Stunned by your words I have to write

A few days ago I finished The
Anonymous Novel. Sensing Future Torments by
Alessandro Barbero. Judging by the dedication you weren’t quite sure who to
give it to; the evidence of your indecision plainly on view. Anyhow, a couple
of weeks ago I picked it up and began reading and continued reading helped by
the fact that Leah was overloaded enough for her return journey to Norwich that
the weight of an extra book was 542 grammes too much. And helped by the fact
that this novel was enthralling. It was hard to believe that the writer was not
a Russian – it has such an insider feel to it. Set in Gorbachev’s about to
crumble USSR it manages to tell the story of the Russian attempt to create a
better world, a socialist people’s republic, and the failure of that attempt
through the eyes of a cynical narrator, a chorus, against which ‘his’ cast of
characters, from Moscow to Baku trace the fractures of failure and the
emergence of the forces that will dominate the shift from a brutal socialist
and comically inefficient economy to a brutal market economy plus for added
value the development of the radical Islam that has dominated our news for the
last ten or fifteen years.

It’s a book that marks those of
us lost in anonymity – not famous, not celebrities, not wealthy, not powerful –
and has been published this year in the UK (it was published in Italy in 1998)
by Vagabond Voices based on the Isle of Lewis. Vagabond – a word which we also use – to
define a position that we might or might not occupy at different times, in
different ways – suggests wandering, homeless, beneath the radar, disreputable
even criminal, on the margins, and what about ‘not to be trusted’? At the same
time it is a position chosen by, say, George Orwell (another disreputable Old
Etonian) in his Down and Out in Paris and London. A position which holds that those with power, wealth or celebrity to
defend cannot be trusted, we have to look down and from underneath, from where it’s
mucky, to see what is really going on, or to put it another way, that truth
might well be born homeless, amongst the animals.

A book I’m half way through
reading at the moment is William Fotheringham’s Fallen Angel The Passion of
Fausto Coppi. The story of the great
Italian cyclist who rose to international stardom amidst the wreckage of
post-war Europe, from a desperately poor northern Italian peasant background, to
outrage conservative Catholic opinion, and die young (40). And, yes, there’s
the heroism and the grandeur of the rags to riches story, but there’s also the
messiness, the betrayals, the pettiness, the sheer falleness of our hero who
rides like an angel, with the gods, over the high mountains.

What are those whispered words
and who is whispering?

All the rush and noise, all the wishing for dread terror not
to be part of MY life. Can’t it be merely something that YOU suffer from,
perhaps as a patient of some benevolent medic/therapist. I must act fast,
movement is balance, speed along before I too slide into that patient place
(again!). I imagine an impatient patient – can’t you do something for me,
doctor? What if I dig deep into my pockets and go private, would that help?
Lull me to sleep; those words of Auden touch and frame, offer an image – Muse,
Clio – a sort of silent embrace or setting up the possibility of embracing
silence and yes, doctor, lulling me to sleep with a lullaby. Hang out the Do
Not Disturb sign. We call it falling asleep. Letting go of our fiendish desire
to control. Falling, a moment of terror and . . .  perhaps not even that, a seamless transition between conscious and
unconscious . . . and later I’ll read you a story.

A couple of evenings ago I went up (it’s out of town and up
the hill) to the local cinema to see Inception, the newish film from
Christopher Nolan. A very watchable, even enthralling movie, though it shuffles
about on the edges of incoherence. Come to think of it, shuffling about on the
edges of incoherence sounds oddly familiar, like I might be catching a glimpse
of myself in the mirror, inadvertently, so to speak. A story about planting an
idea in another’s mind – a theme that is banality itself given that we are
always engaged in conversations that attempt to do just that. But to make it interesting
you have to bring in power and control. How do you get an idea into some
powerful person’s mind to your own advantage? So it’s business as usual:
powerful wealthy people making use of clever skilful people who need a bit of
cash or some other favour, but here digging into the mysterious nature of the mind and its ability
to tell us all sorts of stories whilst we are asleep. Stories that are so real
when we are in them but after waking, begin to fragment, drift into the air
like smoke, leaving us with fractured images that may mean something or
nothing.

Anyway the movie is very noisy and they all have lots of fun
jumping into each others’ dreams, killing endless numbers of anonymous 'baddies', fascinating special effects, and at the same time exploring the dynamics of
loss and mourning.

    With no wish to diminish the
disastrous tragedy unfolding in Pakistan – how unsettling it is to see reports
of the English cricket team joyously beating the Pakistan cricket team whilst
floods threaten ever greater swathes of their country, as though the English
are gloating over their wounded Pakistanis opponents – but the 12 million you refer to (14
million according to yesterday’s Guardian) is the number of people effected by
the flooding rather than made homeless. That number has been estimated to be 2
million.

Meanwhile how do we remain ‘one holy
catholic people’ amidst the jabber of riotous discourse, argument and counter
argument? We are an excitable bunch. I often notice how impossible it is to
remain calm, still and quiet when whoever I am with is struggling to work out
how to do something; I can’t wait to get my hands/mind on the pesky problem. If
only the mote in my eye were not a damned great length of 4X4.

It seems to be accepted as a fact
of life that in our fabricating accounts of this thing we variously call life
or reality, we make use of fiction and non-fiction, we lie and steal,
occasionally attribute, more often unaware of what comes from where. After all
there are deadlines to be met, salaries to be earned, fees to be claimed. When
attacked we tend to defend ourselves, vaguely aware that our defence is
compounding our lies, but what else can we do? I listen to the Church or BP
defending themselves with finely honed PR skills and I groan in despair at
the inadequacy of the exercise. But I also have to accept that when my integrity is
under threat – and integrity and being must be closely related – I have to act
(internally or externally) to reintegrate, to repair the damage.

Words have a job to do and it is
probable that seeking truth is only part of that job. 

Ai! Those red green eyes! Did you
see me? Did you bother to look? Wrapped in my own dreams I missed you – and
yes, I can hear you say, surprise me. The red eyes of the green man, the green eyes
of the red man. Red man walking, green man walking, freed from the confines of their shared metal box, a
nimble leap to the ground and they're off down the road and what’s more hunger's in the air, though at first this aching discomfort confuses and energy courses into
those green/red eyes abuzz with lascivious greed, or to put it another way,
dripping lust – acid drops burning holes in the scarred asphalt. Restaurant
detritus piled high, fear in the streets, Uncle Wally humming – to himself or
some unknown, unnamed god, sees red green, green red waves of democratic joy laced
with the thin excitement of fear. Have you noticed the pervasive, penetrating
power of fear? Tracing lines, contours of granite brutality. Oh yes, ever bigger green/red red/green men have a first thought bursting through which I shall translate/interpret as joy. A joy
of hunger in the midst of the waste of possibility – that joy–fear that is
life’s response to life. Uncle Wally loves to see the working of mind, the
waking of mind. In the night. Luminosity. Uncle Wally knows the how and why.
And, come to that, knows where Pinky and Perky have hidden themselves.