men are often reduced at an early age to shiny-pated skulls, fit only for phrenologists' models.

But even the headiest brew of the body's chemicals seems to leave the beard unscathed.  Hence the hordes of bearded, balding men: the one compensates for the other.  It also allows them the luxury of variegated styles: their hair may be gone or going, but they can still choose from a glorious gnathic gamut.  There are bushy beards, beards of stubble, beards combed up or down; Charles I beards, moustachioed and moustacheless beards; goatees, mandarins, beards to the chin and beards down the neck; long, white wizard beards and curious little beards shaved like an 'O' about the mouth.  And beyond these, there are shapes and styles without a name, marvellous idiosyncratic variations on the theme of bristles.

With this variety comes the possibility of change.  It is striking how women are re-animated and even re-juvenated simply by an alteration of hair-style; with the new image comes a sense of new possibilities, of a sloughing-off of old cares with old looks.  A beard gives a man the same luxury, that of re-making himself, of surprising the world.

Finally, there is the supreme treat - one denied to all women however well-endowed they are with gorgeous, silken tresses and a pampering panoply of attendant hairdressers  - available only to the man who has grown a beard: the simple, unforgettable experience of shaving it off.

(1989)

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