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Dead Fly

R.I.P. dead fly in my window. It died trying to get through a pane of glass to the sunlit world outside.

I learned some time ago that when they want to collect semen from a prize stallion they put it with what is called a ‘breeding mount’ – an object that (see link) doesn’t resemble a real horse at all, but does look something like a gym horse with an artificial vagina at one end. My momentary initial thought was that this demonstrated how simple and easy to fool horses were compared to humans. But then I realised this wasn’t the case at all. How is the stallion climbing onto the breeding mount more stupid or easy to fool than, say, a human male jerking off over porn? At least the breeding mount is a three-dimensional object, and not just a pattern of pixels on a screen.

In one sense neither is fooled, since presumably the stallion doesn’t think the mount is really a mare, any more than the man hunched over his screen thinks he is really in the presence of another human being. But, since in both cases there is enough there, in certain circumstances, to activate and sustain sexual behaviour, their instincts, in a way, are being fooled: their bodies’ machinery responds as if this was a breeding opportunity, when in fact it isn’t.

It isn’t just sexual behaviour that can be so activated. People experience tension, fear, excitement, pity, when watching actors on a TV screen in the corner of their living rooms, or when scanning the black marks on a white page. They know the story isn’t real, but there’s enough there to activate real emotional responses. In fact you could make a case that pretty much the whole of human culture works like this: a vast system of things that remind us of things, that remind us of things, that ultimately remind us of something that’s able to set off some preprogrammed emotion or drive, and allow us in some way to act it out.

Flies see the sunlight and head towards it. Their vision isn’t good enough to detect the glass. When they hit it, they perhaps have no other response in their repertoire but to keep on trying to head towards the sunlight. There are two kinds of tragic scenario here. In one of them, an ironic one, the window is actually partly open, and all the fly would need to do would be to crawl over the lip of the upper window frame and it would be free. But that would mean not heading directly towards the light, and many flies die without ever learning that the way out was only ever a few inches away from them.

Flies are relatively simple creatures, but all the same there is nothing uniquely fly-like about this scenario, any more than there was anything uniquely horse-like about the breeding mount one, and it’s equally easy to think of human analogues. I would guess that psychotherapists might see their job as helping people to stop beating uselessly on the glass, and help them find a way to the part of the window that’s open.

In the second scenario, the window is closed. There is no way out. The fly can either beat on the window until its life is over, or simply give up, and live out its life inside the closed room. In some analogous human situations, it’s hard to know what the right choice would be. Is it better to accept that the outside world is lost forever, and settle for imprisonment in the dreary, empty room – or better to refuse to give up, to continue the struggle right through to the end, even when to an outside observer, it’s obvious it can never succeed?

Cages

Gnostics saw the material world as a cage in which the spirit was trapped. Christianity (like other religions) has been preoccupied with the idea of the soul needing to free itself from base, animal instincts.

But oddly at the same time as characterizing our animal nature as something to be struggled against, Christianity has insisted that ‘unnatural’ behaviour is wrong: homosexuality, contraception, feminism have all been portrayed as going against the natural order of things.

Progressive liberal morality, which sees itself as supplanting those old moral codes, is nevertheless their heir. It is no longer stern about sexual continence. It sees sexual diversity as something to be celebrated, and gender, or the roles to be played by people of each biological sex, as a choice, rather than something to be imposed or enforced. But there is still, in progressive liberal morality, that same sense that our animal nature is something to be fought against. It’s just that other aspects of our biological nature are now the focus: our tendency to form hierarchies, our tendency to favour our own family and our own tribe.

Progressive liberal morality still expects people to struggle against what comes naturally to them. Any morality must, I suppose.

And liberal moralists get confused, tied in knots, just like the old moralists. There are tribes of anti-tribalists, who look out in contempt at the tribalists beyond their circle. There are hierarchies of anti-hierarchalists, with powerful opinion-formers at the top who lay down the anti-hierarchical doctrine, and armies of followers below to hound those who do not conform.

(History shows how easily the religion of the God of Love turned its hand to torture and murder, and how quickly the political doctrine of equality created its own godlike despots.)

These days people fight human biology on its own ground, by modifying bodies and body chemistry with surgery and medicine, and even altering the genetic code. We now have alternative bodies too in the form of thinking machines which one day may have souls of their own. Some people, weary of the endless struggle between humanity and itself, speak of evolving a new a better kind of being: superhumans, robot saints.

But I don’t believe that a self-reflecting being could exist that didn’t experience the conditions of its own existence in the same ambivalent way that we do. Is a human being happier than a lark, or kinder than a lark is to its fellow creatures? If not why would we expect a superhuman to be happier or kinder than we are?

Old

I went to the 70th birthday party of a friend recently. Since she has friends who are older than herself as well as friends who are younger, I was among the younger people there, but I’ll be 66 at Christmas, so I was very definitely part of the same generation as the people there in their seventies. I was in a group of old people with white hair, and brittle skin, and stiff limbs, and I was one of them.

It is a cliche, and only partly true, to say that I don’t feel old. In some respects I certainly do feel old. I have arthritis. I have health conditions which I’m now stuck with. I ache in the mornings. I have to pee at least three times every night. I have to make a effort to stand up from a sitting position. I am a granddad.

It’s not all bad, and that last is definitely one of the nice parts.

Another thing: my parents are dead, and have been for several years, which to be honest is also one of the nice parts. They were not bad people, and I felt affection for them, but all my life their neediness felt like a ball and chain which I had to drag around behind me . Latterly, neither of them wanted to carry on living and both of them deliberately hastened their own deaths. The fact that they no longer wanted to live was part of the burden, and now I’m free of it.

Another freedom I have now comes from having a pension. I don’t have to work unless I want to. This is obviously also a nice part (and perhaps especially so for a writer). I well remember, a few months after finally retiring from my last part-time day job as a university lecturer, suddenly realising how lucky I was to have an income until the day I die (not particularly high, but perfectly livable), and giving a little whoop of relief and delight at this new freedom which I have, whether or not I deserve it. The only downside is that it’s a reminder that I’m in the last part of my life, I am in the part of my life where society no longer demands anything of me.

The sense in which I don’t feel old – and I remember my mother saying the same thing- is that it feels like the same me looking out through my eyes as looked out through those eyes when I was 21, still grappling with essentially the same things.

Continue reading “Old”

Blocked

My new book Tomorrow came out a month ago. Normally, I’d have another book well on the way by this stage, but I haven’t. Plenty of ideas, plenty of scenarios and first chapters, but nothing that seems to want to crystallize into a book.

This is more of less the situation of the narrator of Tomorrow, a would-be novelist who can’t seem to get started on a book. It worked well for me when I wrote that book, the story just flowed out of me, but it’s not something I can hope to pull off more than once.

I can’t find the exact quote but the poet Ted Hughes said something about having to find a way to evade his mental policeman in order to write. Sounds right to me. You can’t keep using the same trick because the policeman gets wise to it. You have to find another.

Two Tribes audio drama

Here’s an audio drama put together by Chris Gregory for his Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast, based on an extract from Two Tribes. You’ll see the names of the actors when you click the link. What makes this a exceptional feat is that the actors were not together in the same room, each one recorded their lines separately – or rather several versions of each line- and Chris G selected the delivery he thought worked best, spliced them together, and added sound effects. It’s constructed around a central scene in the book where Harry and Michelle, meeting for the third time, go together to the Tate Modern in London, where they have their first big row.

Two Tribes: Harry and Michelle (paperback publication day post)

Although told from 250 years in the future, the main part of this book deals with a Cambridge-educated North London architect (Harry), and his relationship with a hairdresser from a small town in Norfolk who left school at 16 (Michelle).

When I described this to my friend Ian, his immediate reaction was ‘well, that would never happen’. You’d need to read the book to judge whether he was necessarily right, but it’s interesting, I think, that such a relationship seems so unlikely. I’m sure he wouldn’t have reacted in that way, if for example, I’d said the book was about a relationship between Harry and another architect who had, say, an Indian Hindu background. Nothing particularly unlikely about that. Which suggests to me that the cultural gap between different ‘cultures’ is actually smaller than the cultural gap between different classes.

Over much of my lifetime there was a kind of alliance between Harry’s class (which is also my own) -the liberal professional class- and the working class, both of which tended to vote Labour (just as both tended to vote Democrat in the US). In recent years, and notably in the Brexit vote, that alliance has fallen apart. Isn’t that what we really mean by the rise of ‘populism’? And that was the background against which I wanted to foreground Michelle and Harry’s relationship.

Two Tribes on Hive.

Two Tribes on Amazon

Two Tribes in paperback

Two Tribes is out in paperback this week, so here’s a short post to celebrate. (More info about the book here.)

This is a book with a simple moral, which (adapting Solzhenistyn) could be summed up as ‘The line between good and evil does not pass between those who like the European Union and those who don’t.’

Or: ‘It’s a mistake to assume you’re one of the good guys, just because you and your friends think you are. Pretty much everyone thinks their lot are the good guys.’

Or: ‘Just because someone doesn’t agree with you about politics, doesn’t make them a monster.’

Although mainly set in the aftermath of Brexit, it isn’t really about Brexit. It’s about social class, and specifically about the complicated relationship between the liberal middle classes and the working classes in Britain, and the way that relationship is changing.

I’m very proud of it.

Here’s another moral. ‘When there is more than one elite, each elite condemns the elitism of the others, but denies its own.’

Two Tribes on Hive.

Two Tribes on Amazon