Ideas, philosophy, politics, current events and happenings, music, literature, art and simple incidents out of my everyday life; Reflections and observations which, I hope, might just get you thinking ...
“ … the only thing we have to fear is fear itself …”
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Inaugural Address (1933)
"There is always
an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Menken, The
Divine Afflatus (1917)
Let me begin here with an admission: When I look at our
world today, at the end of 2015, I am afraid.
I am not afraid of terrorists, Islamic or otherwise. They
want me to be afraid – that’s what terrorists do, attempt to incite terror. I
know that there is an infinitesimal chance that I, or someone close to me, may
become their victim; we may be in the busy centre of a large European city, or
on an aeroplane – just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. I could also be driving along the motorway/highway/autobahn when some
confused or crazy fool comes shooting onto it through the exit ramp. Or I could
just be struck by lightning. But I repeat, I am not afraid of terrorists; I
refuse to grant them this power over me. They are attacking the values of the
open society in which I live. The vulnerability we have towards their attacks –
despite all the reasonable security measures in place – is the inevitable price
we pay for the values of openness and tolerance which are at the foundation of
any society which truly claims to be civilized.
I am not afraid of migrants, be they refugees fleeing from
war or persecution, or so-called “economic” migrants, those prepared to uproot
themselves, abandon their homes, families and friends, give up everything they
know in order to seek a better future for themselves and their children. I
realise that their arrival will challenge the country, culture and society in
which I live. But I believe that this challenge can be fruitful, creative and
positive if we face up to it with courage, honesty, openness, and generosity. I
accept that the arrival of larger groups of migrants will change the culture in
which I live; that there will be an inevitable interaction and mingling between
my (Western European) culture and the different life-experiences and traditions
that these migrants bring with them. But cultures are and have always been
dynamic and fluid realities, constantly shifting, and frothing, and mixing, and
growing. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do with a pizza, or a
vanilla latté, my grandmother would have been scandalised by Madonna and Lady
Gaga, or the use of the word “fuck” on prime-time TV.
I am not afraid of Islam. I don’t much like it, but then a
general attitude of scepticism and suspicion regarding all religions has been
growing continuously in me in the past decades. There are aspects of Islam,
particularly the ambivalence regarding violence towards non-believers in many
places in the Quran, which I find disturbing. (On the other hand, there are
passages of the Old Testament which aren’t particularly edifying in this sense
either.) I find the cultural misogyny of most Islamic determined traditions
deeply distasteful. But I am also aware that the Christian and other religious
traditions have anything but a pristine history when it comes to their
treatment of women – and that not all of these historic attitudes have been
left behind. I believe that secularism and the freedom to believe and practice
religion (in so far as this practice does not restrict the freedom of others)
are some more of those basic values I mentioned earlier, those foundational
values of civilized society. As long as its practitioners accept these basic
values, any religion, no matter how idiotic it may seem, can be practiced in a
free society. Ultimately, I believe, the basic values of the secular, open, and
free society will prevail over backward-looking, exclusivist, chauvinist and
fundamentalist versions of every religion, though it may take generations. And
that includes Islam.
As long, of course, as we hold fast to those values, born
in the Enlightenment and matured – with much struggle and suffering – primarily
in Europe and North America – in the 19th and 20th
Centuries; openness, tolerance, secularism, participation, democracy, civil
rights, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, freedom of thought and
expression, a critical press, the social securing of the basics necessary for
life.
But as I look around the world at the end of 2015, these are
the values which I see increasingly under threat. And not only that, they are
being challenged and scraped away bit by bit in their original heartlands;
Europe and North America.
It is this of which I am afraid. I take Roosevelt’s
observation seriously. For what I perceive increasingly in the past year is a
growth of uncertainty and fear in our society. I am becoming more afraid of
fear itself; more specifically of the exploitation of that fear and the
consequences of that exploitation.
Living in the centre of Europe I don’t have to look far to
see it. There’s Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey. Closer to home, to the
east there are Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński and his PiS party in Poland. Looking west, Gert Wilders
in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France and UKIP in Great Britain. And all
the other populist right-wing demagogues in many other European countries. In
this context – despite the perennial tendency of US Americans to
perceive their culture as exceptional – Donald Trump is also just another
confirmation of a widespread trend in the developed democracies. Here in
Germany, where Angela Merkel has taken a courageous stand on the question of
migrants (and if you’d told me a year ago that I would find myself praising the
German chancellor I’d have replied with an expletive!) and where the country
has provided a safe haven for a million people this year, Pegida and the Alternative
für Deutschland have been gaining in popularity.
Despite all their
particularist agendas, all of these various obnoxious figures are pretty much
carbon copies of each other. All feed off and exploit the same fear that is
widely present in our societies. This fear has many sources, but basically it
is rooted in the apprehension many (particularly those who are less educated)
feel when faced with a world in which change is all prevailing, in which the
shape of the future appears to be less certain and more threatening. The
demagogues all put forward the same kind of analyses and strategies;
retrenchment, stigmatization and persecution of those who are obviously other, building walls and fences, narrow
nationalist pride, appeals to cultural (and often religious) chauvinism.
They are all
offering (to paraphrase Menken) simple and easy solutions for complex problems.
These solutions are not only wrong, they are dangerous. For, playing to and
exploiting the inchoate fears widely present in our societies, they deny the enlightenment
values which are the fundament of our societies, appealing instead to emotional
irrationalities. To anyone with any sense of the sorry history of the 20th
Century it should be obvious where this leads. Make no mistake, my friends,
even if these people are democratically elected, even if they keep the forms of
democracy in the countries they control, regularly having themselves
re-elected, they are proponents of an evil the world has already seen too much
of. Putin, Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Kaczyński, Farage, Erdogan and all the others
are proponents of what might best be described as fascism lite. And they are quite prepared to use many of the
techniques perfected by their predecessors. To give but one example, all of
them are prepared to publicly trumpet untruths and continue to do so, even when
these statements have been repeatedly rationally proved to be untrue. Both
Hitler and Goebbels described this strategy as “the big lie.”
So, faced with
this resurgence of irrational, dangerous, fascist demagoguery, what can we do?
How should we, in our ordinary little lives, react to this exploitation of fear
which will, if it continues to grow, destroy the fundamental values of the
societies in which we live?
"All that is necessary for evil to
triumph is for good men to do nothing," is a quotation usually attributed
to Edmund Burke, though in this form it goes back to Tolstoy. No matter, it
gives us a strategy for responding to these attempts (far more dangerous than
anything ISIS can do) to destroy the character of our societies. We must
respond immediately to the facile, dangerous lies put about by these fear
mongers wherever we encounter them; from friends, family members, work
colleagues, acquaintances; at home, at work, in the bus, in the pub, on
Facebook. Many of us are just too polite, or too apprehensive of conflict, or
just too lazy (I know that all these reasons frequently apply to me) to engage
here, to get involved. But, I am becoming increasingly convinced, the failure
to contradict the nasty simplistic views, grown in fear and cultivated in
ignorance by neo-fascist ideologues, only leads to their growth and spread. If
they are not countered, they will lead us into a new Dark Age.
Do you know the feeling, that feeling of anger and disgust
at the amount of fucked-up stupidity, evil and hopelessness in the world?
Today a couple of (almost certainly) Islamicist fanatic
terrorists attacked the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people.
There is video coverage online of two gunmen shooting a policeman down in the
street and then finishing the execution with a headshot, even as the man on the
ground raises a hand, possibly in a last plea for mercy. It’s horrific in its
brutality so I’m not going to post a link to the video itself here. The photo shows enough.
Charlie Hebdo is
not a particularly pleasant newspaper; but that’s not what its makers want it
to be. It is relentlessly satirical, regards nothing as sacred, and is prepared
to lampoon anyone and anything in the news, be they pope, prophet or president,
moron, mullah, or messiah. That’s their job as they see it. And it’s their
right in a free, pluralistic, secular society. If you don’t like what they
publish you don’t have to buy it or read it. If you feel personally damaged by
something they publish you can sue them. That’s the way a civilized society
works, particularly a civil society which sees freedom of expression and the
press as a basic value.
One result of this barbaric event will certainly be calls
from the populist (partly proto-fascist) right in France (led, no doubt, by Marine Le Pen and the Front National) and
worldwide for clampdowns on Islam, and Islamic foreigners, and foreigners
generally; migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The usual cacophony of
ignorance, fear- and hate-mongering. Indeed, this may have been one of the
perverted, calculated aims of the mad, evil bastards who planned and carried
out the attack.
Here in Germany in the past number of weeks we’ve been
treated to the dubious spectacle of thousands of ignoramuses marching every
Monday night in the streets of Dresden under the banner of a strange
organisation calling itself PEGIDA[Patriotic
Europeans Against the Islamization of the West]. According to the Saxon
Interior Ministry in 2010 0.1% (around 4,000) of the population of Saxony (of
which Dresden is the capital) describe themselves as Muslims [Source: Spiegel Online]. Biiiiig threat.
Last Monday night, as a sign of some hope for sanity in my adopted
home-country, thousands of people marched in Cologne, just a few miles down the
road from me, in favour of tolerance and an open society. Cologne has 120,000
Muslims out of a population of around a million. For those who can’t do the
math, that’s 12%. Around a hundred times higher than in Saxony.
Personally, I’m not a great fan of Islam. But then, I’m not
a great fan of evangelical Protestantism, traditionalist Catholicism,
neo-liberal free-market capitalism, or Justin Biber either. This nevertheless
doesn’t mean that I would ever contemplate or tolerate any calls for or moves to
forbid people their right to believe whatever they want to and to freely
profess and express those beliefs, however idiotic I may consider them to be.
This freedom is one of the constituting principles of a humane civil society.
It goes further; even people who profess beliefs abhorrent to these
constituting principles – like, I am forced to conclude, quite a number of
those marching in Dresden – have a guaranteed right to do so, as long as they
don’t resort to violence, or incitement to violence, against others. That’s
what a humane civil society has to be able to tolerate and, I have no doubt,
any healthy civil society is well able to withstand the irritation caused by
such misguided fools.
Of course, that does imply that those of us (the vast
majority, I like to think) who value these basic principles of humane civility
sometimes have to speak out for them and defend them.
A journalist friend just told me the story of an initial
interview she did this afternoon. It was with a young man who’s been in Germany
for four years now. He was born in one of those war-torn countries we
frequently hear of in the news but his family fled terror and conflict when he
was a child, finishing up in Iran. He spent seventeen years there and managed
to obtain a degree in computer-programming before realising that, as a
stateless person with no official identity-papers, he had no future in the
mullah-dominated Islamic Republic. His mother sold the last of her jewels to
provide the necessary money and he (alone of his family) made a long,
dangerous, illegal journey, culminating in a frightening boat-trip across the
Aegean from Turkey to Greece before finally ending up here in Germany four
years ago.
In Germany he has the status of a tolerated (but not recognised) asylum seeker. He still has
no legal papers, so that his “official” status, such as it is, can be described
as stateless. Inquiries at the embassy
of his native country have resulted in no practical prospects of ever getting a
passport. He is given enough to live on – barely – in Germany. He is not
allowed to work, although he has good training in a field where his skills are
demanded everywhere. His freedom of movement here in the country is extremely
uncertain, since he has no official papers. Without them he cannot open a bank
account or make a contract for telephone and internet access with a
telecommunications provider. He spends his life in fear of police controls, of
suddenly being thrown out of the country. He has little hope for the future and
has been suffering – increasingly – from depression.
No wonder.
This is one of those people the fools in Dresden seem to be
protesting about. This is one of those people who will be regarded with
increased suspicion and even hatred as a result of the brutality of the terrorists
in Paris today.
This is someone who only wants to live an ordinary life,
someone with the skills and potential to offer a positive contribution to any
society which would welcome him.
The way our world is so screwed up, it doesn’t look like
he’ll be welcomed anywhere.
That humane civil society I was defending earlier in this
essay still has a long way to go.
“Narrative” has become one of those buzz-words or
buzz-concepts which one cannot avoid nowadays. At its most basic, it simply
means “story”; in the more precise cultural context in which it is generally
used, it is a story told or shared
within a group as an instrument to define a common reality, or at least
perception of reality (whether in fact there is any difference between these
two is a more complex philosophical question I have no intention of going into
here). The following is an attempt to analyse the current situation in and
around the Ukraine with the help of this concept.
The Conventional Wisdom Narrative
This is the one that that is prevalent in the West – in the
US and (maybe somewhat less stridently) Europe. The Ukraine is a democratic
post-Soviet country where the majority of the population wants more distance
from an aggressive, powerful neighbour, which used to be its imperial master,
and therefore wants to orientate itself more towards the West. In this, the
Ukrainians are simply following the course already taken by other former parts
of the Soviet Empire in the past twenty five years. All the former Warsaw pact
countries, as well as the three Baltic republics, are now members of both the
EU and NATO. They have been able to take advantage of the freedom they
(re)gained following the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the nineties
to reposition themselves as part of the “free” world, developing and deepening
their democratic, economic, political and social structures to integrate
themselves into the new European model which has brought such prosperity,
stability, and democratic standards to those countries which have embraced it
since WWII.
All the majority of Ukrainians want is to follow the same
course. But Russia won’t let them. It has been consistently trying to
destabilise (with varying degrees of success and failure) every attempt the
Ukraine has made in the past twenty years to position itself in the western
camp. Putin sees the Ukraine as an essential part of the Russian sphere of
influence and is not prepared to accept, under any circumstances, a reorientation
of the Ukraine towards the Western block.
During the chaos following the fall of the pro-Russian
Yanukovych government at the beginning of this year, Putin judged the situation
favourable for more direct action and, basically, annexed the Crimea. Though
the West condemned this, there seems to have been a fair deal of international
understanding for this move. The majority in the Crimea is pro-Russian,
Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian. The Crimea is of major strategic
importance for Russia – particularly with regard to naval emplacement in the
Black Sea – and there had been special status agreements regarding Russian
military interests there ever since Ukrainian independence.
Encouraged by the Crimean experience (which, he judges, he
had basically got away with), Putin has now decided to repeat this process for
the whole of the Eastern Ukraine, where there is much stronger (possibly even
majority) support among the population for a pro-Russian course. As a result,
he has been covertly – and increasingly overtly – supporting separatists in
this area, who have declared the independence of the region from the Ukraine.
This support has included weapons and weapons-systems, (almost certainly)
military advisors, and (probably) troops. This is the kind of stuff that’s
difficult to control tightly. On July 17 a group of separatists almost
certainly used a military-grade anti-aircraft system to shoot down a Malaysia
Airline jet, killing 298 innocent people, probably because they thought it was
a Ukrainian Air Force fighter. Put bluntly, they fucked up, probably because
they weren’t sufficiently trained, weren’t patched into the intelligence
air-traffic control systems which would have told them that the plane they were
aiming at was a civilian one, and/or were possibly even drunk.
This put Putin in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice;
he never wanted this. Damage control
swung into place, the Buk anti-aircraft
battery used to shoot down the plane was swiftly disappeared back into Russia,
jubilant posts on the web were quickly deleted (though not quickly enough), and
a whole plethora of smoke-screening diplomatic, media, and PR-spin measures
have been put into place.
Following the conventional wisdom narrative, my take on Putin’s
tactics is this: The Crimea is essential to Russian interests, he wanted it, he
got it, and he’s going to keep it. I also feel that the West (and even the
Ukraine) has generally been prepared to accept this. As far as the Eastern
Ukraine is concerned, my suspicion is that, while he might like to have it, he’s not set on it. Keeping some low-level
conflict going there, stirring the pot, keeping the general chaos level up, is
probably sufficient for him. It keeps the whole Ukraine unstable, blocks any
real movement to cement the country into the Western alliance and means the levels
of tension with the West won’t rise above a controllable volume. The US and EU
will scream and complain and will do some little PR-spin economic sanctions
(which will hurt Russia a bit, but they’re worth it from his point of view).
The situation remains fluid, so he still has some freedom to act and react,
depending on the way the situation develops. The downing of Flight MH17
disturbs this strategy, it ups the ante for him to a level which is
uncomfortable. So I would expect the Russian position in the wake of this
murderous disaster in the next weeks and months to be a mixture of obfuscation,
half-assed cooperation, talking things up, playing things down, introducing red
herrings and pink elephants; generally muddying the waters and judiciously
stirring the shit until things simmer down.
Of course, all of this is set within the Conventional Wisdom
Narrative. It’s even all true. But it’s only one narrative.
The Russian Counter-Narrative
There was a Cold War and Russia (in its Soviet iteration)
lost. The whole of the Eastern European buffer-zone (aka Warsaw pact) and the
Baltic Republics, which the Soviet Union occupied to protect the Rodina [the “Motherland”, a Russian
expression of identity, almost mystical in its cultural and nationalist
meaning], are now all firmly part of the Western sphere of influence. Russia
has historically suffered on an almost unimaginable scale as a result of
aggressive invasion from the West. Tens of millions of Russians have been
killed and huge destruction has been wrought on them, from Napoleon to Hitler.
The basic Western attitude to Russia historically has been to regard them as
sub-human, Asiatic barbarians, who don’t really belong in what Gorbachev (in
his boundless naïveté) called the “Common European House”.
The West simply cannot be trusted. Its leaders speak in fulsome
tones about values such as freedom, democracy, and self-determination and then
aggressively proceed, under cover of these phrases, to follow their deeper
instinct to keep Russia weak, perhaps even destroy it completely.
In the negotiations about German reunification, following
the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West made solemn promises to the Soviets. "The Americans promised that Nato wouldn't
move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of
central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It
shows they cannot be trusted." (Michael
Gorbachev, 2008).
But the losses following the end of the Cold War go far
deeper. Not only were the strategically necessary Soviet conquests in Eastern
Europe gone, the losses were even greater. From Peter the Great onwards, Russia
had followed a consistent path to push Christian civilization and values
eastwards, in the Caucasus, Central Asia and further. Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and
Siberia were all conquered, settled and civilized by the Tsarist Empire. What
the United States had seen and realised as Manifest Destiny to the west, Russia
had done eastwards. Only (unlike the US), this had never been accepted by the
rest of the residents of the Common European House. Russia was not seen as expanding
European values eastwards, rather as building up a dangerous barbarian
Asian-infested imperium to threaten the real Europe from the East. All these 18th
and 19th Century Russian conquests, with the exception of Siberia,
are now lost. The scale of the secession of all these former Soviet Republics
from Russian hegemony has only one modern historical parallel; the attempted
secession of the Confederate States of America from the Union in 1861 (and we
all know what that led to).
And that’s not all. The original heartland of Russia is not
just Moscow-based Russia, but rather, from the very beginning, a kind of
federation of three closely-related proto-nations; Russia, Belarus, and the
Ukraine. The origin of later Muscovy and subsequent Russia, is, historically, Kievan Rus’ (9th
Century). In an exercise of (from the Russian point of view) desperate damage
limitation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus could ultimately be
stabilised under the firmly pro-Russian dictatorship of Lukashenko (1994).
Despite continuous Russian attempts, a similar stabilisation of the Ukraine
within the Russian orbit has not been possible.
From a Russian point of view, the role of the West in all
this has been deeply suspect. At best, the West has been cheering on all the
centrifugal tendencies within the former Soviet/Russian Unity from the side-lines.
There is a widespread – indeed almost general – perception among Russians that
the West has actually been actively encouraging and fomenting every possible
movement towards fragmentation, when and wherever they occur. This is not
simply paranoia; the involvement of a plethora of Western groups (with clear
pro-Western agendas) within the former Soviet hegemony, and particularly the
Ukraine, is generally accepted and well documented.
To this has to be added the enthusiastic involvement of all sorts of Western
business (and state-supported) interests in the massive garage-sale/robbery of
practically all the national resources of the former Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics in the chaos of the Yeltsin years, which led to a transformation from
a state-owned to an oligarchy-owned economy in less than a decade, the
consequences of which Russia is still attempting to deal with – or just live
with.
This is the background to the Putin era and is essential to
any understanding of where Russians are today. It explains a lot about how
Putin understands himself and the goals he sets for the country he rules. It
explains why Russians tend to perceive anything
coming from the West (apart from consumer goods which you can buy and own) with the deepest suspicion and
cynicism. It also explains Putin’s enduring popularity with the great majority
of Russians. Faced with a collective psyche deeply traumatised by what his
people experience as defeat, humiliation, and betrayal by the West, he’s giving
them back their dignity; a sense of strength. And worth. Balm for a badly
wounded soul.
Is it then any surprise that ordinary Russians are willing
to believe the spin/propaganda put out by the overwhelmingly state-controlled
media in their country since the current Ukrainian crisis gathered momentum?
That they accept the official line that the present regime in Kiev is fascist?
That dark, abstruse conspiracy theories about sinister US-agency involvement in
the downing of flight MH17 are given widespread credence?
Such narratives of cultural identification are immensely
powerful. For those who identify with them they supply a coherent world-view, they
provide a conceptual framework which allows both individuals and groups to define themselves
and relate to the chaotic, complex wider world in which they find themselves.
We all have our narratives, for the simplest and most fundamental of all is the
individual personal biography, merging into family narratives, the stories
which express the experiences of particular communities, moving into all sorts
of larger-scale instruments of group identity such as religions and nations.
They bind stories of the past, value systems and questions of the present,
shared vocabularies, dialects and languages, common ways of seeing the world
and interpreting individual and shared experiences to provide those contextual structures
of meaning which we all need at a basic level to define our very identity.
Narratives are also
wonderfully and necessarily flexible. They are not monolithic. We all identify
with and buy into multiple narratives, which – and this is centrally important –
need not be consistent with each other. So, to give just one example, there are
many people who manage to combine a particular fundamentalist Christian
world-view with a scientific one, so that they can simultaneously work, say, as
molecular biologists while denying evolution.
This particular example also offers a good illustration of
how important and powerful narratives can seem to be completely resistant to
what others, who do not subscribe to them, regard as self-evident “facts”. No
matter how much “evidence” you bring, you will not be able to bring a
creationist, whose world-view is based on a particular religious narrative
which is a central element in that person’s self-identification, to abandon his
position in favour of an understanding of the world based on evolutionary processes
going back for billions of years. And such considerations also help to explain
just how difficult it would be to persuade the majority of Russians that their
perception of the “realities” of the current Ukrainian conflict, and
particularly the destruction of MH17, is “wrong”.
The Realpolitik Narrative
This is the starting point and context for those who regard
themselves as illusionless realists. They are adherents of a narrative
encapsulated by such expressions as, “Politics is the art of the possible” (Bismarck),
“France has no friends, only interests” (de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston
on England), or “Those who have visions should go to the doctor” (Helmut
Schmidt). It tells the story of a world where the ultimate reality is a social-Darwinist
one, going all the way back to Thucydides’ famous description of the Athenian
position in the History of the Peloponnesian
War, “the strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must”.
Certainly this narrative is one of those which inspires
Vladimir Putin. Following its premises, the most likely future scenario looks
much better for the Russian position than the Ukrainian one. For all the
platitudes being spouted in the EU about the primacy of international law, its
members will do nothing serious to change the current status quo, one in which
Russia has grabbed the Crimea and may even possibly go on to occupy additional
territory in the Eastern Ukraine, or at least control it by proxy through a
Russian-supported separatist regime.
There are already some indications of this. Despite economic
sanctions being talked-up at the moment, France is still going ahead with the
delivery of Mistral
amphibious assault ships to the Russian navy. But the real test of principles
against interests will develop in the coming months, particularly if Russia
maintains its current aggressive position. At the moment, the EU imports around
a third of its natural gas and oil from Russia. Germany’s dependence is even
greater (36%
of natural gas and 39% of oil). Expanding sanctions to cover this area –
something that would genuinely hurt
Russia – would mean the EU would have to put its money where its mouth is.
Higher prices at filling stations would certainly be one result. Literally hundreds
of millions of EU citizens heat their homes and power their workplaces with
natural gas, a significant amount of which is imported directly by pipelines
from Russia. (Just to make the situation even more complicated, the most
important pipeline runs through the Ukraine.) Would anyone like to bet what
would happen to Angela Merkel’s currently high popularity ratings in Germany if
home heating prices rise sharply this winter or (worst-case scenario) the
situation so deteriorates that no gas flowsfrom Russia, the winter is particularly long and cold, the gas reserves are
used up, and rationing has to be introduced? And this doesn’t even address the
question of what consequences real economic sanctions on Russia (and Russia’s reactions
to these) would have on a world economy still in a state of precarious, fragile
recovery from the disaster of the Crash of 2008.
Are the leaders of the western democracies, compelled as
they are to win elections at regular intervals, prepared to gamble their
popularity and positions for the sake of principles? How important are the
international rights of a former Soviet republic to the citizens of the West,
compared with their economic well-being and comforts? How long will the shock
and indignation at the killing of a few hundred plane passengers last before
our short attention spans are diverted to the next crisis or scandal, driven as
we are by a continuous, ubiquitous media frenzy for the next new big story?
The Realpolitik
narrative teaches that interests always trump principles, that bread and
circuses are always more important to the masses, and that public opinion is
always infinitely malleable. The reality of the world is that it spins, and the only thing you really
have to do is to make sure that your spin
works.
And, anyway, nearly all the real power in the world belongs
to a tiny elite of the super-rich who use their wealth to consolidate, maintain
and increase their position and privileges. This is also part of the defining
reality of human existence; it has always, basically, been this way and there
are no good reasons to assume that it will ever substantially be different.
Revolutions and upheavals may sporadically occur, but such wobbles in the basic
spin of the world correct themselves relatively quickly and everything reverts
to business-as-usual.
Awareness of multiple narratives
The narratives I have outlined here are not the only ones
relevant to the current crisis in and about the Ukraine; I have not, for example,
delineated the Ukrainian Narrative, a central one for any complete
understanding of the situation there. There is also a Polish Narrative which
has some significance. I have especially
avoided the Moral Narrative (which is
related to but not identical with the International Law Narrative) since the complexity
of that particular story would at
least double the length of an essay which already threatens to be too long.
The important point is that in every complex human situation,
particularly where differences and conflicts are involved, there are multiple
narratives and that these narratives can be (and usually are) simultaneously
contradictory and true. A realisation of this is essential for any attempt at
conflict resolution. It also moves the work of conflict resolution beyond the
search for simple compromise on the level of a lowest common denominator
towards a search for some kind of metanarrative which can encompass the most
important elements of all the narratives involved.
Writing this as I do in the summer of 2014, my thoughts inevitably
turn back a hundred years, to the summer of 1914. Anyone reading Christopher
Clark’s The
Sleepwalkers, a magnificent account of the beginning of World War I,
cannot fail to be struck by the parallels between the aftermath of the
assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, and the
aftermath of the downing of Flight MH17. Very few people, particularly those
who were responsible for making the crucial decisions, really wanted war in
1914. They all thought that they could manage a situation of brinkmanship. That
the world stumbled into a cataclysmic conflict was in no small part due to the
inability of the major responsible actors to realise the strength of all the
other narratives which were not their own.
I was in an aeroplane, more than seven miles up, when I
started thinking about the complexity of things.
For people who do meditation, one of the major goals is to
achieve simplicity, that sensation when all is one, when the constant ephemera
of daily experience disappear into ragged wisps of illusion, where there is
only the reality of breathing in and breathing out, holding on and letting go
until you transcend the duality, moving beyond thought and feeling into monad
unity … Ommmm.
I have never been very good at this.
There’s a hamster in my head; a driven, energetic little
bastard who gallops away on his exercise wheel all the time. I’ve spent much of
my life (futilely) trying to stop him, or at least slow him down. Most of the
times I try meditation – and it doesn’t make much difference what technique I
use – I generally manage to get through the initial phases quite easily, into
that area of inner stillness and relaxation and then, in the growing silence, I
start to hear that bloody hamster more clearly.
Most of those who teach meditation counsel not to worry
about this. “Don’t fight it,” they say. “Let the thoughts come … and go. They
will arise and then fade away, leaving growing peace, emptiness and goalless
fulfilment in their path.” Om mani padme hum.
They don’t know my fucking hamster.
He’s a persistent little bugger, and he enjoys the space
provided by the initial phases of the meditation process. One his nastiest
little tricks is to take the role of the observer of my progress, analysing it,
commenting on it, making the process of voluntary not-thinking into an
interesting, obsessive, conscious subject of thought – and thus neatly
derailing the whole process.
He’s given me quite a bit of grief in my life. For many
years I found I could slow him down, or even put him to sleep altogether, by
using (ever increasing) amounts of alcohol.
Not a good idea.
Dealing with the consequences of that took a lot of time and effort. Generally, I believe that using
psychoactive substances to try to modify aspects of your personality isn’t good
for you in the long term, because you’re only putting temporary “No Entry”
signs on major areas of yourself, which only function as long as you’re
actively taking the substance. (Disclaimer:
This observation should be no way seen as applicable for prescribed and
monitored medication for mental health issues such as serious mood disorders or
potentially psychotic personality problems.) And, as my experience with alcohol
painfully taught me, such strategies often have serious – and lasting – downsides.
So, I have learned to accept, I have to live with my hamster
and develop other strategies for dealing with him.
Choose your battles,
they say. Don’t get into a fight unless
you’re pretty sure you can win it. Sometimes, instead of trying to wrestle
my manic hamster into silence, or to ignore the constant rattling of him
whirling away on his wheel in the corner of my mind’s living room, I take a
different tack. I consciously open the door of his cage, inviting him to come
into the room and really stretch himself. Reach
for the ceiling, I tell him. Be
welcome. Show me what you can do. (And, very quietly, whispering to myself
so that he can’t hear the furtively hoped intention; Knock yourself out.)
And so, in a kind of anti-meditation, instead of relaxing
and emptying my mind, I relax and consciously allow it to fill up.
Which brings me back to the aeroplane.
I’m in an Aer Lingus Airbus A320-200, more than seven miles up in the
air, travelling at about 500 mph. Along with around 150 other people, I’m
securely enclosed in a warm and comfortable environment, which is just as well;
a few feet away, outside the aircraft, the lack of oxygen in the thin air would
be competing with the very low pressure and a temperature of -60° C to kill me
within a matter of minutes, long before I’d hit the ground at the end of my
fall.
I start to think about the number of people involved in the
process which has me here. There were the thousands of people involved in
building this plane, which was manufactured either in Hamburg or Toulouse (or
even quite possibly both – since Airbus has a very complex assembly process,
the result of intricate political horse-trading). The CFM engines were almost
certainly built in France, though many of the components were made by GE in the
USA; thousands more people involved in building, selling and transporting the
hundreds of thousands of individual components incorporated in the actual
aircraft in which I am now flying.
But, my expanding thoughts about complex human connectivity
realise, this is only part of the picture. What about all the people involved
in making the ancillary fittings; the companies which did the final fitting for
the airline, for example? It’s quite possible that some of the stitching on the
faux-leather/plastic seat cover on which I am sitting was done by some Chinese
woman, working a sewing-machine on a twelve hour shift in a sweatshop factory
for three euros a day. The list of those involved in making my journey possible
expands again to include all these people, and all those who were part of the
myriad operations of packing, transporting, unpacking and installing stuff from
many corners of the globe.
And then there’s the crew, and all the people working in the
two airports getting this plane into the air and back down again safely. The
ground-staff and the baggage handlers, those who did the security checks and
signed off on the passenger, cargo and fuel manifests. The air-traffic
controllers who are guiding our flight safely through the night. The people
working on pumping the crude oil out of the deposits where it has lain under
the ground or the sea for millions of years before those complex hydrocarbon
molecules began their final journey to be refined into kerosene now being
burned to provide energy for the jet engines pushing us through the skies above
Germany, Holland, the North Sea, Britain, and the Irish Sea, all the way from
Düsseldorf to Dublin. Was the man who oversaw the pumping of that original
crude a well-paid shift worker on a North Sea oil-rig, or a much more
poorly-paid Filipino migrant worker, sending remittances home to his family
from Saudi or Kuwait? All the people involved in refining that kerosene and
finally transporting it to be pumped into the plane’s fuel tanks.
Still more human connectivity; As I order a chicken and
lettuce wrap to eat, my thoughts turn to all of those involved in producing
this, from those working in a food-processing plant somewhere to put it all
together to the farmers who raised the chicken (probably somewhere in a
battery) to the ones who grew the lettuce and the other ones who grew the wheat
baked into the wrap. And who were the people who mined the salt which was used
to season it, and where did they live and work? And how many people were
involved in buying and selling and transporting and assembling all the
ingredients of the snack I’m eating?
Ephemeral, momentary, fragmentary connections with literally
hundreds of thousands of people who have all been involved in some way in
making this journey I am on possible, but connections which are none the less
real for all that. Our modern lives are perfused with incredibly complex
interconnectivity; in thousands of everyday situations, which overlap and fuse
into each other, we live lives of wonderfully complicated interdependence.
Without noticing, my racing thoughts become weaker, quieter,
fall away. I find myself becoming quieter, more peaceful, more relaxed.
The hamster has lain down in the corner and fallen asleep.
As a little boy, around fifty years ago now, I decided that
there was something virtuous about walking quickly. I suspect that this is a
common phenomenon among little boys who go walking with their fathers; fathers
have longer legs and just cover the distance faster. And therefore, because
little boys look up to their fathers and want to be just like them, they decide
that it must be good to walk quickly.
At any rate that’s the way it happened with me. Walking was
primarily a way from getting from A to B, and it was obviously advantageous to
do so as quickly as possible.
As an adult, many years later, I discovered another use for
walking; exercise. In a society in which we have become increasingly conscious
of things like cardiovascular performance, body-fat ratio, the potential health
dangers of obesity, overeating, and a too sedentary life-style, keeping
physically fit has taken on many of the characteristics of a religious
proscription. To admit, as I do, that I find every kind of sport (personally
practiced – being a spectator is something quite different) supremely boring is
comparable in many circles to someone confessing in medieval Spain that they
were a Jewish atheist with an interest in witchcraft.
Walking then was something I saw as a possibility to combine
the necessary with the useful. If I did have to walk somewhere, then the thing
was to do it as quickly as possible; get the old circulation working, push the
heart-rate up, get the muscles flexing and bunching, burn up some of those
endless extra calories which would otherwise (in a lipid form) congeal around
the waist-line or (more dangerously) within the artery walls.
Necessary. Useful. But never really pleasurable. The idea of
“going for a walk,” something millions of people unselfconsciously accept as a
normal form of recreation has never really appealed to me. I have always tended
to see the time needed to get from A to B as a period to be practically and
rationally managed in order to reduce it to the minimum possible. Which meant
that if I was going to walk anywhere I planned the time necessary on the basis
of a brisk – a very brisk – walk.
Last April I moved house. It was a project which was quite
significant for me, in all sorts of ways, most of which I won’t go into here –
not now anyway. But one aspect of my move was that my new flat was much more
central than my old one. And as the summer bloomed and I finally started to
feel settled in, I made a resolution; with butcher, baker, supermarket and
pharmacy all just a few hundred yards away, and my place of work only a fifteen
minute walk distant, I would consciously strive to walk when I could – thus ensuring
a minimum of exercise and even massaging my liberal light-green conscience
about the size of my carbon footprint.
Life was good, and the future was bright, bright. Only by
the end of August I was forced to the realisation that I had slowly, unknowingly
been slipping ever deeper into a condition which I knew all too well. Knew intimately
and still not recognised in its insidious approach, even as it dug its talons
deep into my soul.
I have written about depression on this blog before, a
number of times, and I don’t want to go into too many details about it; it
happened, it was bad, I’m slowly coming out of it again. The frightening thing
about this episode was that there was no real reason for it – everything was
okay, I had the feeling that I was in control of my life in a way which I hadn’t
been for years. In retrospect I was able to identify certain factors which had
possibly (probably?) triggered it, but I have had to face up to the unpleasant likelihood
that this is a condition to which I am simply prone. I have to accept that it
may happen again, and that there is little I can do to prepare for it, except
practise a certain kind of relaxed watchfulness so that I am not quite as
blindsided as I was this time.
Indeed, in writing this it strikes me that the roots of this
last episode may be even farther in the past than I have realised up to now. It
is well over a year since one of my creative wellsprings started to dry up – by
this I mean my inclination to write. My essays here became more seldom, and
harder to write. If I had had to explain it last April or May, I would have
simply said that it was due to the increased busy-ness and heightened stress
involved in moving house, a few months later, when I finally accepted that I
was at the bottom of a very deep pit, the idea of writing was simply
unthinkable. If this is really the case, then the fact that you are reading
this is a sign that I am well on my way back to the light (though I’ll make no
promises about how long it will take for me to post the next essay!).
But even at the worst of the depression in September I still
walked. On the occasions when I had to leave the flat, something I found hard
to do, I marched forth, desperately striding to an appointment or to the
supermarket to buy groceries.
And then one day, returning from a session with my therapist
(seven and a half minutes brisk walk away), I realised something. There was no
reason to hurry. I had nothing planned for the rest of the day. It didn’t
matter a fucking toss whether my walk home took a few minutes longer. It was a
beautiful autumn afternoon and the more my pace slowed, the more I found myself
appreciating it. In a seeming inversion of the logic to which I had chained
myself, the more leisurely I walked, the more time seemed available to me. And
the more time there was available, the more my racing thoughts slowed, my mind
moving into a freer, more relaxed space, a space which it had so desperately
longed for and needed.
It was not a miraculous, spontaneous healing, that would be
a drastic exaggeration. It was, rather, an intuition, an inkling, a brief
glimpse of a reality different to the negative, worried, obsessively and
futilely circling inner world in which I was captured and held.
Like most such inklings, this one was quickly gone. I
completed my short journey home (walking slowly) and then forgot the
experience. But the next time I was returning from a therapy appointment I
remembered it once more, and once more I slowed down. I remember consciously
deciding to generally walk more slowly when I was returning home from therapy.
Initially, my thinking was still typically purpose driven. I
found myself formulating the explanation that I was giving myself this extra
time afforded by walking more slowly to reflect on what had happened during the
hour of psychoanalysis, what insights I had achieved, how the whole process was
progressing. An opportunity to
increase the value of the session, to retrospectively continue to mine the
depths just plumbed. For I am, indeed, a typical child of my time and culture,
formed by and embedded in a world obsessed with development, with efficiency,
with optimizing, doing things better,
and faster, and more comprehensively, and (usually presented as the most
important of all) more economically.
"Sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again I just sits."
Only, I found myself gradually realising, it wasn’t true.
The therapy session may have been very productive, I may have found myself
suddenly exploring a whole new area of my psyche, or achieving a wonderful new
insight about the way I tick, but I wasn’t using the more “relaxed” state of
consciousness I was achieving by slowing down on the way home to reflect on and
deepen the therapeutic experience I had just gone through. Instead, I was using
it to do … nothing. Oh, I might start thinking about something, but, I realised,
my thoughts usually petered out, spreading out and thinning before vanishing
into emptiness like the fractal silhouettes of the leafless winter trees I
found my wandering gaze idly and momentarily focussing on before moving on.
I have started to expand the experiment. I no longer just
walk slowly when I’m coming home from therapy; I now try to do it whenever I’m
walking somewhere without a definite time that I have to be at my destination. Which
means, for example, that I continue to walk briskly to work but when I walk home from
work I do it slowly.
I usually work the night shift, which means that my journey
home takes place around 7.30 in the morning. It’s an interesting time to be on
the move if you have the leisure to do it slowly in a relaxed way. There’s a grammar
school on my street, and a primary school at the end of it (and German schools
generally begin their day at around 8.00 a.m.) so there are lots of kids
underway, the small ones lugging bags on their backs nearly as heavy as
themselves, most of the older ones in groups practising and living the all-important
and ever-demanding teenage attitude of cool. A splash of headlights, brake-lights
and rushed activity in front of the schools as hordes of parents fulfil that basic,
most essential parental duty, being a taxi-driver for their offspring, the cars
backing up behind halting school-buses. Adults on their way to work, moving
determinedly, their faces generally closed and concentrated. At this time of
year it’s dark when I begin my way; by the time I get home the sky has
lightened and the day has come. And I’ve found myself noticing and rejoicing in
the fact that, as the planet precesses on its cosmic path deeper into 2014, the
dawn begins a few minutes earlier from day to day.
It still doesn’t come naturally to me; this strange exercise
of walking slowly. The habits and attitudes of a lifetime are deep, and I often
catch myself unnecessarily striding forward and have to remind myself to slow down. But maybe, for me, walking
slowly is something like playing the piano or learning to drive a car;
something I have to practice quite a
bit before it starts to come easily or naturally.
It’s a mild January afternoon as I finish writing this – the
sun breaks out frequently from behind a scattered cloud cover.
I think I’ll go for a walk.
There were lots of musical options for this topic; Dionne Warwick, "Walk on by," Fats Domino, "I'm walking," Katrina and the Waves, "Walking on sunshine," etc. In the end, it had to be Lou ...
Images sourced from: http://www.pittsburghlegalbacktalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FestinaLenteCorrect.jpg http://johnesimpson.com/blog/2012/02/sitting-silent-open-minded/ This quotation is most often - incorrectly - attributed to the baseball player Satchel Paige. Some say its author was the great philosopher, Winnie the Pooh (sadly it isn't, though it suits Pooh). In fact, the first use of it seems to have been in this Punch cartoon, over a hundred years ago.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things
differently there.”
(L.P.
Hartley, The Go-Between)
I had
occasion recently to visit a part of my past, a period immensely important and
formative for me, a place which was, for seven years, both focus and circumference
of my whole world, the centrality of which was so self-evident to me that I
could not then imagine that it would ever be otherwise in my life.
I was
seventeen years old when I left Sligo. The
leaving was a wrench, soul-tearing, ambiguous; on the one hand I was taking a
self-chosen step into a different world, a new life, for I had decided to join
the Dominican Order, on the other hand I was leaving nearly everything and
everyone I knew behind me. The parting was all the more radical, for at the same
time, my father was transferred and our whole family moved to the other end of
the country. Although I was to return there frequently in the years that
followed, the basic bond was broken; the continuous connection formed by the
unity of family and place was gone. It meant that the inevitable decay of most
youthful friendships was greatly accelerated in my case, for home had been sundered and the most
basic part of it had moved elsewhere.
It hurt,
that sundering. I remember feeling very aggrieved, with the unthinking, naïve
selfishness of youth, that my parents had moved away from Sligo
while at the same time being perfectly self-righteous about my own move into a
new life, which also took me to other places. But I recovered. After all, in
the following years, I still went back there, even if not as frequently or for
as long as I might have wished, and I still retained my basic feeling of
identity with and love for the place. Given my peripatetic history, the simple
question “Where are you from?” has always been a little problematic for me, but
Sligo still remains one of the default
answers.
After I was
ordained a Catholic priest, therefore, in 1985, it was completely clear to me
that Sligo would be one of the places where I would celebrate a formal “First
Mass.” And if someone had told me that day that it would be twenty eight years
before I would return, I would have laughed in disbelief.
But that is
what happened. In the following year, primed by the potent fuse of love, my
life exploded into scintillating chunks and shards of new directions,
possibilities, preoccupations and priorities. I found myself in a different
country, living a very different life, with a wife and baby daughter, and practical
decisions concerning job and career to be made and carried through. While I
continued to visit Ireland
throughout the following nearly three decades, limitations of time and
practical considerations somehow never made the journey to the north-west of
the country possible.
Another in
my family had made a very different choice; my sister, Máire, had found her way
back to Sligo and has lived in the coastal village of Strandhill,
six miles from the main town, for many years now. So when she invited the whole
family to join her in celebrating her fiftieth birthday this month I finally
found myself on my way back to the town of my youth, on a journey into the
world of my own memories and the contrast between their local background and
the reality of the present.
Ireland has changed enormously since the
mid-1980s. The country I left was still, for the most part, traditional and
conservative. It was poor, in recession, unable to provide attractive prospects
for many of my generation, who were leaving to find decent, interesting jobs
and adventure in a world of much wider horizons. But then the Celtic Tiger
came, nurtured in its infancy by a massive transfer of structural funds from Europe. It grew up, roared mightily for around ten years
before becoming so bloated on a diet of hubris, fantasy and speculative funny games
with international capital that it crawled into a corner and died – of a
strange combination of economic gluttony and malnutrition.
The traces
of all this were clear to be seen on my journey, from the new motorway leading
out of Dublin to the empty property developments in towns like
Carrick-on-Shannon along the way. Even the approach to Sligo was completely
different to that of my memories; the towns of Collooney and Ballysadare bypassed,
a new road to the town itself, leading to a new bridge across the Garavogue river.
The
following morning, Saturday, I spent a couple of hours walking around town. It
was very strange. The basic geographical skeleton remained as I remembered it
but much of the flesh on the bones had changed; new buildings, new shops and
businesses in old buildings. Deeper, stranger changes too; children of African
and Asian backgrounds speaking with the distinctive Sligo accent, a Polish
butcher’s shop – signs of the internationalisation of Ireland through
immigrants, drawn by the boom of the Tiger years, something unimaginable in the
mono-cultural world of my youth in the seventies when Ireland was a country
which exported rather than imported people. In the past five years the export
has begun once more.
I knew, of
course, that things would not be as I remembered them; I had no expectations
that the place would spontaneously open its arms to me, recognising and
welcoming the long lost son. It was curiosity which led my steps, a desire to
see just what had changed. But as my feet led me along the streets I had walked
so often as a teenager, I found myself becoming more detached. The time elapsed
was just too great, the changes – perhaps, most of all, the changes in myself –
too profound. Though I had already intellectually known that there is no such
thing as time travel, that the past is irrevocably gone, it was something more
to really practically experience it in this fashion. “Something’s lost and
something’s gained,” Joni Mitchell sings, “in living every day.” Over ten thousand
days had past since I last set foot in Sligo, so much lost and so much gained
in all that time that it had, I thought, become impossible to regain any sort
of deep contemporary contact.
And so my
urge to walk further waned. There was a Sligo which was real for me, that town
which had been the stage for my life during those oh so intense years of the
ending of childhood and the unbearably exciting and frightening growth into
increasing adulthood, but it had little to do with the town in which I now
found myself. Looking at my watch, I realised that I still had an hour before
the next bus would leave for Strandhill where I was saying. Finding myself at
the junction of Wine Street
and Quay Street,
I noticed that Lyons’
Café was still there and decided to spend the time I had to wait with a
cappuccino.
Climbing
the stairs to the hundred and fifty year old café, I discovered that here at
least much remained as I remembered it. Oh, the menu is more extensive,
sophisticated and cosmopolitan but someone has been careful to preserve the
basic character of the place and the small tables and wooden chairs are still
the same as they were in the seventies when this was one of the favourite
haunts of the teenagers of the town. There weren’t all that many places where
the boys from SummerhillCollege and the girls
from the two nuns’ schools could meet on common ground and do all those things
which are so important for teenagers; preening, flirting, talking, teasing,
laughing, showing off, making dates and plans … just hanging out and wasting
time. Lyons’
was one of the few establishments back then which tolerated us, though we were
all experts in making a Coke or a coffee last for a whole afternoon, far more
interested in each other than in giving custom to the café. Today the coffee
was good and the place, I was glad to see, was doing a brisk business.
As I drank
a second cappuccino, I tried to understand what I was doing; what I had
expected of my perambulation and what exactly I had experienced. Perhaps some
part of me had been hoping for the kind of epiphany described by Proust in his
famous madeleine episode in À la recherche du temps perdu, where a particular
taste throws his protagonist completely into a memory of the past. If so, it didn’t happen
for me; sitting there in the café, many recollections of my youthful years did
come to mind, but still far away and detached from me, the teenagers of the
mid-seventies populating the room around me like barely perceived, transparent
ghosts. Reality, I thought, was more like L.P. Hartley described it, the past is
a foreign country.
And then, that evening at my sister’s party, I had an encounter which
changed everything. One of the guests was someone I had known back in the time,
the memories of which I had been attempting to recall with my walkabout through
town. She was another member of that clique to which I had belonged as a
teenager – to be honest, I’d had quite a crush on her when I was sixteen, but
had been too uncertain and insecure to ever mention it to her then, or to
attempt to move it beyond the confused desires of my youthful wishes into the
realm of practical action. Now we were meeting again after more than thirty
five years of life and all that it had done with us during that time. I had
gone away and never returned; she had left for a number of years but had come
back, and married another of my friends from that time. Our children are now
older than we were back then.
And as we talked, I suddenly I realised that I had somehow come to the
place I had been looking for that morning. Having exchanged the broad outlines
of our stories of the long interim, we started reminiscing together about that
faraway world of our youth. I discovered myself (and so, in a real sense, rediscovered
my earlier self) asking about people I hadn’t thought of for decades and she
(who had remained in – or, rather, returned to – Sligo) knew a lot of the
answers. We found ourselves sharing memories of things that we had done
together, of events commonly experienced. The past, which had seemed so
irretrievably far away to me just a few hours earlier, was suddenly just around
the last corner we had turned, the years between not negated but somehow
bridged. It occurred to me later that I’d had this kind of experience on a
number of occasions over the past decade or so, a period where I have had the
great good fortune to reconnect with quite a few friends with whom I had lost
contact. It’s what happens when you meet old friends and discover that you can,
amazingly, just pick up where you left off.
And I realised a truth – at least something that is true for me. While
place is important (and one would suffer from some kind of serious deficiency
not to cherish the beauty of Sligo, magnificently set as it is on an Atlantic
bay to the west, framed by the mountains of Benbulben to the north and
Knocknarea to the south), in the end it is people and not place which are more
central to a feeling of belonging, of home. And though in memory
we organise things by assigning them a location, this is only background, the
setting of the stage of life on which we perform the stories of our lives in
interaction with others. In my case, I would wager (and I suspect that my
mistake is not uncommon) that I had tended to confuse the importance of people
in my life, and the stories we created together, with the place in which these
stories took place. Setting is of course important – context is everything, as
Derrida once remarked – but people, not place, are the most significant
component of context.
It is a realisation
with which I, for one, am quite content.
"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that
time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow
of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly
with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the
childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his
means,
