Rereading People's Act of Love: Month 1

Whirlwind (1906), by Filipp Malyavin (from A World History of Art)

I know, I know - you're sick of this topic. But I have to find out why this one book, above all books, 'shakes my soul', to paraphrase a review in the Washington Post Book World. In my own words, why this book resonates with the metaphysical nothingness through which I swim - literally resonates like a note and a tuning fork.

(Read back a few posts and remember that this is my virtual identity, so really this is my party and you can just close the browser using that cross-shaped thingie up there on the right. In this world, we all have choices.)

I am rereading it as an experiment. Is this book genuinely soul-shaking or was my soul already shook? As I'm learning, the benefit to rereading a great book is that you can deconstruct why it is a great book. (Or you realise it wasn't really so great, but that's not the case here.)

This paragraph bothers me, but I am going to write it anyway. There are no adjectives that can summarise the horror of the convention of exile in Siberia in the early 20th-century (and for centuries before). Trust me, I have just tried. (See previous post about trauma.) Without trivialising this, the first two chapters bring this horror home. Using something more than words. Something with all the features of psychological unease.

The beginning of the third chapter gives the reader (me) some space, like an interrogator allowing the prisoner to sleep for a few minutes. Probably because he knows the torture that follows will be even more brutal for this respite.

Unlike the first chapter which assaults you until you can't remember a before or see an after, the third slides into the assault, crushing hope with the heel of a boot as one would a cigarette butt. And that is where I am now. Literally and metaphorically. 19 days and 46 pages in.

This is no melodrama, folks. This is my subjective experience of a book that uses me as a tuning fork in a way that only visual art does (again in the absence of words, which sinks into the spaces of me before I have time to hold it still and analyse it) - which I am learning will have to do in the absence of objective truth. (This doesn't mean I have to like it or even value it (it is nothing but a tautology, subjective truth), but there it is. It is all any of us have.)

I sound defensive. I am defensive. Emotions - especially extreme ones - are treated with some disdain, as an hysteria of the feminine world. They are not productive - in fact they may hamper productivity. They are naive; they are the realm of creative eccentricity, which we value as do an ethnological comparison.

Get to know me, the champion of one's emotions - especially those that swim deeper, and you will find that I appreciate logic and knowledge and those good things that bring a sense of objective security. You will probably still call me naive and eccentric, but then you don't know what I have witnessed and know of human nature, which led me to understand that trauma begets trauma begets trauma. That this is as much of a fact as the arc of the Earth around the Sun.

Now, I have just written, deleted, rewritten and deleted the above paragraph over and over. All I can muster up to try to convince you (and myself) that subjectivity has value - the same as that of logic and knowledge and science - is in this book.

Lady by a Piano (1899), by Igor Grabar (from A World History of Art)

On little questions

I know I'm not the first to write about this. I know this because we danced around it in various classes at varsity. I did my readings, submitted my essays and wrote exams on it, along with hundreds (and thousands) of other students. Amateur representations imitating other 'more credible' representations about the politics of representation, and so on. A snake biting its tale, which really is all philosophy is.

Now, you see, I know this (the last bit). But knowing is not understanding. The concerns of philosophy are, for me, concerning. Which makes being a writer a little bit tricky.

Because representation raises ethical issues about the observed, the observer and the viewer. (Me being the first and last.) Let's say I have some time so I mosey on down to the promenade, sit on a bench and write about what I see. What I see is an elderly couple walking, without looking at the scenery, without saying anything. They are walking side by side, without much distance between them.

(This already is a character study, but let's carry on.)

I dub them Mrs Blake and Mr St John. They began an affair in their thirties, Mrs a widow and Mr married. Having been married once, Mrs didn't care to repeat the experiment and never pushed him to leave his wife. Ho-hum, life continues for a few decades. (Whether or not the wife knows is irrelevant because she's not the one on show. Mr loves both women.) Then Mrs St John dies. But the relationship carries on as before for a few years, hidden, to dodge the gossips. They finally come clean (about their love, not the affair), the children are gutted, and they continue much as before. Ho-hum. After all this, they know each other well enough not to have to speak. They have walked the promenade many times before and know the ocean's many moods without looking. Intertwined with themes of memory, choice, accountability and gender relations.

This is a fiction. Imposed on a reality - someone else's reality. Think of your relationship with another person. Would you want to be described like this? Even if it is made up. If some trace of you remains: a gesture or expression.

A person isn't a theme or a metaphor; you have a complex inner life and the right to that. Do you permit me to manipulate that? If so, why?

The example above is just that. My main concerns have to do with the disenfranchised; the people you see at traffic lights, under bridges, knocking on your door. Even if written in an empathetic or sympathetic voice - especially if - what do I know of their lives? Anything I write will stem from pity or accusation; they will become symbols of time or chance or human dignity. What right do I have to their lives? What right do I have to pity or blame?

But how do I continue to ignore a portion of society whose stories already are ignored? Continue the cycle, heap blow upon blow, act the hypocrite. Equality isn't food, shelter, education; it is human relationships. If you want respect, respect all you would pity or pass judgement on until you know their story.

(Again I have sidelined the point: to do with travel photographs, amateur and professional, and how they objectify the lives of people. Another time.)

There is no solution here, we say (I hear the whispers). Let's not bother, then. Let's continue with our lives without tripping over the little questions. True. We can't second guess every moment of our lives: every thought, action or emotion. But that doesn't drown the little questions. And to someone else they may be crucial ones. To me, they are.

Sacred Hunger

Way back when (two years or so ago), a friend and I proposed to read the entire list of Booker winners. Yes! We would speak knowingly about these books above other books - we could truly consider ourselves cultured.

Printed list in hand, highlighter poised... I realised we hadn't heard of most of these books. And some of them sounded really, really boring. Still, we would persevere! (C'mon, deny that you've ever proposed a scheme like this, when your time is already so limited that sometimes you forget to breath properly or even blink, before you snigger.)

(These are all genuine side effects of stress. No jokes. How often do you find yourself yawning even when you're not tired? How often do your eyes seem dry, even without aircon to blame it on? Unless my doctor's having me on...)

This is how Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth ended up on my list of books to read. Now, this sounds like it's an excuse. Because it is. It's not a bad novel, but neither is it a great novel.

The novel follows a slave ship across the Slave Triangle - from Britain to Africa to the newly appropriated North America - juxtaposing this with the trials and tribulations of the ship owner's son. The intention is obvious: to represent the distance between the enterprise and the reality. A nail and hammer to kill a mosquito, but ok; slavery isn't exactly a topic for subtlety.

Some of the events described are brutal, so brutal, but again, we're distanced from them - the kind of distance (and reassurance) you get from watching a slasher movie. Again, intention resorting to a nail and hammer.

What I suspect the author intended was for us to identify with the protagonist, who is then implicated in the brutalities even in his sympathies, and so translate our own sense of implication. But the character is so consistent and his motivations so transparent that we anticipate even this.

The other characters range from this extreme to another: too consistent or too inconsistent (read malleable). Some of them intentionally draw on our sympathies and others revolt us. Then there is a scene featuring an animal that deliberately secures the allegiances of the characters and the reader.

Skip through a few hundred pages and the novel hurriedly nails together a mishmash of social philosophy, political philosophy, musings about the human condition, psychology and history, perhaps intended to throw the rest of the novel into relief.

Ta-da and a few pages later we have resolution and then it all ends.

Reading the novel feels like reading someone's confession. Whose? It is tempting to point to the author, but I feel uncomfortable brooding on someone else's thoughts, which then are my thoughts, and so on.

So perhaps this is the point: to feel as though you are reading a confession in which you are implicated but from which you are distanced. Can we be held responsible for someone else's mistakes? For society's mistakes? For all societies' mistakes? Where does this end?

Even mediocre novels tell us something about ourselves.

Following from my last post, my new favourite perfumes are...

Cool Water - Davidoff (the men's fragrance)

Key Lime and Ginger/Gingerflower - Charlotte Rhys

I'm still thinking about Thierry Mugler's Cologne and Chanel's No. 5 and 19, though.