|
From
PP 1 PP 2
PP 3 PP 5 PP
6 PP 9 PP
10 PP 11
PP 24 PP25
From PP 1
Is a community of writers possible? This is not an
artistic but a philosophical question which is why Penniless Press will
publish philosophy along with art. The Scottish philosopher John MacMurray
has written:
"... the extreme individualism of the artist and the
extreme individualisation of his object provide no basis for personal
togetherness."
Art may require an extreme individuality of vision which
makes artists as artists incapable of co-operation, but before we are
artists we are men and women and our personal togetherness is more
important than art. To put it in a way that sounds silly and obvious: life
comes first and art after. Yet this isn't so silly or obvious when you
consider the petty jealousies, the bitterness, the conceit and the bloated
egos so often characteristic of the world of art. Penniless Press agrees
with what Arnold Bennett has one of his characters say: "Art is a
very small thing." But no less a marvellous thing for that.
Community first, art second. Personal togetherness first
and let art be its servant. We are penniless and proud. Our values are the
best of those of the bohemians: modesty of material means, friendship and
lack of conventional ambition. As Georges Brassens says: "Les copains
d'abord".
Penniless Press will try to make art serve community,
friendship, personal togetherness. We welcome ideas but have no truck with
ideology. We admire clarity like that of the poems by Fred Voss which
appear in this issue and of the beautiful prose of Irving Howe, subject of
an essay by Jim Burns.
Let our watchword be this from Clement Greenberg:
"... if you have to choose between life and
happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness.''
From
PP2
In his final interview in London in 1993, Ken Saro-Wiwa
argued that he could not work like a western writer. Western literature is
principally for entertainment. It is obsessed with individual angst. It is
part of a culture too comfortable to allow it to break out of this
narrowness and inwardness in order to become part of the means of changing
the world. He, on the other hand, could make no distinction between his
writing and his activism, his campaign for justice for the Ogoni people
and others like them, his fearless opposition to the goons who rule
Nigeria, his accusations against the complacency of western governments
and the racism of multi-nationals. He could not be, as Gunter Grass
explains, a writer on the one hand and a citizen on the other. The need to
change the world had become for Ken Saro-Wiwa too urgent for literature to
be used as mere entertainment.
Yet literature is merely literature. It is neither
politics nor religion. It seldom, if ever, changes the world dramatically.
The oblique and imperceptible relation between literature and action makes
it difficult for writers to believe that their work can make any
difference. It is easier to be an entertainer. It is simpler to divorce
writing from citizenship or to admit that at best they sometimes overlap.
But there is one responsibility that all writers have at all times and in
all places: to resist the degradation of language.
Dictators, tyrants, exploiters, oppressors great or
small, in public life or in private, require a language twisted to their
ends. When the Nigerian government complains, after having murdered Ken
Saro-Wiwa and his fellow campaigners, of the "unfair" response
of the Commonwealth nations, then the meaning of "fair" and
"unfair" has been demolished. Those who uphold injustice, which
is nothing more than making a special case for themselves, must debase
language to their ends. The primary responsibility of writers is to resist
such debasement, to ally the use of language to honesty in thought and
feeling, however painful and costly such honesty may be.
If Ken Saro-Wiwa was right and western writers feel they
live in a world so comfortable that there is nothing to write about but
petty neuroses and trivial crises, it speaks of an enormous failure of
imagination and a weary parochialism. Our comfort is an illusion. It is
bought at the cost of genocide against peoples like the Ogoni. It is the
comfort of the morally dissolute. In the west writers love to win prizes.
But beyond the glamour and glitz and self-congratulation and petty
resentments and jealousies of the literary awards lie the real prizes for
which all responsible writers should strive: justice and freedom. Ken
Saro-Wiwa gave his life for them. All we need sacrifice is our
complacency.
From PP3
Samuel
Beckett once remarked that thinking of literature as a career is an
idiocy. John Gross in his marvellous RISE AND FALL OF THE MAN OF LETTERS
says that literature is not a discipline but an enthusiasm. What better
way to think of literature than as an enthusiasm that has nothing to do
with careerism? Yet whenever you read about a writer these days there
seems to be an unhealthy concentration on prizes, awards, kudos. It's a
shortcut for the lazy-minded of course; people who rush out to buy the
latest Booker winner just because it's the Booker winner but who ignore
much interesting writing because it isn't on a syllabus, or reviewed in
the Sunday papers, or because its author has never been on television.
Journalistic hype dominates more and more the way we are to think about
writing and writers and the unfortunate thing is that the small presses,
which exist for something else, fall into the same trap: they can't resist
mentioning that this writer has won a Gregory, or that writer came
runner-up in the National Poetry Competition. Poetry Competition ? Don't
the words sit oddly together? Dylan Thomas was once asked, while touring America , who was the best
poet writing in England . "Why."
he replied, "is it a competition?" Of course it isn't, but too
many writers think it is.
Of course, writers are only human and when there are prizes on
offer, who can resist them? Get your poems in the prestigious journals,
your novel published by a big house and reviewed in the right places, your
play produced at the Royal Court and you might be in
for fame and money. It is perfectly possible to be an honest writer and a
success in commercial and worldly terms, but it is equally true that
sometimes the price of honesty is failure in every respect except the
artistic. On which university syllabus for example are you likely to find
any of the novels of Alex Baron? Yet some of his work, FROM THE CITY FROM
THE PLOUGH springs to mind, is every bit as good as, say, some of the
highly-praised novels of Graham Greene whose POWER AND THE GLORY I studied
in an academic setting many years ago. I wish I'd studied Alex Baron. When
literature becomes dominated by an ethos of worldly success, it follows
that many must be called but few admitted. If you want to sell literature
like soap powder, you need a few big names the punters can recognise.
When John Ruskin published UNTO THIS LAST he refused to allow it to
be advertised, for he thought advertising vulgar. It appeared in an
edition of a thousand copies which ten years later had not sold out.
Apollinaire's famous poem ZONE was first published in a magazine with a
circulation of forty. When it appeared, all forty subscribers cancelled
their subscriptions. Ruskin and Apollinaire are now, of course, world
famous and no doubt someone has made plenty of money from their books, but
there is something right about their attitude. It's the writing that
matters. Forget the narcissism of prizes, money, fame, careerism (that
blight of modern life in which an ostensible interest in something outside
yourself turns out to be nothing but mean self-obsession), and get on with
the work. Literature should be written for enthusiasts by enthusiasts, and
when someone asks you about a writer, talk about the writing and ignore
the prizes.
A few years ago, Harold Pinter admitted with regret that he had
voted Tory in a fit of pique when a production at the National was halted
because of a strike. We ought not to be surprised that leading cultural
figures who proclaim their defence of human rights behave with
self-regarding petulance. They often do. But we should get things in
perspective: literature is important, but not more important than people's
lives.
From
PP5
Socialism,
common wisdom has it, is dead. It seems appropriate, therefore. to begin
this issue with a defence of its virtues from one of the century's
greatest intellectuals. Of course. Einstein is old hat, a sluggish.
antediluvian mind out of keeping with the modern, enlightened celebration
of the free market' Perhaps the geniuses who are leading us to the
promised land of the social market or the market community or one nation
of rich and poor and a lump in the middle or whatever it is, will soon
turn their attentions to Unified Field Theory and offer us proof QED that
Einstein is a redundant duffer distinctly Old Science. a fool with bad
hair, poor dress sense and no appeal to the masses In the meantime,
however, some of us may prefer to wallow in nostalgia and find in his
astute little essay a diagnosis of our modern condition as pertinent now
as when he wrote it in 1952
Individual
and society. What shall be the relation between them? Who, in contemporary
Britain. would admit to a delight in a ' naive, simple, and
unsophisticated enjoyment of life"? And how strange that a man who
produced a theory so sophisticated that hardly anyone understands it can
celebrate these qualities Our life is dominated by a false sophistication.
a purchased pseudo-sophistication and an opinionated ignorance which
believes itself to be informed wisdom. Society, in which we should have
some hope of finding ourselves stands opposed to us, refusing to accept
our wish for naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment It demands that
we submit to its injunctions to pursue wealth, status, success power and
their trappings. It insists that the 'economic anarchy" of capitalism
is the only means of producing wealth. It denies that there is any life
beyond the pursuit of profit and competition to "deprive each other
of the fruits of.. collective labor' It sets its impersonality against the
irreducible fact of the personal nature of human life and makes the latter
serve the former.
Public
enterprise, in which thousands herd together in factories or offices, is
called private, while the private lives of the rich and famous are put on
public display. And when we have elected our leaders as Einstein points
out, they are beholden to the economic power of conglomerates richer than
many countries. Indeed, the richest individuals in the world command more
wealth than some of the poorest nations. And the cure for our ills, we are
expected to believe, is more of the same.
The
age of ideology, apparently, is gone There remain merely pragmatic
solutions. But what are we to be pragmatic about? Pragmatism about living
with capitalism is ideology pragmatism which accepts the crippling of the
lives of millions is not pragmatic at all. it is an abdication of moral
striving Some seem to have been so blinded by the success of capitalism in
producing and distributing consumer goods to the most fortunate that they
no longer see its moral failings. Socialism provided a moral focus. Its
failure forces us to rethink how to move beyond capitalism. Economic
determinism is no answer. We are now locked into the economic determinism
of capitalism. Einstein's solution seems quaint even to those who
sympathise with it. The cynics will say he should have stuck to physics.
Science,
as Einstein says, can only help so far. It can provide us with means but
not ends. But it can also provide us with understanding. Look at how
modern biology makes a mockery of racial theory for example genetic
differences within races are far greater than those between them.
Capitalism, we are told is human nature. Is this supposed to mean that
natural selection has wired us for capitalism? Crazy Marx was wrong in his
belief that the human mind is a tabula rasa upon which culture imprints
whatever it likes. Just look at language, it is the innate restrictions of
Universal Grammar that make the flexibility of language possible. I am
choosing how I write this editorial. And we choose how we relate to one
another too, but not out of an infinitely flexible nature We are born with
needs capacities instincts. The question is what will we make of them what
kind of society will we build from them? And here's a reckless assertion.
human beings are wired for mutuality. If we were wired for selfishness, we
would never have survived. If the earliest human beings had behaved like
capitalists and fought one another for the means of life the species would
have perished. Capitalism is an historical aberration kept alive by
perversity and ignorance. Somewhere beyond it we will discover, like
Einstein, to appreciate life as naive simple, unsophisticated enjoyment.
From
PP6
Literature
engenders a surplus of itchy backs and the mutual scratching can drive you
mad. Just pick up any copy of Poetry Review. Some of those spines must be
raw. It happens everywhere of course. I use my carefully manicured nails
lightly here and there, though at feast I can say that the marks on my
shoulder blades weren't made by literary whores. in this edition I do a
terrible thing: I publish myself at length. But only to assist a
remarkable and hugely underrated talent. I dare to call John Murray a
genius. If I'm proved wrong it won't be by much. On the other hand, there
are those who say that a young female poet from Manchester deserves the
same appellation, as there are those who say that if you don't rhyme
you're not a poet, as there are those who say poetry is football and
football as poetry. What I say is let the scratching stop and the
literature come first.
If
you make money from writing and you've got a reputation you need to make
the right friends. As I don't and I haven't I can cultivate the right
enemies. Literature needs writers who are prepared to go out on a limb,
like John Murray. His work makes not a single concession to popular taste.
it is intensely literary. But who would criticise football for being
intensely sporty? It's also difficult. He likes language and has in his
vocabulary words the average football fan might not normally chant on a
Saturday. At random: sessile, anoia, metanoia, brindled, horripliation, poikilothermic,
cachexic. He doesn't show off though. These words sit modestly and
appropriately in his prose.
Money
and reputation can be made from what is aesthetically third-rate, either
by writing it or reviewing it. Dishonesty is almost a hallmark of much
reviewing these day. Puffing inflates the egos but it leaves the
literature where it is. And it's astonishing how some reviewers can tell
you so much about themselves and so little about the book. But then, when
writers aren't scratching one another's backs they're likely to be
scratching one another's eyes out: there's only so much money and
reputation to be had. But she isn't a genius and football isn't literature
and if you want to write notices for Poetry Review, you'd better get to
work with the emery-board.
From
PP9
The
editor apologises for the late publication of this issue, occasioned by
the unfathomable perversions of what the French quaintly misname
ordinateurs and the brutal eviction of Penniless Press from its
back-bedroom office to facilitate the flowering of a teenage personality.
The magazine's relocation in a tiny corner of the conjugal chamber where
literature must learn to coexist with lingerie, though congenial to the
the editor's obsessions, is unpropitious for punctuality.
From
PP10
Some
say there are too many writing poetry. Do they say also that too many play
musical instruments or sport; too many sleep in comfortable beds and eat
good meals; too many visit the theatre and are kind to their children? How
can too many participate in a higher activity or strive for enrichment? We
live in a culture of fences, of barriers and exclusivity whose assumption
is that the higher activities, the better thoughts and feelings, the
richer accomplishments are inappropriate for the majority. For the few,
the works of Homer and Whitman. For the many, a tabloid newspaper. I see
nothing in Homer or Whitman which should exclude the majority. On the
contrary, I see much the majority could access and delight in. And what
better response to Homer and Whitman than to write your own Illiad or
Leaves of Grass? To attempt to write and to fail to come within a universe
of the genius of a genius, is nevertheless to have striven. It is
nevertheless to have learned: how great, rare and universal is the work of
Homer and Whitman; how the nature we all carry can be given exquisite
expression by a superior mind. To write inferior poetry is to understand
the genius of the superior. And even the experience of writing the most
inferior poem can open up within the mast modestly talented individual the
narrow and difficult path that can lead to higher aspirations, better
thoughts and feelings, a new behaviour. No attempt at writing is ever
wasted, however inferior the outcome. As no attempt at playing music is
ever wasted, however incompetent the performance. We should not encourage
people to play music In the belief they may be Beethoven, but because we
know they aren't. Beethoven is the musician we would all be had nature not
been so niggardly in the distribution of talent. But to play one bar of
the simplest tune is to be your own Beethoven. It is to enter the sea of
music where we may only paddle while Beethoven could dive to the greatest
depths. To paddle is better then to go through life in fear and ignorance
of the sea. We should encourage people to write because we know they can
never be Homer. But to write one line of simple poetry is to be your own
Homer.
The
angry and mean exclusivity which says too many write comes from the belief
that only they should write whose accomplishment is great. But greatness
is once a century. If only the great were published, our bookshops would
be half-empty. Do we say that no-one should play a piano whose does not
possess the gift of Kissin? Would any truly great artist wish to exclude
others from the excitement and elevation of their art? All art is an act
of generosity. All art is for all people. An art which wishes to fence
itself in destroys itself. An artist always communicates, in his or her
own experience, what touches on the experience of everyone. What is
produced by the majority will always be inferior but you are much more
likley to read Homer by discovering the Homer in yourself through your
inferior verse than if you are told to put away your pen and paper. And
those poets who tell the majority to stop writing should not be surprised
if their books don't have an audience.
As
for the plight of the inundated editor. I receive two thousand poems a
year. Some from poor, excluded people. Poems scrawled on scraps of paper.
Poems not even starting to be poems. But in these poor, miserable
scratchings is there not the same hope that inspired Homer and Whitman? Is
there not the pathetic hint of the grandeur that lay within Beethoven? The
old man from London, lonely, unable to afford the return postage is he not
striving for a better self, a better world in the barely legible snippets
he sends me? Should I tell him to stop writing? I don't want to be
associated with the exclusion of the many from the best that human culture
has produced. Not nearly enough appreciate that poetry is for everyone.
But there's plenty of sniffiness to convince them that it isn't. And I
would be glad to be inundated.
From
PP11
Narcissus
Ascendant
In
a culture of visibility, of spectacle, It's no surprise to find literature
caught up in the struggle to displace substance and enthrone image. The
retreat from objectivity so characteristic of a narcissistic culture, the
attempt to replace all objective standards by mere subjective preference
finds its disastrous expression when a highly visible writer can seriously
argue that what distinguishes a good from a bad book is whether or not he
likes it. If this is true, literature is dead. It lives by the acceptance
of standards which go beyond personal preference. You don't have to like
Jane Austen to see that she is a great writer. But what of the contention
that if I happen not to like her work, then she is a writer of no
importance? Philistinism. The regressive impulse behind the refusal of
objective standards, the contention that there is no distinction between
the world and myself, that whatever I like is good and whatever I dislike
worthless leaves us with an empty culture which must hype itself to
conceal its atrocious lack of reality.
This
is prevalent even, appallingly, in the small presses. Philistinism hiding
behind hype and passing itself off as culture is the dominant tone of a
strain British literary life. Putatively serious young poetesses
publishing trashy novels clearly intended to do nothing but heighten their
profile and bring in money while serious novelists writing taxing work
have their manuscripts turned down by every decent-sized press in the
land, reveal the inversion of values which is reducing literature to the
level of pop music. Accompanying this is the cowardly denial that it is
happening, the pretence that all cultural products are equally valuable
and that to make a distinction between The Spice Girls and Seamus Heaney
is to be elitist and therefore both wrong and bad. This is the defeatist
position of the thoroughgoing narcissist for whom all distinctions
threaten a reduced sense of self and who wishes to avoid them through
either a symbiotic blending with the world or a denial of any reality
beyond the self. The paradox of this, of course, is precisely that
selfhood is the recognition of distinction, of limits.
A
marketing man seeking to sell you toothpaste will not offer a
dispassionate analysis of its chemical content. More and more the hype
that is employed to sell literature is creeping into criticism. This is
not a matter of the age-old business of puffery but of a serious loss of
orientation. It is encouraged by editors who spike honest reviews of
hotwriters. Most reviews disguise the sense that any struggle is taking
place in literature. This is what you would expect from a narcissistic
orientation to culture: it is an undifferentiated mass of work within
which you can orientate yourself only by personal preference. The reader
who prefers Jeffrey Archer to Gunter Grass is not revealing an inferior
literary sensibility , but merely doing the only thing available to any of
us. To argue about the objective value of works of literature is to miss
the point: they exist to please, to be consumed. I choose my toothpaste,
you choose yours.
Allied
to this is the revolt against criticism. To disable criticism is, of
course, the narcissist's way of ensuring that his need to blend with the
world or to deny it can never be challenged. But the demise of criticism
leaves literature at the mercy of superficial judgements. Milan Kundera
has attacked the dismissal of criticism on the grounds that without it
“a work is surrendered to completely arbitrary judgements and swift
oblivion." This is the irony. Those who seek to emasculate the critic
in the hope that in this way they can protect their work, ensure its
ultimate neglect. Serious, dispassionate criticism is exactly what the
modern literary sensibility despises. In the struggle of each against all
for a little passing notoriety which is the contemporary literary world,
the fear that one's work will not stand up to serious scrutiny haunts
every writer. The traditional defence against such fear is attention to
objective quality. The contemporary defence is a dismissal of posterity
and a denigration of the objective.
It
is this ability to value what goes beyond our subjectivity we are losing.
The poet who sits quietly among books writing poems is destined to be
neglected while the showman who knows how to attract media attention will
be hyped, even if the work is dull. The end of the twentieth century has
found an ingenious solution to the tragedy of the loss of objectivity: it
celebrates it. What was tragic in the work of Paul Celan - a subjectivity
under such imminent threat of disappearance that it could gain hardly any
purchase on reality - has become a joke. We are all narcissists now, so we
might as well enjoy it. Nothing could be more tragic than the loss of the
sense of tragedy. But such paradoxes are lost on minds which seek instant
gratification and a glib laugh, even at the gates of Armageddon.
Narcissus
has a diminished fear of death, a blind optimism. If there is no reality
beyond the self there is no need to fear the loss of self. This is the
tone of some modern literature: things may be bad, but there's no point
breaking your heart or troubling your mind. Pull back from significance.
Pretend it will all go away. But it won't. Living for the moment ensures
the death of the future. What will the future's intelligent inhabitants
make of this curiously inward, reduced, self-deprecatory literature? The
literature of Narcissus.
From PP24
Peggy
Ramsay thought Joe Orton the best writer she’d handled. Why ? Because of
his detachment. She was right. Detachment is what makes great literature
and Orton had it. He claimed that going to prison was the decisive
experience. There’s some Orton mischief in there but at the same time
it’s true: the pain of the deprivation of freedom made him look at
himself utterly dispassionately. Orton’s detachment is what some of our
modern dramatists lack.
Orton was a great writer but a ruined man. Some of his behaviour
was beyond excuse. He knew it. He refused hypocrisy. He knew he was ruined
and he struck back at the values that had ruined him, especially sexual
hypocrisy. In his life, he was a mess. In his work, he was a saint. It’s
the work that matters.
Supposing we didn’t know who’d written What
The Butler Saw; would it be
any less a work of genius ? What I love about Orton is his writing. His
activities in public lavatories are as sordid as any other beleaguered
homosexual’s in the early sixties. Alan Bennett’s film makes too much
of the life, as if that’s what made Orton a writer. No, what made him a
writer was detachment, even from his own experience. Which is why he’s so
much better a writer than the self-indulgent Bennett.
So, in PP23 the work was detached from the writers, or from their
names. At least a little bit. Though the names were listed. There’s a
rational objection: what if I like the work and want to read more ? Well,
drop me a line and I’ll tell you who wrote what you like. Or visit the
website where all work is attributed. It’s no big deal. It’s just
seeing what happens to the writing when you let it stand alone.
Personally, I like anonymity. I like my work to go out into the world, but
I prefer to stay at home. There’s a public persona called Alan Dent
who’s known to be a ranting Marxist. If he writes a poem about eating
porridge, don’t be fooled: there’s politics in there somewhere. It’s
for this reason and others that I sometimes publish under assumed names.
People see the name not the writing.
I’ve never met Simon Armitage. I’m sure he’s a nice bloke.
He’s from the north. He’s down to earth. But I don’t know him.
Personally, I wish him well. I hope his marriage flourishes and his
daughter is a little joy who grows into a big joy. How do I know he has a
daughter ? Because I read it in a paper. I assume it’s true. But his
personal life is, frankly, none of my bloody business. Just like the
personal lives of the folk across the road who never speak to me. I wish
them well too. But Armitage’s writing is public. I do know that, or some
of it. It’s up for grabs.
It’s part of our attempt to define ourselves through culture. Everything
in that space can be challenged, debated, torn to pieces. It’s not
personal. Literature is as objective as physics.
Who did the cave paintings at Lascaux ? Does the fact that we
don’t have a name diminish their power ? They are great art. Detached.
Who wrote Sir Gawain ? Is it any
less a poem because we don’t know if he was married or had a daughter ?
Then we come to the question of selling. It’s that Alan Dent
again. But the facts are the facts. Publishers are out to make money. If
you want to make money, sell a commodity everyone wants. Make them want
it. To publishers, a name is more important than good writing. Julie
Walters publishes a novel and it gets reviewed in the Sunday papers.
There’s a guy up in Cumbria with an Old Testament beard and a flat cap
who can write the arse off Ms Walters whose latest novel didn’t. Do me a
favour ! Let’s get some detachment. It’s the writing
that matters. Ms Walters can’t write for toffee. As far as we know,
Tolstoy couldn’t act. Why not stay in your sphere ?
As a matter of fact, the guy up in Cumbria can write the arse off
most of the novelists whose books are piled up in Waterstones. What should
grab the headlines in the world of literature is good writing. But the
young publishing execs laugh their socks off:
Good writing ? Get real! This is about money !
Unfortunately it’s also about ego. We all want praise. Even bits
of praise do us good. When my wife tells me I’ve made a good job of
cleaning the kitchen, my self-esteem rises. Magic. If you were shown
photos of a thousand pairs of feet and asked to pick out those of your
spouse, you couldn’t do it. If you were shown ten thousand faces and
asked to do the same, you’d find it easy. Why ? Because your brain has
specific face-recognition neurons but no specific feet-recognition
neurons. Natural selection sorted this out for obvious reasons. See the
smiling face of someone you like and your brain lights up like Blackpool
illuminations. The same happens when you get recognition, when your book
is published, when it’s reviewed, when it wins a prize, when it’s for
sale in all the shops. Everyone craves that good feeling. That’s why the
literary world is so murderous. People want their
name
in print because that’s where the good feeling comes from. Such is the
delusion. The true good feeling actually comes from seeing your work in
print and knowing it’s accomplished and well-received by serious
readers. But the neurons that fire up for that aren’t the ones that make
you feel self-important. My guess is that the artists who did the
paintings at Lascaux knew how good they were. They knew they’d be
admired so long as eyes could see. That’s satisfaction. The other
feeling is empty pride.
Celebrity has invaded literature. A small press publisher wrote to
me not long ago telling me excitedly that he’d “got” such-and-such a
poet. A name. Are the poems any good ? What does it matter if the name
will sell books ?
I like the idea of creating this tiny, tiny space where readers can
encounter writing in its complete detachment. The writing must speak for
itself. Finding out who wrote it, if you need to, can come after. But
isn’t it a joy to meet the writing naked ?
From PP 25
Astute readers will notice we no longer
call ourselves a quarterly. The Trade Descriptions Act is what it is. We
are law-abiding disreputable quasi-bohos. This is our second edition of
2007 and it probably won’t arrive on your mat till early 2008. But we’ve
launched our website and that gets more visitors than the average
Anglican church so we can confidently claim we’re a little more popular
than god. In any case, regularity of publication is important for
commercial publications. Good writing and important ideas don’t depend
on adhering to a timetable. We hope our readers agree that our mag is
worth waiting for, even if we are less reliable than Godot.
There are those
who believe, of course, that god’s fingerprints are all over the
universe. We believe he wore gloves. He was still pretty careless
though: what kind of idiot creates an eye with a blind spot ? And the
human spine is barely, as they say in today’s nauseating jargon, fit
for purpose. On the one hand, he seems to be a thoroughgoing
determinist: a tiny change in the relative weights of sub-atomic
particles and the universe wouldn’t exist. Yet when he got to human
beings, he had a brain-wave: free will. What a joker ! But he created
good and he created evil and gave us the freedom to choose between them.
This has kept the hangman and the dramatist busy for a few thousand
years. But think of this: take a hundred very hungry people who don’t
know where the next crust is coming from, cast in front of them enough
bread for seventy meagre appetites and what will happen ? Our free will,
which gives rise to ethics, makes the experiment impossible, but we can
think, we can imagine. They scramble and fight or even kill one another.
The wretches ! Haven’t they heard of the struggle of good against evil ?
Why don’t they exercise their free-will ? They may use their higher
judgement, of course. A moral genius may arise amongst them and say:
We have only enough bread for seventy, but let’s share it so at
least we all have something. They may take the advice. But they’re
more likely to reach for the cross or the rifle. The moral genius has
been around a very long time and the rich still reign through violence.
Now imagine the same hundred people comfortably housed in Reigate and
fed at one another’s well-laden tables. Cast enough bread for seventy
before them and what happens ? They fill their glasses with Bollinger
and say bollocks to the scraps. What ? The struggle of good against evil
comes down to the provision of bread ! God really is a pillock.
Vulgar
determinism is, of course, intellectually discredited. The vulgarians
try to convince us that everything we are, every decision we make, every
idea we have, even our precious sense of identity, depend on the firing
of bits of jelly in our brains. And what determines how the bits of
jelly fire ? Why, circumstances. If you wiggle your little finger,
neurons fire in your motor cortex. Command neurons telling your little
finger to wiggle. About three-quarters of a second before that, neurons
fire in your pre-motor cortex. Not command neurons, so why ? Well,
probably to give you a sense of agency, to make you feel that you are
deciding to wiggle your little finger rather than having it wiggled for
you. But if a wasp is about to hit you in the eye, or you stick your
hand in boiling water, you won’t make any decision about blinking or
pulling your hand away. So just what is the you that decides to
wiggle the little finger ? Beats me, whatever that may be.
Flaubert liked
the fact that god has made himself scarce. He’s not interested in
celebrity. He’s done important work and doesn’t need to strut. The
writer should do the same: build the world and disappear. And don’t
forget the gloves. There are those, however, who don’t like this. They
think it deprives the forensic folk of work. They believe fingerprints
are vital. Flaubert existed, of course, and we know all kinds of things
about him like his frustration with the neurotic and self-dramatising
Louise Colet and his horror at the thought of fatherhood. But there are
no fingerprints on Madame Bovary. It might almost have been
published anonymously. God Forbid !
|
|
