Imports and Exports

“Imports and Exports”

In Ireland we have a history of imports and exports. We export what we don't want or need. We import what we do not have. Sounds like common sense, doesn't it?

Yeah - but we have been exporting people since the famine - we don't want them. Emigrate, please: that has been a recurring message to our children over the last 150 years.

We have exported women - especially pregnant women. every year, 5,000 unwanted pregnancies are exported to the UK. 

We export football; we export boys who play football. I'm not talking about Gaelic Football: that doesn't get exported: nope. Just the 'Garrison Game' and the proles who play it.  

So, I'm writing this blog to see (from the books I read, the films I watch, and the music I listen to) what I want to import and what I want to export!

Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1, Swann’s Way

This is a good place to start because Proust's narrative is about time - the thing I don't want to waste.

Simply put, this book is about a delicate, over-sensitive narrator’s memory of being a delicate, over-sensitive child and young man. It contains exhaustive descriptions of furniture, chapels, towns, flowers, and above all else, the contents of the narrator’s febrile mind and the terribly fraught relationships – familial, romantic and contractual – between the people the narrator remembers.

It is a modernist novel in the sense that its subject matter is this liminal space between consciousness and the outside world – which is not to say that it is a epistemological novel – Proust seemed content to describe this space; he does not really address the question of whether or if we can know anything through or of the media  of consciousness, perception or the material world. He does paint lots of pretty pictures. 

It is a Victorian novel, though, (rather than a modernist one) in its dense syntax and complex grammar – there are enough subordinate clauses in any given sentence to give a publisher a heart attack – but this is not a reason to not to read this novel.

The part of the novel that tells the story of Charles Swann’s unhappy love affair with Madmoiselle De Crecy (Odette) is depressing. It’s depressing because it is a love affair that brings out the worst in both characters – he is blind, duped, used, abject and spineless while she is vain, ignorant, grasping, deceitful  and cynical – and this is especially so in the catastrophic denouement of their marriage.

[It is jarring that ‘cynical’ and ‘canine’ share a common etymological root:  what creature is less cynical than a dog?]

For the character of Swann, music is a conduit to a deeper, more intense understanding of his  world, his lover and himself - particularly in the form of the notes of a musical phrase that is “the national anthem of their love” – I’ll test this Platonic idea  proposition in another blog entry. This is probably not the last time I’ll mention Plato.

The novel is of course, about time. Ever since science became the primary narrative in Western Society, metaphor has been a poor relation. Does metaphor have the right to explain time?  I think so. The lesson I’m taking from Proust brings me back to the reason for starting this blog. Life is infinitesimally short yet each second; each millisecond is full of meaning, full of life, full of pain and pleasure. How can I go on, dimly plodding on towards my ever approaching demise without opening my eyes, without trying to notice what is in front of me, without trying to remember?  I will be dead for a long, long time – I must try not to lose time.

[I like the way the Italians and French combine ‘wasting’ and ‘losing’ time – perdere il tempo/perdre du temps ]

I guess that we should import Proust's technicolour perception of every single moment - we are too careless, too stupid in this country  - but I guess there isn't really an appetite for truth on this little pile of North Atlantic mud.

I know that we should import respect both for metaphors and for science.