Letter bombs

We are all terrorists.  Probably every week we indulge in a tiny act which has all the hallmarks of urban sabotage: its immediate consequences are distant from us, the innocent are often harmed, and it takes no courage to carry it out.  We are talking about one of the most insidious, because most subtle, forms of terrorism: sending a letter. 

A letter is a time bomb.  We write it, we post it; hours or even days later, it arrives at its destination.  We do not have to witness or suffer the immediate effects; this in itself may encourage us to heights of folly or depths of despicability which the safety of time and distance alone can bring out in us.  A letter is nearly always the coward's way out.  It is controlled and one directional.  You, the letter-writer, call all the shots: the reader is never allowed even the smallest of walk-on parts.  If they are acknowledged at all, it is likely to be through patronising rhetorical questions.  Words are put in their mouth which invariably damn them even deeper.  As the writer of the letter, we treat our audience as little better than children, servants or slaves; they are seen in our mind's eye, but never heard.

Conversations are far more dangerous.  There, the audience has parity with the speaker, who in his or her turn will find themselves on the receiving end.  Dialogues can go horribly out of control; soon you may find yourself in uncharted territory, where your honed speeches are wasted and useless.  In contrast, a letter is like a rigidly formalised ritual, or a highly stylised game, where you have set the rules, and you are the umpire.

And yet sending a letter has its own dangers, willingly embraced by the sender.  Because of the time-lag between writing and receipt, a letter must always be an act of recklessness, a gamble, a death-wish almost.   We feel, we write, we send; we may well then repent in the leisure which the wait for its effects affords us.

But we know that a letter is unstoppable.  Once it is popped into the postbox, it is as good as gone.  We are like condemned prisoners, waiting for the last dawn; we are doomed, but we must wait.  During those long nights of the postal service, we may suffer ecstasies of remorse, sudden accesses of shame, fear, even circumspection.  And we revel in our impotence, for all the world like exquisite masochists.

Each time we post a letter we ignore this fatal flaw because the process has been neatly partitioned.  The act of posting a letter is, in itself, trivial and harmless.  The dreadful hour when the transmitted letter arrives and does its awful work is tomorrow, hence, never.  The personal casuistry of the twentieth century works its magic once more.

Because letters can be so apocalyptic in their effects, and yet so painless in their execution, they therefore form the perfect pick-me-up.  They offer the powerful and thrilling prospect of almost limitless potential consequences without the trouble of having to face any of them immediately.  Power without responsibility; it could almost be the textbook definition of a modern-day terrorist.

(1.12.87)

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

Meditation on a Christmas card

Books could be written about the sociology of Christmas cards.  Just as Christmas itself has been annexed by consumerism, and cut off from its roots, so the business of Christmas cards has widened in import until it now stands as a microcosm of late twentieth century life.

For example sending cards has become a surrogate for the extended nuclear family’s earlier rituals of bonding.  We no longer assert the tribe by gathering but by remembering, an act commemorated by a token missive sent second class once a year.  It is a pledge; it says “you are of our group.”  For non-family members, this ritual can attain even more significance.  To be sent a card and not to have sent one is not only a gross solecism, it is a signal defeat in the lists of social jousting.  Hence the convoluted schemes of bluff and double-bluff as prospective recipients attempt to second-guess their friends’ and colleagues’ intentions.  Without such precautions they are forced to send cards to everyone.

When the card list has been drawn up, it is then necessary to choose the right card.  With the burgeoning of choice, this is no easy matter Once upon a time pictures of mangers and angels would have done; today we are embarrassed by religion.  It shows our Christmas up for the shoddy materialistic display it has become.  It is no accident that commerce prefers to call it by the anonymous and sanitised name of “Xmas”.

Usually some blameless winter scene is chosen.  This is certain to be safe, since the image nearly always depicts snow, by now an almost mythical accompaniment to Christmas.  As a mere fantasy scene, we are well-equipped to deal with it; our response are automatic and infallible.

Unfortunately most card manufacturers have tumbled this, and produce minor variants of the same.  So the next factor comes into play: vanity.  A few years back, the charities hit on the plan of competing with purely commercial concerns by producing their own Christmas cards, but with a special added ingredient which made them unbeatable.  This was the warm glow purchasers felt at the base of the heart, secure in the knowledge that not only were they fulfilling social obligations by buying and sending the dratted things, they were also market out as magnanimous.

And so the great race began.  Receiving a Christmas card became an act of abetting: by taking  you acknowledged that others had given.  Your only defence was to retaliate.  A hierarchy evolved, though one that nobody would admit to.  Cards supporting donkey sanctuaries inevitably scored less than those helping the aged.  Leper colonies notched up the points, but anything to do with children tended to romp away.  After all, Christmas is a time for children, as we are constantly reminded by toy manufacturers.

The net result of this classical Darwinian evolution is that what was once a charming, personalised gesture has become a frantic competition.  To make the New Yorker in us all feel totally at home, this contest even has “parameters” by which we are judged: timing, quantity and quality.  This, then, is my Christmas card – because it lacks all of them.

(20.12.86)

See also Moody Sonnets – Happy Christmas

Index

If I were a gnat

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a gnat.  Leaving aside the fact that as a gnat my brain would be too small to be able to answer the question, and assuming even more unreasonably that I knew what it felt like not to be a gnat and so could make comparisons, my main impression would presumably be like swimming in treacle.  For we tend to forget in such anthropomorphic fantasies that the world has a scale built into it, and that effectively the laws of physics would seem very different if we were a thousands times smaller – or bigger.

For example, ants are often cited as immensely strong for their size since they can lift many times their own weight.  Sometimes this is expressed in some such striking form as to say that if an ant were as big as a cow it could throw a combine harvester over its shoulder.  In fact it couldn’t, simply because its legs would buckle and break under the weight.  The strength of its body is defined by the material, and this does not change when you scale up the size.  So what is immensely strong when insect-small becomes as weak as any other organic material when the size of a human.

Another manifestation of this effect is to be found among the dinosaurs.  One reason why the very largest of them like the Brontosaurus are likely to have spent most of their time wallowing in shallow pools is that the stuff of their leg bones – which is the same in giant dinosaurs as it is in dainty gerbils – would probably have shattered under the immense pressure caused by propping up several dozen tons of Brontosaurus meat.  The animal simply would not have been viable without the auxiliary support obtained by partially floating in water.

The effects of scale can also be seen in much more homely surroundings.  When tiny children fall over with an apparently enormous impact, they often get up with almost no ill-effects.  Had an adult fallen in a similar way they might well have sustained serious damage.  In part this is due to the design of the child’s body: it is by nature very soft and supple, and the bones themselves are far less brittle.  But the scaling effect of physics also contributes: for children the impact is indeed less serious than for an adult simply because they are smaller.

Scaling can also be temporal.  Our personal sense is partly defined by the total time elapsed, or the total time remembered, which will obviously be less.  So, very roughly speaking, for a two-year-old child to wait six minutes is the equivalent of a twenty-year-old having to wait an hour.  Even though the scaling will not be exact, it does at least suggest why two-year-olds’ attention spans are so short.  Moreover, it also goes some way to explaining the converse slowing down of time for the old.  For an octogenarian an hour passing is like only fifteen minutes passing for a twenty-year-old, at least in terms of its relative weight in their life’s duration so far.

Thus whatever rulers and clocks try to tell us to the contrary, scales change.  We start near to the gnat, and finish near to the dinosaur.  Pity that in between we forget to make allowances for both.

(24.12.91)

Index