The havs and the hav nots

Tolstoy's neat oppositional pairing of war and peace has prompted others to try their hand at the game. An obvious candidate is death.  Woody Allen's attempt, love and death, is plausible, but ultimately undercut by the fact that his film of the same name is a parody of War and Peace. A more appropriate though more cynical pairing might be money and death.

Certainly in these days of leveraged buy-outs and mega-mergers, death seems the only thing which can stop the juggernaut of the great god Dosh.  This is sadly not true of love which, whether through a lack of moral fibre or simply through diminished fashionability, gives up so easily.  And, as often as not, to money.

Without death, money would be unstoppable and omnipotent. There would be no way to fight back; power would lead to more power, lack of it to less.  One of the reasons for the early success of the Christian religion among the Roman slaves and poor was that it promised everything to those who had nothing. More: it even suggested that the old wielders of power might be barred from entering heaven because of that power.  It broke the cycle. 

Death, like the Christianity based on it, changes the money equation.  It is a truism that you cannot take it with you, but few plutocrats realise you cannot even leave it behind - it can only be left.  Money is promiscuous; once you are gone it belongs to someone else.  Cash has no memory.  Which is why the rich hobnob with artists, commission and buy works from them.  What they seek is a vicarious immortality normally granted to artists alone because they alone can create outside time.

People may say that there is no difference between a pile of money and a pile of manuscripts.  Once you are gone neither will do you much good.  And yet still artists paint, write, compose.  Many are not sure themselves why they do it.  Proust, for example, believed the only true, eternal experience was that of unconscious memory.  Conscious evocation - through writing for example - was a sham. But he wrote, and wrote with a driving obsession which kept him alive against all reasonable odds.

The reasons for this seem to be twofold.  Creating for posterity is, it is true, a pretty barren activity. There is some marginal satisfaction in knowing that your name will live on, that your actions will have made a scratch on life's parchment.  But most artists like everyone else live for now.  The works they create - whether they are printed, read, performed or seen or not - are created for themselves.  They represent for the artist a distillation and justification of their life so far – a proof of existence. 

A minor but perfect example is Jan Morris' Last Letters from Hav.  This fantastical conflation of place and memory is more than intricate variations on the theme of travel, of destination, of elsewhere.  It is a kaleidoscopic view of Ms Morris' internal world, all her Venices and Istanbuls and Moscows rolled into one romantic whole, an impossible but uniquely precious landscape of minarets, statues, towers and fountains.  By creating it, she has achieved something which others have not; she has saved part of her life; and the wealthiest are poor in comparison.
 
(8.2.87)

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