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Rings and mead halls

I enjoyed hearing the late Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf on the radio the other week. There’s something wonderfully taut and muscular about the language of this epic poem.

One phrase stuck in my mind. A good king is described as a ‘ring giver’. As to where the rings come from the authors of Beowulf are completely unabashed. A good king wrecks the mead halls of other kings and extracts tribute from their people.

Nothing very much has changed. Political leaders are still judged by whether or not they have made us better off, and, though we’re a lot more squeamish these days about where wealth comes from, it still has to come from somewhere. As a character observes in Ann Leckie’s excellent novel Ancillary Justice, ‘luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish.’

Other people’s mead halls are still being wrecked to provide rings for the supporters of the powerful, but recent news items remind me that there are always additional options: stealing from the poor, stealing from previous generations (which is what is really happening when publicly owned resources are sold off at prices far below their real value) and of course stealing from our descendants, which is what is being done when efforts at mitigating climate change are dismissed as being too costly.

Burgerisation

I’m always troubled by the music videos I have to watch on my annual visit to the gym. They seem to be simultaneously pornographic and narcissistic: ‘I am an object of immense desire,’ the performers seem to pout, ‘and that single fact utterly absorbs and obsesses me’. This is true of the semi-naked female performers, but it’s true in another way of the supercool male gangster types with their impassive faces, so sure of their own power that nothing can move or impress them.

This article speaks of ‘pornification’ in connection with music videos, and it’s a good word for it (in my novel Marcher I actually invented a musical genre called pornopop to try and capture the same phenomenon), but I suggest pornification is a part of an even wider process which you might call burgerisation.

A McDonalds-type burger, it seems to me, is a food from which everything has been stripped except the things that we actively crave for. Never mind subtle flavour or variety, the burger homes ruthlessly in on the basic ingredients which our evolutionary history has wired us up to find irrestistible, notably salt and fat. For why bother with the irrelevant detail? Not only will it put up the production costs but it will dangerously delay the moment of gratification for fickle consumers, who are always in danger of wandering off to other less challenging sources of pleasure.

And so with the music videos. Stories of tenderness and romance have been stripped away and the message pared down until it as close as possible to the primitive templates of desire – desire for sex and for control – that are hardwired into our brains. Why bother with anything that actually has to be listened to? Why bother with anything that deals with the messiness of actual human relationships?

Even the gym itself, in a way, represents a kind of burgerisation, for it provides pure exercise from which everything else has been clinically removed: the pleasures of productive physical work, the joys of the open air, the sights and sounds you experience when you go for a run, or a walk, or ride a bike. My son once pointed out to me a glass-fronted gym where the exercise machines on the first floor (with their dials and heart rate monitors) were accessed via an escalator, presumably to save the few seconds of unscheduled exercise that would be involved in using stairs.

That really is the essence of burgerisation. Like a call centre which has refined all possible queries to just six options, a burgerised product is quite deliberately isolated from the world’s richness, and from its own origins, in order to meet a few basic core objectives with the maximum efficiency and the minimum of unnecessary cost.

No wonder I stay away from that gym.

Dis wata de col col

A while ago on the radio I heard a speech by the President of Sierra Leone, announcing the end of civil war. He began the speech in English:

‘The war is over!’

And then he said the same thing in Krio, the English-based creole which is the country’s lingua franca.

‘Wah done gone!’*

Every part of the English-speaking world has its own version of English, but in most cases these haven’t diverged from one another so much as to become actual separate languages. On the contrary, the prestige and utility of Standard English, with its stabilised grammar and spelling, mean that the various regional versions of the language tend to converge towards the standard form rather than flow away from it. This has happened with the regional dialects of England, and it may well happen in Sierra Leone too. A standardised official language is like a deep channel dug through a river delta where the waters have broken up into many small streams.

But if the channel silts up, or access to it is lost, then new streams form. Under the Romans, Latin was a deep channel across a wide swathe of Europe, in many places completely replacing the indigenous languages. But after the empire broke up, so did the language, splintering into countless Romance tongues, a few which became new national languages.

As the world is at the moment, I guess this sort of divergence is only likely to happen with English in a place like Sierra Leone, where literacy and exposure to Standard English would have been comparatively low while Krio was evolving. But it could happen in the future in any part of the English-speaking world, whether as a result of limited exposure to the main English-speaking community, a reduction in the prestige of the parent language, or a need for a separate language for purposes of group identity. If you listen to Krio being spoken it’s a fascinating glimpse of the kinds of language that would emerge: still recognisable as part of the same family and still partly comprensible, but no more similar to standard English than Romance languages are to one another.

The complete isolation of the people in Dark Eden and their very limited literacy would have undoubtedly have resulted in their language diverging from Standard English. (Their isolation is obviously far greater than that of Krio-speakers in Sierra Leone. On the other hand, Standard English was spoken by their forebears, which is not the case with creole languages).

I tried to give a small sense of this divergence with the small variations in grammar and vocabulary that everyone notices in the book. One of the drivers for this divergence, I thought, would be the fact that, at the beginning, the population would have consisted of two parents and their children, which I felt would result in simplified childish forms becoming established, without a wider adult world to ‘correct’ them. (In a similar kind of way, Afrikaans is thought to have evolved a grammar that is radically simpler than that of its parent language, when Dutch settlers found themselves speaking on a daily basis to servants and slaves with only a limited understanding of Dutch.)

Rather pleasingly, I’ve since found that the most obvious distinguishing feature of Eden English is actually present in at least one variant of English found on the planet Earth:

It is common in Guyanese Creole to repeat adjectives for emphasis (as if saying, very or extremely). For example, “Dis wata de col col” translates into “This water is very cold”. “Come now now” translates into “Come right now.”

(Wikipedia entry on Guyanese Creole.)

*This probably isn’t the correct spelling.

Little pipers

At a place we stayed over the summer, some bats were roosting in an empty barn. There were six or seven of them dangling from the ceiling in a little cluster: little fluffy creatures, about the size of mice, in various shades of brown, with pointy ears, tiny faces, and alert little beady eyes.

I’ve always found bats fascinating. They are one of a number of miscellaneous phenomena that for some reason strike me as slightly implausible, so that I almost have to pinch myself to remind myself that they exist. (No really! Little furry mammals with ears, teeth – and wings!) I went into that barn many times just to stand and watch them.

They were not equally enchanted with me. As their fierce little faces glared down at me, they squirmed with agitation, and sooner or later one or more of them would drop into the air and zoom round and round the room until they found another roosting place further away.

I never managed to see how they did that trick of somehow getting hold with their feet of something above them while they were still flying, but I did see that when one bat came to rest too close to another, the offended party would wriggle, show its teeth and hiss, until the offender moved further away. I imagine this involved some squeaking also, but I’m past the age when people can hear the sounds of bats.

I believe they were pipistrelles. As I watched them, it struck me that this was a Romance word which probably originally meant something like ‘little pipers’. I found this thought curiously pleasing.

Fierce little pipers, with pipes so shrill that only youthful ears can even hear them!

The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley

This is George Bush in Air Force One, flying back from Texas to Washington. He’s requested that the plane divert over New Orleans, and he has invited the press to come through from their section of the plane to photograph him looking down concernedly at the city whose lower parts have now been flooded for two days, since Hurricane Katrina broke the levees. If any single image captures the mediocrity of this man, this is surely it. This was not a leader, but a dull little rich kid whose daddy’s friends had fixed him up with a job, and provided him with helpers to do the difficult parts. In this case, even the helpers screwed up.

‘You’re doing a great job, Brownie!’ Bush told the Director of FEMA, the federal agency responsible, but of course as we all know the agency’s performance was very far from a great job. In a curiously telling detail, Douglas Brinkley observes that Brownie was not in fact a nickname that anyone actually used. The dull little rich kid was trying to suggest a level of engagement that did not in fact exist.

The Great Deluge is an account of what actually lies below him as he gazes down for the cameras: a devastated city, where bloated corpses are floating in the streets, sick and elderly people are dying alone in flooded houses, and thousands are crammed into a sports stadium without adequate food, water or medical attention, waiting for an evacuation which, for no obvious reason, has still not arrived.

There is lawlessness. Some of the local police have simply abandoned their posts and run. Women waiting for rescue have been raped. Looters raid shops not only to steal but in some strange attavistic ritual (of revenge? of triumph?) to defecate on cash registers and on goods that they can’t carry away. But the lawlessness has been taken by many of those who should be helping the survivors as a reason for treating them all as criminals. (Another telling moment: a new general arrives in New Orleans to get a grip on the military efforts, and one of his first acts is to instruct is to instruct National Guardsman not to point their guns at people when they’re talking to them.)

The very boundary between lawful and unlawful has in any case been blurred. Is it really looting to break into a store for bottles of clean water, when the only other option is drinking polluted flood-water in which human and animal corpses are floating? (Is it even exactly looting, I wonder, to steal a TV or some other valuable piece of hardware, when you’ve lost your home and have no savings to fall back on?) In the Morial Convention Centre, some gangsters are taking it upon themselves to provide protection for the vulnerable in the absence of any formal forces of law. Other are just terrorising the weak.

The fact that nearly all the people trapped in New Orleans are black and poor almost certainly doesn’t help. Police officers and Guardsmen frequently treat them with undisguised contempt, and suggest that it is their own stupid fault that they stayed in the city after warnings were given that they should move. But where would you go, if everyone you know lives in the streets around you, you have no money to pay for accomodation elsewhere and the government, though it can afford to pay for wars on the far side of the world, has provided nothing? Some people who try to leave on foot are stopped at gunpoint by police from neighbouring areas which don’t want to take them in.

It’s outside the scope of this book but we know too that other communities which did initially respond generously were quickly to grow tired of the burden of caring for the incomers, and to begin to stigmatise them as lazy and undeserving of help. In another book I read recently*, a woman relocated to Austin, Texas, describes her children being bullied and stigmatised at school because they are ‘people from the storm’.

I wasn’t completely enamoured of the way The Great Deluge was written – I could have done without some of the long, folksy biographies of various characters with which the account is punctuated, and the numerous quotations from songs and literature which never seemed quite as apt as the author seemed to think they were – but it provides a detailed and vivid overview nevertheless of what actually happened during that dreadful time, as well as of the things that one would expect to happen in the world’s wealthiest country but in fact did not. I was left with a powerful sense of how quickly we human beings can shut down compassion when it asks too much of us, simply by relabelling our fellow humans as something other than ourselves.

Any one seriously interested in writing or thinking about the future should be reading this book, and books like it. The way things are going, there are going many more flooded cities before this century is out, many more people who don’t have access to food or water, a lot more ‘people from the storm’.

*Community Lost: the State, Civil Society, and Displaced Survivors of Hurricane Katrina, by Ronald J Angel, Holly Bell, Julie Beausoleil and Laura Lein.

Role play

Our next door neighbours have a little boy of 3 called Marlowe.

The other day I saw him with his dad in the street and he showed me his plastic toy smartphone. I held it to my ear and said ‘Hello, is that Marlowe?’

He shook his head.

‘Say it’s Ben calling,’ he corrected me in a stage whisper, ‘and ask me if I want to speak to him. Then I’ll tell you I’m too busy.’

I held the phone to my ear again.

‘Hello is that you Ben? Do you want to speak to Marlowe?’

I held out the phone to Marlowe.

‘Marlowe, it’s Ben for you.’

‘Tell him I’m too busy,’ Marlowe said.

Hunger

Something reminded me of a dream I had some years ago about a young blind man. This was a real person who I had actually met in waking life, so I knew that not only was he blind and homeless, but that he had had the most awful childhood, having been rejected by his own family at an early age, and rejected since many times.

In my dream he was begging on the street. Unknown to him the cash machine in the wall behind him had broken and was spewing £20 notes out onto the pavement.

* * *

I once took it into my head to study for an MA in English Literature. For my final dissertation I wrote about a short story by Philip Dick: ‘I hope I shall arrive soon’. In the story, a man spends so many years in a state of desperation, longing to arrive at his destination, that when he finally does arrive there, he can’t believe it. He can’t be persuaded that this isn’t just another fantasy.

* * *

I bought a phone the other day which came with a single game in it called Snake Xenzia. You direct a tiny snake around the screen, picking up pieces of food. If you take it off the top edge of the screen, it reappears on the bottom. If you take it off the right, it reappears on the left. Each time it eats, the snake grows longer. The thing you have to avoid is the snake bumping into itself, at which point the phone vibrates sickeningly with the impact and the snake dies.

As the game progresses the screen becomes fuller and fuller with the snake’s coils, winding back and forth across the screen and in and out across its edges. If it is to continue to feed itself, the snake must negotiate an ever-growing labyrinth constructed of its own body and its own past.

Enchanted objects

I saw the recent movie of The Great Gatsby. Visually I found it a little lurid, but I was interested by the story and I went on to read the book, which was already sitting there on our shelves.

What had particularly struck me in the film – it is actually surprisingly faithful to the book – was the image of the little green light burning across the bay. It is the light at the end of the landing stage of the mansion of Gatsby’s lost love Daisy.

There is a brilliant moment, after Gatsby has met up with Daisy again, where the narrator wonders if Gatsby has noticed that the green light will never again have the same meaning:

‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby. ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

Rats, wolves, bears

Someone told me recently that rats pair off for life and that male rats are closely involved in the care of their young. The term ‘love-rat’ turns out to be poorly chosen. Rats are faithful husbands and conscientious dads.

Another animal I’ve always thought we’ve got wrong is the wolf. Countless fairytales have encouraged us to think of wolves as dark, sinister, uncontrollably violent. We use the words wolfish, vulpine. And when we imagine wolves in human form they are savage and murderous.

But why? On what evidence?

I’ve sometimes thought of writing a story in which a real wolf-man is created with the body and intelligence of a human, but the instincts and drives of a wild wolf. To everyone’s disappointment, he turns out to be a mild-mannered, comformist creature, anxious to please, concerned about his social standing and willing to do what he’s told.

Wolves are social, hierarchical creatures, after all. Their desires and priorities are like our own. It’s not a coincidence that they’re the ancestors of our best-loved pet. With added intelligence and a human body, wolf-man is pretty much an average bloke.

But in my story there’s also a bear-man, and he’s another thing entirely. Having the instincts of a solitary hunter, he has no need for company of any kind, except for occasional sex, and cares nothing at all for what people think of him. In my story, bear-man is capable of calculation and learning, and so assumes some sort of veneer of human-ness because he perceives it to be in his interests to do so, but beneath it he remains utterly unreachable and entirely cold. A truly scary being.

Oddly enough, though, the bear is much more positive figure in human culture than the wolf. Think of Winnie the Pooh, Paddington, Baloo, Yogi, and try and find even one wolf equivalent. Bears are seldom the villain in stories, in spite of the fact that killings of humans by bears, unlike killings by wolves, really do quite regularly occur.

Is it their very similarity to us that makes wolves our animal of choice when we want to project our violent impulses onto some other creature?

(We’ve got more than a little in common with rats too: versatile omnivores which have managed to spread themselves across most of the planet.)

Blakeney: a seaside postcard

You couldn’t capture this in photographs. It’s one of those places that demonstrate how different our perceptual system is from a camera. Our eyes don’t take discrete pictures. Our brains assemble, not a picture, but a 3D model, drawing on memories and associations as well as what is literally in front of our eyes.

The hinterland of this coast is undulating rather than truly hilly, a green rolling landscape of fields, hedges, dark woods and pretty Norfolk villages with houses faced with flints and prosperous square-towered churches. The village of Blakeney descends from this gently undulating terrain to a quay where there are sailing boats and ice creams and people fishing for crabs.

But this is not the edge of the sea. The boats and crabs are in a tidal creek and the sea itself is another mile away. You can’t even see it from the quay, only the ridge of shingle behind which the beach lies.

Between the village and the sea is a marsh. To the right of the village, looking out, the marsh has been enclosed in a dyke and drained to make pasture on which cattle graze, to the left it is still undrained, a salty place of grass and shrubs and flowers that is intermediate between land and sea. Crabs crawl and bees buzz a few feet away from each other; the cries of seabirds mingle with the song of larks. A couple of dilapidated-looking houseboats lie stranded on the grey-green grass.

Because of the creeks, you have to go a long way round to stand on that shingle ridge. But from there you can look back across at the little villages dotted along the inner coastline, the edge of the solid land. There they are with their red roofs and their flint walls and their church towers, with the woods and fields behind them: Salthouse, Cley, Blakeney, Morston. I’ve seen them in bright sunshine over there while just behind me, waves sucked and rattled at the stones, terns dive bombed for fish and a ghostly mist came rolling in from the North Sea.

You could take pretty photos here, there’s no doubt about that: a stranded houseboat, oyster catchers on the pebbly strand, a church tower rising above the trees… But photos only show what’s in front of you and they reproduce perspective with a literalness that the human brain avoids without a moment’s thought. A shot that took in the whole of that string of villages, would necessarily reduce them, and the low green land behind them, to a narrow and insignificant-looking strip between expanses of sky and marsh. It would all seem quite flat and dull.

And now I come to think of it, flat and dull was exactly my impression of this place when I first came here many years ago. With no 3D model, no associations, I was reduced to taking mental snapshots and comparing them unfavourably with pre-conceived notions of what attractive coastal scenery should look like. This is no Cornish cove. This is no sandy bay. But to my mind now it’s as beautiful as anywhere on Earth.