Long gone are the days when we had barbarians at the gates. The Romans had taken on the tribes and pushed them beyond the limes, and fortified the frontier, but there was always that threat beyond. When they broke through the limes from the end of the third century onwards the sense of fear and threat must have been palpable. Fast forwarding one thousand years the border between Christian and Slav, in what is now modern Germany, was for centuries a battleground, with death or slavery the penalty for defeat.

Such is the nature of frontiers, and death was an ever-present reality as settlers pushed the way west beyond the Mississippi in nineteenth-century America. California was the final frontier, but untypically it was a land without threat, from sea or land. The Spanish missions had deprived the indigenous Indians of their lands, and once the Mexicans had been expelled the way was open, with the high Rockies the last barrier, the California dream beyond.

*

California was the ‘golden land’ in American mythology. Joan Didion refers to a Faulkner short story of that name in her memoir, Where I Was From. How did the dream progress? First came gold, then the railway, then the land was parcelled out, and bought and sold, great landholdings accumulated, which in turn were sold off. The Sacramento valley was a swamp, 150 years on it is agribusiness taken to its furthest degree, with big dams ensuring the rivers always behave. It’s only 150 years since settlers were losing wagons and lives trying to beat the winter over the passes. Most lived and told the tale, the experience seared on memory, but many didn’t.

In Didion’s words by the 1880s Californians ‘had already sold half the state to the Southern Pacific [railroad] and [were] in the process of mortgaging the rest to the federal government’. She continues to chart a reality that never lives up to the high promise of the California dream. Such is the dysfunction of the modern Californian state I wonder if they’d be emigrating if there was anywhere left to go to. Instead they turn in themselves and protect what they have, building new prisons, cutting taxes so the state can’t fulfil its obligations, and showing the same paranoia toward immigrants as other southern states.

Silicon valley opened up a different frontier for California, entrepreneurs creating a reality quite different from the aerospace and agribusinesses that had underpinned the California economy for many decades. But the rest of the world, first Seattle, now New York and London, India, China, Singapore, is answering back with huge hi-tech investment. So that frontier looks dodgy too.

*

How quickly frontiers turn from opportunities into places to defend. We talk now of liminal experience, but we’re looking for challenges from a position of comfort, we’re frightened of the old frontier mentality. We like talk of being at the edge, but we want to be safe. In earlier times that wasn’t an option.

Where will the new barbarians come from?

Why do people radical in youth often become blinkered and right-wing in their older age, often throwing out the humanity and compassion that they felt when younger? We feel after a decade or two of adult life that we have the answers, we resort to our own big ideas, which readily turn into prejudices. Youthful ideals get left behind. Withdrawing into more private worlds, identifying with family rather than the wider world, we lose touch with the wider world, and with it our wider sense of compassion.

That’s how for years I’ve looked at the world, and how I’ve interpreted the political divide. It’s not so simple of course. One big idea of our time, now well-established in the centre ground of politics, is that entitlements and the culture that they encourage do more harm than good. True compassion lies in encouraging self-reliance. But taking benefits away can be a cold and cruel process, bereft of compassion. 

Two approaches, present and past, illustrate the dilemma. The second, Victorian, example doesn’t provide a solution, but it does point a way forward.                                                                     

Ian Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have much of common sense about them. The country is living beyond its means, and we expect too much from the state, too little from ourselves. But whichever report I read, whichever reform is discussed, I ask myself – where’s the compassion? How does this reform relate to the everyday realities of people’s lives. You’re in a corner, unemployed, employable in theory, but you’ve tried everything you can think of, maybe you’re depressed, not knowing what to do next, and some bright spark employed by the government tells them you could be working and your benefits are going to be cut. Maybe you’ll be shaken into action, but maybe that sense of hopelessness will just take a deeper hold. 

Going back 150 years, there’s an article about a wonderful lady, Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, in the current National Trust magazine, arguably an unlikely place (as it is these days, not as it was founded) to find a social conscience.  She set up housing projects in London, back in the mid 1850s, backed by private investment, with housing managers who engaged directly the poor, tackling worklessness and homelessness. She was against government involvement, council housing, free school meals. Everything should be paid for, but no-one exploited. It was a great Victorian charitable enterprise, and that sense of charitable involvement is something that the state’s engagement with our welfare can take away. 

There are some remarkable social entrepreneurs in our own time, and we need more.

So  the same goal, but two different routes. One top down, the government pushing you deep into a hole in the hope that you will somehow feel empowered to climb out, and the other actively empowering you. Charity shouldn’t and can’t take over from the state, but they can be much more in balance. If there are more opportunities for hands-on charitable endeavour, will more people take them up?

 

In cinemas today it’s as if we wear blinkers. We’re oblivious to those either side of us and we normally want it to stay that way. Watching The Artist last night I noticed how the audience for silent movies turned to the people next to them at special moments to smile or nod. The absence of any sound other than music left open the option of shared communication.

At the end in the movie they broke out into applause. That’s what I wanted to do last night. I wanted to turn and share the best bits with neighbours, and I wanted to applaud at the end, but the credits came up so quickly there was no time. Maybe they should change that now:  audience participation at that moment would round off what is a near-perfect movie experience.

Think of the other extreme, cocooned, watching some noisy blockbuster, in front of the TV, playing a game on your computer, completely immersed in your own private world. The contrast couldn’t be more stark. Silent movies were only one step removed from theatre, as The Artist demonstrates. I was reminded too of Cinema Paradiso where the combustible qualities of film stock were also very evident. George in The Artist loses his memories, the Sicilian village loses its cinema. But the village could also have lost a way of life, which it did when the cinema finally closed. Cinema then was a social occasion, a smaller screen, much more audience interaction, a sense of palpable social excitement.

All now gone.

Promoting a newly commissioned book, The Optimism Bias, the editor describes the book as ‘a fascinating investigation of how our brains are wired for positive predictions and why the illusion of optimism may be central for our survival.’ I take issue with one word – illusion.  It’s kin to another word, happiness, which is also increasingly defined as an artificial, manufactured state. There is indeed false optimism, and false happiness. Both are transient, both can rise with the sun and disappear with the first cloud. Neither are the real thing and yet that’s how they’re treated.  All sorts of guff gets talked about creating conditions for greater happiness, and at the more academic end of the spectrum neuroscience is opening up new pathways and it may be social engineering is just around the corner.

God help us. The answers are much simpler if we’re open to them.

If we’re tied to expectations then of course we’ll be up and down as they happen or they crash-land. If we have a saner and more measured view we’ll find that optimism and happiness arise naturally out of our understanding of our lives. Expectations are illusions, dispense with them and there’s a new freedom to accept what happens and be grateful for that.  We should influence how our lives work out as much as we can (making our focus opportunity, capability, free expression, open spaces for body and mind, not self-indulgence), yes, of course, but we shouldn’t get hung up or brought down if events don’t work out as we’d wish. Go beyond a reliance on expectations and we’ll find optimism becomes our natural state and we’ve a chance of real happiness. Which sad to say doesn’t come about as a result of winning an argument, watching TV, passing an exam, even making the best love of your life, or even beyond that (though some may dispute it), finding God.

It comes to us because we’re open to it, not because we seek it.

More thoughts than a review ….

I’m assuming you’ve read the book. If not, read on anyway. There’s something special here.

We travel from Odessa to Paris to Vienna and I was lost in wonder at times at the atmosphere and detail of it all, but did anyone else lose heart a little when the focus switched to Japan? There the intensity waned. Iggie moved to Tokyo, but not the family. The link was there in the netsuke but the story, the myriad connections lay elsewhere.

I’d also found Charles’s life in Paris a little too much at times.  Connoisseurship can stretch too far, following every twist and turn can be over-indulgent. And yet… where else can we find such a personal take on the France of Manet, Degas and Renoir, de Goncourt, Japonisme and Proust. Charles as editor of the Gazette for many years achieved much, apparently so sure of himself and his wealth and impervious to all talk of his Jewishness.

That’s always an undercurrent, stronger still in Vienna. I was overwhelmed, still am in recollection, by the tale of Viktor and Emma, married in 1899, extraordinary affluence undermined by war, destroyed by hate.

*

This is a book of stories. It’s the story of de Waal’s netsuke collection, which opens the door to a thousand other stories. All the objects in the book, everything he encounters, has a story.  ‘It is how you tell their stories that matters’. The stories too become objects, conjured so sharply as to be real.

Early on he tells us how he wants to explore the relationship ‘between this wooden object… and where it has been’. Rolling it in his fingers is so much more than merely tactile. ‘…this netsuke is a small tough explosion of exactitude’. Bad at names (he claims) he’s good at pots, weight and balance, surface and volume, edge and tension, how it works with nearby objects – how ‘it displaces a small part of the world around it’.

This explains de Waal’s intensity. His sense of detail, utter determination, complete absorption – absorption is key. He never thought not to follow up a lead, and as the book ends he says he was still making lists, he almost didn’t know when to stop. He goes to Berdichev, where the Ephrussi’s came from. It’s no longer there, destroyed in the war, but he wants to see the sky above it. Was the place, I wonder, full of dust as Odessa was? He doesn’t tell us but dust of course settles on pots and there will always be a war between any lover of objects and dust.  Hence the recurring theme of vitrines.

Past and future – he wants his pots to have a long life. ‘You just hope they make their way in the world and have some longevity.’ That’s another angle. Pots, objects, they have a life, they come to life in stories. In one way he’s very unJapanese or at least very unZen, because he’s far from living in his moment. His moment is someone else’s, where the netsuke take him. Yet the pots he makes himself, he tells us, are minimalist,  and that may explain why he is so brilliant in containing his love of story. He throws in every possible detail, lists everything with a joy, a full recall and a mastery of language and atmosphere that’s spell-binding. But he knows when to move on.

Maybe my problem with the Japanese coda to the story is in part because if you don’t know Japan there simply aren’t the points of reference you need, as a European, to comprehend how Japan looked forward and past simultaneously in the post WW2 years.

How the netsuke survived in Anna’s pocket is a story in itself, but she is incidental, almost the one channel that opens up only to be shut off. She is maternal, in a way Emmy could never aspire to be, she has no magic.

De Waal doesn’t hype or emphasise emotions. It is enough simply to relate how the children are allowed into Emmy‘s dressing room, the only time they ever had real intimacy, and play with the netsuke there. Tensions explode after WW1 and build as the Anschluss approaches, in the reduced circumstances of the inter-war years. Anxiety is ever-present. De Waal doesn’t need to imagine himself into Viktor’s mind as he awaits the exile that others arrange for him, just in  time. Viktor’s resignation contrasts to the storm of activity around him,  humiliation accepted, maybe only his books matter. He was never a banker really.

De Waal’s final Odessa chapter is entitled  ‘astrolabe, mezula, globe’.  They were bought for the Jewish orphanage the Efrussi brothers founded in 1892. Casual mentions in the text, they re-appear as the chapter title. A kind of mnemonic code maybe: de Waal’s memory for detail is almost as remarkable  as the memories he conjures.

In the final pages he talks of patina, which stories share with objects.  Rubbing back to the essential, and yet additive in the way ‘oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing’. ‘You put an object down… and you begin to tell a story.’ All the objects, all the stories, with their rich patina, are contained within the book just as the netsuke at the book’s end are contained within the vitrine he buys as a throwaway from the V&A.

All he writes about has decayed (Odessa) or been utterly transformed. The living heart has been torn out as it was being in Odessa when he visited the Efrussi palace there. De Waal quite remarkably fills in that heart, makes it more, immeasurably more, real than the buildings ever can be – or more real almost than they ever were. There’s a hard reality about the banker Ephrussi, even the aesthete Charles. Edmund de Waal while rooted in fact is all imagination.

*

Efrussi became Ephrussi, Chaim became Joachim, Eizak Isaac.  We all have stetls to return to somewhere, if we go far enough back.

In politics the grand scheme of things may sometimes be clear, but its local and personal implications are often dire.  Take current proposals for benefits reform. David Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith (IDS) are trying to reform the system, by  empowering people on the one hand and reducing their dependence on the state on the other. The aim is laudable  but the consequences potentially disastrous.

This is where the Archbishop of Canterbury entered the fray. While his brush in including education was too broad and his political sense lacking, and his supporters like the Bishop of Guildford bumbling, nonetheless he had truth on his side. Child poverty will rise, benefits for the unemployed will be cut, the disabled will be tested and interviewed to check if they’re capable of work. There’s a distinction of course between being available for work and work being available for you to do. Many disabled people would like to work – but where and for who?

IDS may be right that poverty as such is not the real problem. For him, it’s the dependency culture. But that’s an easy phrase and breaking it may have a devastating effect on ordinary people. That is the level at which priests, carers and social workers operate – they, not IDS, will feel the hurt.

We may judge people in their millions and judge they need to change. But each person has his or her own challenges and crises, involving everything from self-esteem to sanity.  Policy has to work at that level too. How do we balance the requirements of basic humanity against the inevitability of change, all the cares and hurts and challenges and anxieties that make up our lives against the simple fact that where many of us are now is simply not a good place to be?

There is no easy solution. Each needs to be open to the other’s point of view. Change can be positive but it needs to be  that way at all levels. If change is only seen as a negative, as taking away, then it won’t happen.  That for Cameron and IDS is the great danger.

I have been introduced to sodcasting, which apparently is playing music loudly on your mobile phone in public places, ideally a confined and otherwise quiet(ish) place like a bus. Sodcasters it seems look upon silence as an unnatural state so they feel they are performing a public service and we should be grateful. If they win over the wider public it will leave people like me clinging on to silence. We were speculating this evening that the answer might be headphones (which would of course instantly set us apart) which drowned out sound. My tunes would be soundless, silence. Or at least that was my suggestion. My son, Ben, elaborated further. We could have sounds of the countryside, or better still we could have the sound of buses … gentle revs, small talk, unruly children, even angry mums and stroppy dads, which once upon a time we thought of as noise but in the sodcasting world we would welcome as peace and quiet.

Not only will we have to escape one sodcaster, they may turn up in numbers and cast different sods into our paths. Different sounds and rhythms combining into a happy cacophony.

Noise will win the final battle over its arch-enemy. Silence will lie routed on the battlefield.

The stakes are high!

All news is fragmentary, a succession of visual and sound bites, widely differing. It mirrors our  thought processes, which are equally fragmentary. For calm considered rational thought we have to look elsewhere. Even the occasional wisdom of a commentator such as the BBC’s Nick Robinson, briefly a relief, is rapidly swept away by the staccato of stories that follows. We’re left with all the pieces of a jigsaw and little hope of assembling them into any kind of picture. And yet we endlessly try, and endlessly fail.  The BBC’s the Moral Maze, wonderful though it sometimes is, exemplifies the same point at a higher level: if not a jigsaw, a maze.

I could go on about this … it seems daft that we should be so keen on and so accepting of all this confusion and trivia in our lives. There is a way out, but that’s for another time!

Vince Cable’s office announced (Monday 6^th June) in advance that there could be further restrictions on unions if they take disruptive industrial action over pensions this autumn.  Why in advance of his speech, why not let the speech happen and then be reported? But that’s not the modern way. Early release means you control the space. The unions on the other hand would prefer the shop floor meeting, the local ballot, the simple majority, the sway of oratory rather than heated argument in a largely right-wing national press. Pension reform is inevitable and so I can’t support union action. But I can share their frustration as not just the means of protest but the means of argument are taken away from them. Union leaders may still find some sympathy from the Mirror but their members are as likely to read the Sun, the Star, the Mail, the Express… so it’s hard to get their opinion across and that in its way contributes to their militancy. If there’s no forum for discussion and the opposition try and shout you down, you shout back.