There’s a song playing, I’ve no idea who the singer is, the refrain of which is, ‘love makes a fool of us all’. And as so often with this ‘love’ word we can slide our attention across to the ‘life’ word – life makes a fool of us all – yes indeed! I thought you were serious – no I was joking. I thought you were joking – no, I was serious. Life and love, love and life. I liked the sound of The Art of Ending – were you serious? – but then within the space of between ten and twelve seconds, I’m thinking is it a joke? And we’re straight into the arms of the self-help industry: get it right, make sure you get it right, you too can get it right. You mean the rocket takes off without you realising that this was one hell of a mistake! Like the absurd notion of closure which is rolled out to accompany any claim for pity and a handout. Come on we’re all beggars now. I just wanna li’le closure baby.
Come on, we do what we can, we do what’s in our minds, but if it’s not in our mind there’s not a great deal we can do about it – not until it is in our mind . . . but then the moment has passed and we think, oh well I can learn from that and next time . . . but the next time is always a new time, different. It’s why we watch our elected representatives blindly wallowing around in the swamp of events, clearly not knowing what they’re doing but trying to laughably kid us that they’re on top of everything.
Is this a joke or is it serious?
We could refer to some sort of bureaucratic wishful thinking; smoothing out all the wrinkles; the completely joined up government of getting it right. But maybe we’ve got a right to get it wrong, a right to our wrinkles that we’ve so richly deserved from the uncountable millions of the mistakes that we’ve made.
The Art of Failure: not so far down the road to the Art of Loving.
There’s a very funny review by Julian Barnes in the current LRB (18 November 2010) in which he examines in detail Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary (Penguin). Though not only her translation but every translation that has been attempted and, of course, translation in general. I don’t think Barnes wrote this as a comic piece, it is serious and pedantic and must have cost him much time and study, but it’s funny in just the sense that I’ve been trying to elucidate above – the attempt to get it right. But how do we try to get it as right as we can without making a clown of ourselves. Surely it can’t mean that any old botched job is good enough, but it does turn out to be that every job is to some degree a botched job and we must laugh at the comedy of it all – a balancing out of this and that – the weighing of the flour and the sugar and the butter. And it’s true some cakes are certainly better than others.
To shift somewhat (but how far?): your letter addressed to **** (a four letter word? Love, work, f**k or what?) highlights one of the difficulties with gaining meaning from the written word. There has to be a certain specificity, like hand and toeholds on a treacherous ascent, otherwise I just can’t get a grip and I find myself still at the bottom looking desperately for something to grab. Somebody I might or might not meet at some indeterminate time in an unknown future. OK.
Over to you, Jimmy.