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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