History and fiction - and dinosaurs

When I was pre-teen, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I would have been content curating a museum, because long excavations without access to proper showers wearing clothes chosen because they showed the dirt the least and brushing dirt away from a metatarsal would have tested my love even for custard croissants. Then a teacher - as they do - crushed my hopes by pointing out I wasn't very good at, like, school. Jokes on her because I then vaulted the scholarly alphabet, but sans my dreams.

What they fail to tell you in school - among many things - is that a job title hides many variations of task. Even though I lacked fundamental logical skills, as it turns out, I could have risen through the corporate landscape, perhaps in funding, by bemoaning the inadequacies of the previous job-holder and then revising everything because Steve Jobs did it (in a competitive and innovative technological environment that is completely different to most companies).

I especially love dinosaurs. Now, I understand that this discipline is a bit of a joke because it requires ignoring the amazing range of animals we have now. But, they are giant reptile-like creatures, people. And this is also a treasure hunt. We don't even really know what they look like or sound like, just where they died, really. We don't have complete skeletons, people. We're throwing a party if we find an intact femur. And like with Pluto, we're notching creatures off roll call all the time.

When I was still living in the clouds like scarecrow looking for my brain, I had collections of magazines, trading cards and posters of my favorite dinos. I drew a cartoon of a dinosaur family that I realise now was improbable because different species can't breed, and I'm pretty sure a T-Rex and brontosaurus do not a stegosaurus make. Most kids grow out of this and into, I dunno, cars and making dinner like adults.

Did you know there is actually an internet discussion about who would win: T-Rex or Allosaurus? Your answer? It's a trick question. They lived in different eras. But should time and space collapse, my money's on the Allosaurus. The T-Rex is bulky and wins mostly by rushing at its prey, and Allosauris is lithe and fights like a boxer. Another anticipated show-down is Allosaurus versus Stegosaurus. I leave that to your imagination.

A stegosaurus staring down an Allosaurus.

There is a type of dinosaur that would beat them both. A saurupod (four-legged herbivore) so big nothing could kill an adult, except maybe worms, gangrene and flu. Oh, and humans. First they were known as gigantosaurs (yes, I know, I would have called it Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus) and then titanosaurs (I call it Fiveminutesoffame-saurus). A single femur is about one and a half times the height of a person.

A herbivore at the centre of the food chain.

According to reputable sources, a velociraptor was captured last year alive in Congo. There are some people who take this seriously because some fossils of extinct dinosaurs that were not wiped out in the mass extinction have been found in the area. Unfortunately space and time has not collapsed, and a few million years is a long time for anything to hibernate. Also, if they were real, I would be there reenacting the scene in Jurassic Park where the kids are hiding in the kitchen.

Some of my favourites have always been (until they check it off roll call) a species of duck-billed dinosaurs, which is a description not a nickname. They grazed in the same way as cattle, with their lips. Do I need to state the obvious? That their lips looked like bills. Well now I have. They ate on four legs but ran away on two, smart buggers.

Bird beak rather than bill, maybe.

This was not where My Point was meant to be (this never happens. Never). I was actually going to write about a popular science book I am reading that I am sceptical about. (The author claims he wrote a paper that founded string theory. Which is interesting given that the theory predates his birth.) But, you know, then dinosaurs. Perhaps I like history because if it were going to affect us, it already has. Like a  novel, you can close the book or skip the chapter on mass sacrifice or how that fossil came to be dead in the first place. You squint at your mortality, shift your head so that it looks like immortality and leave to get lunch.

I would be good at curating a museum. Far away from other people. With only the past and fiction for company. (I meant or: past or fiction. Definitely.) Can someone translate Bowbeforemedwarves-aurus into Latin?

PS. I realise a person who hunts dinosaurs is a paleontologist. But I was 12.

Harvest

How did I find this book? Did I download it or did I copy it from somewhere (I'll explain this criminal activity later)? Was it in my Amazon-generated list of recommendations? This is how it feels to read Harvest by Jim Crace. It feels a bit like reading Oryx and Crake (or have you forgotten this quickly?!). It lingers, like overpowering aftershave that wafts into a thin note of something cool and shadowy. Obviously shadowy does not mean happy tralala handstand here, because you know how I feel about happy. Suspicious.

I also don't know why I didn't blog about it when I finished it. I read it a few months ago, in that bleak period when I was too tired even to read. Yet I read Harvest. I couldn't not read Harvest.

Am I the only one whose relationships with books sometimes don't have words? Or is it just the nature of tapping away at a keyword (the 'j' button of which is stuck, I think with something sugary) without human contact? I mean, if it's just me, I don't have to use words, do I? And if I do, well, that's a new problem that requires me leaving my apartment.

Apart from Oryx and Crake, it also characterised my reading of People's Act of Love and Mara and Dann. Which if you read back (although I don't think I used labels back them so you'll just have to stumble blindly through 400 and something posts. Good luck), gutted me. Not only because I missed the characters and narrative style, but because my friends had just kicked me out of their snowy or verdant or dusty lives and I must have hit my head because when I woke up I was here. But here doesn't fit like there did.

Make sense? No, I didn't think so. I'm not sure I understood that. But then I did hit my head so I have an excuse.

Most of Harvest is almost unbearably creepy. It reminded me of The Village, except after a little while, you don't have time to worry about the Others - one eye is watching your neighbours in case they set fire to your house and the other is watching the gentlemen of the farm because people are going missing (well, not missing, you know where some of them are: inside the house), your brain is thinking about this idyllic but harsh life on the farm and in the village (where your neighbours are so welcoming) and your heart is bleeding for the trespassers who are now undergoing a punishment that seems like a hanging except you live and people throw squishy tomatoes at you.

Sorry, is that a bit much in one gulp? Well, that's the point, although I'm sure you realised that. Right?

Okay, now, spoilers exiled. Within the first few pages, you meet the narrator, a villager on a late 19th century farm, as he tries to convince us the villagers live autonomously. Feudal system aside, he was not born in the village, but married into it. (No one seems worried about interbreeding and the rather stupid children they seem to be producing.) So his neighbours are wary of him. Who knows what he could do?! Set fire to his own house?

Rather than being wary of him right now, they become wary of a camp of trespassers. Apparently setting a fire in that part of never never land means you are settling there, like a smoke signal (har!). The villagers and gentleman of the farm traipse towards the smoking fire to dissuade its lighters. No one appears to be home so they destroy everything like children unmaking a fort into a mess their mother has to tidy up. But no, there is a beautiful woman. Now the men stand around and gulp.

Then, like the trespassing rats they are, two men step in to help her. Her family, we can assume. One threatens the gentleman on his horse, the woman spits at him and the men are captured but the woman runs away. Some of the men go after her and you know enough to rock on your heels thinking she best run and hide like a deer. One that survives.

There is another gentleman on the farm, not propertied but an artist slash surveyor. Although he may just be an artist wishing he were surveyor because he needs the money. He goes after her too, but instead of feeling relief, you hope he runs and hides like a blerry rabbit.

Some feeling you can't name because it's hiding in the shadows is now tumbling around and making you dizzy. You don't like this situation, which is solved by everyone leaving the forest. Trespassers (minus one) in tow. No wait! There is a gallows-type structure set in some ruins of something, someone pulls out two nooses (neese?), they point the men's heads through until their chins are resting on the ropes and they are forced to stand on tiptoes. Then the villagers walk away. They intend to come back later and throw things at the men but then there is a violent storm and they snuggle up next to fires.

The narrator, not being a real villager, does come out to help them - and there I have to stop recounting that plot line because I almost spoiled it. I can tell you the woman is narry to be found, which is either a good or a bad thing. Obviously. But you don't know which to hope for. The artist is also missing. And all the men are missing the woman and all the women are furrowing their brows.

Plot line B involves the gentleman of the farm's deceased wife having relatives who suddenly decide to become farmers. The farm is technically theirs, but they are complete jerks who act like bouncers at a club where the club is anything that touches the same earth as them. They have now arrived to assess the property, because they would like to evict the villagers and turn the land to grazing. Basically replacing the villagers with cows. Bad joke. It's a metaphor for industrialisation and the disregard for the wellbeing of other humans - well, not a metaphor, it's an example.

The narrator has some suspicions about these men, but it doesn't really matter because the villagers can see the writing on the wall and they are hightailing it anywhere else but there. Well, obviously not anywhere else, but somewhere within a couple of hundred kilometres where they can make a living without being beaten by these specific men.

To recap, my dear readers, we are in the village from The Village, but the red people are hiding in the hearts of the villagers and the nooses and the entire bodies of the men who repossess the farm. Some more red things are hiding in the spaces left by the woman and the artist, who allegedly has led the exodus from the farm, but without taking his stuff.

On the bright side, you learn a lot about subsistence farming. Because the narrator is relatively new to the area (having parents who aren't cousins), he relates the learning curve of trying to fit in among these people who don't trust him (because his parents weren't cousins).

Jokes aside, this part of the story balances (and maybe draws) out the unsettled feelings that do handstands in the corner of your vision. The way the narrator describes the world around him helps you to understand why he lives among these people. There is also his sense of loyalty - he grew up with the gentleman and has never left his side. He is honest about his guilt and failure to stand up for the trespassers, his concern, and his sense of self-preservation - and his lust and jealousy.

Harvest is more than a horror story. It is more than an example: it is a metaphor for the changing times, from the pastoral to the industrial, the sense that no one explains what is going one, but someone keeps switching the signposts around. And just removes some of them. As a result, you too are wary, looking into every shadow of the story, hoping to see the young woman or a matchstick you can use to halt the wrecking ball on the horizon.

Some of the mysteries have answers and others don't - not in the way detective series have led us to understand 'answer'. I suppose even the alleged answers are mysterious. I'll bet that you feel a little unsettled and a little curious based on only a few paragraphs that are mostly facetious jokes, right? What did it for me are the tortures inflicted on those men for silly infringements. You're a vagrant, just like these people are about to become, and these people attack your shelter and wife. What are you, especially as a man in that time, going to do? Threaten their stick-thin and therefore breakable fibula is what.

These jokes are a way of dealing with what I don't understand, which is almost everything in this novel. The extent to which I am trying to deal with it is a verification of how little can be understood (which is tautological, but this seems fitting). Harvest is a beautifully told novel in which the narrator and his voice fit as perfectly as a novelist can write them. You know as much as he does - what he knows is what he has learnt and what he feels he needs to explain, and what he doesn't he still feels he needs to uncover. (And here we are at the beginning again.)

Dover Beach

I always associate winter afternoons in a school classroom with warm toes. Oh no no, that's not a good thing. It was cold - frost holds on to the air and your digits until lunch time - and now it is warm. Basic science, er, biology or life sciences - whatever you call the rose, it smells like a rose. Unless it's genetically engineered to smell like something else. Skinny toes contract in the cold and swell in the warmth, birthing chilblains. Chilblains are itchy and sweaty and both things are worse in stockings. Trust me.

More specifically, I associate English class with warm, itchy, sweaty, swollen toes against fabric that feels like sandpaper due to all of those things. There was A Tale of Two Cities, which a teacher believed would be less painful read on tape than by us. Gerunds and participles. Dover Beach, which our teacher (and principal) tested us on in our first week in Grade 12. Our marks hovered around 50 per cent and her temperature around 50 degrees Celsius. Because clearly we were all the problem.

I remember my toes, that I was sitting next to a window and heater, which only made things worse, staring at a single piece of photocopied paper, wondering if I was the only one who couldn't see the connection between a stupid beach and whatever she was talking about.

I have never liked poetry about nature: yes, thank you, clouds are fluffy, the sea is azure and birds flap around without ever once thinking about how interesting it is they are there, right then, when they could be not there any time, which is true the rest of the time, when it's not there. "The sea is calm tonight"? Keen observation. I'm pretty sure that's not intentional, unless we all clapped our hands and Mother Nature sprang into being and asked us to call her Tinkerbell before she calmed the raging seas.

"Listen! you hear the grating sounds of pebbles..." I don't like beaches and seas (or dams or lakes or, especially, reservoirs and ships), mostly because there is a lot of water and a little bit of me, so the odds seem stacked in the ocean's favour. I don't gamble. There is also a lot of water, and carnivorous and just creepy things hiding under the water, that I can't see while flapping like a seal and where I can't breath. But many beaches I have visited have broken up seashells that cut the underside of your feet and don't grate, or at least, I couldn't hear it over the crashing waves filled with jellyfish.

True story, I also once saw a Mako shark beach itself, from about 20 metres away. 

You're nodding as you read this post, I know. English poems are deceptively short and magnificently tedious. If Mr Matthew Arnold had just written "The sea is calm but the tide is high against the cliffs of Dover", I might have understand because the three things are juxtaposed (one mark), in a row, in one sentence, using conjunctions and other parts of speech. There is some conflict between the "calmness" and "fullness", and the bloody cliffs (one mark).

When you get the end of the poem, thinking it's about a beach, the poet changes the topic: "Ah, love, let us be true". Sorry, what now? Wait, it gets worse, the poem's not even about love, or so They allege. On the upside, the poem rhymes, which is more than you can expect these days.

Five years later, I am sitting in a lecture room, reading this poem again. My toes are cold and then warm and all the other stuff, but I am wearing socks and not stockings. I know I have read this before, because the mention of Dover makes me think of the white cliffs of Dover. (Or is that the horse?) But I cannot remember what our teacher alleged it was about. My heart sinks because I have learnt that teachers usually choose the more boring (and conventional and safe) pieces of literature.

Except this time when I finish the poem, I think I understand it, and don't really care what my lecturer says it is about, because I am learning how to read metaphor not regurgitate allegations. See, this is what my Grade 12 teacher should have said:

Way back when, the illiteracy rates were 99 per cent or close enough, because the church didn't want anyone to read and know they were con artists stealing what money people had away and calling it donations. Along came Martin Luther (the German one) and tacked a piece of paper (he could read) to a door. This piece of paper said everyone should have access to the Holy Writ. Or at least the pictures. 

They killed him but these ideas made sense, even to people who couldn't read. There are revolutions all over Europe, and although people keep getting slaughtered, they pass on the spirit of rebellion until it finally sticks like the fur of a cat brushing up against the walls. In particular, the rights and responsibilities of humankind, and the right to education. 

While people are getting slaughtered for the right to read, other people are making things from metal and steel, and sending plumes of environmentally irresponsible toxins into the air, and still others are lining up to work in factories for those people. The Industrial Revolution is slaughtering the craftsman and the sense of community, and the working man's spirit. 

But, see, now people have the right to education (mostly, there's still some spirit to pass on) and they worship at the altar of said metal, steel and carbon monoxide - oh and money. That's basically Chaucer through to the Brontes, just much more quickly. 

As one might expect, disillusion sets in. Some writers start writing poems about clouds (Wordsworth), horses (Hughes) and assorted birds (all and sundry), reminiscing about simpler days or suggesting that living like animals is preferable to hot water or that at least one deity has possessed the countryside. They do not like cities and these are complicated days and the plumes of smoke are the breaths of a devil but at least they have hot water. It sets in and then settles in, in the form of Modernism.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, we get the point!

I've said before (and I'll overlook those who don't remember) that I have the nature of a Modernist but the cynicism of a Post-modernist. This explains a lot, I know. The Modernists have had belief stripped from them, but they refuse to believe it. Every time they look at the world, they see evidence of tragedy, lit by an ill-defined transcendence. And tragedy lit by transcendence makes for wonderfully depressing but thought-provoking poetry.

Read verses 2 and 5, and you will understand the poem. Nature represents the newly discovered truth of life: that it is meaningless, but if we find love, maybe we can pretend it isn't so awful. Existence has always been this awful, but even so, isn't this a lovely view. Juxtaposition tells us what the poet isn't saying: that there is some kind of meaning to be had in beauty and time passing, even though there isn't, technically.

Even at 18 I would have understood the conflict of belief and meaninglessness, because after the Modernists came us, and we lost the plot or found it depending on your point of view. Anyway, melancholia is cathartic, except when you have some of it weighing you down. According to the movies, we all look at the ocean and are dismayed by the vastness of it, even if we don't hear the pebbles grating. Or we look and see possibility, but that is not very interesting, unless it is a made-for-TV movie staring the Olsons.

"We are here as on a darkling plain..."

That comes close to how I felt that day, reading the poem. If only I had known... And not only because I was bored and probably doodling (usually dragons seen from above, because it's easier than from the side, any side), and because I thought it was another useless poem saying things that needn't be said, but also because my toes ached and the only way I could stop them aching was to place one heel over the other set of toes and press, so I felt very sorry for myself. It would have helped to know that someone else felt worse than me.

The Historian and The Swan Thieves

What do William Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Kostova have in common? Yes, they are all part of a Western aesthetic tradition, but so arguably are their 'ethnic' cousins. Yes, they all do have an 'a' in their first names. Schooling turns all of us into tame dogs, sitting to attention and staring hopefully when someone asks a question or utters a command, that the same someone will give us the answer, too, maybe a biscuit. So please, lean a little forward while I answer this uncontextualised and open question myself.

(I planned this.)

Here is what I learnt in three years of studying English literature: The Bible was the first printed work but plebs weren't allowed to (and couldn't) read said holy book. (Meaning that the priests could say whatever they wanted and so they did. Want to go to heaven? Pay me 500 shekels and I'll put in a good word. That's a good rate! This book here says 600 is the price for your soul. Limited time offer.)

Then along came Martin Luther (the German one), who nailed a piece of paper to the door that said that even the plebs should be allowed to read the Bible (even if they wouldn't because they had other things to do, like not starve) and see what the price of their souls are (unfortunately, there is no price list, but if you confess your sins, the priest will translate your sins into prayers for you). People died for the democratisation of the media. Just be glad the same hasn't happened with digital media. Oh wait, didn't someone just hang himself for this?

Luther's revolution is the Reformation. The Reformation is a handy bookmark for the rolling stone ancestry of contemporary literature, for today known as Post-modernism. Because like all good christenings, we name the baby after it has grown into an old person. This is when people realised that all that is written is not gold. (Gold is heavy. Even the Hulk would struggle with a bag full of this stuff. Maybe that's the real reason it's so valuable?)

But that was the German Reformation. Across the sea, England's revolution involved an obese wife-murderer and adulteress (do you know there is no male form of the noun?! Except expletives) swapping Catholicism for Protestantism. Anyway, the point is that Europe is not one cultural entity, with a single history, any more than Africa is. Everyone hear me?

Screen adaptation of Hamlet, 1990

So, the stone rolled into William Shakespeare and his infamous ilk, Christopher Marlowe. Both wrote and directed plays (a step ahead of the cops, because anything that didn't make money for the Crown was illegal. Kinda like the priests and their bribes) and plays (like movies, for the young 'uns) require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. Like in The Tempest (one of my least favourites fyi), we don't believe there is a ship, a storm and an island on the stage (duh, it's only big enough for one of those things).

Despite the haunting tragedies of Hamlet and Faust, Shakespeare and Marlowe were funny and self-deprecating (ok, no, not Marlowe) men. Like Luther handing round the Bible, these men wrote plays that spoke about themselves and addressed the audience directly. In Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the characters stage their own plays, within the play, making us think about the nature of this play that we are watching. The one we paid (or were given comps) to see.

The Dessert: Harmony in Red (the Red Room), Henri Matisse, 1908

The two men die and enrich the soil, and Charlotte Bronte springs into being in an English moor somewhere. I have written all of this garbled and probably left of history post to get here. Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, that proto-feminist (yeah, right, and you'll see why), Gothic (but less so than Wuthering Heights, by her sister) novel that everyone studies in English undergrad. We slot both books in the Victorian shelf, above the Romantic shelf, which is a couple of shelves up from the Elizabethan shelf (stacked with Shakespeare's plays).

The stone of self-reflexism (it used to be a shard) has rolled down the slope and through many a Romantic novel. When it gets to the Bronte's house, it is gathering speed, and protective of their family (including an complex imaginary one that may or may not have survived their adolescence), all three give it a kick in turn, to make it spin faster. This metaphor has just become cryptic. Charlotte also uses her novel to think about itself - and I use the passive here for a reason.

Because she also asks us directly to break through the suspension of disbelief (that an orphan girl, much plagued by her cousin and prone to supernatural meetings, can become an au pair, fall in love with the father who feels the same way, and then discover his crazy (debatable) wife in the attic (I would also become crazy if you locked me in an attic. Crazy angry) and talk to the main character (which is itself a suspension of disbelief).

She says, just before the conclusion of the book: "Dear reader..." This book is not written in journal form, so... To reiterate, suspension of disbelief means involving yourself in the fantasy: there are no authors or readers or characters; for a certain period of time this fictional world and the assumptions necessary for it to exist (belief in ghosts or time travel or crazy women in attics) does exist. For the author or the character to talk to us, the readers, breaks that bond we all agreed to.

Interlude (perhaps make yourself some coffee and get a biscuit): this "Dear reader" is a plea for us to sympathise with Jane and accept her next set of choices. Feminist? Ha! If she has to plea, she considers herself guilty, so my judgement is unnecessary. But, just for the record, I do. I do judge.

What now? You figure it out. I wrote an essay on this, so you can work for the answer.

This is a long post, but Elizabeth Kostova writes long books and I have read the first and am reading the second, so you can read with me. Pay attention as you read and you will see 'Dear reader's sprouting from even the least fertile pages, like crime novels. Just splattered on the page like blood. Splattered, artlessly. I think Charlotte Bronte would rather move into the setting of Wuthering Heights, without Linton to bring some charm to it, than acknowledge these offspring.

I am reading The Swan Thieves at the moment. I mean 'reading' to imply that this is a long-term relationship and I am beginning to wonder whether the bumps and bruises are worth it. I can't say until I get to the end, so I can only rely on past history. This is not My Point, but the history is tedious, largely because of descriptions of people and places and trees and grass and hands and and and..., and because of the effeminate voice of the (male) main character and his tendency to fall in love with every woman he meets.

The history is also Kostova's first novel, The Historian. In hindsight the novel was probably also tedious and for the same reasons, but the main character is a) female (and therefore effeminate) and b) the daughter of a historian. The novel is a historical mystery novel and the mystery is the source of the legend of Dracula, which is fascinating no matter how many observations about hands, because each hand could provide a clue.

You can hear (not literally!) how worked up I am getting, right? Why? The protagonist follows a series of notes and letters, one of which begins: "To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history." My brain leaps the suspension bridge (har har) and I become the protagonist. Silly thing, it can't differentiate between the fictional 'you' and me 'you'. This is now my story and my inheritance, although I know I'm being manipulated, I see the bridge below me - but, wait, does this mean the protagonist is being manipulated too? We both know that Dracula is a novel built on an East European myth (all those countries being the same, right?). So what are we chasing?

Again, essay written, book read, your turn.

The history of literature is its own type of fiction. As is any history. I have identified what I want to see, to argue for the evolution of free thought in the Western world, as if this is a good thing. Well, really I'm arguing for a type of device used in literature that I find interesting and using history to support it. Or I am overthinking everything and writing tedious blog posts, and trying to justify my use of direct address, like 'you' and 'fool!'. Not that this fiction. Because I really think you should read Jane Eyre and agree she is not a feminist, or only a pseudo-feminist, and that maybe you should read The Historian because it's long but fun and engaging. There's even an audio book. Would the consequence of the direct address be the same in speech? Hmmmmm...