Category: Books

Beneath a tamarisk tree on the Cornish coast

Reading Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets, sitting beneath a tamarisk tree on the north Cornish coast.

…hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

That ties in well with the landscape all about me, which has memories of many millennia stored within its rocks, ancient tracks, stone-hedged fields and sand dunes.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,
Its berries a swart caviar of shot,
A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple 

Might that change the way you look upon the elderflower forever, or might it just be, depending on your mood, overwritten and overblown?

The tamarisk was planted long ago, when houses were cottages, and the land was ploughed, and the season was the farmer’s all year round, and not just the holiday-maker’s summer months. The wind scurries the fronds, a Cornish blue beyond and above, but they’re so fine that their susurrations lose out to the ash tree, which with the freshness of youth is a sounding-board for the breeze.

The tamarisk branches move uneasily, they creak, and the ash sways. The ash is all deep shade, the tamarisk a light touch of sun. A gull squawks, and when the wind falls low, there’s the distant sound of a combine harvester, for fields still do run away inland, when you climb beyond the pitched roofs and white facades of the holiday homes.

Inheriting a library

Inheriting books – that sets up a whole further range of problems. Problems I’m delighted to have but I’m also inheriting a responsibility. To a great aunt, who I knew well, but now I know her library – and I wish I’d known her better. Her books which take me through from 1910 to her death in the late 1990s are the story of her life – the intellectual, literary story. She read English at Oxford in the 1920s, but never worked, other than as a companion to a fierce-looking great-grandmother of mine, who I never knew.

When I downsized from house to flat I threw away some of the cheap novels (Everyman’s Library and the like) which had been her everyday reading staple – many duplicating books where I already owned copies, and others by authors hardly ever read today. But – for a few years now I’ve felt guilty. They were a mini-library, a personal story, and I wish we hadn’t parted company. I do sometimes imagine her up there, Auntie Frances, with a stern look and a gently wagging finger.

She was born in 1900 and her grandfather was the manager of a cotton mill, or so I understand, in Manchester, and he lived in Prestwich, and he was educated, a member of the new affluent middle class, that Manchester middle class which was the first real middle class in the whole wide world, and he was a book collector, and his books which my great aunt inherited were a pride and joy to her. And now to me.

As examples, two marvellous volumes, London City and London Suburb, which he subscribed for in the 1870s, and his name is in the back, along with all the other subscribers. Bound sets of Studio magazine. Beautifully bound volumes with tinted and tissued paintings of birds and flowers. Macauley’s History of England, in five volumes. Five – but I can only find four. I must have the fifth, surely? (I will be searching.) A middle section of  binding on the spine of volume two has come away, and that is on a small pile of books to be repaired. The metal clasp on a miniature prayer book has already been repaired.

But my biggest puzzle is a volume where the front cover hangs by a thread, and the opening pages are missing. Two books are bound together – a bible from the 1730s and a prayer book from the 1780s. Don’t ask me why they’re bound together. I will need to research.

The more I explore behind the old bindings the more conundrums, and the greater my pleasure. I now have a bookbinder who can help me out. And I will read – in so many ways Victorian books are superior to those of our own time – finer bindings, and illustrations each one of which was a labour of love.

Thirty years ago my great aunt took one book from her collection and gave it to me as a present. Pigot’s County Atlas of England, from 1840. Individual county maps, and a four-way fold-out map of England. I loved it, and when I set up my own publishing company in 1989, the little-lamented Garamond, I published it as a facsimile edition. It looked and looks superb, and I took delight seeing it featured in bookshop window displays. But, the book itself, well, it had to be broken apart before being sent for repro, and it came back to me with the counties as individual parts, the boards (cover) intact, but unbound. And it stayed that way until a month ago, and now at a cost of £230 I’ve had it rebound, and I’m as chuffed as can be to have it there, on my coffee table.

There’s another story to the book. My great-grandfather, whose second wife was the fierce-looking (and black-robed) lady I mention above,  was a successful builder – he built many the houses and shops which line the streets of Bramhall, my home village in Cheshire. And a young man, he’d worked for the rector of nearby Mobberley, the Reverend Herbert Leigh Mallory, the father of George Mallory, long a hero of mine, who lost his lfe along with Sandy Irvine somewhere above the Second Step just below the summit of Everest in 1924. His body was found in 1999.  So my atlas would have been in George’s library in the Mobberley rectory when he was growing up. I like that idea, and wonder if he might have perused and pored over it as I like to do.

I asked Noel Odell, the last man to see Mallory alive, disappearing into cloud, when I met him thirty years ago at the Royal Geographical Society, whether he thought Mallory and Irvine had made it to the summit – he was sure they had.

There will be other stories, I’m sure. More bookish adventures.

 

All about books

A friend of mine lent me ‘Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader ‘ by Anne Fadiman. And I will be forever in her debt.

Lending books – something Fadiman doesn’t have a chapter on in her wonderfully erudite and obsessive and mesmerisingly enjoyable book. I’m sure she does lend books to friends but books are for her, as they are for me, about ownership. Norma will get her book back – and I’ll buy my own copy.

One problem when you borrow a book: you can’t annotate – scrawl untidily in the margins. For Fadiman a well-annotated book is better than a clean one – so much better a used and loved and cherished book than a virgin tome, maybe even (sacrilege) with pages still uncut.

She loves typos, as we all do, especially if we’ve been editors. And I started my publishing life as a Penguin copyeditor. She quotes a prize find from a friend of hers, a sentence in a manuscript sent to a San Francisco publisher:

‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity led to the development of the Big Band Theory.’ (Could, I wonder, E be for Ellington and M for Miller?)

She’s also wonderful on plagiarism, and I fully acknowledge my source. Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman.

‘One day when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.’

I like this and would like to replicate it, out on one of my walks, or long-distance runs, but I don’t hunt, and I don’t think I’d be too keen on plucking a dead crow. Writing in blood? Maybe. To establish an undying bond, over a dead crow? Maybe not. But there are sentences which occur, phrases, at the wrong moment, with no pen or pencil to hand, and typing into ‘notes’ on my iPhone seems a bit feeble. So what to do? I could carry a catapult and practise my skills, in the manner of David, with a stone or two. But I might kill a Philistine and miss the bird…

Fadiman having put aside a much-loved pen now uses a word processor. And she does what I do, she ‘moves the rejected phrases to the bottom of the screen, where they are continuously pushed ahead of the text in progress like an ever-burgeoning mound of snow by a plough’.

Great, but snow hardly describes my mis-spellings and mis-statements. I’ve used the same ploy writing serious e-mails, pushing rejected text to the bottom just in case it’s useful. Then forgetting it’s there and sending the e-mail with gibberish attached.

Both Fadiman’s parents were writers. A distinct advantage, if you as the offspring are also that way inclined. If not I guess you take up pogo-stick dancing, or similar, and pretend that’s your passion. It’s not just in the blood that books are found. They’re also out there, on the shelves, in your library, your attic. (‘No way will we have books in the dining-room,’ I remember being told.)

My problem is that while the shelves are bespoke and individual shelf heights can be adjusted, that means removing all the books from one section of my library, adjusting the shelves, and then discovering that, yes, you can now display your art books upright, but you’ve no longer room for those awkward over-sized B-format Penguins. I can cope with the Adeles (A-format), it’s the Emperors that cause the problem.

Fadiman quotes from three-times prime minister William Ewart Gladstone’s inspired and obsessive 29-page tome ‘On Books And The Housing Of Them’. He fantasised about library shelves on (tram)rails, so the shelves can be pushed together, and pulled out as need be. But maybe not in my sitting room, which doubles as my main library. (The Benedictines at Douai Abbey spent £1/2million on doing just that, building a wonderfully compact library containing tens of thousands of volumes from the libraries of now defunct and monkless monasteries. The books had nowhere else to go. How often are they consulted, I wonder? Theology I guess does go on forever.)

They read aloud a lot in the Fadiman household. Not least bedtime reading, when she and her husband read aloud to each other. She approves of the poet Heine, who ‘read Don Quixote to the trees and flowers in the Palace Garden of Dusseldorf’. That’s the kind of snippet I like. Not just any book, or any place. And not just quoting or murmuring, but reading aloud to the trees and flowers.

There were empty benches in the Parks in Oxford this afternoon. The sun was shining. I had my book with me, I could have sat down – and read aloud. I had trees and flowers all around me.

Books do get squashed between other books, and if they’re thin and almost spineless, they’re forgotten. A problem I recognise. But worse for me is having to tuck books behind, in a second rank, as a necessity, being the only way I can house all my books. (Yes, I have thought of buying a large house in the country, or a small house, with one very big room. Two can share a single bed, and we all had galley kitchens once.)

My Penguins, hundreds of them (once a Penguin always a Penguin), already on an unreachable top shelf, have a front and a back row. (The back row isn’t happy.) I’ve catalogued them all, so I know what’s there, but sometimes it seems almost quicker to go out and by a new book.

But, one big advantage – surprise. ‘I never knew I had that,’ I’ve exclaimed a few times.

Gladstone believed that his shelving system might ‘prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded into the surrounding waters by the extent of their own libraries’. Maybe he imagined a future where we’d all be literate, and we’d put away all trivial pursuits, and buy books, and read – but instead we have our televisions, and our computers. We and our surrounding waters are safe…

I’m on the side of libraries, but say that to almost anyone these days and they look askance, they look amazed. Serious bibliophiles who mull and mutter through endless happy hours in libraries were then and are even more now a breed apart.

I will continue to mull and mutter.

The Plough and the Stars

Were I to write a review of the Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, which I saw at the National Theatre last night, ‘bloody marvellous,’ might do it.

Intense, overwhelming, the agonies of Nora, which destroy her, and death of Bessie Burgess, shot by a British soldier who thinks she might be a sniper – they are sustained, stretched out, they leave the audience on a knife edge of emotion, they’re heart-rending and overwhelming. I felt when the lights went up at the end that I’d been an intruder, an uninvited guest, wanting but unable to intervene. This was not a time or place to applaud. (But of course we did.)

Curiously, one reviewer thought the play ‘so heavy going and full of crude stereotypes’ that it’s hard to care about the characters. Michael Billington, in the Guardian, on the other hand, got its measure: … once the play starts to exert its grip, it never lets go, and leaves you shaken and stirred’.

How an audience could fail to be stirred by this production – that disturbs me. Are we so inured to passion and poetry? So stultified by the easy emotions of endless evening soaps that we can’t distinguish real emotion – the real emotion of great theatre – from its cheap substitutes?

Let O’Casey have his say in the subject.

“The beauty, fire and poetry of drama [he’s writing about the early 1930s] have perished in a storm of fake realisms. Let real birds fly through the air; real animals roam through the jungle, real fish swim in the sea, but let us have art in the theatre. There is a deeper life than the life we see and hear with the open ear and the open eye and this is the life important and the life everlasting. So to hell with so-called realism, for it leads nowhere.”

He doesn’t mind going for the jugular, he’s not afraid of big characters and big emotion – and in The Plough and the Stars he gives the roles that rend the hearts to women. This isn’t a play about the front line – that’s around the corner, down the road, at the General Post Office. The confrontations, the aggression, are at home and in the local bar. Long after the event O’Casey reflected on his own life, and explained his aggression:

“I have lived a troublesome life in Ireland, in my youth hard times in the body, and in my manhood years, a hard time in the spirit. Hardship in my young days taught me how to fight hard, for if that characteristic wasn’t developed then, it meant that one became either a slave or a lick-spittle…. “So I learned how to resist all aggressive attempts to make me a docile one, and could hit back as hard as he who could hit hardest. This gift (for an earned gift it is) kept within me when I reached the world of thought as it had been in the world of hard labor – at times, I fear, fighting what I thought to be aggression where none was meant.”

‘…at times, I fear, fighting what I thought to be aggression where none was meant.’

Almost a throwaway line. I’ll always (this is ‘zenpolitics’ after all) argue against anger and aggression, and argue for facing up to it as soon as it arises. O’Casey faced up to it after the event. But given there are no perfections in life, and that theatre – as well as quiet places (walking maybe by the Liffey) – should always play its part in human existence, then I’m almost on O’Casey’s side. Sometimes anger simply does overwhelm. Better to realise that later (as O’Casey does!) than never.

And if one result is great drama, great theatre – well, should I be complaining?

[Quotations above taken from the New York Times O’Casey obituary.]

 

 

 

 

 

On being a European

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian by birth, a European by instinct and vocation, an author and poet who became the most translated writer in Europe in the 1930s, a Jew, an exile, a refugee, who in spite of two world wars and exile continued to write and travel and argue – until in 1942 he and his wife took their own lives in Brazil.

He championed international cooperation, championed culture and the intellectual life – his aspiration that they might bring Europe together, and triumph over petty nationalisms.

In the World of Yesterday, ‘one of the canonical European testaments’, he tells the story of his life and times from school days to 1939. Curiously in the UK he never achieved the fame he found in Europe.

Maybe that should change.

*

On Europe…. 

‘It will be decades before that other (trusting) Europe can return to what it was before the First World War…….bitterness and distrust have lurked in the mutilated body of Europe.’

As more became known about Hitler and his ready resort to violence ‘the conscience of Europe’ chose not to take sides, because all violent acts were within Germany…. (my italics)

After the First World War, ‘The orderly German nation did not know what to do with its liberty, and was already looking for someone to take away it away again.’ (Today the guardians of that liberty hold sway, but the threat is always there, from neo-Nazis, and from political parties such as Alternative fur Deutchland.) 

In Austria in 1937, before the Anschluss, few at least publicly made the connections with 1914 – no-one wanted to. Zweig describes vividly a traditional Christmas in Vienna in 1937.

All the while a new power out there, aiming to seize government, ‘regarded all idea we valued as outmoded – peace, humanity, reconciliation…’

He compares the English with Austria, Germany, or France – they lived more quietly, more content, thought more about their gardens.

(We lose so much if we deny ourselves that European focus – if we imagine the values we hold sacred are specially English, or British. Reading Zweig reminds us what it was like living through that remarkable period from 1900 to 1940. We are part of Europe, our outlook and culture – and origins. The rest of the world sees us as European – we are foolish to think otherwise. )

On government – and the people …

In the run up to 1939 (and too often true today): ‘ … 10 or 20 people (in Downing Street, the Quai d’Orsay…), few of whom had ever shown any evidence of any particular intelligence or skill were talking and telephoning and coming to agreements which the rest of us knew nothing about.’

Zweig ‘knew that the vast majority always go to whichever side holds the balance of power at any given moment.’

On armchair revolutionaries… 

Zurich in 1916 – the Zurich of Dada – Zweig had never met such an impassioned and varied mixture of people and opinions. Since his death Zweig’s been accused of being a coward for not coming out more strongly against the war. His comment about ‘coffee house conspirators’ gives the answer – his disdain for ‘professional revolutionaries raised from personal insignificance merely by adopting a stance of opposition’.

(There were many such – and there were as I well recall in the 1970s when I was a trade unionist –Father of Chapel of the Penguin Books NUJ chapel, and they are still very much out there today – and will be in every generation. )

On the arts… 

The poet Rilke, a friend of Zweig’s – ‘Can there ever be such pure poets again…all they wanted was to link verse to verse perfectly in quiet yet passionate endeavour, every line singing with music…. can that kind of poetry exist in our new way of life… which chases out peace of mind like a forest fire?’

On being a refugee, in England…. 

‘I, the former cosmopolitan, keep feeling as if I had to offer special thanks for every breath of air that I take in a foreign country, thus depriving its own people of its benefit…’ Zweig had ‘trained his heart to beat as a citizen of the world for 50 years… On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of 58, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory set within borders.’

On being Jewish….  

Jews used to have ‘an inviolable faith in their God’. But they were many peoples, multiple languages, now thrown together – what did they have in common? And they asked – ‘what is the reason for this pointless persecution.’

The questions asked by Job.  [‘Why did I not perish at birth, an die as I came from the womb?’  (3:11). ‘What strength do I have, that I should still hope? What prospects, that I should be patient?’ (6:11)]

After the Anschluss – his elderly mother enjoyed walking – but now ‘no Jew must sit on any public bench’. She no longer had a place to rest. And that was almost the least of the strictures which took down and took apart Jewish life in the city.

And at the last….

A confession- ‘I do not mourn for what I have lost – the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy..’

And yet – ‘But in the end every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.’

*

Zweig has many lessons for us, as a European, a Jew, a citizen of the world, a man of culture and intellect, with many flaws as have all of us – but just maybe someone to champion in our own times, when uncertainties are greater, and crises seem – and are – closer to hand, when there’s a sense that the post-war consensus might just break apart, and we need reminders, we need a champion or two.

A little help from my friends

The referendum has left most of us convinced Remainers worried, angry, feeling cheated – and feeling the country has been cheated. Waking in the night my first thoughts have been referendum, and my first emotions negative.

I’ve been helped by a determination to ensure that an open and an open-hearted politics win out in the end – while at the same time taking on board a good few lessons. If I’d been aware in the past of resentment and anger among those who felt left behind, or that this was no longer their England, their UK – then that’s as nothing to my awareness now.

Getting away from it all also helps. Three books I’d mention –

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, a magical encounter with the Cairngorms – a landscape I remember well. No writer lives landscape quite as she does – the corries and snow and skies, the eagle and the snow bunting, the storm and the silence.

(Of the peregrine falcon and eagle) ‘The speed, the whirls, the torrents of movement are in plain fact the mountain’s own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is … the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by a strict adherence to the needs of function – so much more is the mountain’s integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.’

‘No-one know the mountain completely who has not slept upon it… Up on the plateau [on midsummer nights] light lingers incredibly far into the night…Watching it the mind grows incandescent and its glow burns down into a deep and tranquil sleep.’

‘Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shaped, should so tranquillise the mind I do not know…’ No one before, not even Wordsworth, has told it quite as she does.

She’s now destined, humble walker and explorer of the mountains as she was, to appear on a Scottish postal stamp.

At the other extreme, I delved into the poems of Sean O’Brien. But whereas with Nan Shepherd you feel you are living her memories as she is living them as she writes – we feel in O’Brien’s case that they are memories, and where Shepherd elevates he brings and keeps us down to earth – to the the sluices and dirty harbour waters in which fish yet swim, to drains, and empty parks, to deprivation sluiced through with politics. The landscapes draw you in, the language inspired because there’s magic in it, though the content may bring you down – and that’s the problem in my post-Brexit world. I want words to lift me up.

Someone with whom  I’ve shared my life for a few years now is the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. He sought God in the silence and moved toward Buddhism and political engagement as the years past. Whereas I in the turmoil seek silence sometimes, he in the silence could not hold back from the turmoil. Like thousands maybe millions of others I connect with the manner of his life and his engagement with it – if not the detail. And his diaries are matter of fact, and detached, but there’s always a wisdom interwoven, and I turned to his diaries on the Friday night after the Thursday referendum vote, and it was 1968, and Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and Merton wondered what else might happen that year. The Chicago convention, the death of Robery Kennedy of course – and his own accidental death.

This is 2016, and I wonder what else might befall the UK, and the world, this year.

If Merton on this occasion added a new dimension to anxiety, getting out beyond books in the post referendum week proved more successful.

All day in Kew Gardens with my partner’s grandchildren: you escape into their lives, and into Kew’s open and closed spaces – to the newly opened and magical Hive, where we literally tune in to the world of bees, and the Palm House, where the mist drips big drops of water on plants and people.

The Sunken Treasures exhibition at the British Museum – reclaiming remarkable artefacts from cities long sunk under the waters of the Nile Delta, a reminder of the transitoriness of life, civilisation and belief systems. And of course political life.

And finally, a day on a narrow boat of the Sharpness to Gloucester Canal, when after weeks of storm and rain and cloud the sun broke through and shone all day, and we could chug slowly to Gloucester and back through countryside hardly changed in a hundred years – the canal wide and the waters empty, and below us – yes below- the widening estuary of the river Severn.

No talk of politics, eight of us, a picnic of the river bank, and nothing to do. Just occasionally I took the tiller and took charge – though really it was the boat taking charge of me.

Obama and the U.K.

In a world beset with fanciful notions of power and influence, Obama stands out as a voice of sanity. I love the fact that he went to the Globe to listen to extracts from Hamlet this morning (400 years to the day since Shakespeare’s death), and later on in an address to young people in London urged them to ‘reject pessimism and cynicism’ and ‘know that progress is possible and problems can be solved’. ‘Yes, we can’ for the next generation of voters.

There’s his welcome intervention in the EU debate, making clear the USA view that UK has and will have much greater influence as part of the EU, rather than outside. And pointing out that for the USA a trade deal with the UK wouldn’t be a priority – would come ‘at the back of the queue’. Waverers in the Brexit debate take note.

We’ve had as a response, ‘irrelevant’, from Liam Fox, ‘talking down Britain’ from Nigel Farage (Farage and I don’t live in the same country), and references to Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry from Boris Johnson. To think that a fool such as Boris has aspirations to be prime minister of this country.

‘Take a longer, more optimistic view of history.’ That’s also from Obama’s speech this morning. I’m tired in the context of the EU debate of hearing about a disfunctioning country, and a disfunctioning institution over in Brussels, linked to an extraordinarily optimistic vision of a golden age that lies around the corner, or up in the sky, outside the EU.

(Malfunctions are addressed by imagination and time and hard grind – not by magic pills.)

Aristophanes in his play The Birds positioned Cloud Cuckoo Land up in the sky, a kingdom of the birds between earth and the gods, and that’s roughly where the Brexit campaigners would leave us.

Staying with Ancient Greece, there’s a creature in Greek mythology known as a chimaera, an assemblage of the parts of other animals, ‘a monstrous, fire-breathing hybrid creature’ (Wikipedia). It usually had the head of a lion, and the head of a goat sticking out of its back, and a tail of a snake ending in another head. I can’t resist imagining Boris as the lion, head and shaggy mane, and Nigel as the goat. Who might be worthy of the tail?

Answers, please, on a postcard.

Taking the measure of Shakespeare

Justice and mercy – concepts which Shakespeare simply takes in his stride. His characters take up the arguments: Shakespeare himself stood above the fray. A way of avoiding arrest for sedition? ‘No, that’s not what I believe,’ he might have said, ‘that’s Angelo, or the Duke, or Isabella.’

They are concepts which weave their way through Measure for Measure, which I’ve recently read for the first time. The title refers to a passage in Matthew’s gospel: ‘…and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.’

For the story in outline – read on.

Angelo, left in charge by the Duke, who isn’t too keen on worldly affairs (‘I love the people,/But do not like to stage me to their eyes…’ – a reticence many in our time could usefully copy), sentences Claudio to death for the offence of – put simply – sex before marriage. Is this justice?

At the time he’s arrested Claudio accepts his guilt – and it seems, his fate: ‘Our natures do pursue,/Like rats that do ravin down their proper bane,/ A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.’

The Duke likewise supports the rule of law and its stern implementation:

‘Now as fond fathers,/having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,/Only to stick it in their children’s sight/For terror, not to use, in time the rod/Becomes more mocked than feared: so our decrees/Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,/ and Liberty plucks justice by the nose,/The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart/Goes all decorum.’

Now, quite apart, from anything else, the language is extraordinary. As a fond father I never threatened with twigs of birch, but I did try and ensure that the baby didn’t beat the nurse – or the dad. I love the half-rhyme of ‘nose’ and ‘nurse’. Stating the supremely obvious, Shakespeare was one hell of a poet.

I won’t recount the full story. But Claudio has a beautiful sister, Isabella, a novice nun, no less. Isabella pleads for mercy for her brother – pleas rejected by Angelo – in language reminiscent of Portia in the Merchant of Venice. Compare:

(Isabella) ‘…Well, believe this,/No ceremony that to great ones ‘longs, /Not the king’s crown, nor the deputed sword, /The marshal’s truncheon, nor the judge’s robe, /Become them with one half so good a grace /As mercy does.’

(Portia) ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d,/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:/’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown;/His sceptre shows the force of temporal power…’

But then Angelo suggests a cruel bargain. He promises to free Claudio – if Isabella will sleep with him. Back to the Bible, and seeing the mote in another’s eye and not the beam in your own. (I grew up with metaphors such as this – but I doubt if my children would understand…)

The Duke has wisely kept Angelo under surveillance, and Angelo is tricked into sleeping with his ex-fiancee, Mariana, who he has cast aside, while thinking it’s Isabella – a very Shakespearian stratagem. (Always check who you’re sleeping with – that might be the warning here!)

There’s more, but it’s enough to remark how Shakespeare supports authority, but with a light touch – reminding us of the hypocrisy which too often (I was going to say always, but maybe we should let the Duke off – he seems an all-round good guy) goes hand-in-hand with authority.

Shakespeare never preaches – he leaves that to his characters. Sexual desire is part and parcel of life, and the rough, and the tumble, and the illicit and the licit, it’s all of a piece, all part of his story. To take out sexual desire would be ‘to geld and spay all the youth of the city’ (in Lucio’s words).

I could find all sorts of parallels with our own time. We have the current case of the Culture Secretary, and his affair with a hooker, and the press of which he’s in charge of regulating claiming that they didn’t report the story before because it wasn’t in the public interest. Hypocritical tosh of the highest order.

But that’s enough – let Shakespeare speak for himself. He is the world in microcosm, and even though he was writing four centuries ago the characters who walked the stages of the Globe or the Swan still walk our streets and share our beds today.

 

Workers or shirkers

There was a BBC2 programme on ‘workers or shirkers’ last night, exploring a division which dates back to Victorian times (and earlier), to notions of the deserving and undeserving poor.

Ian Hislop (and it came over very much as his programme) provided some interesting background detail, taking us back to the 1830s and Edwin Chadwick and the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which established the Victorian workhouse. We had Chadwick’s categorisation of the population from worker to able-bodied vagabond (I don’t have access here to the exact categories), all very utilitarian, but it was often brutal in its effects, and stigmatised poverty. Hislop of course doesn’t stigmatise but he fails in his programme to get to grips with what being an outsider in society entails. A wiser programme might have used that word – those destined to be ‘outside’ the mainstream – the unemployed, the handicapped, the uneducated, the illiterate – people from broken homes, with no parental role models, in reduced circumstances, people losing jobs in towns where there are no jobs available or only the most menial. The poor – and, too often, the elderly.

The very use of the word ‘shirkers’ is playing the tabloid’s game. Likewise using George Osborne’s 2012 Conservative Party conference speech: Osborne’s imaginary worker, setting off to work seeing the ‘closed blinds of [his] next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. The polarity is totally wrong. Yes, there is a category of able-bodied worker who chooses not to work when there are good opportunities for them to do so – the press parades them when it can find them.

My own experience (not least of education) suggests that it’s de-industrialisation, the switch from industry to services, available jobs now being of a fundamentally different kind, and in different locations, which lies at the heart of the problem. In Victorian times the surge to the cities brought problems of poverty on a massive scale. Today it’s the re-location of industry away from existing cities and towns, not least in the north of England, and the growth of new industries, especially service industries, in very different areas, which has brought new problems. Urban poverty has always been with us, and too easily becomes institutionalised. What we’re not faced with, contrary to what some would have us believe, is a wild and wilful recalcitrance.

If you’re ‘working class’, probably with a rented home, little by way of savings, limited education – when you’re world goes wrong you have nothing to fall back on. Maybe there’s a job sweeping streets, or loading shelves, paying little – much less than in a previous job. If you’re ‘middle class’, educated, home-owner, with friends and relations who may be able to help – you’re sheltered from the worst. And – if you’re lazy, don’t feel inclined to work too hard, or to get on too far in life,  it doesn’t really matter. Your circumstances will be reduced, but there will be no-one out there pointing a finger at you.

We’re back – and I’ve argued this many times – to compassion, and at the heart of compassion lies understanding. Hislop never once mentioned compassion, and never once tried to understand, to get inside the mind, the reality, of being an outsider.

That simple polarity – you’re a worker, or you’re a shirker. Hislop ended his programme by repeating it and pronouncing, ‘I’m with the workers.’ As he claimed most people are when presented with that false division. And that division has of course become the stock-in-trade of the press. Forty years ago we accepted and were proud of the welfare state and we had moved a long way from that Victorian divide. But it’s now back, and it’s pretty brutal, and where once the BBC might have been expected to show some neutrality – and indeed recognise the plight of society’s outsiders, it’s no longer fashionable to do – or maybe, and simply, the BBC no longer dares to show a heart of its sleeves.

And finally – Hislop made no mention at all of the extraordinary population growth in the early 19th century, consequent upon the industrial revolution, and the major problems faced by cities such as Manchester. See Alison Light’s Common Ground for the situation in Cheltenham. The Poor Law Amendment Act was a response to a perceived and real emergency. We have no such excuse in our own times.

Yes, there is a continuing discussion to be had about whether or not austerity has gone too far, and payments of some benefits have increased to an extraordinary degree in recent years. There are issues to be addressed but the worker-shirker divide is entirely the wrong context.

Militant atheism and the spiritual path

Now that is quite a a title for a post…

I’ve just finished reading Sam Harris’s Waking Up – subtitle ‘searching for spirituality without religion’. When he claimed Chris Hitchens as a friend, I was instantly worried. And then I had the usual stuff about religions being mutually incompatible so no-one can possibly believe that ‘all religions are the same’. Well, we don’t believe they’re all the same – but we do find an underlying unity. He should have asked us first – but he hares off on the hackneyed ‘violence of religion’ tack, and even finds a Zen story where a disciple hacks a finger off – and then is suddenly enlightened.

The sad thing is that Harris has gained some kind of spiritual understanding over many years as a seeker and meditator, and he’s especially keen on, and good at describing, Dzogchen Buddhism (‘focusing on the intrinsic selflessness of awareness’). But he fails completely to recognise that it’s a specifically religious search for understanding in this life that led to the revelations that he now, as a militant atheist, has the benefit of.

And then we have the following on drugs: ‘The power of psychedelics is that they often reveal in a few hours depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.’ Having been down that route, and experienced the ecstasy, I know that selflessness – the experience of non-self, anatta – and drug-induced ecstasy are two very different things. The path – I almost want to say ‘true path’, but that really does sound too religious! – is step-by-step, unfolding, learning, consolidating – I say learning, but it’s not learning in the sense of acquiring knowledge – it is simply that awareness that opens up beyond self. And where you find a differently kind of joy and peace from anything you’ve experienced before.

And a final grumble – no, more than a grumble. This is serious stuff. Reading a review of John Bew’s book, Realpolitik: A History (premise – pragmatism dictates that the overtly and obviously moral route can’t always be the one to follow – politics has sometimes to be about compromise), there’s a reference to Barack Obama drawing on the wisdom of the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Obama has tried to articulate a liberal realist world view – avoiding misconceived adventures on the one hand and isolation on the other…

Why is that relevant to Sam Harris’s book? Because Harris and his like go on about the evils of religion but overlook that it’s not violence but compassion that drives religion. And that the spiritual without compassion is selfish and not selfless. Compassion has to be at the heart of politics, and I believe that Obama has tried to do just that, and his successes and failures are indicative of how hard it is to follow that path in today’s world – and yet how essential it is to try.

Religion when taken over by the power-brokers of the world for their own ends has caused many a disaster. But religion allied to compassion, in the minds of a follower, disciple or believer (however you wish to describe yourself), has been the ultimate force for good in the world. (Now that I admit is a challenging statement – and meant to be such!)

I heard Steven Pinker speak about his then new book, Better Angels Of Our Nature, a year of two back. It’s predicated (and brilliantly argued) on the role of violence in human history – how over centuries and millennia we’ve created social and political structures to contain that violence, allowing the creation of stable, or relatively stable, societies and government. (And how violence continues to decline, even allowing for two world wars and many other horrific events.)

Pinker argues that the primacy of reason and enlightenment values from the 18th century onwards allowed empathetic values, not least compassion, to find expression. The pattern of history for me is very different – violence and compassion have existed side by side throughout recorded history – compassion is hardly a recent phenomena, and it’s in the exercise of that compassion that we as human beings have found our greatest fulfilment.

Compassion and religion have always been closely interconnected. And if you’re a militant atheist, that poses a problem.

My recommendation to Sam Harris would be – get off your podium, stop preaching, and get out there in the world. And if you do, you’ll find yourself working alongside some wonderful people – of all faiths, and none, including humanists. We all work together. We just don’t call each other names.