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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Ludwig van who?

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In our apotheosis of the greatest artists we strip them of the very humanity that lies at the root of that greatness.  Too often we elide the life, thinking of the works, not the men and women who made them.  We may know in a purely abstract way that they were born on such a date, studied here, married there, produced this masterpiece under those conditions, but these remain disembodied statements: they have no person at their centre.

Because of our awe, we tend to think of Beethoven, say, as a kind of Platonic essence, the common divine factor to all his music.  We forget that he was ultimately a deaf, smelly old man who died in great loneliness.  More importantly, we forget that he was born at a time when the classical idiom in music was reaching its maturity; as a result, he happened to arrive on the scene when there was a perfect framework for the kind of compositional iconoclasm that forms the core of his achievement.  In a word, as far as timing was concerned, he was lucky.

This may seem an outrageous thing to say about one of the supreme musical masters; but it does not detract from that mastery: the music he wrote still required an incomparable genius to write it.  But the fact remains that just as his time needed someone with exactly his skills to produce the works he did, so Beethoven himself needed precisely that time.

Take the same man - the same physical and psychological make-up, though obviously with an upbringing changed in details - born now in the fourteenth century.  Music was fundamentally different in its sound, its structure, its scale, and in its performance.  A fourteenth century Beethoven might well have produced masterpieces within those conventions, but they would never have had the impact of works which could draw on the rich and complex possibilities of the classical language at its peak.

The same is true of all the greatest artists.  Shakespeare needed the English language to be poised exactly as he found it - a fresh and subtle blend of powerful Anglo-Saxon roots with infinitely variable Latinate extensions.  Born a hundred years later and his works for the stage would have been incomprehensible doggerel.  Rembrandt too absolutely required the Renaissance's anthropocentric assumptions, and his milieu's painterly techniques, to make the final searing self-portraits possible.  Picture him during the impressionist era, an eccentric and obsessive academician.

If the key creators are great partly because of their eras, it follows that there may well be hidden among us Beethovens and Rembrandts or equivalent figures, whose particular cast of genius is at odds with today's artistic currents; they are like powerful orators forced to use a bad phrase book to communicate awkwardly in a language not their own.

But we should not mourn these losses too much; after all, there are for certain greater tragedies.  For example, the millions of gifted children who will never realise or even discover their vocation, through being born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a desperate poverty which makes art a superfluity.  There are Beethovens out there, for sure; but we will never know their names.

(1989)

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The knife's deity

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The story of weaponry has been the saga of actions at increasing  distance.  The mutual danger of hand-to-hand grappling gave way first to the impersonal stones and clubs, and then to slings and arrows which removed the attacker from the immediate arena of the attack.  Following them were guns whose thousand yard reach was then lengthened into miles with the development of artillery.  Today the ultimate weapon will be launched with the press of a button by people buried deep in the earth against unseen and unknown populations half the world away.  Target and effects will be little more than figures on a monitor, the final de-personalisation of the business of murder.

Amidst this abstract death by technology, the knife remains the most intimate of weapons, and still provokes an elemental fear in us.  The very act of stabbing is like a violation of the tissues it penetrates.  To be cut with a knife is to feel an invasion of the body: it is as if the blade were probing for the soul within.

The knife is not gross like a blow from a club; it is not sudden and brutal like a bullet.  There is something haughty and horribly clinical about a knife; it is no coincidence that the sharpest and most efficacious knife of all is that wielded by the disinfected, omnipotent surgeon.  Such antiseptic sterility suggests the inhuman; and what is inhuman is by implication inexorable.

Hence the propensity of crazed murderers to choose some old fashioned blade for their worst and most depraved acts.  Often those acts tend towards the ritualistic, and the knife has always been a pre-requisite for sacrifice: picture the spiritual squalor of a ceremony in which the victim - animal or human - were shot or clubbed to death.  The knife sanctifies that which it destroys, as if it were the mysterious touch of something that blesses.

We acknowledge frankly this ever-present god of the knife.  Given a honed and glinting blade, we hold it gingerly, and handle it reverently.  We know that there is a powerful spirit within, whom we treat without due respect at our peril.  Vengeance is swift and terrible.

This I found to my cost once.  Handling a Swiss army knife with a positively baroque multiplicity of tools, I began carelessly exploring its secrets.  After opening the main blade I found its lesser brothers and sisters.  Then there were corkscrews, bottle-openers, and a pair of scissors, first cousins to the knife.  All of these were released awkwardly, but the scissors proved particularly difficult.

In frustration, I tugged hard on them.  Finally they emerged in their miniature Swiss neatness.  All this while I had neglected the splay of razor-sharp knives already arrayed.  As I sprang out the scissors suddenly, my thumb drove deep onto one of the waiting blades.  For a second or two I gazed abstractly at the clean parting of the flesh; then a huge bright red blossoming welled up.  I realised I had sinned against the knife's deity, and that this was my punishment and reparation.

(1987)

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Wallpaper

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Powerscourt is a great country house just outside Dublin.  It stands on a magnificent site with formal terraced Italian gardens running down a steep hillside towards a lake and a fountain framed by tall, dark trees.  The Wicklow mountains form the backdrop.  Tragically the house itself was gutted by fire in 1974; all that remains is the shell.  Peering through the windows at what were once the grand saloons, you see massive bushes and greenery pressed up against the glass, eerily filling the whole space.  In one of the wings the rooms remain bare and empty.  There you see no foliage, just ancient, faded wallpaper.

There is something particularly sad about old wallpaper exhibited in this unwonted, even unseemly, manner.  It is as if wallpaper were the undergarments of a house.  Unlike the bluff, confident facades presented to the outside world, wallpaper is meant to remain private and hidden.  In the harsh light of day it looks wan and vulnerable.

This sense of vulnerability stems from all the emotions we invest in our wallpapers.  New wallpaper is put up with such hope; it is an act of faith in a domicile.  And few things in our home make such a strong statement about our self-image, our chosen environment, our aspirations.

For this reason wallpaper does not travel well between different domestic contexts: often the first task after moving into a new house is to strip the old owner's wall coverings.  The act is partly symbolic: the old internal skin is sloughed off, and a new one grafted on.  Mostly it is simply that you find their choice appalling and incomprehensible.

The incomprehensibility of other people's wallpaper is literal: you cannot understand the patterns and the accretion of other marks.  The latter are born of years of living, and can only be read by their authors.  That was where we spilt the soup; that was when the dog went wild; that was the height of little Freddy when he was two.  Wallpapers absorb our lives' tiny details: they are a domestic palimpsest.

More importantly, you cannot read the patterns.  Living with a wallpaper means imbibing its pattern, humming along to its visual mantra.  Each day that pattern is reinforced until your eyes become so conversant with it that it is part of the very fabric of the visible world.  Encountering a new wallpaper is like hearing a harsh and discordant eye-music.

The importance and impact of wallpaper patterns is perhaps greatest for children.  They spend much of their early lives in bed, either ill or else failing to go to sleep.  What is there to do, but look at the wallpaper?  Again and again and again, until they feel hypnotised by its insidious and relentless rhythms.  The shapes and images begin to vibrate and hover in space; they seem to be filling the entire world; for the bed-ridden child, it is the world.  Which is why we are still shocked and saddened to see a house or block of flats being pulled down.  The intimate wallpapers are exposed, their secrets revealed, the personal histories betrayed.  When we see wallpaper abused in this way we see the past torn and fading, and we are suddenly aware of the paper-like fragility of our own world.

(1989)

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