I think, therefore -

Central to Descartes' philosophy is the clear and distinct idea.  If we perceive something with a real clarity which admits of no doubt, then we may accept its truth.  Provided, of course, that there is a God whose perfection necessarily guarantees that He is no deceiver.  God's existence we can deduce from that sense of perfection which complements our innate sense of imperfection.  And that innate sense is rooted in Descartes' most famous proposition: 'cogito, ergo sum' - I think, therefore I am - a privileged concept which must be true, no matter how deceived we are in all other respects.  If I am deceived, I exist.  And so on that one bedrock certainty, the edifice of Cartesian philosophy is built.

The clear and distinct idea may seem, paradoxically, to be far too vague a method with which to construct that edifice.  And yet we have probably all experienced the reality and power of that feeling in studying mathematics.  Indeed, it was from the pure and perfect certainties of mathematics that Descartes drew the original inspiration for his clear and distinct idea: he was gripped by the unique sensation of understanding the steps of a theorem - truly seeing them with a blinding clarity as if gazing directly at the countenance of reality.  He was doubtless also struck by the concomitant sense of grasping the totality of a mathematical proof.  When we fully understand a proof, it is not just the individual steps which we see clearly: we also hold the sum of them in a simultaneous vision.

It is an exhilarating feeling.  I shall never forget half a day I spent at university trying to comprehend, to hold in my head, the steps of a particularly profound but recondite theorem in General Relativity - Hawking's so-called Second Law of Black Holes.  Gradually each part fell into place.

Then, as the last lemma in the demonstration was lit up by my strained understanding, for a few glorious moments the whole amazing proof stood present in my mind - not as a series of hard-won and tiny illuminations, but as a complete and single blazing truth.  It was like unbolting a long series of doors, and then placing myself so that through their aligned openings I could see a vision of paradise. The sensation lasted for a few minutes only, as if the mental energy required for this feat was too great to be sustained for longer.  The alignment was lost, and the doors began to close.

It is not just in the rarefied atmosphere of mathematics that we encounter these manifestations of the Cartesian clear and distinct idea - or its absence.  How often in reading do we find the words suddenly drop out of focus, convey no meaning as we lose the thread, as our concentration vanishes?  And talking with someone we can in an instant find ourselves in the middle of a sentence without any idea of its destination, lost amidst a babble of sounds.  To talk and write meaningfully and transparently we must have within us that sense of the step-wise progression building to an overall argument.  Losing that sense is terrifying, because it threatens a loss of our selfhood's defining function of a coherent viewpoint; but running with it, either in speech or in writing, is to experience and embody consciousness at its most clear and distinct.
 
(25.11.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - AI’s Secret

Index

LP RIP

Like children, we are easily impressed by changes in scale.  On the one hand we are always delighted by successively bigger buildings, chunkier earth-moving equipment and longer single-span bridges; on the other, we marvel over the constant miniaturisation which lies at the heart of most electronic technologies.  Once that change in scale has occurred, we find it hard to take the old size seriously. False sophisticates, we laugh at other people's small aeroplanes and enormous floppy discs.

The same is true of LPs and CDs: the latter can make the former seem gross by comparison.  To some, the discs are their own emblems: the one, big and black like a huge piece of liquorice, the other small and iridescent as if a tiny galaxy had fallen to earth.  For converts to CDs, the 12 inches of vinyl belongs to an age of cat's whisker radios, Morse code telegraphy and horseless carriages.

Certainly the technologies seem to back this up.  An LP works by placing a physical stylus in a track which wobbles in a kind of three-dimensional hula dance.  Its operation is analogue; that is, the transcription process converts the infinitely subtle variations of music into completely equivalent variations in the surface of the record.

CDs are digital.  They take music and translate it to a kind of Platonic essence made up entirely of numbers. Proponents might argue that there is a rigour in this process which is almost metaphysical; CDs, they would say, glean the musicness from the raw sounds, and code it in the most abstract and therefore most spiritual of systems.  Moreover, the instrument for mediating this conversion is again purity itself: light.  Laser light, too, which is a super-purified, co-ordinated variety.  It seems clear, then, that the CD is the acme of technology, whereas the LP is positively Neanderthal in its crudeness.

And yet.  It is a curious but well-attested fact that the very best gramophone systems produces a superior sound to even top-flight CD players.  The difference is most telling for the human voice. Compared to the lean, clean sound of an LP, a CD has a certain indescribable edge to it; there is a distinct metallic tang to the sound of singing.  In the worst cases you feel that you are listening not to a human, but to an android offering a passable but not perfect imitation.  This effect is real, and is a product of the CD's vaunted technology.  By its very nature, digitisation is a finite process, and encodes only a finite level of detail in the music.  When reconstituted, there is a tiny element which is lost. The subtle human ear can detect this absence which it perceives as a harshness in the upper frequencies.

So those who cling to the LP are not entirely sentimentalists.  At the moment, this big, old, clunky technology is actually superior.  Recording companies are shifting to CDs for two simple reasons; it enables them to introduce a price differential, and on cheaper audio systems a CD does sound better.   The CD, then, is a glistening monument to corporate profits and the power of mass mediocrity.  Which only makes the LP, the antithesis of both, even more attractive to its unabashedly elitist enthusiasts.

(22.10.89)

Index

Bookness

The book is extraordinary technology.  Computers may be touted increasingly as its successor, but in terms of portability, display options, storage density and access modes, they still come a very poor second.  And even when these technical shortcomings have been addressed, computers will never entirely supersede the book.

For the book has a unique and irreplaceable attribute: its physicality.  The act of picking up a book is beautifully apt: it offers you the promise of reaching out and taking all that lies within.  Balanced on the palm of your hand, a book almost throbs with potential like a mighty mental engine, its intellectual content manifest in its weight.  And fanning through its pages can be as satisfyingly cathartic as telling beads or spinning a prayer wheel, a catharsis that comes from a simple bodily action tapping into a complex symbolic one.

That physicality also gives books a scale quite separate from their abstract stature, one which allows us to relate to them directly, with our bodies.  In this sense, no book is inhuman.  Most are comfortingly domestic: small enough to carry around and easy to read; giant tomes may impress by their size and bulk, but they never threaten; and the tiniest books, virtuoso artefacts of a miniature world, emphasise the essential gift of the medium: that of so much being held in so little.

Through its physical presence, the book offers not just informational content but also the experience of its mediation - the outward form becomes an attribute as key as the plot line it transmits.  Some of my most vivid memories of reading are of books whose appearance was an indissoluble part of the whole encounter.

For example the black, brooding covers of the Wessex edition of Thomas Hardy's novels already hint at and form part of the story of human sadness and despair which lie within.  Similarly, the layout, typeface and paper of The Oxford Illustrated Dickens have shaped my image of his world as much as Hablot K. Browne's characteristic representation of the characters.  Even my reaction to the unencompassable Shakespeare has been tinged by the nature of first complete edition of his works that I bought: it cost just 9/6d, was printed on thick, crude stock in tiny, dense type laid out in endless columns like wallpaper; and yet the mere thought of it still suggests the spine-shivering plenitude of his achievement.

This obsession with books as objects is not new.  Nor is it simply a matter of a bibliophile's delight in fine bindings or crisp printing.  Petrarch treasured a copy of Homer in the original Greek - of which he could read not a word; the content alone - inaccessible to him, but somehow present nonetheless - endowed the book with a magic which raised it above all others.  I, too, have found myself buying books not to read them, but simply to have them because of what they contain.  It is as if owning them gave us their knowledge. This clearly reaches right back to the most primitive response to books, a fear of their inexplicable power, and a desire to master them by possession.  Implicit in this ancient fear is an amazement, a huge, ancient wonder at the miracle of their bookness.

(27.10.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker)

Index

Our type

The Taj Mahal is not a building, but a book. Its surface is covered with text, but in a script often so abstract it has passed beyond a representational system into pure art.  That art was born of Islam's stern edicts concerning pictorial images which were considered a derogation of Allah's divine rights.  As a result, artists turned to the only stuff they had, the words of God, as conveyed through his prophet Mohammed in the Koran.  Since the content was immutably fixed, great artists were forced to express themselves through subtle variations in the form.  The mullahs could hardly object; nothing was added or taken away from the meaning; the ornate style was simply a manifestation of the artist's reverence for the unchanging verities of the Book.
 
Great civilisations further east have adopted a similar approach.  Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings often include poems or other texts.  Poets produced copies of their verses which were themselves treasured as works of art.  Part of the poetry lay in the creation of beautiful ideograms, and the truly great poem was one that married form and content in a single perfect expression of the poet's feelings.

Western culture shows a signal blindness to the form of things. Calligraphy has never been taken seriously as an artistic discipline; if regarded at all, it is as decoration.  Instead we have become obsessed with content, always trying forlornly to dissolve the mediation which stands between us and the text.  Hence our obsession with simplifications, condensations, extracts - all designed to give us the essence, the Platonic heart. Our Koran is The Reader's Digest.

But we delude ourselves. As the East knows well, even if only unconsciously we read the form as well as the content.  Witness the distaste with which we greet even slight redesigns of favourite newspapers and magazines: though we cannot articulate the problem, things look off, strangely wrong.  Some can say why, and do know that appearances are important.  They are the typographers, the crafters of the faces we choose churlishly to ignore.  They and the designers who use their work know the subtle magic of the serif, the crude impact of the bold, the foxy grace of the italic.  They know the myriad alchemies of mixing types such as Times, Bodoni, Futura, Palatino and Oracle.

Like subliminal messages, the characteristic forms of letters leave their imprint on us, a resonance lingering in the mind, inkily colouring the words they carry.  This colouring works both ways: typefaces may tinge our view of a word and its concept, but in a kind of Newtonian balancing of reaction and action, those typefaces are similarly infected by the ideas they convey.  By constant repetition of such associations, entire categories of life fall into disjoint classes determined by their common defining letterings.  As a result, surreal gossamer linkages lie across our culture, as a typeface strongly associated with a shampoo turns up in that of an airline or of soup, or another linked in your mind with a magazine is seen carrying a poster hoarding's propaganda.  Everything we choose or do or think tugs at and is tugged by these threads; they form a tiny but key part of that complex entity which goes to make up our 'type'. 

(9.12.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - A Chinese Scroll

Index

Managerial joys

For the modern middle manager, there are countless pains and two pleasures.  Both derive from the control he or she exercises over their fiefdoms.  Since the control is limited, the pleasures are necessarily tiny but, to the connoisseur, also exquisite.

The first relates to what is usually called the trading statement.  It presents as a snapshot the state of the manager's concern.  Typically it shows a breakdown of income, of variable costs, fixed costs, and any other overheads.  Each figure is presented for the time period in question - a week or a month, perhaps - along with its variance from the figure predicted in the plan for the year, determined previously.  There is also a cumulative figure for the year to date, together with variances.  There may also be sundry other statistics offering different cross-sections of the business - turnover per staff, return on sale and so on.

This document offers to the manager all the challenge and excitement of a good crossword puzzle or detective story.  For hidden within those figures lies the secret truth, the definitive facts about what he or she and their team achieved in that period.  It contains inarguable clues as to failings by them or their suppliers, offers implicit admonishments to all without fear or favour; it hints subtly at trends, nudges helpfully towards solutions; it crystallises and memorialises the very essence of the manager's actions, both a symbol and instrument of rank.   To read the latest trading statement is, for the true middle manager, akin to the experience of reading the score of a Mozart symphony for a musician.

How much greater then is the second pleasure, that of preparing business plans.  For if the trading statement is simply a passive recollection in tranquillity of past corporate deeds, the business plan offers the manager the unique privilege of predicting - and shaping - the future.  It is pro-activity incarnate.  Preparing the plan, the manager feels the stream of time coursing through the veins.  He or she becomes a conduit, able to influence in their own small way the turn of events to come.

This supreme managerial joy is born of a sense of poised equilibrium between power and impotence.   The power stems from the detail required: typically a business plan needs the same kind of information provided by a trading statement - though without the variances - for each time period in the coming year.  It is like a map through time of the department's actions.  The impotence arises from the ultimate unknowability of the tomorrow: even the best manager is frequently surprised by unforeseen problems - and opportunities. He or she feeds off this thrilling tension.

Recently, this latter joy has been enhanced by a technology that exposes its true, playful nature.  The advent of the micro-based spreadsheet - effectively an electronic budget sheet - has meant that the preparation of plans has become both easy and fun.  Significantly, the speculative element has been enhanced too; the so-called What-if? function allows the wildest fantasies to be effortlessly, safely - and secretly - indulged.  Oh, to be a manager, now that April and the new financial year with its attendant need for a fresh business plan are here.

 
(9.12.89)

Index

Where are the New Chiliasts?

Wulfstan, Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Worcester and York, was not an optimist.  In a sermon he wrote: "Many portents shall occur throughout the wide world, both heavenly apparitions and terrestrial disturbances, before that great judgement comes for us all.  And verily, just as the flood came once on account of sin, so now comes the fire upon mankind for sin's sake, and it approaches rapidly."  Preaching his famous 'Address to the English' he said: "Dearly beloved, know what is true; this world is in haste, and nears its end; and for this reason as time goes on, the worse things get; and on account of the people's sin it will grow even worse until the advent of the Antichrist.  And verily, at that time it shall be fear and terror throughout the wide world."
 
Wulfstan may have been extreme, but he was not alone.  Like him, many around the turn of the first Christian millennium were convinced that the end was nigh and the Antichrist close to hand.  1000AD was not the only date to fear; 1033, the thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion, was a popular second choice, when the millennium itself passed without incident.  And when in its turn 1033 came and went, 1065 was the next candidate; for in that year the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday for the first time that century.

Such chiliasm seemed natural enough at the time.  For a society touched with an almost childlike wonder at patterns and congruences in numbers, the millennium was clearly a special date.  The harrying of the barbarous Vikings around the coasts of Europe and their audacious forays deep inland only added to the sense that time had grown old and was staggering towards the embrace of the Antichrist.  We, too, teeter on the brink of the millennium.  If we lack the numerological turn of mind of our forebears, surely we have enough portents, surrounded as we are by daily chaos and carnage, and the dissolution of society's most cherished values? Where then are the New Chiliasts, the lashers of an overripe age about to reap its bitter fruits?

Perhaps it is an idea whose time has not yet come.  At the moment we seem to be enjoying a last fool's paradise.  Ceasefires are being announced in long-standing wars, fashionable glasnost is thawing the hardened hearts of both East and West, democracy and capitalism, albeit in truncated forms, sweep all before them, and even the world economy seems to have been kickstarted into some semblance of life. For most of the potential nay-saying Savonarolas, life is good.

And as Breughel's 'Triumph of Time' so graphically showed with its pitiless portrayal of death and dalliance, nothing takes your mind off Doomsday so much as a good party.  Today those 'heavenly apparitions' are likely to be jittering lasers and stuttering strobe lights, while the 'terrestrial disturbances' are simply the subwoofers of the wicked sound system.  How appropriate then, that the imp-like Prince - in any case thought by many to be Beelzebub incarnate - has already provided us with the music for the Last Day's Ultimate Party - called, appropriately enough, '1999'. This is the way the world will go; not with a bang but a boogie.  If only Bishop Wulfstan had known how to bop.

(10.8.88)

Index

Working it out

It is understandable that the general public is dubious about an activity which takes 'no pain, no gain' as its motto.  And as anyone who has started out on the long quest for the castle of the body arduous can attest, it does indeed hurt.  But beyond a certain critical point - of effort and time and determination - the rewards become so apparent that crossing the pain barrier is merely the first step in an enchanted land.

The manifest benefits are easily described.  The extra years exercise may add to your life can never be known, except through the faith of statisticians; but for every hour spent working out, demonstrably you gain two or three more endowed with a special alertness.  At the end of a late twentieth-century urban day, an existence doubly fatal through being sedentary and stressful, the phrase 'working out' sums it all up: you can feel the rings of tension sliding away.  That pent-up, atavistic aggression is channelled in perhaps the purest and most cathartic form; pitting animate against inanimate body, moving objects which might have been designed almost as paradigmatic manifestations of the Platonic concepts of weight and mass.

A by-product of this activity is harder to articulate. It is as if the body had become weightless: limbs can be moved so effortlessly that they might almost be one of those perfect rods beloved of mathematical problems.  Bodies become futuristic stick robots of immense power.  Presumably those who are grossly overweight and underexercised suffer the opposite effect; their limbs seem huge and unwieldy spheroids, over which they have limited and rather pathetic control.  Their self-image is perhaps one of bloated pneumatic human dolls from some middle period Picasso painting.

A consequence of working out, then, is that even the most ordinary of movements becomes a voluptuous pleasure, an aesthetic treat. Walking is raised to the level of the Olympic swimmer's proud and masterly furrowing of the waters which part before and close after; and reaching out to take the humblest of objects becomes a languorous and ecstatic experience of balletic grace.

There is a further aspect of weight-training which is certainly a powerful attraction; you cannot cheat. As anyone who has worked out knows, you either can or cannot lift that weight or do that hundredth press-up; if you can, it is because you have worked towards that goal.  Good coaching may help, as can the right equipment; but the bottom line is you.

This makes pumping iron one of today's most democratic activities.  There can be no snobbery, no favouritism, no unfairness; what people can do, especially in terms of stamina rather than power, is largely determined by the effort they have put into training.  Body sculpture does not just mean vulgar bulging biceps; it also embraces the whole attitude of mastering your body, and shaping the physical through the mental.  It is an affirmation of mankind's transcendence of crass materialism.  'No pain, no gain' is a motto which the iron-pumpers of the world can be proud to bear on the self-made escutcheons of their bodies.
 
(9.8.88)

Index

Moody in Edinburgh (3.9.88)

The essence of the Edinburgh Festival is the Fringe, and the essence of the Fringe, excess. So a one-day flying visit seemed appropriate.  The one-and-a-half hours delay caused by fuel leakage on the original 9 am flight from Gatwick ate into that day somewhat, but as at the Fringe, a certain degree of Buddhist detachment is necessary.

First, a taxi ride to the Assembly Rooms to pick up a ticket for Kate Ceberano and her sextet at midnight.  The Assembly Rooms always provoke regret and nostalgia.  Compared to the very early days of the venue when it was a real hotbed, but one achieved in an organic and at times anarchic fashion, today's Assembly Room is a tribute to dull ergonomics.
 
Then up to the Flowermarket Gallery, one of the nicest exhibition spaces in Edinburgh.  Futuristic images, images from an arty version of Blade Runner: vast dark cities aglow at night, lightning, blazes of lights.  Across to the City Art Galleries for Reality and Imagination, the main exhibition around the Italian theme of the festival; a typical and typically interesting collection of minor Neapolitan painting from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  Not worth going out of your way to see, but worth seeing for all that.  Ate in the café there, a busy bustling place set in a high room with a particularly spacious air.
 
Also visited James Thin on South Bridge Road.  Another case of the Assemblies; the grand old secondhand department is a shadow of its former self; paltry and boring.  Elsewhere the usual popular books, the new necessities of bookselling.

Down to the National Gallery on the Mound.  The mildly controversial rich maroon wall-covering - the colour Turner wanted for his pictures but got a nondescript non-colour at the Clore - works well, though one complaint: the matching colouring of the accompanying labels are all but illegible.  The National Gallery is a wonderfully compact space.  On to the Pietro Longhi exhibition - though the latter term is being generous.  Interesting for its close observation of that crazy Venetian society which tottered to its end in 1797. Otherwise all a bit small-scale.

Back to the Flowermarket for tea - the only place to have it - then to St Columba's by the Castle via a photography exhibition at the Stills Gallery, always worth a visit.  St Columba's was, of course, the venue for my own Fringe concerts.  Although the visit was to the crypt rather than the church itself, it was an interesting act of excavation and exorcism.

The piece was Morgaine by Able Bodies.  This turned out to be quintessential Fringe stuff.  Judging by some of the background to the performance - the scratched out names on the leaflet, the changed timing - this was a cut-down version of something.  Not that you could tell.  Four young ladies hummed and chanted and keened their way through a vaguely feminist interpretation of aspects of the Arthurian legend.  It was all faintly embarrassing, but impressive as a result; this was young, tentative theatre teetering on the brink and sometimes over the edge.  An audience of 16 looked on tolerantly.

Back over to the Assembly Rooms taking in the International Exhibition of Photography, which proved to contain pretty much the collection of obvious images you would expect: naked ladies, misty fields, whimsical collocations, gnarled shepherds.  On quickly to the Picabia exhibition; poor trite stuff, redeemed by the presence of Stephen Varcoe practising for his concert there that evening.  The informality - he kept on stopping and making comments - worked well.  Perhaps other galleries should follow suit.  Food at the Assembly Rooms was even worse than remembered, something between school dinners and a greasy spoon.

On to the Playhouse, the main pretext for my visit.  There for the second performance of John Adams' 'Nixon in China', with the original Houston Opera cast.  A deceptively large theatre, cunningly built on the side of hill.  Adams himself conducted a thrilling performance.  The chorus was razor-sharp in its ensemble, the scenery grand and impressive, the stage business all that one has come to expect from whizz-kid Sellars.  The singing of the soloists uniformly impressive, but special mention for John Maddalena's totally convincing Nixon.  Contrary to some critics, I see the very bleak and simple third act as the perfect conclusion to the grandiose theatrics which precede it: surely the point is that Nixon in China, for all the mythic nature of that event, remains populated by small, insecure people.  The only failure was the miking of the singers, which altered the acoustics badly, and sometimes caused pops and squeaks.  A modern masterpiece nonetheless.

Then on to the Kate Ceberano concert. A young - 21 - Oz jazz singer, she had tremendous onstage presence, great grace, natural ability - but little character.  She constantly sounded like someone else.  Her band was rather unfocussed and sloppy.  Back across the city to Club Sandino - adjacent to the Playhouse for the final stop of the evening.  A civilised sort of club with a room upstairs mercifully without loud music, food available, chairs.  There I whiled away the hours of two, three and four o'clock of the morning, watching that unique anthropological specimen, the night-clubber; always trying to be cool, always desperately on the look-out.

Club Sandino definitely the place to be.  Adams was there, along with Maddalena and more of the motley crew.  I took the opportunity of congratulating the former, but unwilling to turn into one of those tiresome devos, took my congé fairly rapidly.  And who else should turn up but Ms Cerebrano? Definitely the place to be.  Along with her and her band, many other Australian fringers who seem to be taking the place over.  Lots of address swapping, fond farewells; it was the last day of the Festival.

And the end of the day.  The Club Sandino finally threw us out at 4.15 am.  Then the fun began; the Great Taxi Hunt was on.   I wandered up hill and down dale for nearly an hour before going to Waverley Station and calling one up.  Edinburgh at 4.30 am is surprisingly lively; lots of wandering couples, lots more snogging in the shop doorways.  A cold morning wind blew down the High Street.  Out to the silent airport, where a few cleaners prepared for the next day.  I arrived there at about 5.10 am, sat and read the new Scotland on Sunday, an attractive paper, boarded my plane and rose up through the bright morning sunshine, on to another day after one well - and truly - spent.

(4.9.88)

Index

Sex and Billy Graham

How does he keep it up?  He has been at it for decades, and still, night after night, he performs, unabashed and unabated, before an audience of thousands.  And at an age too: grey-haired and with a grandfatherly twinkle in his eye, he is well into his seventies.  It is an impressive feat.

Billy Graham's apparently unstoppable daily round of global evangelism is clearly part of his power. He is a living demonstration of the life-giving force he affirms.  But he is just one albeit high-profile representative of an entire class, of a philosophy even - whether articulated as such or not - which has nothing to do with the spirituality he would doubtless claim as the source of his own dynamism.

Graham and his ilk possess a doggedness, a blind, blundering persistence which propel them night after night on to their respective stages, before their audiences, however big or small.  It gets them up early in the morning to take yet another flight to yet another land where they must perform.  It gives them the willpower to push the poor, complaining flesh yet again, yet harder; it enables them to shoulder aside all the doubts and despairs which afflict every one of us at times; its deep-seated ineradicable force keeps them powering forward every waking moment.

We encounter these extraordinary people everywhere, in every situation.  Indeed, by a kind of Darwinian evolution, every niche will have at least one such a person who by virtue of their single-mindness rises to visibility as the dominant figure in that area.  But they are by no means restricted to the marginal, to being whales in fish tanks.

As a rule their drive and obsessional nature informs every activity.  If they desire something they will ask and ask and ask until they are given it simply to get rid of them. When they want a job they will apply for hundreds, ring endlessly potential employers, turn up uninvited on doorsteps, network unceasingly.  They get the job.  If they fall in love, they never give up, never take the resolute 'no' or 'never' as an answer.  They persist, they endure, they embarrass by their unshakeability.  And in time they impress.  Because like Graham's energy, their unswerving fidelity is the highest proof of their feelings.  In their devotion to a person, they pay the highest compliment, they give the gift of their lives.  And they win.  Eventually, everybody else gives in.  They win because they do not, and because once they have communicated that fact, it is only a matter of time before the other party capitulates.  And since it is only a matter of time, it may as well be sooner rather than later.  So the power feeds itself; the stronger it is perceived to be, the more effect it has to make it seem stronger.

Because these people have achieved a kind of perfection in their approach, the arena of their virtuosity is ultimately irrelevant.  Whether they are the world's greatest preacher, a monomaniacal collector of matchboxes or an unremitting priapist, we lesser mortals of boringly moderate tastes and drives can only stand back and be impressed.  We know too well that unable to keep anything up for long, we can never hope to keep up with them.

(25.11.89)

Index

The Lie (12.10.86)

George Steiner calls it counterfactuality: the ability to imagine something which is not.  It lies at the root of man's creativity and the progress of civilisation. The day a child lies for the first time marks great leap forward in its growth as a human being.  And yet telling lies is universally held to be anti-social and reprehensible.

The reasons are clear enough.  Lies propagate dissonant world-views which cloud and curdle the great pond of perception. The world is based, as a first approximation at least, on the assumption that people tell it as it is.  Without this faith, everybody's every statement would need to be verified personally before proceeding - clearly an impossible task.  It would render knowledge, and written knowledge in particular, useless.

So truth has evolved as a pragmatic solution in the face of this anarchy.  Like children, the first humans probably arrived at lies some time after rising to consciousness.  Initially, you could only think true things, since thought itself had no meaning without a corresponding external reality.  The first lies probably threatened the fabric of those fragile early societies to such an extent that we can imagine lying as an offence against the tribe, punishable by death.

As a result, telling the truth, like obeying authority, has been built into the fundamental assumptions of society ever since.  And this even though neither is truly in the interests of the individual.  Yet parents scold children when they lie, and schools inculcate for years the habit of obedience.  Both play into the hands of those in power.

Furthermore, this intensive training in early years leaves its mark on the adult.  To such an extent that even when lies would be better for all concerned - society too - we are unable to utter the untruths.  It is as if we believed that reality and facts existed as absolutes, and were too important to sully with muddying fictions.  Instead, we resort to feeble evasions, implausible half-truths which salve our consciences but betray us as clearly as if we had admitted everything.

It is almost touching to see the amateur way people lie.  They do not seem to realise that lying is an art, and a demanding one.  Just as lies send out ripples of disturbance through others' world-views, so lies must be part of a huge spreading web of deceit.  The very best liars can weave these as they go along, twisting and turning a few concessions to truth until they end up with an elaborate tapestry of greying lies.
 
This is what makes the policeman's job so easy.  When pushed hard and far enough, most people give up in their make-believe stories, simply because they are caught out, or cannot go on inventing.  This also gives the true, studied and inveterate liar an incalculable advantage over the rest of us.  He or she is able to mould reality to their will, trapping us in a fine-spun tissue of lies which obscures both reality and its own factitiousness.  If these people can combine such skills with a largeness of vision, they are well-nigh unstoppable.  And yet we pretend that lying is for losers.  Perhaps that is the biggest lie of all. 

(16.10.87)

Index

The ultimate tie

Ties are curious things.  At the last count I had forty-six of them, which seems a trifle excessive for something which can only be worn one at a time. What is even stranger is that I wear at most five of them with any regularity.  The others are simply and manifestly impossible.  Some are enormous kipper-like objects; others are indescribable shades of mud-brown; there are unknottable woollen things, slinky silk jobs which once tied cannot be unknotted; and then there are the perfectly suitable ties which have succumbed to the rigours of usage and bear those faint but all- too visible stains.

Looking at this motley collection, it is clear that it represents a cross- section through successive tie-strata of my life, with different eras mapped out by the wildly different tastes.  I recognise the ties from my time at Cambridge, when, as a post-graduate student I attempted to upgrade my sartorial appearance with the aid of a few striking and rather garish ties.  Some of these made it through to my first job, while at the same time new motifs were introduced.  These eventually triumphed, and the tie- paradigm shifted to something nearer its current state.  Most recently, a further attempted upgrade in status has caused a new influx of ties, quite radically different from the previous generation.  I like to think that they are bolder and yet more sophisticated.  In a few year's time, I shall doubtless feel about them as I do about my previous choices. Ties do not age gracefully.

If my own past ties are curious, how much stranger are those we see in shops. Whenever, on the rare occasions I wish to augment my tie collection, I search systematically through the men's clothing shops, I find few examples which I could even consider as candidates.  It is a red-letter day indeed if I do find and buy a tie which I might even wear.

Who on earth wears all those ties?  The ones made of materials which shout cheapness from every stiff pore, and which seem based either on sackcloth or plastic?  Who can want the ties in colours which have no name – unless South American gauchos have come up with them to describe obscure parts of obscure breeds of cattle?  Or the ones with patterns which make Rorschach tests look positively normal?

The dreadful truth has, of course, already been hinted at.  I myself have bought ties which were perilously close to many of these designs.  Only now have a I purged myself of the error which made me guilty of such acts.  It is clear, then, that those ties we all see for sale on the tie-racks, and which never in a month of Sundays could we envision being sold, are indeed bought, and by people just like you and me.  Worse: the ties that we buy must, in their turn, be regarded by the majority of the world as belonging to a similar group of totally inexplicable ties which ought never, in a sane universe, to be produced, let alone sold.  In other words, we are all wearing as ties what for other people are bad nightmares and sick jokes, just as for us, their own choices are crazed and deluded.  And however much the details of our taste differ, it is this terrible, inescapable fact of our mutual bad taste that is the ultimate tie which binds us all together.

(6.3.88)

Index

Form v. content

Every since writing was invented, a subtle dynamic has been at work.  There has always been a tension between what was written, and how it was written.  In the very beginning, form and content alike were trivial; inventories of a king's storeroom, lists of goods, tallies of herds - all were represented as notches on a stick, simple scratches on a broken pot.  At some point a leap was made, and these signs gained a life of their own; instead of being identified with the things they described, they became simply ways of describing them - or anything else. With that independence from the original defining object came a freedom of form.

It was obvious - so the argument must have gone, thousands of years ago in the dusty court of some king or emperor - that modifying the shape of the letter did not destroy its meaning: and with the dubious nod of agreement from that king or emperor, the rising profession of scribes gained at a stroke their unique power over our perception of the world.

For as they well knew, changing the form may leave content intact in theory, but it can also refract it in subtle and often dramatic ways.  From this flowed the power of those same scribes - not to change irrevocably, but to inflect, to suggest, to subvert, by means of the shape and placing of letters and words they employed for their king's or emperor's commands.  The battle between content and form - which itself mirrored the struggle between the literalism of the absolutist powers and literacy of their interpretive minions - had begun.

In some cultures there has been an effort to reconcile these two opposing elements of creation.  For example, oriental poets were judged as much on the beauty and aptness of the calligraphy they employed in writing out the poem as in the words and meaning of the poem itself.  For Islamic civilisations, where certain types of creativity - religious, for example - are so circumscribed by what may or may not be represented, there has been a preoccupation with written form which is obsessive, though the results are undeniably beautiful. Western society has veered the other way; it tends to ignore form altogether.

When a monk in a medieval monastery was taught to write the uncial script, he had failed to master it until it was an exact replica of his master's own uncial hand.  To learn to write meant to learn to write in that and no other way.  Each age may have had its own style and ideal, right down to Victorian copper-plate, but the scope for individual flourishes was always intentionally limited.  For the West, writing has meant what you write, not how; there is simply no artistic form or tradition which caters for personal expression through calligraphy.

This century, that bias has been continued.  It was reinforced by the typewriter, whose central idea was the mechanised reduction of each letter to anonymous uniformity.  Today it has gone further; with the introduction of the word-processor not only has the movement from paper to screen replaced the physical element of writing with a purely logical one, it has become totally impersonal.  Every word can be produced in any style, and hence of itself has no style.  Form no longer exists; content has won.

(28.12.87)

Index

The Wipees

They came from nowhere, these urban guerillas.  They knew the terrain, choosing their theatres carefully: major intersections, where the confluence of four or more roads meant lengthy and predictable delays at the lights.  Then they struck, moving with practised ease between the stationary, stranded cars, wielding their weapons with an imperious facility: buckets, sponges, cloths, scrapers and chammy leathers.  Trapped inside, the vehicles' owners could only look on helplessly as they fell victim to one of post-Thatcher entrepreneurialism's strangest manifestations: the Windscreen Wipers.

And so driving in London became a journey between islands of soapy, savvy assault.  You could choose to avoid the hotspots - Vauxhall, Chelsea Bridge, Clapham Old Town - but in doing so you felt that in some obscure sense you were being pusillanimous, that you were cheating.

Because it was notable that whatever the hour of the day or night, and whatever the weather, these Wipers maintained an evenness of temper, a cheeriness, a gaiety even, that seemed almost independent of how much they were given as recompense or indeed whether they were given anything for their pains at all.  It was almost as if they were carrying out some philanthropic service, providing to the motorised an analogue of the marathon runner's en route water supplies, offering mankind solace during its symbolic journey from departure to arrival, cleaning the vehicle's screen as a parable of a greater purification to come.  Not to provide them with an opportunity for this smiling magnanimity seemed churlish.

Could it be that this pleasure they derived from the act of washing and wiping had something to do with their origins?  Many were foreign, including Wipers from such far-flung and exotic places as Australia and Jugoslavia.  Were they perhaps just happy to be in this great, seething metropolis, surrounded by the swirl of traffic which was a visible manifestation of the great diurnal pulse of the city?  Did they feel in some obscure way that by offering this service - however pointless and however humble - that they were in effect being co-opted and hence accepted by the society and world that they had travelled so far to see?

Or were they so happy simply because they were able to earn about £20 an hour for work which required no more than a few seconds of mild effort every few minutes?  But if this financial aspect was indeed cardinal, it was made possible only as a result of the unique dynamics that existed between the Wiper and the Wipee.

For clearly the Wipee had not asked to be wiped; nor could the Wiper enforce any sanctions against non-paying Wipees.  All that bound the two together was a tenuous ethical link between someone who gave without asking for anything, and someone who received that gift.  In other words, the Wipers were banking on the general decency of the Wipee.  Perhaps this is why the Wipers from abroad were here; perhaps only in a country like Britain with a residual sense of fair play could the whole magic dance of Wiper and Wipee be played out.  Perhaps this is why they were smiling, and why we too have reason to smile that Wipees still exist, even today.

(24.12.91)

Index

The cicatrice

I have a confession to make: I love drugs.  Not your everyday socially- acceptable addictions like caffeine or alcohol, and certainly not the more crazily destructive ones like heroin or cocaine.  No, the drugs I like are the ones any doctor will give you.  All you need is a little disease.

Not that I like the diseases, and neither would I trivialise the general state of being seriously ill.  But whenever I have needed to visit the doctor's surgery for medicine to alleviate some minor ill, I have felt like a child approaching Santa's Grotto.  I go in, tell the man or the woman what I want - a cure - and marvellously and miraculously it turns out to be Christmas again, and he or she gives it to me.

I love these drugs with their haunting poetic names that sound like Aztec gods, because they usually work.  I apply the unguent to the relevant part of my body, and whatever it is I have I get rid of.  In doing so, they offer a true magic.  For me they are like other thaumaturgical manifestations of modern life: the huge, improbable aeroplanes that take us to other lands with little sense of travel; the powerful little consumer gadgets that fill corners of our daily lives we never knew existed; the clever computers whose abilities seem to know no limits.

Drugs are another testimony to the power of technology, and their efficacy makes us believe that we are indeed in control, that life with all its vagaries is ours to command.  They make us trust medicine and its power to give us health, and so life.  They grant us leave to hope that even death, the ultimate disease, will in its turn be wiped away with the right ointment, one which the doctor can and will give us.

Perhaps such a need to see this everyday redemption of the flesh was present even in my childhood.  It would certainly explain an equivalently morbid fascination I had then.

At that time, I was frequently knocking and grazing myself.  My knees and knuckles and elbows were a rich tapestry of scratches, scabs and scars.  Like all children, I loved the scabs.  It seemed miraculous the way what was a bloody, seeping hole turned into the dark-red crusty mass.   And the way in which that crust would gradually begin to lift at the edges, to detach itself from the skin, until - with a little help from me as I picked at it obsessively - it finally came away, leaving behind some new, pink young skin, and the miracle of the heal.  Each cicatrice was like a sign that everything would be all right, that the body simply repaired itself, that the knocks of life were nothing to fear.

My more recent delight in healing drugs seems an advance on this position.  I know now that the body does not always succeed in repairing the damage, that the knocks of life could indeed by serious.  True, I have also discovered that we are not totally defenceless.  With their armoury of pharmaceuticals doctors may help that less than perfect body, allowing us to regain something of the childlike simplicity of the scab and its healing.  But even with this new hope of a tiny resurrection of the body, I cannot ignore the scar of knowledge that remains underneath.

(22.3.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Clapham Uncommon

Index

Credit cards

Sometimes it is hard not to believe that there is someone up there with a bad sense of humour watching you.  Some years ago I was burgled the day before I was due to fly off to America, and more recently my wallet of credit cards was stolen again, the day before leaving the country. Although less traumatic, the latter proved more problematic.

Without credit cards I could obviously not pay by plastic.  I was also unable to write cheques, since nobody trusts you to do this without some kind of supporting card, and I had lost all of them together, along with a number of other cards - those for membership of libraries, clubs and professional associations.

After I had cancelled the credit cards I started thinking about the non-financial ones.  I began to realise that their loss, although superficially trivial, was in fact just as serious.  Each of those cards, in its own small way, defined who I was for part of my life.  When I went to the library or down to my sports club, I only existed for them as a card: they did not believe in me, only the piece of plastic and what it told them.  For many of my more general social interactions I was defined by the intersection of all those cards.

 
Had I lost any one of them I could easily have used the others to prove who I was and so obtain a replacement,  Losing them all was to collapse into a non-existence which seemed to admit of no reprieve because there was no link back to my place in the outside world.  Fortunately, as it happened, I still had my passport. With this, I was able to break the chain of nothingness, obtaining a credit card which in turn allowed me to demonstrate my public persona and hence to replace the other cards.  To have lost my passport as well does not bear thinking about. 

The importance of these little cards is such that they are required to carry a heavier burden as time goes on.  Some come with a barcode which speeds the process of recognition, and many - pre-eminently the cards from banks - come with magnetic strips.  On the latter about 400 characters can be stored - around 65 words. Usually this represents some kind of potted biography of you relevant to the card and its use.

Already the next generation of such cards are in use, notably in France.  The so-called 'smartcards' use not a magnetic strip but a tiny embedded silicon chip to store data.  Each can hold about 5000 words - a fairly detailed short story about you.  But even this pales into insignificance beside the very latest technology. Soon optical memory cards, in effect updatable miniature CDs, will permit 200,000 words to be stored, along with pictures and even sounds.  It would be relatively easy to put all of your current pieces of plastic - bank cards, membership cards - additional information such as health records - complete with X-rays - plus driving licence and passport on one such card, updated every time you use it for any of these activities.  Given to you at birth, it would represent an almost complete records of your life.  Supremely useful, and supremely dangerous, it would virtually define who you were as a human being - the ultimate identity card without which you would have no credit anywhere.

(14.3.92)

Index

Normality

What does it mean to say that the probability of getting a head when you flip an unbiased coin is 1/2? Not that if you flip it a million times it will come down heads for half of them; but that if you flip the coin a million times it is more likely to be near 500,000 heads than it is to be 600,000.  So what does 'more likely' mean in this context?  That if you repeat those million flips ten million times, say, writing down at the end of each million flips how many heads there were, and then plot on a graph how many times each number of heads occurs, the peak number will be very close to 500,000.  In this sense, it is the most likely.

Plotting the number of heads obtained for each of the ten million sets of a million flips will, if the coin is truly unbiased, produce a smooth bell-shaped curve, high in the middle, falling off sharply and going to almost nothing at the edges. This shape - called the Normal distribution - occurs frequently in probability theory and in systems determined by the aggregation of millions of essentially random events.  Its name is partly a reflection of this universality: almost independently of the details of the context, it will pop up time and time again, a demonstration of how larger structures can emerge from the combined action of many small and apparently structureless effects. 

So, for example, the Normal curve is found throughout tests of various kinds of ability mental, physical, scientific, artistic.  Where such skills can be measured, it is generally found that there is this bell-shaped distribution: most people in the middle, clustered around the average - the peak of the bell - with correspondingly fewer people any distance away from that middle area. This obviously corresponds to experience, were we tend to meet many people with more or less average skills, but very few with anything out of the ordinary.

However, there is one facet of the Normal distribution which needs to be emphasised; it is symmetrical, the tiny tail above the average is always balanced by a tiny tail below it.  Thus for any system which approximates to this theoretical ideal, you will always find a match between the extremes.

This has an interesting consequence in the field of human abilities.  If, as the statistics seem to indicate, measurable qualities like intelligence - of whatever kind, not just the very limited type judged by discredited IQ tests - understanding, strength, speed, and some forms of creativity are indeed distributed according to the Normal curve, then the ineluctable logic is that for every genius, every exceptionable performer, every athlete, there will almost certainly be someone who labours under a corresponding lack of intelligence, lack of ability, lack of strength.  In a sense, for every mental or physical advantage we enjoy, someone, somewhere, is paying the price of a conjugate lack of just that mental or physical attribute.  But just because blind chance and unfeeling Nature exact this price does not mean that we should acquiesce in this inequity.  Instead we should be acutely aware that the burden of responsibility for using our inherited ability properly is double: we owe it to ourselves, and, even more, we owe it to our unknown, suffering twin.
 
(25.12.91)

Index

Così fan tutti

Every age seems to misunderstood Mozart's last opera buffa in its own way.  Unlike the witty Nozze di Figaro, the dramatic Don Giovanni or - albeit in a different tradition - the perennially fresh Zauberflöte, Così fan tutte has suffered constantly from critical abuse, periods of neglect and downright artistic violence in the shape of various Bowdlerisations.

Inevitably perhaps, the Victorians viewed the work as an appalling aberration in the otherwise pure output of their divine, childlike Mozart.  Superficially its plot is both chilling and ridiculous.  A man bets two younger men that their sweethearts will prove unfaithful in their absence.  To test his theory, the men depart and return in disguise, each paying court to his friend's betrothed.  Eventually the women succumb, and the men resume their original identities to confront the women with their betrayal.  The opera ends with an apparently insouciant return to the original pairings.  This levity in the face of the moral and emotional turmoil that has gone before was bound to offend Victorian society's highly visible and vocal sense of propriety and decency.

We tend to think of ourselves as rather superior to the Victorians in our broad-mindedness - and in our smugness prove that we are not - but many people remain disturbed not so much by the opera's immoralities as its implausibilities.  Would men really take their loves so lightly as to bet on it?  Would the women fail to recognise their lovers and give in to strangers?  Would everything be forgiven so straightforwardly at the end?

Some of the opera's artificiality is purely formal.  The time-scales involved are driven by the genre, and the men are not recognised so that the same singers can be used and so that extra pathos can be wrung from the situation.  In fact in this and other respects the opera emerges as Mozart's most perfect.  There is a symmetry to work itself - in four acts rather than the usual three - to the pairings among the six characters - the sixth being the maid, the female counterpart of the old cynic - and in the delicate intertwining of relationships.

This preoccupation with form accounts for some of the opera's striking features.  But far more fundamental to explaining its exceptional nature are Mozart's extraordinarily modern insights into the human condition.  Yes, he seems to say, men would be so stupid to wager on something as profoundly important as their loves; yes, even engaged women are attracted to romantic strangers paying court, yes, they do succumb.  And yes - the last scene seems to say - people learn to live with these facts.  The original couples re-form, perhaps a little sadder and wiser after their foolish acts, but they re-form because they recognise that these things happen, that people are like this. 

Perhaps the only real disappointment of the opera is its one outstanding asymmetry.  The title is Così fan tutte: thus do all women.  But as the work shows, thus do all men as well.  It is strange that in our modern, right-on age that there has not been a move to rename this work with the more egalitarian title Così fan tutti: people - all of them, all of us - are really like this. 

(29.2.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - In Mozart’s Garden

Index

The itch

The urge to travel is always latent within me.  When I am not travelling I feel restless and uncomfortable.  I am conscious of how much of the world I have not seen, and of how little time left I have to see it, that I have at most another fifty different springs and fifty new autumns to discover.  So when I am able to travel I go literally to extremes, seeking to travel as fully and as far as possible.  The nearly antipodean New Zealand was therefore an inevitable choice.  It offers a unique combination of great geographical isolation with a physical size that allows you to travel yet further within this distant world.

I decided to spend most of my time on the South Island, itself the more isolated and less populous of the two.  I hired a car in Christchurch and drove north-west from there towards the Southern Alps, a great chain of mountains which lie along the western side of the southern island.

Christchurch itself is every picture postcard English country town you have ever seen; a neat gothic cathedral, a park full of cloudy cherry blossom in October, tiny Edwardian hotels smelling of paint and breakfast.  The road from it looks like the perfect English country road except that it begins to rise and keeps on rising towards Arthur's Pass, the main gap in the Southern Alps.  As you ascend, the countryside changes.  It passes from Augustan pastoral to Wordsworthian fells, everything as harmonious and ordered as a poem. From there you descend to the plain and the coastal road, a long gently curving thread that hugs the seashore.

At Haast, a couple of hundred kilometres later, you turn inland again, Once more you rise through stunning lakelands, crossing the huge, slow mouths of rivers, their waters sparkling in the sunshine as they tumble over the granite stones and pebbles.  And you continue to rise, until the Cumberland hills have become Nepalese mountains.  You are surrounded by massive and majestic peaks, their sides indescribable combinations of greens, ochres and purples.  In the distance you can see the misty outlines of great, placid lakes.  All this while you are driving on a road without a blemish, and you have not seen another car, another person even, all day.  You realise that you have travelled so far to the end of the island at the end of the world that you have driven into paradise.

When you stop and gaze at this paradise you hear nothing, not even the wind.  If there are no clouds in the sky even time seems to be absent. Only one thing accompanies you in this heaven; the hell of sand-flies.  These black, gnat-like insects have a bite like no other.  Drinking in the landscape's beauties for a few minutes I was soon bitten.  And once bitten I found myself scratching, uncontrollably.  While I itched there was relief, but then, inevitably, the itch returned still more fiercely.  Although rationally I knew it was madness, I had to scratch.  I have never in my life been so helpless in the face of such an uncontrollable desire, such a physical necessity.  And as I scratched and itched and suffered this purgatory, I began to understand something about real addiction, about the truly imperious urge that brooks no argument - and the immense distance between it and its pale brother that I had known so far on my travels.

(1.3.92)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels - 1989 US, New Zealand, Fiji

Index

The flip of a copper

One was very nice.  He came quickly to my burgled flat and took the situation in at a glance.  He saw the forced window, the mess, the absence of the stolen goods, the hopelessness of ever getting any of it back.  He saw me, rather pained at this irruption into my privacy.  His face was a picture of subtle sympathy - nothing over the top, but simply there. He said the right things.  He was everybody's perfect uncle: wise, helpful, his dark blue uniform exuding safety and calm.  He did everything but make me a cup of tea.

The other one was a nasty piece of work. He told me to get out of the car. He marched me across the gravel and made me sit in his.  He got out his pad, showed me the timing equipment, boasted of his practised skills in measurement, and almost dared me to question its accuracy.  He seemed to speak in three word sentences and neither invited nor responded to my replies except by writing things down.   His face was as hard as the peak on his cap.  His dark uniform looked black, his massive hand white as it clenched the scratching biro. I half-expected handcuffs.

So after the crash I was completely confused.  One moment the car was moving, the next it was stationary.  My neck hurt.  Somehow I got out of the bent heap of metal and stood by the mess in the middle of the junction.  People were standing around; some tried to help.

The police were there remarkably quickly - or perhaps my sense of time had been damaged too.  At first the officer was solicitous but formal.  As part of the routine, he explained, I had to take a breath test.  I blew into this strange little bag, hyperventilating slightly.  His brow darkened: had I been drinking? The preliminary test showed I had: just one, I said.  His manner began to change imperceptibly; I was edging closer to the line.  We waited for what seemed minutes for the final verdict from the little bag: it was alright, I was well below the limit.  I was the right side of the line.

The witnesses were unanimous in blaming the other driver, so the officer could be sure now.  And being sure, he became nice.  That avuncular look came into his eye when he regarded me.  He made lots of helpful suggestions, called an ambulance for me - just to be sure.  As I got into it I half-noticed the policeman and his colleague giving the other driver the full nasty treatment.
 
The camps who think that all police are either routinely pleasant or unpleasant are both naive; even those who think that some are naturally pleasant and some naturally unpleasant miss the point, which is that all, or nearly all, policeman are both, because they inhabit a world which is starkly bifurcated.  Either you are the right side of the line, an upright member of society, or else you are not, in which case you are a felon, a threat to good order and all those upright citizens.  The fact that we are all both at various times is irrelevant for the policeman or woman.  Their job is about enforcing lines of demarcation; lines, by their nature, are meant to be clear, not fuzzy.  The line between the nice and the nasty policeman certainly is.

(15.3.92)

Index

Just say 'nay'

Eventually every author has to face the sad fact that one of the greatest threats to good prose is fine writing.  There seems to be an ineradicable tendency for a penny-plain sentence to become lush and purplish, blossoming with assonances and alliterations, and falling into the sinuous, sensuous curve of a half-heard beat as rhythm's subtle samba of words kicks in.

It is this same urge that gives rise to full-blown poetry.  Verse is born of a sensitivity to surrounding words which goes further than the simple sense they contain.  A poem is like some subtle force field, a web of tensions between every word it contains, every syllable instinct with the knowledge of its antecedents and successors.

At one, simple level this means rhyme, that miraculous unjustified coincidence of sounds.  As poets write they have not only to navigate their phrases through the ideas they wish to express but they must also hit a particular sound at a particular point along the way.  This in part explains our enjoyment of poetry: it is tremendously satisfying to reach these little havens of rhyme whose existence had been implicitly promised by the first element of the couplet or triplet, and whose appearance is a kind of resolution, like a perfect cadence in music.

At a deeper level this unconscious feeling for the literal ramifications of every word - the branches of rhyme, rhetoric and the rest - may play a crucial part in creating the poem's final structure. After all, just where do words come from if not from other words already written whose shape and sound suggest other forms and phonemes to us which in turn lead us by the hand down a new and unexpected poetic avenue?

Nor is this restricted to verse. Although there we are licensed by its assumptions to make these similarities explicit - through the chime of rhyme, through the emphasis of alliteration, and through the linguistic tricks of repetition and such-like - it is easy to spot similar turns of phrase elsewhere. Indeed many languages have this kind of homely poetry built-in to their culture.

For example, English is full of nutty two-beat phrases which alliterate, assonate or rhyme: 'bread and butter', 'north and south', 'the bee's knees'.  It is interesting to note that cockney rhyming slang takes this approach even further.  Thus 'feet' become 'plates of meat' which rhymes, has the two-beat structure, and offers an apt and witty transformation.

No wonder, then, that these complex habits of echoing forward and back crop up continually in even the least pretentious of prose.  Every word we write begins to suggest the next or one in the next sentence.  Every word brings with it a family of rhymes and a large clan of near-rhymes, all begging to join their relation.  Similarly each word has hundreds of other friendly assonances, puns and handy pre-existing phrases which it is keen to introduce to us.  No wonder, then, that in our desire to accommodate this huge, chattering tumult, our tumbling prose becomes overloaded with those wonderful words to which we just can't say 'no' - or 'nay'.

(29.2.92)

See also Moody Sonnets

Index

Unlonely planet

One of the most remarkable growth sectors in recent years has been that of tourism catering for the 'independent traveller'. In fact the independent traveller is quite likely to be travelling in a group with a guide. The 'independence' is more a question of getting off the beaten track and exploring remoter areas of the world.

In part this has been driven by improved communications; there are very few places now that cannot be reached by a cheapish flight followed by a drive in a locally-hired car. The other main factor is demographic - those baby boomers again, self-confident, affluent and ever-so-slightly jaded.  They want new experiences and new challenges.

Parallel to this development, and probably helping to fuel it in no small measure, has been an equally remarkable growth in the travel publications serving this market.  The original, and still the best, is the Lonely Planet series.  Set up in the mid-1970s, this Australian-based outfit started with a book on South-East Asia which the authors - a footloose Englishman and his wife - had wanted for their own travels, but in the absence of which were forced to write themselves.  Their suspicion that there might be others with similar information needs proved correct, and the enterprise has flourished.  Among many other titles they now publish books on Tibet, Alaska, the Galapagos Islands and Papua New Guinea, and the list grows every year.

As the names above show, the Lonely Planet guides concentrate on areas of the world where travel has always been close to the original etymology of the word: 'travail', or suffering.  Their brief is to provide the essential information to enable truly independent travellers to move around and find somewhere to stay.  Along the way there are concise descriptions of what to see and rueful ones of what to avoid.

So successful has this formula been, and so well-judged are the books for their intended readers, that it is rare to see either seasoned or tyro travellers in these places without their trusty Lonely Planet to hand.  Which of course brings its own problems.

For the very success of the guides has meant that hitherto unspoilt and almost touristless areas of the world are now increasingly frequented by the latter and are decreasingly the former.  The nature of the books, which are quite judgemental about what to see and the best places to stay, means that everyone using them tends to follow the same routes, see the same sights, compete for the same lodgings.  As a result, it turns out that the parts of the planet the guides open up are not lonely at all.

It would be nice to imagine the production of a new series of guide books, called perhaps the Lonelier Planet series.  In them you would find all those hidden spots and amazing restaurants that even the Lonely Planet series misses.  Except that as soon as these Lonelier Planet guides appeared, they too would be used, followed and rendered as self-defeating as their predecessor.  It is inescapable tragedy of all tourism that it must destroy what it comes to love.

(28.12.91)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels

Moody Sonnets – Among the Celts

Index

The career of language

The Indo-European group of languages covers an immense geographical area: from the British Isles in the West to Siberia in the East, and from the Arctic down to India.  Among the hundreds of different members deriving from the single common ancestor are English and the Germanic languages, the Romance languages stemming from Latin, the Celtic family, Greek, Russian and the Slavonic tongues, most of the Indian languages, and many others such as Iranian, Armenian, Latvian and Kurdish.

Although every language in the group has followed a different course of development, they all have one thing in common: over the centuries and millennia since that primal tongue, each has become more basic in terms of its morphology - that is, the endings used to distinguish different parts of verbs, and cases of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and the rest.  This is a continuing process.  Today's English, for example, is still evolving towards simplicity, chipping away at the few remaining subtle distinctions in the language - such as the use of 'whom' rather than 'who'.  Similarly every tongue seems to have gradually lost a case ending here or dropped a letter there, perhaps because everyone seemed to understand what you meant anyway, or it was easier to say, or just for reasons of fashion.

Largely through the efforts of dedicated German philologists in the last century, we have an excellent idea of what changes occurred when.  By looking at the entire Indo-European family, and comparing the features of the ancient language each retained, finding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle now in this tongue, now in that, the scholars managed to reconstruct almost completely the original Indo-European mother-tongue from which all these far-flung varieties emerged. It is a splendid achievement.

Splendid but disconcerting. For what we are presented with is a language deduced from its slimmed-down descendants, and therefore necessarily much more complex than any of them, even Classical Sanskrit, perhaps the nearest we have to it in time - Sanskrit texts date back to around 1500 BC - and hence in appearance.  Cases and forms seem to exist for practically every category of experience imaginable.  But given that, as we have seen, language seems to show an irresistible tendency to become less complicated, how did this amazing tongue ever evolve with such an incredibly rich structure? Are we to imagine the elders of a tribe sitting around defining for their language ever more complicated noun and verb declensions with an almost Teutonic rigour and attention to detail?

It remains a mystery to this day how it all happened, and is likely to stay that way at least until a point in the future when some kind of time travel is possible. Then the world's greatest philologist - probably a German, if such concepts still exist - a life's career founded on the study of this riddle, will be able to return to the age when the original Indo-European language was at its peak, and find out what exactly happened. But imagine her mortification if she were to return to that time and find...nothing. Just a few rudimentary pig-like grunts, the merest sketch of a language. Her life's work in ruins. Perhaps she might be tempted to teach the elders a few basics of Indo-European grammar and vocabulary; just enough to get them going, you understand.…

(26.12.91)

See also Moody Sonnets – Mind Your Language

Index

Thank you, fug

Much as I hate smoking, there have been occasions when despite my cherished prejudices I have found myself succumbing to the romance of a situation in which smoke formed a crucial element.

I recall a night - part of a night and more of a morning - spent at the Brixton Academy where a mixture of dead smoke, stale sweat and other, sweeter fragrances, was stabbed through with lasers, or burst into garish blotches of colour from the throbbing light system high above us.  And as the exhausted but manic figures bobbed around in this miasma, the atmosphere became almost palpable, as if the kilowatts of repetitive sound energy had cooked and congealed that strange airy confection into a wispy candy-floss veil which wrapped these ghostly presences like a shroud.

In a more intimate context I recall a late-night jazz set, buried deep in the cosy, claustrophobic space of the Village Vanguard in New York.  A hot young band was playing - the Harper Brothers - and the place was packed.  It was a cold March night outside, and the heating was turned up full in there, mixing its almost liquid warmth with copious tobacco smoke and the faint smell of alcoholic drinks.  I could barely breathe, but as I sat there, literally under the bell of Michael Harper's trumpet, I found a sense of authenticity in all this that kept me riveted.

I also recall with amazed fondness the same ostinato olfactory sensation of smoke during one of several long journeys in Egyptian taxis.  The driver puffed away continuously, lighting the next cigarette from the chewed and stained stump of its predecessor.  As before, there was music: a wailing female voice sang on the car's music system, punctuated by tape jams cleared by thumps from the driver, who also tried to use crumpled cigarette packs to wedge in the tape as the car swayed drunkenly about the road. Outside, the sun scorched the endlessly unrolling desert.

Against these memories, the locale of my latest smoke-filled experience was far more prosaic, taking place in a tiny, airless basement of no distinction, I had gone there for a two-day business meeting, and found myself surrounded by two French, one Italian and three Spanish chain smokers.  I was soon conscious of the foulness of the air I was breathing, of the burning soreness of my eyes.

But something miraculous happened.  The more I suffered, the less I consciously paid attention to what was going on around me, though part of my brain was still aware of it.  And what that part still engaged externally saw was, naturally enough, a business meeting.  Nothing extraordinary in that: people spoke, I listened; I occasionally added a comment while they listened.  Nothing extraordinary except that I realised with a sudden excitement that this meeting was being conducted entirely in French, a language I had hitherto been quite hesitant in using, certainly for business discussions like these.  My preoccupation with the smoke and discomfort had freed other parts of my mind simply to forget about details like translating or language, and enabled it to transcend the situation completely.  As the fug descended, I was granted the nearest I shall probably get to a Pentecostal experience 

(26.12.91)

Index