Incomprehensibles Archives - almost everything is unexpected.

Why are the British (well actually, English) people so unrevolting?

I will be brief. The place I grew up in, where I osmotically developed as an ‘Englishman’ (English person) is no longer that place. It is a different, a much darker place; but this is not the interesting or surprising thing.

The interesting and surprising thing is also the horrifying thing: far too few – look, it’s the English to be honest, not really the Scots, Welsh or the Irish; perhaps they have some ancestral, residual Gallic/Celtic spirit of rebellion – are willing or able to realise the patently obvious, let alone to do damn all about it: the country is being slowly and not-at-all subtly converted by its rulers into an authoritarian state. A whatee? A state wherein the ruling minority – not governing, per se (that demands working with reality), but ruling (imposing an artificial reality) using a well-worn combination of propaganda and thuggery (Putinism, for the sake of argument) – tell the ruled majority what they must believe and what they cannot do; and it’s always a very long list, often with criminal sanctions attached. Why are the non-ruling majority English people using every tired old trick in the book of Great English Mythologies – read: delusions carried over from times past – to convince themselves that this is not really happening? Why are the English people so unrevolting?

Perhaps, to respond as the French do under similar circumstances would be the ultimate treason: to adopt Gallic remonstrance over and above good ole un-French stiff upper lip. Ne’ mind eh? Perhaps its the under-studied multi-generational effect of funds pulled from public education. Perhaps it’s the boiled [human] frog syndrome: spiritual death by tyranny is a sly, gradual thing. Perhaps it’s the powerful distractions of gaming, streaming and social media. Et-bloody-cetera; I wish I knew.

But what I do know is that the dynamics of a radical shift away from democratic and egalitarian values (notwithstanding that those values are always judiciously manicured by the ruling minority) are well underway; more than you will ever admit, Oh Al-bi-on! The present government of ‘En-gland’ – in its nauseatingly obvious trajectory and its clueless, wave-riding reprobates’ associated, clumsy ideological slobberings – has more in common with Russia, Hungary, Myanmar, the US and the multiple other countries around the world recently or now fronted by – usually – fragile-ego’ed individuals who must never confront their personal demons and must make YOU pay for THEIR perpetual anguish, whether they are the Capo or merely the Capo’s creepy funereal willing servants. Nota bene: none _wish _you _good.

Once upon a few times, the ruled majority were partially revolting. St. Peter’s Fields? The Peasant’s Revolt? And now? Well, let’s say the signs aren’t good. People are too busy dealing with the consequences to attend to the (bloody) obvious root cause; that’s the most generous take. When I hear the incessant, incoherent ramblings, lies, excuses and self delusions being promulgated in the media and expressed more widely in various polls, I do, really, want to be sick. I want to turn off, but yet find it painful to ignore like the dilemma one might (and some do) face of having a family member lose their mind and yet not being able to accept it with both sides of your brain: that yesterday has gone away and won’t be coming back, EVER. There it is then; the answer to why the English are so unrevolting: plus l’Angleterre change, plus c’est la même chose.

Rabbits! Rabbits!

While I was browsing the used book shelves today a thought spontaneously evanesced (as they do) and I found myself asking: is it too late to say Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits!? No, I decided. Talking to the cats doesn’t count; they are not people, even if I speak to them like they were. This recitation trick, that my paternal grandmother of a rural upbringing embedded in my brain from the age of seven, rewards the speaker with good luck all month if and only if they say aloud ‘rabbits! rabbits! rabbits! before speaking to anybody on the first day of each month. Speaking to animals or yourself doesn’t count (that’s my gloss.)

Most months I remember to unlock the secret to good fortune, which in itself is remarkable since my grandmother stopped reminding me when her own luck ran out in 1985. Some months, like this one – March 2023 – I do remember, but too late. Either I’ve already spoken to another human being – the bus driver, my neighbour, a work colleague who also happens to have decided to come to the office that day – and so accept, with some regret, the futility of trying to cheat fate or, like today, I get the day wrong. Only sitting here, in the evening of March the second, do I now realise looking at my desktop calendar that my rabbits! ran a day late. Sincerely, I chastise myself, for a moment anyway.

What can I expect now? A month’s days of irksome ill-fortune? Late wakings, spilled drinks, missed buses, poorly-judged emojis and flapping shoelaces? The fact that these thoughts even occur is embarassing (thoughts that ‘just occur’ tend that way). I’m objective, rational, not given to organising my affairs according to, or even with a liminal nod to, time-interwoven superstitious tendencies (I claim).

Something more serious? Probably not. Actuarially: unlikely. But then again, one could definitely classify avoiding death or serious injury as good luck. That’s inarguable, we can agree; but devilishly hard to prove, in a causative sense. Stuff doesn’t happen all the time, it just doesn’t get clicks. The human gait is a controlled fall; we are one neurological hiccup away from a visit to the accident ward each time we lurch into perambulation – one second or less in our conscious awareness behind our brain’s grip on the reins (free will is an illusion: discuss).

So why do I recite (or try to remember to) on the first day of each month: rabbits! rabbits! rabbits!? Well, luck (or trepidation at the prospect of not renewing my subscription to the avoidance of bad luck), isn’t it. Traditions are triggers: reminders (if we really wanted or needed them) that we are mere synapses in the collective nervous system of all conscious life: conduits for signals – of the most miniscule and universal frequency. When I say rabbits! each month I see my grandmother’s smiling face, I see us picking raspberries in July, playing dominoes on Sunday, roaring fires and solemn chiming mantelpiece clocks. I give voice to time passing, to life branching and branching. Luck is being part of the tree.

Subterfuge.

As if the slow, meticulous etchings of time,
upon any face, consumed also, immoderate
flux in its workings on physiognomy and all.
It would surprise, to view, disjunctive, brows
raised and sallow mouth - oddly conjoined.
Nature intrigues with us yet we are in its
communion, melded in the cells, to follow,
to listen if we care, to eternality at work.
What conspiracy outdoes nature's work? To
frame us in such lurid light as bleaches
her away.  Some subterfuge akin to other
rules, some aberration yet unknown.  
It is not gentle, deep, recurring.

“People who call themselves ‘writers’ are deserving of our time if only to better understand what part of their personality caused this aberration.”

Fragment

…

It is not so hard to imagine these papers, in some few years from now, consigned to some drawer, mingled with other artifacts of a time in your life which, when you weren’t paying attention, finally lost their resonance, their energy, as a candle burns down or a stem sags slowly in its vase. Then, the words written here will have been pressed finally dry and flat, beneath the weight of consequent events.

It is selfish and naive of me to believe that it should be otherwise.

Acknowledging that the impression of our lives upon each other will and must fade (for how else are we to go on?), the need to leave you with something of myself persists still. I don’t wish, however great the temptation, to be sentimental. If anything, the thin strands of sentimentality will surely cause what I write here to lose its potency as if somehow writing were itself the agent of devitalisation. Sentiment floats, like motes of dust in sunlight, when love, fallen from the tree and not finding the substance to nourish its potential, endures its slow annihilation.

Action, and reaction.

Today, like yesterday, the sky in this part of The Netherlands is a cloudless, pure blue. It is…cerulean. After weeks of high winds, grey skies and freezing rain, and after years of shared constraint — including, for many, great suffering and loss — there is the merest glimmer of the approach of spring (daffodils have bloomed in recent days on the canal banks) and our spirits are prompted to lift again, to think thoughts of new experiences, embracing friends and relatives, journeys and events to plan and attend. Simple but profound and necessary pleasures to contemplate. Finally there is a chance to think of something other than how our governments are, or are not, making life and the future for the rest of us more or less awful.

To the east of here, though, something different is happening.

For some people, hopes are begin crushed, plans made suddenly to seem like yesterday’s foolish dreams. Lives are being wiped away like so much dust and brute force is being asserted as if it were the only conceivable power of persuasion. This shouldn’t be news. It’s been happening around us for years now, decades. We’ve become inured to the sight of Syrian people, of Yemeni people, many others, bloodied and stunned, their ordinary peaceful lives as parents, accountants, shopkeepers, bus drivers, doctors and nurses, brought to ruin by a few individuals — men, mostly –wielding the power they so desperately need and hunger for.

We are all qualified now to chime in, to assert our opinions and give our assessments of the situation — its causes, its likely trajectory, and the best solution for all concerned; after all, we’ve spent more than fifteen minutes researching our social media feeds and a few uploads on YouTube. I do it (I’m doing it now). You do it. We all do it. We can all expound usefully on all the world’s problems. How democratic our world has become! Our voices are finally heard.

I hear Boris Johnson expounding a lot. He enjoys, I’m sure, the fizzy sensation it gives him of worldly importance — all puffed up and then out, with booming, robust words bouncing off the walls into eternity and the ‘history’ books he will no doubt write for the benefit of mankind.

But Johnson, and the various other often-cited craven little men that I need not catalogue here (but including Putin, of course) are the problem, not the solution. Bloated with ambition and testosterone, encouraged by political and electoral systems that reward their useful sociopathy, they view the world and the human societies we exist within as something to control and exploit, rather than the fragile, complex interdependencies that they actually are.

None of this is new, of course. Only, it’s becoming so exhausting. How much more greed, incompetence, violence and cruelty can we afford, can we endure? Yuval Harari recognises that human life, our survival is faced with existential crises – advancing rapidly toward us if not already here – that can only be ameliorated by effective joint action. At this moment in our history, when we urgently need such collaboration, we have world leaders who create and promote division either to bolster their undernourished egos or by such inaction and incompetence that it might as well be intentional. The well-intended ones paint pretty pictures with words, but there’s no follow through. They know our attention, as feeble as it is, reacts badly to nuance. Nowadays, when I see obvious courage and selflessness — in the Ukrainian people and Zelenskiy, for example — I am, (as I imagine, too, are all humans exhausted by the extent of malfeasance in political and public life) filled briefly with a hope I know instinctively is exaggerated by how little of it we have in our daily diet: the hope that we will live through these storms of reactionary violence and emerge as a human society that no longer vaunts sociopathic machismo as the ultimate virtue of our species. It’s the hope of daffodils and blue skies.

When I had the Sportster I’d drive it, aimlessly, foot hard on the accelerator, top down, dusk just over the late summer horizon, across the desolate cypress swamplands to nowhere in particular , listening to Houses of the Holy. She wasn’t there sitting beside me. Moments of peak happiness, still – intense and pure because I found myself alone – what-should-have–been-but-just-wasn’t, now or ever perhaps- a momentous realisation, inchoate, as-yet unacknowledged failure, not yet fully out in the lived world. Driving away jubilant, devastated.

My sister died.

I don’t have time to say it all now. She was my older, only sibling. I’d had no contact with her in many years. She lived a very different life to mine. And now she is dead. I’ll find a quiet few hours – perhaps a Sunday afternoon – to better reflect on it. But it’s important to declare how I think I feel about it. Yes, how I think I feel about her death. Because it seems to me that there are really two kinds of response to news of a death in the family. First, there is the nervous, involuntary response: waves of nausea that roll up from the solar plexus leaving your body wrung out like a rag and your mind released from inhibition in a delirium of grief. And then there is the deliberative response (triggered by asking: what do I feel? how should I feel?), that is called up by nature and orthodoxy, and hangs around until it is either satisfied or fades away from neglect. If the first doesn’t happen, then surely the latter must, because the alternative is to feel nothing at all. So how do I feel about her death, and what should I feel? These I must try to answer for, having also lost – as a teenager – a father from whom I was also estranged, the more difficult question of what ‘family’ means to me begs at least an attempt at an answer.

Transition (Working Title)

Thoughts of evaporation never cease, 
Seeping in, like cold up through the floor,  
While making a sandwich or cleaning teeth.
Drawn into an incandescent fog, or 
Pausing on a lake, as the ice cracks,  

Boomeranged to echoing spaces,
Seeking warm resonance in the walls, 
Or rich stories, in orphaned objects; 

Programmed errors repeating,
For all the dawn song, and  
A green haze on the willow. 

Sleep is a comfort, still, after winter,  
To escape ghosts coming up through the floor, 
The narrowing of life—the failure...to cope.
All these things a burden to lay down at last,  
And fall into the arms of distant galaxies.

Nigel, Bring Back my Books

I’ve waited long enough, it’s been thirty years now. Don’t you think it’s time? To return my books? I entrusted them to you, and they are cherished items all. I told you that, do you recall? Before I left town. Return my books now! By any means at your disposal. The acrid whiff of each, the fliffft of their pages, the nicks and the tears. I love them for what they are. Their absence is a hole in me, but you would not know that, presumably. Or else, they would have been back on my shelf by now, for my eyes to linger over, reminding me who I am.