Art & Lies (12 page)
Work is a long pole with my luggage dangling off it, if not my luggage, then 200 lb bags of chillies, sackcloths of rice, a row of chickens tied by the feet.
The way down to the river, where all life starts, is ricked with shallow steps. Mediaeval steps, that have served for feet since then. Feet in embroidered shoes, feet in thin silk slippers, feet in fur boots leather sewn. Feet bound for the marriage market, the bare feet of the labour market, up and down the slippery steps, the coolies, shoulder-poled.
Goods arrive this hour, this minute, every other. A babble of goods, speechful, mobile, carrier and carried indistinguishable and unshapeable, a gaudy bundle moving up the rock side.
The boats that bounce the river are both humble and grand. Each pulls to a pole sunk in the black mud. A particular and thick black mud that sucks a pony’s hooves to its fetlocks. The black mud and the yellow river. The wasp drone of the small engined craft, and the deep gluga, gluga, gluga, of the diesel boat.
This is the market, but the goods cannot be sold unless the humans are sold too. The price is not high; a dollar a day, hours, dawn till dusk. In return, a shelter, two bowls of rice noodles, 3 oz of meat. That way the peasants can save a little to take back home. They shrug, ‘This is the market.’
My companion, a banker, there to explain to the humble Chinese that their characters for Free Man and Happy Man, are in the West spelt Capitalist Man, said to me, ‘Lesson Number One, Handel, be realistic about market forces.’
Why? Why must I? Why must I be realistic about an invention? There is nothing a priori about market forces, nothing about the market that isn’t a construction and that couldn’t be deconstructed. When I question the great god of the market, my friend, who is atheist, laughs and calls me a dreamer, but his way of life is a nightmare. He is a successful man who has abandoned three marriages, who owns four houses, but rents them out, who lives mostly in an aeroplane, and when he is not doing that, he makes his home in an hotel, and looks for companionship at night. He has not taken a holiday in five years. He is a successful man. I said, ‘Alan, the least of the animals can find a home that suits it, can get enough to eat, can bring up its young, play its part in the pack, and have time to bask in the sun. For a human being, the roof and crown of nature, those things are a considerable achievement. Most of us are substantially worse off than the rabbit in the field.’
There are two cities in the world where that which is increasingly desired can no longer be bought. Not happiness or love, both outside the money exchange, but space. No matter how rich I am, I can’t buy it, because it doesn’t exist. The gardens have long since been built over. The larger apartments have been divided. Houses, if you can get one, have yards, if you are lucky. A yard fit for a slum tenement, the dank restricted area that would have embarrassed a nineteenth-century weaver, and where a Chinese peasant would throw his rubbish. That is what a millionaire can buy in Tokyo and New York City.
I confess I have a passion for land. The slate green moors of my childhood are the geography of my heart. Hard to accept that my heart is now a National Park. What was wild is tame. What used to be unpathed, now has rustic trail ways, decorated with acorns. There are no oak trees. There are cafés and rest rooms every 10 miles. Pony trekking on demand, so that everyone can discover the freedom of what was once the countryside. Why should country folk have it to themselves? This is a democracy.
It’s had to be improved, of course, not the democracy, the countryside. It was simply too bumpy and rough for the average family car. Naturally, on a day out, children need regular injections of Coca-Cola followed by a good flush on the toilet. They can’t be expected to squat in a hedge. The wild blackberries and nut trees have had to be grubbed up, they could be poisonous, and they don’t conform to EEC food hygiene laws. Those delightful rushing streams, so quaint on a postcard, have had to be fenced off in case of insurance claims against the local authority. There is plenty of grass, but now that the sheep have been removed to facilitate public access, the grass is too abundant, and it has to be sprayed four times a year with a bomb of chemicals slung under the belly of a Cessna. No need to worry about the chemicals, unlike the blackberries and nut trees, sloes and hips, chemicals are perfectly safe.
My advice is to stick to the paths, which lead in a Dantesque descent, from the car parks to the toilets, to the gift shops, to the Heritage Museum. There they go, democratic man in his shell-suit and fluorescent kagool. As yet, city scientists have not found a way to improve the weather over National Parks.
Gleams like the flashing of a shield. The sun on the uncut slate rubbed smooth. The gleam of the land is in its rocks, the fine-grained argillaceous rocks, here, not purple or grey, but green of living stone.
The rocks cry out. The bone of slate beneath the green clothes, moss, mole soft, moleskin dense. The land ribbed with bright stone that forces its colour into the soil, into the grass, into the tough tongued sheep. Sheep that stand as hill carvings, things wrought not made, things wrought out of their own land, deep land quarried and mined, the very depths drilled for the pitched roofs of the little houses that come out of the hill. Stone and slate connecting generations to the land and to each other.
The road is narrow at the foot of the moor. Narrow as the smoke from a chimney stack of a single house. From a distance, perspective gives the road a crazy turn and runs it upwards into the smoke, so that the smoke continues the tarmac road as a carbon ribbon, making way for the traveller among the clouds.
For so many years I shaped my course to this road; resignation of early childhood, the misery of public school, gloomy adolescence, even some manly pride, my boots ringing to the pleasure of a medical scholarship. On my left, the valley in falling curves, on my right, the moory heights.
The weather changes the moor. In fresh sun and light wind, the red fenescue moves as Moses’ sea; grass waves that part for me as I pass, and close up again in smooth combs. On those days the firm hills billow. The trees bend and the ground beneath them, there is only motion, nothing still but me. A rabbit runs away in the wood.
Is it because my nature is melancholy that the moor I love best is the moor drenched out of colour, slate rain on the slate land, through the open roof of the sky? On those days, the valley houses evaporate, but for a valiant smoke signal that makes a strange high column above the mist. The rain the sheep ignore undyes the hills. The washed green leaches into streams that run, not pale, but frothy and sinister over the shiny black stones. Where the trees re-inforce the reflection, the water has a green eye, and slips reptilian over the rocks. I used to follow it on its tortuous journey, until it flung itself over a crag, a perpetual suicide and rebirth in the deep pool below.
A waterfall is temptation. The sparking living power that never hesitates, but takes the impossible drop at a leap, and makes a crystal bridge for my body. Once, twice, three times, have I taken off my clothes and stood in the spray on the brink, my skin dropleted with excitement, my hair wet through. All of me wanting to risk the prismic folds and slide into the waiting water.
Why did my feet grip the bank with prehensile caution? I couldn’t jump, although every muscle was tensed to jump. I didn’t want to die, I wanted to know that power, the strange electric torrent and the great din in my ears.
I suffer from hydremia. Perhaps that’s the reason why water draws me when I should draw water. When we lived in Rome, we had a well in our garden, I wanted to climb down it and change my name to Angelotti. Even as a little boy, I had no interest in heroics, but my mother played Puccini, and forbade me to be Floria Tosca. I learned to be silent and to hide in the well. I’m not a hero, I’m not even a chessboard knight. Trying to be a priest was something of a fianchetto wasn’t it? Clever move by a poor player.
But Handel is a doctor now. Doctors save lives, doctors are important. My elder brother is a judge. I live off sickness, he lives off crime, and yet we are so very respectable. Bow down at the Sign of the Leech. Ha, Ha. I have one, you know, a wooden board that sports a jolly looking leech. I got it from an eighteenth-century apothecary shop, along with glass tubes, silver vials, lettered jars, and other fattrils of medical hocus pocus. Sotheby’s sale.
I don’t want to sound disillusioned but I am.
What were my illusions?
Progress. Love. Human Nature.
Shall we take them one by one, now, in the stale air of a dead train, shunted by the concrete sea?
Progress: An advance to something better or higher in development. Are human beings better or higher in development than they were? There have been many outstanding men and women in history, and, since there are now vastly more people than at any previous time, we should expect at least a proportionate rise in the number of the great and the good. Where are they? Not in politics. Not in public life. Not in the Church, whatever your brand, there are no great spiritual leaders. I will admit that we have better scientists, if by better, we agree that they are more sophisticated, more specialised, that they have discovered more than their dead colleagues. But if we ask, are they more ethical, more socially aware, more disciplined, more relevant to the happiness of the whole, then our scientists have failed the age they claim to have created. The masses are fobbed off with gadgets, while the real science takes place behind closed doors, the preserve of the pharmaceuticals and the military. Genetic control will be the weapon of the future. Doctors will fill the ranks of the New Model Army. And of course you will trust me won’t you, when I tell you that with my help, your unborn child will be better off? The white coat will replace the khaki fatigues as the gun gives way to the syringe.
I like to read George Bernard Shaw, not, as he hoped, as an improvement on Shakespeare, but as a visionary who truly believed that Socialism could progress man’s basest instinct; greed. Is there a gene we could tag and rub out for that? If there is, the money won’t be there for the research, much more profitable to ease out red-heads or homosexuals. What’s the difference? In the fifteenth century it was well known that red hair was a sign of a consort of the Devil. If our ancestors had possessed our technology, this woman opposite me would certainly be brunette. There would be no red-heads, and we would justify that loss by saying ‘Ah yes, but thanks to us there are no witches either.’ Genetic engineering would have taken the credit for ordinary social change. Witches and devils no longer threaten you and me. We don’t mind living next door to the harmless lady with her herb garden and decoction still, her black cat and red hair. Once we would have tied her to the stake and burned her, but these days, it’s just the faggots that offend.
We strict Catholics won’t flinch from a little medical intervention. We have made that mistake before. In 1936, when the Catholic hierarchy was colluding with the Nazis, Hitler was not in favour of Concentration Camps. He advocated compulsory sterilisation for the ‘hereditarily diseased’. His advisor, Cardinal Faulhaber, disagreed: ‘From the Church’s point of view, Herr Chancellor, the State is not forbidden to isolate these vermin from the community, out of self-defence, and within the framework of the moral law. But instead of physical mutilation, other defensive measures must be tried, and there is such a measure; interning the people with hereditary diseases.’ (Literary remains of Cardinal Faulhaber.)
Strict Catholics. Orthodox Jews. The other day I heard an ex-Chief Rabbi arguing in support of genetic cleansing for homosexuals. It would be kinder, he said, than imprisonment.
The problem with imprisoning homosexuals is that it is impossible to imprison them all. Homosexuality is harder to identify than Jewishness. Much better to intervene while the incipient queer is still in the womb. His mother is to blame. She’s the carrier. Homophobia and misogyny bedded down under the white sheets of bad science. That’s progress isn’t it?
I haven’t said anything about lesbians. I don’t know anything about them. I suppose that they, like other women, will be surprised to find their new listing from the American Psychiatric Association. It is ‘Mentally Ill’, but only when they are pre-menstrual, of course. You don’t mind the harmless lady with her herb garden and decoction still, her red hair and her black cat, who lives quietly with her friend, do you? Do you mind her when I say that she is a mentally ill lesbian? And if I said I could cure her, wouldn’t you think me a good man?
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Don’t be narrow minded Handel, with your gloomy science and medical obsessions. People live longer, our children aren’t slaving down the mines, we do recognise our global responsibilities, even if our governments choose to ignore them. Women are not equal, but they are less unequal than they used to be. We don’t call black men niggers. We are an advanced civilisation. A democracy. Isn’t that something?
Yes, it is something, it’s The Golden Age of Greece, the Athens of Pericles. The Greeks enjoyed longevity. Their own people were not slaves, although their empire depended on the slave labour of others, in much the same way as the West exploits the Third World. Women enjoyed considerable freedoms, though not the same freedoms as men. The Greeks, beyond the concerns of their empire, were not xenophobic. They were an advanced civilisation. A democracy, ahead of ours, in that it was not representative, but direct. To them, we owe, poetry, philosophy, logic, mathematics, model government and sculpture. I admit that they did not invent the microwave.
Perhaps it is a good thing that Greek is no longer taught in most schools. A study of Greek language and Greek thought would make the most ardent computer modernist as disillusioned as I am. Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually?
