Using up the Planet

Over the past few months I’ve been working my way – very pleasurably I may add – through the novels of the Master and Commander or Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien. For those who do not know them – and I cannot recommend them highly enough – the books tell of the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend, the doctor Stephen Maturin, during the Napoleonic Wars.

In twenty books, published over thirty years up to 1999, O’Brien immerses us completely in the world of 200 years ago, a literary and historical tour de force, which critics have favourably compared with the works of C.S. Forester, Anthony Trollope and, above all, Jane Austin, all the more remarkable for the fact that he was writing at the end of the 20^th Century. While there are all sorts of themes in the novels about which I could comment here, I was struck today by an aspect which, while mostly incidental to the development of plots and characters, provides a major contrast to our contemporary world.

Stephen Maturin, a well educated and highly intelligent man, is typical of a particular kind of character of that era in which the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution were spreading throughout the world; the polyglot who is interested in almost everything. His major hobby is one which he describes as that of a “naturalist” or, occasionally, a “natural philosopher,” someone who occupies himself with the scientific discovery, observation and cataloguing of all sorts of living things (his primary area of interest is birds, but he by no means limits himself to the area of ornithology, naming a new species of turtle which he discovers after his friend, Aubrey, and regularly collecting interesting specimens of beetle for his friend and espionage boss, Sir Joseph Blaine). In the course of the books, Maturin regularly takes advantages of his world-spanning voyages with Aubrey to observe all kinds of birds and animals, going into raptures, for example, at his first sight of an albatross and frequently having to bargain with the captain – whose primary concern is the pursuit of his various naval orders – to obtain the opportunity to observe the local fauna in the many parts of the world they visit.

The impression one gets from O’Brien’s descriptions of Maturin’s naturalist activities is one, above all, of burgeoning abundance. So much of the world is still undiscovered, uncatalogued and, even in many of the regions where people are present, most of the birds and animals are largely unimpinged upon by humans. Even in those areas where men are making a living from the hunting of animals – the activities of whalers, particularly those from New England, play a role in a number of the books – the profligate abundance of nature is so great that it seems unimaginable that the activities of humans could ever make a real dent in it.

Well, not quite unimaginable. The Dodo of Mauritius had been rendered extinct by the end of the 17^th Century, a fact of which Stephen Maturin is aware. He is also aware of the encroachment of human beings on the habitats of various other creatures, thus making it at first difficult for him to catch a glimpse of the platypus in New South Wales. But around 1812, the planet still seems to be so huge – even if the seafaring adventures of Aubrey and Maturin send them extensively travelling around it, including a circumnavigation – and so teeming with life, that the possibility of humanity significantly damaging it would hardly have occurred to anyone.

A month ago, Lonesome George, the last remaining representative of one of the subspecies of the Galapagos Tortoise, died. Aubrey and Maturin visited the Galapagos on one of their voyages – the visit forms part of the 2003 film of some of their adventures, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany. Given the longevity of the animals, it is possible that some of thousands of tortoises which they saw there were parents of the far fewer representatives alive today.

Although the world described in O’Brien’s novels is so different to our own, it is not really all that long ago. I’ve described a thought experiment here and it’s worth repeating at this point. Imagine that when you were a baby, a very old person (maybe a neighbour or a relative), over ninety years old, came to visit you and caressed you on the head. Now imagine that that person also had the same experience as a baby, being personally “blessed” by the oldest person in their neighbourhood. If you are over twenty years old today, then that old man or woman was already alive by the time Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo.

In that short period, less than the span of three human lives, the world population has grown from around one billion to seven billion people. And those seven million are claiming more and more of the room and resources of the planet for their own exclusive use.

There’s nothing special about this – it’s a basic characteristic of all life forms to exploit their environment to best suit themselves, usually regardless of the consequences, even the consequences for themselves. Any biosphere is in a state of continuously changing dynamic stability, a stability which is always fragile. Balance is always an interplay of a myriad of complex factors and relationships and is always subject to change. In a way, it’s like riding a bike; balance is only possible when there is movement, change.

But generally (and there are always exceptions of sudden, usually catastrophic change) alteration takes place slowly, over hundreds, thousands, millions of years. Against this background evolution unfolds.

Enter human beings. Like no other animal, we are always in a hurry. And we are endlessly, frequently for other species fatally, adaptable. We think, we learn, we plan, and change our behaviour within single generations.

Let’s be clear about this; this is not a modern phenomenon. By the time Europeans were starting to settle Australia (the era of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin) their aboriginal predecessors, arriving on the continent around 50,000 years earlier, had quickly wiped out all the large herbivore animals, and consequently the large carnivores which had preyed on them (megafauna). The same thing happened in North America, leaving only some wolves, bears and the bison around 15,000 years ago, and – most recently – in New Zealand only 700 years ago. That such major extinction events were less common in Eurasia and, above all, Africa, is most probably due to the fact that these were the parts of the world where humans first evolved and developed and thus other large animals had the necessary time to achieve a kind of modus vivendi with the strange non-conforming naked ape.

Haast's Eagle attacking Moas

Nonetheless, as catastrophic as these human settlements were for megafauna species like the giant wombat (diprotodon), the American lion, the sabre-toothed tiger (smilodon), the moa or Haast’s eagle, humans managed to settle into their biospheres in Australia and the Americas – having basically taken over the position at the top of the food-chain. But even within such systems, small new impetuses could lead to massive change. Thus, the reintroduction of the horse (one of those megafauna species wiped out by the first human waves of settlement around 12,000 years ago) into North America by the Spaniards gave rise to the great Plains Indian societies (Apache, Navaho, Comanche, Sioux, etc.) from the end of the 16^th Century onwards.

But it was the spread of Europeans in the past five hundred years, driven by a new nexus of ideas and their results, like an aggressively missionary religion, Enlightenment ideas and the mind-set of the ongoing Scientific Revolution, which moved change and the rate of change onto a whole new level. By the beginning of the 19^th Century this was really beginning to gather momentum and since then it has simply exploded.

“Increase and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it …” (Genesis 1:28) Well, we’ve certainly done that. The question is whether we haven’t overdone it a bit. The whalers Aubrey and Maturin encountered in their voyagers have largely disappeared – because nearly all the whales have been killed off. The oceans from which the crew of the frigate Surprise regularly fished myriads of anchovies, mackerel or tuna, and which even in my childhood (less than half a century ago) were deemed to be endlessly bountiful are now in danger – in large areas – of being fished out. Just ask the (former) cod fishers of the Newfoundland Grand Banks. And there are many other more complex chain reactions which can also be observed; anyone has gone swimming in or walking on the beaches of the Western Mediterranean in recent years will have noticed the explosive increase in the number of jellyfish … because we have killed off too many of the larger fish which prey on them. Remove one component of a food chain and you can cause all sorts or cascades of change, many of them unforeseeable, and the ecological effects can be colossal. It was rats, who travelled with the first Maoris to New Zealand and who preyed on the eggs of the flightless moas, which were as much responsible for their extinction as their hunting by humans. Rabbits in Australia. More aggressive American grey squirrels driving out the more timid native red varieties in the British Isles. There are countless examples of such unintended consequences and many of them lead to the extinction of species. Some experts predict that the number of existing species on the planet may have been halved by the end of this century.

So what? We need the room and what does it really matter if the final lesser spotted humpbacked toad croaks his last? The law of evolution is the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest and if humans are the meanest, baddest sons of bitches in the valley of death, well, then, that’s just too tough for the others.

Except that the rules of evolution say nothing about the survival of the winners. Any species is faced with the continual danger that it will become too successful, that it will wipe out all its competitors, neutralise all who would prey on it and thus reproduce until it finishes up destroying the biosphere on which it is dependant. It’s always a danger in any closed system.

We humans have spread all over the planet and, large and complex though it may be, Planet Earth itself is a closed system. The signs are increasing that we are causing rising stress for the planetary eco-system itself. Like an organism with a bacterial infection, we are – in a real sense – giving our planet fever. Seven billion humans produce a lot of heat, particularly as our demand for energy is much higher than any other animal and, ever since we discovered fire, our basic way of producing energy is by burning stuff, and most of the energy produced this way is lost as waste heat. Moreover, from our own biological cellular energy production, to the metabolising of the billions of domestic animals we keep to feed us, to the cars that transport us and the oil-fired power stations which produce our electricity, the basic chemical reaction used to produce energy/heat is always the same. Take any variety of carbon bonded with hydrogen (carbohydrates or hydrocarbons - sugar, wood, oil, etc.), add oxygen and a spark of some kind and you get a more or less energetic reorganisation of elemental molecules to form water and carbon dioxide. It’s simple high-school chemistry and the only process working in the other direction on this planet is photosynthesis. That we are producing lots of heat and carbon-dioxide cannot be disputed, the only question that can be debated is how much of this we have to do before it reaches significant, dangerous levels.

So, as Lenin once asked, what is to be done? Wiping out 85% of the present population of the planet to return to the levels of two centuries ago isn’t really an alternative – although one of the last stages for a species which has become too successful in a closed system is the phenomenon of die-back, where, within a very short period of time, most representatives of the species simply succumb to the consequences of overcrowding and too few resources, The result is either, in the best case, the achievement of a new equilibrium with only a tiny fraction of the species or, at worst, a situation in which this fraction is so small that it is no longer viable and becomes extinct.

But, unlike lemmings, we humans have the value of our intelligence, our ability to plan and anticipate our future. We cannot bring back all the species we have managed to inadvertently kill off, but we can modify our behaviour so as to develop new ways of living on our planet in the future. However, this means changing some of our most basic attitudes. Above all, I believe, we need to look very critically at the whole idea of growth, which is at the basis of the economic and societal models we follow. In the world of Aubrey and Maturin, when the world seemed so huge and so bountiful, there was no need to question it, but today, when the reality of the finite capacities of our planet, large though they may be, is becoming more evident, it will soon become unavoidable. To believe that we can go on growing indefinitely within a finite system is fundamentally illogical.

This does not mean that we must condemn ourselves or our children to restrictive, soul-destroying poverty. A good start, in my view, would be to apply our intelligence, ingenuity and imagination to examining the possibilities involved in the idea of sufficiency.

We don’t really have any other alternatives.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Inversnaid, Gerald Manley Hopkins

 

Pictures retrieved from

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUFhvD5hfmA5IyKXOcUM4FeG7wKnLspZgOkRZLwqwCzuY1h_mN3ZVcn7qR9m3BL2guAUYTqnb0t69l96EmCXq0PUnH6_00nUddUg4eSKPRLnJwMGUzGuZ9Ke46Q39yf-GfAaSBatL9l4A/s1600/planet_earth-13848.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bf/Master_and_Commander-The_Far_Side_of_the_World_poster.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Giant_Haasts_eagle_attacking_New_Zealand_moa.jpg

http://mac122.icu.ac.jp/biobk/chemrxn.gif

Günter Grass and Israel

Last week, the German Nobel Literature Prize Winner, Günter Grass, published what he described as a poem, “Was gesagt werden muss [What must be said],” (you can read it here) in which he criticises the right claimed by Israel to carry out a nuclear first strike, should it feel the threat posed by Iran make this necessary, Germany for providing Israel with submarines which could be used as launching platforms for that strike, and the West, more generally, for its hypocrisy regarding the whole subject.

The result has been a storm of controversy, in which Grass has been accused by many of anti-Semitism. The Israeli Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, has responded by declaring Grass persona non grata in Israel. But Grass is not without more nuanced defenders, even in Israel.

The issue is made vastly more complex by the fact that Grass is Germany’s most prominent living writer and because of his own personal history. Grass defined himself throughout his whole public life as one of the primary voices of Germany’s conscience with respect to the Third Reich, and the country’s shameful past and its consequences have been his most central literary theme – most famously in his acknowledged masterpiece, The Tin Drum. He has described his work as “writing against forgetting.” He has also been someone who has consistently and publicly identified himself as an intellectual with left-wing sympathies – to such an extent that he publicly campaigned for Willi Brandt in the sixties. He has commented, often controversially, about many issues of German public life; from reunification to Germany’s relations with Poland. It was, therefore, a sensation when he admitted six year ago that he had, as a 17 year old, in autumn 1944, joined the Waffen SS. This was a biographical fact he had managed to conceal for over sixty years.

Declared intellectuals, as a group in any country, are not particularly noted for charitable, forgiving and understanding dealings with one another, and the German intelligentsia has quite a reputation for being particularly vicious with each other. It was no surprise then when his confession about his past led to widespread excoriation, particularly from many who had previously experienced the caustic character of comments about them by Grass. In a more detached way, the influence of his own guilt and embarrassment about his past provides a fascinating new aspect in an analysis of the roots of his literary and public personality, his writings and his utterances.

What makes any considered comment about his poem so difficult is the fact that it conflates three complex issues, winding them into a ghastly Gordian knot. They are: (i) The person of Günter Grass himself and what he actually wrote, (ii) The question of the extent to which it is acceptable for Germans to criticise Israel, and (iii) The particular question of certain current Israeli policies and actions and the wider issue of anti-Semitism.

(i) Grass and his poem

“The general silence …, which my silence has been subordinated to, … promises punishment as soon as it is broached; the common verdict: "anti-Semitism".”

In his poem, Grass himself predicts that he will be accused of anti-Semitism and this has indeed happened. It is, in my view, not justified – though one of the basic flaws in the piece is his general reference to “Israel,” rather than “particular policies pursued by the present Israeli government,” a weakness which the author himself has admitted to since publication. But, even then, the question remains as to the legitimacy of the automatic equation of any and every criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, a point which I shall take up later.

But Grass’s piece has other major weaknesses. The form he chooses for it is, frankly, a mistake. He himself calls it a “poem” but, apart from the blank verse form he chooses for it, it has little if any poetic characteristics. The very title calls to mind, particularly in the German context where there is a tradition of such things [Stammtisch], a diatribe uttered by an ignorant man, sitting late in the evening with friends in a bar, after the consumption of too much alcohol. He states his entire argument in 382 words, a little more than half of what I have already written here. Though he is normally not a man especially known for succinct pithiness, he seems to have been suddenly afflicted with an extreme fear of the often hasty internet judgement, tl;dr; as a result he fails to do the complexity of the subject justice, something fatal in anything to do with Israel, its history, its present political situation, and its tangled relationship with all its proximate and not so proximate neighbours in the Middle East. It would have been much better for the author – and all who feel moved to comment on his views – if he had expressed them in a longer, more closely argued essay.

Beyond this, given his own biography, it can also be asked whether it was wise of Grass to publish on this subject at all. Even if his membership of the Waffen SS was short, though he was never involved in any of the activities of that sinister organisation which were related to its major role in Hitler’s Final Solution, though he was very young in that chaotic, hopeless last year of the war, it remains a part of his biography which might make him pause to think before publicly taking any position on anything to do with Israel, particularly given the fact that he only admitted it six years ago. Given the sensitive complexity which still permeates the question of how Germans should express their relationship to Israel, it would probably have been better if Grass – a German with an especially ambiguous past – had just this once kept his mouth shut.

(ii) Germany and Israel – guilt, history and responsibility

The philosophy and actions of Nazi Germany with regard to the Jews remain unparalleled in history – all the ghastly aspects of the Shoah – and were one of the factors which led to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The Federal Republic of Germany was founded a year later and since then has seen itself as having a historic and moral responsibility to support Israel.

Germans and Israelis are bound together in their identities by what the Germans did to the Jews between 1933 and 1945. The question of how they regard their historic responsibility for the Nazi period and particularly the Shoah, remains a central and continually developing theme in the definition of German identity. As the generation involved in the war has largely died, and even those who can even remember it as children are now over 70, new questions arise in the discussion of the nature of this historical responsibility for younger Germans. I remember reading somewhere that the legendary Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, once said that it would be a major mistake for Jews to assign Germans the same kind of personal and historical guilt for the holocaust as Christians assigned to the Jews for nearly two thousand years for the death of Jesus.

I have lived in Germany for more than a quarter of a century now and have been an observer of the difficult and fascinating process of the continuing development of German identity during this period. If there can be one lesson learnt from the current Grass controversy it is that even today, 67 years after the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of the war, it is still difficult to have a “normal” dialogue in Germany regarding the complex themes of Germany, Judaism, the Shoah and Israel. There has been little or no progress since the “Walser-Bubis Debate” (1998), the “Jenninger Speech Debate” (1988) or the “Historikerstreit” (1986-89). It seems that there are many people, in Germany, in Israel and worldwide, who see the eternal shame of German history as denying Germans any right to comment negatively about any aspects of Israeli politics or actions.

If Grass’s poem has any merit, it may be to call attention to precisely this fact. It is, I suspect, the kind of thing which will have to go on recurring, a constant re-examination of the present state of the German “soul” and the relationship between Germans and Jews. It is a process which, I would hope, can finally achieve some kind of positive development.

The past half century has seen much positive development in Germans’ own dealing with their own past, from the convenient “forgetting” of the fifties and early sixties (against which Grass so effectively worked) to serious artistic attempts at honesty and catharsis in films like Der Untergang [Downfall] (2004). I can only hope that this could be mirrored in a more general maturing in the relationship between Germany and Israel, in which honest friendship would also admit respectful and honest criticism when you genuinely feel that your friend is doing something wrong.

(iii) Anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel

There can be no doubt that the ghastly phenomenon of anti-Semitism is alive and well worldwide; one only needs to listen to the lunatic ravings of Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad, to be unpleasantly reminded of this fact. But this does not mean that any criticism of Israel can automatically be labelled as such and unfortunately there is a tendency among certain Israelis and supporters of Israel world-wide to do just this.

I’m not going to even enter the snake-pit of discussion about the origins of the State of Israel, the Palestinian problem, etc. There is enough right and wrong to be shared out all over. It is a fact that Israel exists and, as such, cannot be made not to exist – which means that Israelis have a right to live in peace, within secure borders. It is a fact that the Palestinians exist – which means that they have a right to their own state and that the over sixty-year-old scandal of the refugees must be addressed and solved. But none of this means that either side has an automatic right to do anything they choose to protect what they see as their legitimate interests.

Israel is justly proud of its position as the only genuine, mature democracy in the region. But the basis of any democracy is open discussion. Those who instinctively reject any criticism of particular Israeli policies and actions as anti-Semitic do their own cause a disservice – and this includes Prime Minister Netanyahu, who dismissed Grass’s poem on this basis. If this is the case, then there are a large number of Israelis, who vocally criticise the policies of their government, who must also be seen as anti-Semitic.

To criticise the current Israeli settlement policies, for example, is not necessarily anti-Semitic. Nor is it anti-Semitic to be very worried about and afraid of a possible nuclear conflict in the Middle East. To Israel’s credit is the fact that it has possessed a nuclear-strike capacity for decades and has never used it, being content in the knowledge that its enemies know it and know that Israel will use it – as a last resort (the so called “Samson Option”). But even should Iran actually acquire a nuclear strike capability (and most experts agree that this is not yet the case), the Samson Option would still exist for Israel (particularly given a submarine-based launch capability), though in the slightly modified Mutually Assured Destruction mode. The current (nuclear-hinting) sabre-rattling which the Netanyahu regime is engaged in is dangerous, particularly because it is playing on the fact that the USA is moving into a presidential election campaign. This is a game with too many imponderables, and one false judgement could have dire consequences, not just for the region, but for the whole world.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about that worry.

* * * * *

Even as I finish this piece, reports have appeared that Grass will respond to his critics today in the Suddeutsche Zeitung. His reaction is bellicose, and he compares his banning by Israel to actions by the junta in Burma and the Stasi in East Germany. Obviously he feels deeply hurt and misunderstood. It’s a pity that his reaction – just like his original piece – is not more considered and nuanced.

Sadly, however, it seems that nearly everyone involved in any aspect of this whole question, whether the politics, the actions, or the discussions of these, is far more interested in pouring petrol on the fire rather than putting it out.

Pictures retrieved from:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Grass.JPG

http://glossynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/nuclear-israel-threat1.jpg

Belated Bloomsday / Drinking in Dingle

Unusually for me, I’m starting this without any idea of what I’m going to write about. There are around half a dozen themes for posts rattling around in my head – all I have to do is just write them but, for some reason or another (perhaps just sheer intellectual laziness), I don’t seem to want to work on any of them right now. So I’m following the idea that, if you don’t know what you want to write about, just start writing and the theme will come.

Stream of consciousness? I’m not sure. I have the suspicion that much of what passes for stream of consciousness in literature is in fact carefully crafted artefact, particularly if it’s any good. And following that line of thinking I arrive, perhaps inevitably, at the master of stream of consciousness, James Joyce.

Not surprising really, for last Thursday, June 16, was Bloomsday, the day Joyce made immortal in his masterpiece, Ulysses. On June 16, 1904, he had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. In the book, the doings, thoughts and interactions of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedelus, Bloom’s wife, Molly, and various others on that same day in Dublin are described and the result is what is possibly the greatest book to be published in English in the 20^th Century.

Shall I write of Joyce? I hesitate to; so much has been written about him by so many learned people, so many analyses, theories, controversies, paeans of richly deserved praise. Someone who could write so well that it leaves me literally speechless and at the same time makes me want to throw away my netbook in frustration.

Looking out the window I see that there’s a rain shower with a strong wind obscuring the view from my kitchen over Wuppertal to the north … there’s a memory tilt and …

Christ there’s nothing as miserable as a storm coming in from the Atlantic when you’re on the West Cork coast the wind trashing the waves of a sea not snotgreen but certainly scrotumtightening up on the hard fangy rocks and unforgiving cliffs this is the middle of June and there’s supposed to be sunshine and the desirable sights of bottoms bounding and breasts bobbing in bikinis and instead the wind whipping the cold cutting rain as stinging as the crack of a Christian Brother’s leather so that you run through a thousand shades of grey towards the redeeming promise of a pub door …

Finnegan’s Wake, to be frank, defeats me. It’s Joyce gone uberJoyce, hyperJoyce, possibly even completely fallen into the schizophrenic psychotic state Jung strongly suspected he was prone to; though Beckett and others believed in the project and hundreds of literary academics still earn their money by analysing and writing about it. Sometimes I think Joyce is sitting on a celestial cloud, getting royally pissed on some heavenly liquor and laughing his head off at all of them.

But Ulysses is a different matter; a declaration of frustrated, furious love for his native dear, dirty Dublin, a picture of Ireland and his own youthful life there over a hundred years ago which, in a marvellous, epic portrayal of all sorts of particular things, on all sorts of levels, knitted together with such profligate genius, becomes an incomparable hymn to the magnificence of the human condition in all its mundane weakness and soaring beauty. Leafing through Ulysses makes me drunk on language, intoxicated by words and the power they have.

… the fuggy muggy malty woolly welcoming smell of spilt beer and drying overcoats and whiskey and tobacco smoke encloses you like a warm blanket or a woman’s embrace as the door whacks shut behind you your gaze moving searching over the patrons clumping around the tables standing at the bar the buzz of conversations combining with the carrier-wave of traditional music tumbling from the sound-system and you see a face you recognise at a table under a window where the rain is pouring pearly down the panes and a hand rises inviting waving beckoning to you …

And there is a personal theme which I share with the master; for I too, through personal history and complex circumstance, am an Irishman living abroad, in Europe. Joyce worked out his Irishness, his love of and frustration with that particular essential element of his identity, in his writing – perhaps never reaching any resolving catharsis but enriching the world of literature with his search for it. I have been more fortunate. I grew up in an Ireland (for all its limitations) more open, less asphyxiating than that which Joyce experienced, his feelings perhaps best described in the despairing, “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I have found more personally satisfying exorcisms for my own particular demons and my Irishness sits lightly and, in the main, happily on me, both when I visit my native land and in my adopted German home.

I look at the pint of Guinness on the table in front of me. It stands there; patient, promising, prim as a pious priest in a freshly ironed soutane, his Roman collar gleaming white above his rounded black shoulders. When I touch it the glass is slightly slippery, my fingers leaving blacker ovals in the faint condensation mist the warmer moist air has frosted on the glass of cooler liquid. Grasping it again, I raise the glass to my companions, who have also raised theirs.

“Sláinte.”

The word is murmured by all participating in the holy ritual; worshippers in the Church of Saint Arthur.

Introibo ad altare Dei.

The sweet sour hoppy taste of the cool liquid spreads through my mouth flowing down my gullet cascading splashing into my stomach where it pools in that dark almost silent cave the juices mingling the alcohol moving into my bloodstream racing through my whole body heart feet balls brain joining the music and hum of conversation and conviviality and synaptic snapping at the release of necromantic neurotransmitters to make the magic of this epiphanous sacrament extend a golden glow over the afternoon …

“I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.”

“When money's tight and hard to get

And your horse has also ran.

When all you have is a heap of debt

A pint of plain is your only man.

…

When food is scarce and your larder bare

And no rashers grease your pan.

When hunger grows as your meals are rare

A pint of plain is your only man.”

The author of the poem, the writer Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien) – whose genius I have already celebrated here – was one of the initiators in 1954 (along with, among others, the poet, Patrick Kavanagh) of the practice of celebrating Bloomsday by repeating the “odyssey” of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedelus through Dublin. In true Joycean fashion and worthy of the best episodes of the novel, the pilgrimage ended well short of its planned conclusion in the Bailey pub in central Dublin, dissolving in drink and dispute. Nowadays Dublin is full of guided tours of inebriated Americans, guide-book-toting Germans and picture-snapping Japanese all following sanitised versions of the route and events in the book. Inevitable, I suppose, in our culture.

…I can feel her knee and thigh against mine as we are pushed together by the crowd on the bank beneath the pub window where the drops are now sparkling in the light of the low evening sun come out finally from the retreating clouds glinting diamond in my fleeting eyes as I turn my head towards her again and again and our glances catch and there is a sense of promise in her eyes and her slightly open inviting lips and I know that she is feeling my body just as I am feeling hers and I hopefully imagine the spirit of Molly Bloom descending on her in tongues of flaming desire …

“…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Touch and Go - Would You von Schutzengerl1205

Pictures retrieved from:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guinness.jpg

Where The Wild Things Are

"Boys and girls may have to shield their parents from this book. Parents are very easily scared."

Slate Magazine

Maurice Sendak published his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are in 1963 and the book quickly became a classic. The book tells the story of Max, the little boy who misbehaves, is sent to bed without supper and makes a magical journey from his room to the island where the Wild Things live, before eventually returning home to discover that his supper is, in fact, waiting for him … still warm.

Forty-eight pages, mostly wonderful pictures - the written story contains only twelve sentences in all – and a tale which has captivated millions of three to seven year olds since it was first published. My daughters were fascinated by the story when they were small and my grandson, the four-year-old representative of a new generation, loves it too.

One of Sendak’s great strengths is that he deals with themes which are very real for small children; in this case, the consequences of misbehaviour and the fears which arise when you are alone and those you love (and who love you) aren’t available for comfort and security – the monsters who lurk in the dark. His treatment of these subjects means that the story is immediately accessible to small children – he is describing their actual world and, by naming and pictorially describing things openly, giving them mechanisms to help them cope with them.

Many of Sendak’s books, including Where the Wild Things Are, have been criticised for dealing with themes which are not suitable for small children. In the Night Kitchen (1970), which features a little boy prancing around naked, is still challenged and even banned in a number of public libraries in the United States. The critics, in my view, simply miss the point; children live full lives in our societies, are confronted with all sorts of things we might not wish them to be confronted with and, by refusing to discuss issues with them and give them channels to help them approach difficult themes and develop healthy strategies for dealing with them, we are not doing them any favours. On the other hand, to be completely fair, Sendak has generally reacted very sensitively to criticism and has, in some cases, exaggerated the extent and amount of opposition his books have in fact encountered – his comments on Bruno Bettelheim, regarding Where the Wild Things Are are one example of this. 

It was of course inevitable that the idea of filming such a popular classic should quickly come up. In the early eighties, Disney did some serious work on the idea but in the end it came to nothing and Sendak’s classic was spared the kiss of kitch which would have inevitably accompanied the project – though, to be fair, the Disney tendency to over-sweeten the pudding has never bothered children. Instead Universal Studios, in cooperation with Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone, gave the project to director Spike Jonze, who, in close cooperation with Sendak, finished the film for release two years ago.

A week or so ago, my grandson was visiting me for a couple of days and we stopped by at our local electrical market. Looking over the DVDs on sale, I spotted Where the Wild Things Are and he agreed enthusiastically to my suggestion that we buy it.

That evening we watched the film. It received the ultimate accolade from Ryan who, when it was over, promptly announced that he wanted to watch it again. And, thinking about it, I realised that I did too; though my reasons were probably very different to his.

I was fascinated by the community of monsters, the Wild Things, their personalities and interaction with each other. Jonze and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), who wrote the screenplay together, have produced characters which work for both children and adults because they are so real, so normal and, at the same time never lose that dangerous violent unpredictability which makes them what they ultimately are – scary monsters. Thinking about this, it struck me that this is the way the world of adults must often appear to small children; big people, who are incredibly powerful and are always doing completely unpredictable, sometimes scary things and why, therefore, those adults whom you love and who love you and whose love is consistent and sure are so important and necessary in your life – even when they’re angry at you.

For an adult, of course, the attraction is somewhat different. Carol, Douglas, Judith, Ira, Alexander, Bernard and K.W. are a group of insecure, neurotic, very human monsters with complex personalities, problems, visions, relationships and group dynamics and issues which, I suspect, are familiar to most of us. The arrival of Max on their island acts as a catalyst to bring a lot of things into the open, maybe clarify some things somewhat before his departure leaves them with some problems clearer, some, perhaps, on the way to resolution, others basically as they were. Just like real life.

But personally, the behaviour and interaction of the Wild Things made me think of a particular period of my life and some of what I experienced then. Thirteen years ago, for all sorts of complex reasons I won’t go into here, I had a pretty comprehensive nervous breakdown. Part of the long process of recovery I went through involved spending a number of months in full-time residential therapy. It was therapy with a strong emphasis on group work and it meant that, in a relatively short time, you got to know a number of other people very well indeed, discovering things about them (as they discovered things about you) that even those closest to them had never known.

We were a motley crew; suffering from all sorts of problems like borderline syndromes, through bi-polar disorders, addiction issues and depression, to people whose life-stories and personality structures had landed them in individual psychological cul-de-sacs – or various mixtures of such problems. In many cases of what we call “mental illness,” the label isn’t so important anyway; as a therapist once remarked to me, “in our area the therapy often comes first, the diagnosis comes at the end.”

Many people, particularly those going through crises, have difficulties with group therapy. You think that you have such massive troubles of your own, that the last you want to do is to waste your time listening to the problems of others or, even worse perhaps, laying out your own horrible private stories in front of others. But if you’re able to open yourself up to it, you start to realise that this isn’t what it’s really about at all. Firstly, listening to the others telling their stories, you realise that while all stories are unique they are all very similar. You start to understand how others got into the mess they’re in, to see possible solutions and strategies for them … and then you start to realise that some of these solutions and strategies might just be applicable to you as well. Secondly, experiencing the interaction in the group – an interaction which goes on after the “official” sessions with the therapist are over, in many ways dominating your whole life during the therapy period – you start to see the way people act and react to each other (in many cases continuing the problematic patterns they have described in their stories) and, if you’re lucky, start to observe and reflect on your own behaviour (and patterns) within the overall group dynamic.

It helped me at any rate, though it didn’t work for everyone. There were some participants whose disorders could really only be handled with medication – though many of them also found the insights into their own situations which emerged through the discussions and interaction immensely helpful. There were others who just weren’t capable of climbing out of their own boxes and so basically continued to bang their heads against the same, largely self-constructed walls. And, just as I was coming to the end of my stay there, there was one participant … at this stage friend would be a better word to use … who finally succumbed to the limited, closed logic-loop of his subjective suffering and took his own life.

It’s a long time ago now and my life has moved on since then, generally in much more positive directions. But I still retain some friendships – one a very deep one – which were made in that strange, difficult, intense time. And one very basic realisation; that if you find yourself getting into a situation regarding important personal situations in life where you can only see two alternatives, black or white, all or nothing, then it’s high time you called “stop” and looked at things again. For, though decisions always have to be made and it is usually better to decide yourself rather than have decisions made for you, there are nearly always far more alternatives available to you than you can see at first glance.

And so, watching the clumsy, complicated relationships between the Wild Things last weekend, the things half-spoken, the issues not resolved, their behavioural patterns being repeated even when they were obviously dysfunctional, my thoughts returned to that group I was part of, all those years ago. The “monsters” in the film are thrown together by the fact that they find themselves together on a distant island; we were thrown together by our shared inability to carry on the way we had been going. When Max sails back home, leaving them behind on their island, we know that things will go on much the way they have been before he arrived. But we also know that they will go on, because – in their own neurotic, wounded, dysfunctional ways – the Wild Things do understand and care for each other. It’s not certain of course; Carol may go into another uncontrolled rage and kill one of the others, possibly Judith after she has provoked him once too often, or Douglas or Alexander because they are simply unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe K.W., who understands him very well, will be able to avert disaster (once again).

Nothing is certain or perfect anyway, and it can be dangerous to lose oneself in the pursuit of total solutions. The suicide of my friend Jens had a lot to do with that kind of fallacy. Often the way forward is to accept that there are many partial solutions for seemingly intractable problems, that ever more alternatives start to become available once you get yourself (re)started on the adventure of life. That you sometimes just have to hope and put a bit of trust in yourself and others. The way, in the end, that Max can go back to his mother because, deeper than anything else, he knows that she loves him.

And that she would never really send him hungry to bed …

 

Many thanks to Pagan Sphinx, who gave me the link to Slate Magazine which provided the real impetus for this post. J

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