Etta's Week 1

Stormy Weather all over again. Something more up tempo tomorrow

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Reconsidering the scientific adviser versus minister affair, surely the best, most proper defence of the government position is to argue that alcohol and tobacco are indeed likely to have worse effects - and sooner - than cannabis or Ecstasy, but that is no reason to let two more potentially harmful, potentially addictive drugs on the market, however minor. Just because we've got rats it doesn't mean we want mice too. The unstated defence that 'the press will skin us alive if we sound soft on drugs' is not good enough. Nor is it good enough for Channel 4 TV News to bring on the mother of a girl who died from drug abuse to tell us that cannabis is definitely more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco when it is clearly not. Certainly not on the day after a man who tried to take back his girl friend's witch's hat from the drunk group who stole it was murdered by them.

The general device of bringing on weeping mothers tends to conclude any case on TV. See? There is a weeping mother. Case dismissed. You must be wrong. Feel that emotion. What more proof do you need?

On the other hand the professor's comparison of the dangers of cannabis as opposed to the dangers of horse riding is equally nonsense. The most dangerous place for accidents is, apparently, the home. Would scientists therefore advise us to spend our lives outside trotting on horses along some country lane because that is safer than sitting in a chair from which we might possibly rise, trip and break our necks?

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In the meantime, back in Márai...

Here in Rome there are all these wonderful statues and paintings and grand tapestries, like the cast-offs of a lost world, the kind we get in junk shops back home. But maybe all the masterworks of Rome offer just one view of culture. It might be that culture is also what happens when people cook for themselves in their own kitchens exactly the way they cooked for the rich, with butter or oil, with complicated recipes prescribed by the doctor – as if it were not only their teeth and guts that required nourishment but they had to have a special soup for the liver, a different cut of meat for the heart, a particular blend of salads for the gall bladder, and a rare form of pastry with raisins for the pancreas. And having eaten all this they withdraw into solitude so that their mysterious organs of digestion can get on with digesting… That was culture too! I understood it all, full-heartedly approved of it, admired it. It was just their way with nightshirts and pyjamas I failed to understand. I could never reconcile myself to it. Damn the God that invented such things!...

Have patience, I’m about to tell you. After making the bed I had to lay the nightshirt on top of it face down, folding the bottom end of it back and over, spreading the sleeves… See what I mean?... Looked at this way the nightshirt or pyjamas looked faintly Arabic, like some Eastern pilgrim at prayer, stomach to the ground, his arms spread over the sand… Why did they insist on this? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s more convenient that way, because it involves one movement less, because you just need to pull it on from the back and there you are, ready for bed, without having to struggle into it and tire yourself out before going to sleep. But I hated this kind of strategic thinking, absolutely loathed it. I simply couldn’t tolerate this affectation of theirs. My whole nervous system rebelled against it. My hands shook with fury whenever I made their beds, folding and adjusting their nightgowns, pyjama jackets and trousers the way the manservant taught me. Why?...

People are peculiar, you see. They are born that way even when they are not rich. Everyone is annoyed or driven mad by something. Even the poor who tolerate everything for a while, who resign themselves to everything and support the weight of the world with a certain awe and helplessness, accepting whatever comes their way… but there comes a moment, one that came for me each evening when I was making the bed and putting out their nightwear in the required manner. That was the moment I understood that there would come a day when people were no longer willing to put up with the world as it was… I mean individuals as well as nations… someone would scream out loud that they had had enough, that things had to change. And that when this happened people would take to the streets and go on the rampage, smashing and braking things… Though that’s only a form of circus. Revolution, I mean real revolution, is that which has already happened inside people. Don’t stare at me like an idiot, gorgeous.

I might be talking rubbish but not everything runs according to the laws of logic, not everything people say or do has to make sense. Do you think it is rational or logical that I should be lying with you in this bed? Don’t you get it, sweetheart?... Never mind. Just keep your mouth shut and carry on loving me. Our logic makes no sense but here we are.

So that’s the nightshirt business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eventually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger after all. It is possible to hate superior forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself, wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.

Newspapers and parliaments are constantly on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching the newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people?...I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so broadly, so generally, so much, about rich and poor, about Russians and Americans. I don’t understand that. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, as well as the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar – a South American I think, a drug dealer, went the whisper, whose very false teeth contained a stash of heroin – that that was not how it was, that it would be the Americans who win out in the end because they had more money.

I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees carrying a burning match, crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb and then whoosh, the whole caboodle goes up. It seems a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh any more at such nonsense. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. Yes, my experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea the surer you can be that one day it will be realized.

I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest at the latter end of the war… One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannon along the embankment on the Buda side of the city… Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously but there were a few wise guys who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle… that’s what they were saying. But it was no trick, at least it did not fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. That’s why I don’t know whether what the South American said will come true, but I have a certain feeling that in the end it will be exactly as he said if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.

I also thought a lot about what the very refined man said about how the Americans would take the decisive step because they were rich. The rich – now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience… though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain – they are subtle and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightshirts is evidence of that. People you prepare nightshirts for the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and it is as well for a poor man to cross himself when coming into their presence. I can’t emphasize enough that I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the money just pops in their hands.

Sunday Night is... Early November

Doesn't get any earlier than the 1st. Miranda Lee Richards. Sounds and looks sixties, the hair, the fur coat, the dress, the skirt the black and white, the op-art here and there, the cheapness of the video. The song itself. Nice straight song oddly dropping out of the sky.

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Meanwhile back in government world, scientists resign because having been told to form an informed scientific opinion they have been told it's the wrong opinion. What was it Cecil B. De Mille is supposed to have asked people: "Tell me, how did you love my picture?"

In case anyone should ask I can remember the sixties perfectly clearly so I can't have been there. Nor indeed was I. Not properly. I think my experiences with cannabis were extremely restricted. I wasn't really interested. I very much like whisky (and whiskey) but have no difficulty believing that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis, never mind tobacco. And yes, I smoked cigarettes too but never in any great quantity. I suppose I neglected cannabis principally because it seemed the thing to do. I have always hated doing the things it is the thing to do.

Alan Johnson looks like the manager of a League 1 football team. It could have been worse. It could have been League 2.

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And since it was this day in 1611 that the great Shake-scene's The Tempest was first performed, and because there isn't a decent version of excerpts from the play on YouTube, (the BBC production in 1980 was worse than pedestrian), and because the wind was blowing and the rain driving all this morning, and because I have already had the magnificent Lena Horne version of 'Stormy Weather', and because the elderly Elizabeth Welch sang the song in Derek Jarman's hit-and-miss camp film version of the play, I hereby end this brief commemoration with Welch doing her stuff.



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And Stormy Weather also puts me in mind of the great Etta James. Next week is Etta James week, one for each day.

Lost languages

The following excerpt from this article by John McWhorter, via the always fascinating A & L

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation....

...The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world’s language being, say, Eyak.*

I love the argument that small languages naturally go with the maltreatment of women. Safe ground there, professor. Reading this reminded me strongly of an open letter written in 1930 by the great early 20C Hungarian writer, Dezső Kosztolányi to Monsieur Antoine Meillet, professor of the Collège de France, in which the latter suggested that the world may be better off without its troublesome small languages, such, for example Hungarian. Kosztolanyi defends the Hungarian language with great passion and wit, noting in passing that:

There are some tiny European languages that are spoken by so few that only linguistics know of them and collect them. For example, Livonian is spoken by 1,255 people, Nakh by 799, Archi by 797, and Ludic by a total of only 494 people. Linguistic communities of this size would fit comfortably into a large tenement house or in a steamboat. If the tenement house were to burn to the ground and its tenants all to perish in the fire.... then these languages would be irrevocably lost.

Irrevocably lost. The current Wiki entry for Livonian talks of it as a moribund language "until recently spoken by some 35 people, of whom only 10 were fluent". (Ludic however has comparatively prospered with some 3,000 speakers on a recent count.) But what is lost?

For a writer who loves language because he knows both its emptiness and its extraordinary depth of association, a language is far more than a dictionary, a grammar and a body of writing. It is a particular sense of the world. For a writer, the argument of convenience that assumes language is simply there to conduct transactions of one sort or another, seems utterly banal. The connection between language and experience is the point. The peculiarity, density and communality of any particular language is, in effect, an aspect of the world.

But let's throw away the mask of 'writer' - let's just talk about people, the way they feel their way into the world through word, syntax, turn of phrase, register, rhythm, timbre, manners. To wish a language out of the way is to wish a people out of the way because, well, they are in the way.

The argument for universality is rarely pushed by those speaking a minority language, of course. It is pressed, most of the time, by those seeking not universality but ubiquity, the ubiquity of the language they themselves speak, a language that, by one or other historical turn, has become a language of power.

At the end of his letter Kosztolányi finds himself "overwhelmed by humility, and love and admiration for every language. It is," he says, "as impossible to give a rational answer to what the point is of a people speaking their own language, of our speaking Hungarian, as it is to determine what the point is in living at all."

We talk perhaps too easily of humility and love and admiration, if only because such feelings are befitting. But that's not to say we don't mean them.

Regarding the Eyak language McWhorter says:

...the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.

That death did mean, to be sure, that no one will again use the word demexch, which refers to a soft spot in the ice where it is good to fish. Never again will we hear the word 'ał for an evergreen branch, a word whose final sound is a whistling past the sides of the tongue that sounds like wind passing through just such a branch. And behind this small death is a larger context. Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.

A problem? To whom? Not to speakers of English, I suppose. But the problem is not about a problem. It is about something more; about a substantial unique understanding of the world that once constituted life, that was itself an element of human life. And the point of living is?...

Header and Footer / Bookends

Launch of UEA anthologies last week. A selection at UEA, the other selection in London. Andrew Cowan introduces at UEA...


In between, readings by Gavin McCrea, Seonaid MacKay, Marisa Silva-Dunbar, Philip Langeskov, Priscilla Morris, Jenny Pagdin, Claire Girffiths, Ruth Selwyn Crome in two parts.

..... I end

The ubiquity of YouTube. I hope you enjoy the readings. Me? Stuffed up with cold for now.

Now with Cold...

...Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante
Had a bad cold nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe...


As with Madame Sosostris so with Monsieur Szirtes who does not claim to be the wisest man in Europe and has an, on the whole, well-behaved pack of cards. Still made it to a reading of Arc poets-in-translation where the languages were French, German and Russian. Suffocated sneezes by popping handfuls of Tictacs...


Shantih, shantih, shantih
It's only a shantih in old shantih town...

....as has been pointed out by another, elsewhere.

At my Father's: cutting a figure

He is ill, small and frail in his armchair. He is in pain, a pain that has taken him by surprise. We are visiting him, having driven up to London on my first free day for a good while. He himself remarks how small he is. He has lost weight. We talk an hour and a half or so. He tells us what he has been through and how things seem to stand. It is not a complete or fully orderly account. I watch his hands. I am shocked to find myself thinking, 'Nosferatu hands. When did he get those?'

In the picture above he is newly married. He is a survivor, as is she. What they have survived has cast a permanent shadow on them but in the photograph they are happy, relieved, in love. They possess a certain vigour and voluptuousness. And yet now, when I look at them as they were, I feel younger than they were then. But that is because I now know him to be old - ninety-two to be exact - and because I don't feel old. Like him, I think of myself as someone young. He thinks of himself as someone young to whom age has happened out of the blue, much as pain has happened: I think of myself as someone young to whom age is waiting to happen. What will happen is a little like what I see in front of me. But that won't happen to me, not exactly.

We ought to see life as a shape that comprehends the entirety of our years, as if what we were contemplating were some perfect median, as if time were not linear but a three dimensional package, its three-dimensions forming a body: our body. Our body-mind-spirit. Our passage. The young always see the old as having been old from the start. The very fact of them having been young so long ago means that they have always been old.

There are moments when I think I can see the shape of my life as a shape, I don't mean progress, I don't mean career. I mean a shape. An incomplete shape, maybe no more than the ghost of a shape. It is, nevertheless, oddly cheering and miraculous to perceive a shape. One ought, after all, to be able to perceive shapes. Poets perceive shapes, don't they? That is what they are supposed to be good at.

Well, I will carry on trying to be good at it. My father will carry on sitting in the armchair. Then he will lie down in his bed and try to keep his food down. And he will get up in the morning and sit in the chair again. I wonder if it is harder for him at his age to see the shape of his life? Everything seems hard for him at the moment. Maybe it is the writer's responsibility to read and render that shape in language, a shape that isn't entirely a story but a kind of median that contains all the hard things yet cuts a figure in space as much as in time.

Arbus: Paragons

Paragons

Those with two heads know something you don't - Diane Arbus

Distrust everything - especially the happy face,
the successful face, the face with something solid
stacked behind the eyes. Locate instead the scapegrace,
the lost and the squalid,

those who have nothing to say with the eyes but the eyes
are open and inward or are lost down a well
where you look down the shaft to find them and their faces rise
like your own in the circle

of water, with lips large as dinner-plates: the man with a tail,
the man who smoked cigars with his eyes, the Siamese twins
in Hubert's or Huber's where there is neither male nor female
but paradigms and paragons

that tickle your guilt and your pity. You say: I don't want
to make you cry, but when the button's there you press it.
And it's true that those with two heads know something you don't,
only you guess it.


(from Blind Field, 1994)



The characters are all from Arbus's own experiences. She was a frequenter of freak shows at a place called Hubert's or Huber's. She also said: 'I don't want to make you cry, but when the button's there you press it'. What Mark Granier says in the comment to the previous post is absolutely true and justified. It is only that "their faces rise / like your own in the circle // of water".

I suspect it is our faces we see as if from the other side. The 'freaks' are not out there: they are within. Those in the photographs retain dignity and integrity, are in possession of themselves. We do not retain it. We, whose eyes have something solid stacked behind them, in that alternative moment become the scapegrace, the lost and the squalid. It is not appearance at stake, but condition.