Booting up

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The blank page has always been the writer's foe.  It lies there, supine, flaunting its passivity so shamelessly that it gradually assumes the character of a challenge.  Today, however, the author has an alternative which not only avoids these traditional pitfalls, but even counters them with corresponding benefits: the word processor.

The blank page is replaced by a blank screen, but one which is vivified by the business of loading up the word processing software.  The preliminary acts alone bespeak a new, more dynamic approach.  First you place the floppy disc in the disc drive; it is like a key inserted into a lock: it promises to release you from the writer's prison of wordlessness.  Then you power up - a gloriously apt phrase for that heady sense of artistic potentiation, of the incipient forging of words into worlds.

Upon switching on the machine, it already starts reacting, coming to meet you halfway - no mere tool, but an accomplice.  It purrs like a sleek and thoroughbred animal, and the screen flickers into action, awaking from its silent silicon dreams.  Words appear - the machine is giving you words before it attempts to take them, encouraging you by its example.  Sometimes the initial messages greet with an easy familiarity, sometimes they are reassuringly business-like.  Either way, they spring into life with an ease which begins to imply that all succeeding words will follow as fluently and as effortlessly.  The blank screen becomes now a taut-stretched canvas, straining for your marks, the tiny blinking cursor in the top left-hand corner an eager child signalling for you to join the game.

Compare all this to the typewriter - which is revealed now as a kind of decerebrated word processor, inert and unable to respond, a purely mechanical assemblage of levers.  The pen and pencil are seen for the wicked, pointed weapons that they are; no wonder that the blank page is so recalcitrant - paper is not used but abused: you attack it, applying an unremitting pressure with your mad surgeon's word scalpel.

By contrast the computer's keyboard is like that of a piano - or, better, like that of some infinitely delicate and subtle instrument such as a clavichord.  As the fingers wander gracefully over its keys, they seem to be tapping out an intricate prelude of Bach.  More than that, as you type, the gentle and flowing movements gain a rhythm of their own; the tactile sensation passes from mere sensuousness to sensuality, until the act of writing is transmuted into a constant loving caress.

Switching on a computer is sometimes called booting up, a reference to the process of bootstrapping, or pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.  The phrase is a neat metaphor for how the machine manages to load a program before it has loaded a program which tells it how to load a program.  This marvellous act of self-creation is a gift such machines offer their users every time they are turned on.  Booting up stands as a constant reminder to the writer who is about to construct without scaffolding some bridge of words across a chasm of non-existence that such miracles are indeed possible.

(1989)

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Dalliance

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As we came out of the theatre after a performance of Schnitzler's Dalliance we wondered out loud whether we would ever see again the strange lights we had noticed some months previously.  As we walked back across Waterloo bridge, we looked up into the area of the sky where they had appeared before.  To our mingled horror and delight, there was the same quivering brightness.

We slowed our steps, our hearts in our mouths and our stomachs in our boots.  We were half-pleased that what we had seen had really been there, that it was reproducible.  But we were also slightly disappointed that, being reproducible, the phenomenon might have a mundane explanation, that we had not been privileged spectators of the dawn of a new age.  It seemed unlikely that UFOs should choose to hover over exactly the same spot of the Thames during a period of some months - and never be noticed.

We walked along the bridge, our straining eyes riveted upon the same indistinct watery light we had seen before.  Again there was no sound of helicopters, just the wind blowing on this slightly cloudy night.  As we stood by the parapet, we noticed a woman who was talking to a man next to her.  Occasionally she glanced in the same general direction as we were looking.  We went up to them.  I made some non-committal remark about the sight and she replied unperturbedly, then went on talking with her companion.  We looked at this man; he too was gazing up at the sky.  And he seemed to have something in his hands.

It was clearly a reel, though the cord was too fine to be seen in the dark.  Simulating a greater sang-froid than I felt, I asked him if he were responsible.  He said yes.  I restrained myself from hurling him into the river there and then, and asked for more details.

He was American, and an inventor.  His brainchild was a kind of kite with a rotor which he claimed could stay aloft with even the merest hint of wind.  It was effectively self-supporting.  It glistened and glimmered as it spun in a light which shone skyward from Somerset House - the reason he had chosen this spot.  I quizzed him on the double occurrence we had seen, and the rapid movement.  He said he sometimes flew two, and that slight movements on the ground could bring about deceptively large ones in the sky.  He was doing this as a publicity stunt prior to the publication of his book on the subject.  So now we knew.

I left very chastened.  I had learnt that however improbable or even impossible it may seem at the time, there is always an explanation.  Those two shocking and cancelling experiences produced by their mixing a kind of vaccine that has inoculated me against all further heretical anti-scientific thoughts.  As a re-confirmed rationalist I am prepared to chant with the rest of the adepts the creed of logical positivism.  But one day something will be discovered that does genuinely lie outside the present boundaries of science.  The latter will then be expanded just far enough to include the new phenomenon.  This leaves us seekers after certitude with a rather elastic kind of dogma, one still with a frightening leeway for perfectly reasonable flirtation with the perfectly unreasonable.

(1986)

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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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