Walter Benjamin writing about Proust:
‘There was something of the detective in Proust’s curiosity. The upper ten thousand were to him a clan of criminals, a band of conspirators beyond compare: the Camorra of consumers.’
Uncle Scrooge, a riot of tartan and SNP rosettes, plus missing teeth, feet in a bowl of gently steaming water, eyes gleaming with something like malice but maybe it is only his sense of humour, caught on camera in his North Caucasian rest home. Eyebrows jutting ferociously, willing Alex Salmond on to ever more demanding political pirouettes. At the age of 93, a well deserved retirement of non-sobriety in his antechamber to the cardboard coffin.
I saw one of these being carried out of the Methodist Chapel the other day, painted a perfect blue of high summer sky and I like to think there were one or two clouds and maybe even a bird or two flying free. The four men carrying it made it appear that it was as light as a feather. Perhaps the cardboard box was merely a container for a departing soul.
A couple of thoughts from Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism:
‘The new world should be formed with a clear recognition that we have only limited powers of objective reasoning.’
Now, that is important to remember, and:
‘People are not as much propelled by material self-interest as free-market textbooks claim. If the real world were as full of rational self-seeking agents as the one depicted in those textbooks, it would collapse under the weight of continuous cheating, monitoring, punishment and bargaining.’
Though, surely, in free-market heaven there would be no need for monitoring – the market would sort everything out. Do you know there are people who actually believe such nonsense!!
Of course Uncle Scrooge was forced to glimpse and contemplate his unhappiness, or ghosts of time as Dickens has it. A touch of reality as the fabric is stretched to breaking point, to tear and reveal in the sharp light shining on all that is rotten in the state of Denmark. Look, there’s the ghost of Hamlet stalking through Borgen.
Since acquiring a Kindle a few weeks ago I have been able to begin a clear out of some of my books that have been accumulating dust and cobwebs over the last decades and I found revealed Julian Beck’s The Life of the Theatre, bought, I think, in Camden’s Compendium Bookshop in the early seventies. The pencilled price is £1.55. Under the heading of BREATHING, he quotes K. M. Bykov, “Textbook of Physiology,” Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1960:
“When insufficiently supplied with oxygen, the nervous tissue and especially the cells of the higher divisions of the central nervous system cease functioning.”
Strange visitations, ghosts if you like, from the past. But do keep breathing.