Strangers from a Plane, Beethoven and an Old Woman

I don’t travel as much as I used to. Whenever I was in a plane I’d look down on towns in Germany or France and think of all the lives that were going on below me; of all the lives that had gone on and would continue to be lived through history, and wonder at how little those people and I had in common.

What bearing did I have on them or they on me? I had nothing to fill in the gaps between us, no way to bridge my world to theirs and so we carry on mutually oblivious, free of commitment, prejudice, commonality.

Is the human race, then, nothing more than an aggregate of strangers?  Are even (or is that especially?) those with whom we have intimate relations unfathomable, unknowable?

Is it better like this? The metaphorical viewpoint granted or necessitated by being in a plane looking down on unknown towns and fields may allow me to make a determination, but in truth I don’t know.

And yet, in language, art, film and music there is evidence of sharing. These media are where we can be together, which is to say these are the places where we are not alone.

Last week I went to the see a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony number 7.  It was a moving experience. There was no one there I knew, and yet as the four movements progressed I had the impression that everyone there was being drawn together. The music seemed to have this awesome centripetal power that was creating a kind of communion, a common body and mind. I imagined that Beethoven was reaching across more than two centuries to incarnate for forty minutes or so the Weltgeist  imagined by his Romantic idealist contemporary and countryman, Hegel.

Or so it seemed. Beethoven and Hegel lend themselves to this kind of thinking. I know that I left the concert with a grin on my face and I looked around the hall and I saw the same face looking back at me. So I guess that others are susceptible to the same influence. So be it. If I’m deluded and vain I’m fairly sure I was not the only one last Friday night!

There was a woman in the audience who was about 80 years old. God knows who she was. I am going to say her name is Brigid. That was my grandmother’s name, so it will do for her. 

Beethoven had been long dead when Brigid’s parents were born. I am tempted to think that I shared something with a hall full of strangers last Friday. Why not say that I shared the same experience with the people who first heard this Symphony on 8^th December 1813?

If Beethoven can make strangers share in the same time and space then why can’t he do the same across time and space? What if Brigid had dropped dead during the last movement? She was rocking over and back a good bit - it seemed like she was tempting fate. We would still have been together for the three and half movements before the temptress kicked the bucket. What was it? Had Beethoven rejuvenated her? Surely there are worse ways of dying than doing so in the throes of returning to ones youth? 

Soon enough I will be 80 years old too. If I have to choose between colon cancer and a heart attack listening to Beethoven then take me now – I’m listening to it again!

Be all of that as it chooses to be, I guess what I am getting at here is that while travelling is good, standing still can be just as good. They are, of course two sides of the same thing.

Oddly, during intervals at the concert I was reading C S Lewis’ The Discarded Image. Beethoven exemplifies not only the post-medieval but of course the post-renaissance world. His symphony number 7 is to my ears, a celebration of the world of the heroic individual. The middle ages could never have produced such a work.

Neither could the renaissance have done so. The renaissance was still too undemocratic for the controlled chaos of Beethoven.

In every movement it has raw and energetic percussion, it has shocking changes of tempo and it is unrelenting in its development and of melody and changes of key. At the same time it is structured and consistent. Not the structure and consistency of Bach but one bending under the pressure of its energy and yet managing to cohere.

The war between form and content in Beethoven is a musical foreshadowing of the struggles that had begun and would continue to take place in history right up to the present day. As such, what he has to say about the tensions between the controlling and the controlled, between the ruling and the ruled skips modernism and speaks much more eloquently than  much of what has followed him.

So Beethoven is one of the authors of how people in our time think, feel and imagine. There is no getting around it. The Romantic worldview may be just as illusory as the bookish conservatism of C S Lewis’ middle ages or for that matter the scepticism of modernism and the formlessness of post modernism but Beethoven comes from a period of creativity in Europe that is, viewed from our time, a kind of twilight of optimism. It would never again be permissible to express the kind of hope that he did - especially given the horrific effects of the transfer of the Romantic sensibility into politics that was Nazism.

Still, though, hope and optimism, if taken in small doses, never did anyone any harm!

I don’t travel as much as I used to.  Maybe for me, it’s better to stand still. I lack patience. I know this.

Last Friday’s concert showed me what can happen if you wait. Beethoven might show up.

Masters, Slaves and, finally, impossibly? Love. Hegel and Talk to Her by Pedro Almodovar

After a gap of nearly 20 years I have been reading Hegel again. Specifically I have been reading about his master slave dialectic. How it is that the identity of the slave is initially lost in being enslaved by the master. And how, too, the identity of the master is, in this act of enslaving another lost in the sense of being closed to the being in itself of the slave. Later, the identity of the slave is transformed because in becoming an instrument of the master’s will he takes on the point of view of the master. In being brought to live in the position of another – the master’s – the slave therefore transcends his own identity by accessing a more universal perspective than he’d previously had.

The slave overcomes his particular identity and becomes a more realised consciousness. Where does this leave the master?

On this account it’s almost better to be a slave.

Sometimes I think that philosophy is God’s version of stand-up comedy.

Hegel’s dialectic was in the back/front of my mind as I watched Pedro Almodovar’s 2002 film, Talk to Her.

I think it helped me understand Hegel.

Talk to Her is a film about interrelated love affairs. It is also a film about how identities can shift and exchange in the spaces between and inside people.  In other words, the question of who these characters are exists as dialectical exchange between the film and its audience on the one hand and in the interrelationships between the characters themselves. These ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dialectical axes produce versions of people that are never fixed or simple.

The film ends without leaving its audience with easily packaged accounts of what it is like to be in love, of what counts as normal love or, indeed, what it means to be a person in the first place.

One love affair is between Marco, a  journalist and Lydia, a bullfighter. Alicia is injured in a bullfight, falls into a coma and is hospitalised:

Another love affair is between Benigno, a male nurse, and Alicia, a beautiful dancer who is in a coma in the very same hospital where Lydia is brought.

Almodovar presents these characters to us gradually – none of them is as he seems to be at first sight.
 

Most memorably, Benigno, who initially seems to be kind and responsible turns out to be a voyeur and, possibly, a psychopath. 

Through flashbacks we see how he had initially fallen in love with Alicia. He watches her dancing in her studio from the window of his apartment. He meets her only twice:  first, when he ran after her in the street to return the wallet he’d seen her drop, second, when he went to her father’s psychiatric clinic for the sole purpose of meeting her.

Following her car accident she is left in a coma, and, lo and behold, Benigno is her nurse. He is devoted to her, washing her, massaging her, cleaning her up when she has her period. Although he tells others that he is gay, it gradually becomes clear that he is in love with Alicia. 

For four years he tends to her every need. She is, of course, in a vegetative state. She is beautiful but brain dead.  He tells Marco: 

“The last four years have been the richest of my life”.

The episodic way that Almodovar sketches Benigno implicates the audience. He is a nice guy. He is kind and calm. He is seemingly, very loyal and very professional.  He is a very likable character…..but…

He is fired and sent to prison for raping and impregnating Alicia. Benigno sees nothing wrong in what he has done.

In one hilarious, absurd exchange, Benigno tells Marco that he wants to marry Alicia, that…

“We get along better than most married couples. Why shouldn’t a man marry the woman he loves?"

Marco replies:

"Your relationship with Alicia is a monologue and it’s insane. I’m not saying that talking is no use but people talk to plants but they don’t marry them!"

Benigno just doesn't get it, the extent of his detachment from the real world is obvious:

"I can’t believe you are saying that! I thought you were different!”

Benigno is sent to prison and eventually, realising that he’ll never get out, he kills himself. However, Almodovar’s ‘horizontal’ dialectic between the two men – Benigno and Marco – means that, in a way, what was impossible, forbidden, is transformed and made possible.

The porousness of identity is a key theme of the film. Benigno and Marco become very unlikely friends. Benigno reads the travel books that Marco has written –

“I read all your travel guides. It was like travelling for months with you at my side. Telling me things no-one tells you on journeys”

It is as if that, realising his days are numbered, Benigno is transferring his identity to Marco. This interchange between the two is neatly conveyed by showing the two actors face to face in a prison meeting booth – the reflection on the window of Benigno’s face and mouth are superimposed on Marco’s:

This horizontal exchange is completed at the end of the film when Marco and the miraculously recovered Alicia meet and are attracted to one another in the theatre:

Originally I thought that performance and observation were the two poles of the dynamic moments at which identity is lost/found in this film. Benigno and Marco, Alicia and Marco both meet at the theatre. Benigno observes Alicia dancing. Marco observes Lydia on the TV. However, observation of performances is not quite what takes place.

The key exchanges in the scenes where there are explicit performances are not the obvious ones of the observers and the performances!

Benigno is attracted to Marco when he sees him crying in the theatre – he is less affected by the actual performance than he is by the sadness of the stranger sitting next to him.  

Lydia is attracted to Marco for the same reason; they’re at a musical performance and she observes him, once more, in tears, moved by the performance.

At the end, Marco is at the theatre and Alicia is attracted by what appears to be his vulnerability, his distress.

In each of these situations what is observed is the opposite of a performance.

Other key exchanges – Marco watching Lydia walk off the set of a tabloid talkshow after refusing to answer personal questions, Benigno’s voyeurism of Alicia – are also moments of observation of what is not intended for public performance.  

I suppose what is being observed in each of these cases is a moment where outward performance ceases and the internal performance of the person is revealed.

Moreover, these points of observation are the points at which love comes alive. So, what’s going on here?

The moments of observation of that which must not be observed described above are moments where identities began to shift, when love took place. They initiate versions of the Hegelian dialectic:

The moment when the observed comes to exist only for the observer is the first stage of the dialectic.

However, in observing the vulnerability  of the observed the observer overcomes his position by a transfer of what it is like to be observed – surely, for any non-psychopathic individual the observation of suffering is at the same moment the experience of that suffering?

So the second stage of the Hegelian dialectic - in observing, one becomes observed – is undergone.  

The reconciliation of the dialectic has to involve a reciprocal movement. The lag of the master behind the slave that has always puzzled me has to be resolved. That is why of all the relationships in this film it is only that of the two men – Benigno’s and Marco’s – that comes to the point where there is an even transcendence of identity. This relationship proves to be the most crucial, the most life-defining, the most loving.

Through one another they negate themselves, they each acquire the view point of the other, and eventually they both rediscover themselves as belonging to a reality greater than those negated prior and assumed other selves.

Theirs is the only relationship where there was a reciprocal dialectic of identities, where there was a reciprocal exchange of love (after all, Alicia was in a coma and Lydia, as we learn later, was actually still in love with her previous lover).

In each of those other cases – Alicia and Benigno and Marco and Lydia – there was enslavement to circumstance or external mastery of the characters that meant their relationships were stillborn. They never got past the impasse of the master-slave dialectic.

A Typology of Islands Part 5 - The Island as 'Individual'.

Meditation XVII by John Donne, "The Wandering Island" by A D Hope, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago (again!)

Recently my brother and I were discussing the history of the individual. When was the individual born? Those are simple words. But they make a very complex question. What exactly is intended by the term ‘individual’ here? What would it mean for her/him/it to be born?

Obviously the term cannot be understood as an anatomical one. Human beings have always been ‘individual’ entities – they are not, except in certain unfortunate circumstances joined to one another at the hip. Humans have always been ‘individual’ in that sense.

In another sense of ‘anatomy’, though,  humans never have been and never will be individual. We are all born of a mother and father, we are all subject to our bodies’ efficiency, health and ultimately, mortality. Individual? Don’t make me laugh.

What, then is the sense of ‘individual’ in this question? I took it to mean something like ‘capable of independent or reflective thought’. What I immediately understood as the individual was that iteration of human being living, thinking and feeling after the retreat of religious dogma, the loosening of the shackles of feudalism, the growth of cities, the emergence of the depersonalised bureaucratic nation state, the birth of the concepts of human rights and responsibilities and the revolution in communications technologies.

An obvious objection to taking these contexts as definitive is that there is nothing at all ‘individual’ about the thinking, feeling and action that happen most of the time in the contexts that I am sketching out, namely, technologically saturated,  late capitalist, secular, democratic states.

If you take individual to mean ‘atomised’ ‘isolated’ ‘deracinated’ then there are lots of 'individuals' breathing in and out, walking, talking, thinking and feeling in these very technology – driven, capitalist, secular, democratic, nation states.

On the other hand if you take ‘individual’ to mean ‘free’ or ‘having free choice’ then it becomes less easy to maintain that the individual has or ever will be born.

Perhaps it is possibility – rather than the practical unlikelihood – of being an individual that is all I need to locate on the timeline.

Moments such as Gallileo’s “Eppur si muove”  have to considered as ‘individual’ – in the sense that his utterance articulates an act of defiance and a declaration of intellectual/epistemological  freedom from his intellectual and epistemological context. He said something true and something new. That was the act of an individual.

And yet, what about the existentialists’ notion that individuality is too difficult, too anguished to be an actually liveable option for most human beings?

Long before that, Rousseau understood the difficulty facing human beings when confronted with the choice of taking up the freedom of the social contract. Ultimately he sees that the recalcitrant must be ‘forced to be free’!

Who wants to be an individual under those circumstances - pain or coercion?  

John Donne had no time for this nonsense of being an 'individual'. 

The metaphor of the island as intolerable human individuality is most famously expressed in Meditation XVII of John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall steps in my Sicknes published in 1624:

Meditation XVII
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Donne’s image of pieces of Europe being washed away must have been in Jose Saramago’s mind as he wrote The Stone Raft. 

Saramago agrees with Donne – the isolation of the human being is a bad thing – it signifies death: 

“Pedro Orce, who is old and already beating the first sign of death, which is solitude…..solitude is to blame, solitude can sometimes become unbearable…”

Saramago sees a remedy for this problem. In fact it is the very separation of the Iberian peninsula from Europe that gives rise to the remedy. This catastrophe re-makes social relations so that his characters find in one another, true friendship, real meaning, a longed for but perpetually deferred sense of longing. The movement of the island makes it possible for these individuals to overcome their atomised, secular, disinterested, contractual individuality. 

For Saramago, love and child rearing are the solution to the ills that beset the deracinated meaningless life of the individual.

Where Donne pities the individual man, Saramago holds him in contempt.

No man is an island? "Thank God" is Donne’s reason why not.  

Love and childrearing are Saramago’s reasons why not.

Another poet who took up the theme of the individual as an island is the Australian poet A D Hope. 

Hope's take on the 'Island - as - Individual' metaphor is far more pessimistic than Donne's or Saramago's.

His poem “The Wandering Island” is depressing but in a very Mid- Twentieth Century way, it is also ‘authentic’.

A paraphrase of this poem could be: “No man is not an island”.

“The Wandering Island”

You cannot build bridges between the wandering islands;
The Mind has no neighbours, and the unteachable heart
Announces its armistice time after time, but spends
Its love to draw them closer and closer apart.

They are not on the chart; they turn indifferent shoulders
On the island-hunters; they are not afraid
Of Cook or De Quiros, nor of the empire-builders;
By missionary bishops and the tourist trade

They are not annexed; they claim no fixed position;
They take no pride in a favoured latitude;
The committee of atolls inspires in them no devotion
And the earthquake belt no special attitude.

A refuge only for the ship-wrecked sailor;
He sits on the shore and sullenly masturbates,
Dreaming of rescue, the pubs in the ports of call or
The big-hipped harlots at the dock-yard gates.

But the wandering islands drift on their own business,
Incurious whether the whales swim round or under,
Investing no fear in ultimate forgiveness.
If they clap together, it is only casual thunder

And yet they are hurt—for the social polyps never
Girdle their bare shores with a moral reef;
When the icebergs grind them they know both beauty and terror;
They are not exempt from ordinary grief;

And the sudden ravages of love surprise
Them like acts of God—its irresistible function
They have never treated with convenient lies
As a part of geography or an institution.

As instant of fury, a bursting mountain of spray,
They rush together, their promontories lock,
An instant the castaway hails the castaway,
But the sounds perish in that earthquake shock.

And then, in the crash of ruined cliffs, the smother
And swirl of foam, the wandering islands part.
But all that one mind ever knows of another,
Or breaks the long isolation of the heart,

Was in that instant. The shipwrecked sailor senses
His own despair in a retreating face.
Around him he hears in the huge monotonous voices
Of wave and wind: ‘The Rescue will not take place.’

Hope’s final stanza examines my earlier claim that a moving island is a living island and rejects it outright. 

Human beings are islands. Moreover, human beings are wandering, deracinated, tormented and doomed forever to find only heartbreak and rejection in the search for love, community, belonging. 

The wandering island is a metaphor for what it is like to be an individual, properly understood. Lived without apology or alibi  the individual is a sorry, despairing,  isolated, fallen being who cannot, will not be rescued from that state.

This wandering island is, as I said, very much of its time. Living in the ghastly shadows of World War Two, writing in the same historical moment as Existentialism, the Theatre of the Absurd and watching the advance of consumerism and capitalism it is not surprising that Hope produces such hopelessness.

Of course, I don't want Hope to be right but lately I've been wondering.

A Typology of Islands Part 4 - The Moving Island

The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago

If the island signifies death it does so by sinking one set of meanings and allowing another to float to the surface. Down into the depths go the island as a retreat, a place of renewal, the location of a life properly lived. 

Bobbing to surface come the stinking corpses of the island as the end of hope, the island as solipsism, selfishness and loneliness.

These islands are dead ends. They signify the end of curiosity, the stifling of growth, the closing off of the future, the stagnation of imagination and the tyranny of ignorance and cowardice; in one way or another the islands I have already pointed to share these features:

The tortured insanity of Shutter Island. The atavistic brutality of The Wicker Man. The heartbreaking loneliness of Szymborska’s “Utopia”. The scandalously unheroic stasis enjoyed/endured by Odysseus on Calypso’s Island in The Odyssey. The commodification of the Aeolian Islands in Caro Diario. The scientific chauvinism of Jurassic Park.  The erasure of the native in Robinson Crusoe.  The arrogance of a new empire spreading its acquisitive and brutal influence from Manhattan in King Kong.

Of course, in all of this I’m really talking about people, not islands. I can’t really blame the islands themselves, can I? I mean if islands could speak they’d say that they’re not responsible for the vices and stupidity, the violence, greed and vanity of human beings.

Islands can’t speak but sometimes they move.

Moving islands are interesting because they refuse stasis. They open up the future, they demand curiosity, they stimulate growth and demand that their inhabitants confront their ignorance; they force the islanders to look out, to question, to open their eyes, hearts and minds.

A moving island is a geographical, geological, semantic, logical and existential challenge. Unlike the islands I mention above it is a living island.   

The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago is set on such an island.

Saramago’s novel is about the sudden detachment of the Iberian Peninsula from mainland Europe and its journey westward, northward and finally, southward while it rotates on its own axis.

The plot of the novel winds its way across Spain and Portugal following the picaresque journey of five friends, 2 horses and a dog. Each one of these people is specially connected in some mysterious way to the sudden mobility of Iberia.

   

The uncertainty generated by this geographical catastrophe liberates the characters. If a whole landmass can just up and move away into the ocean, nothing is certain anymore. How can normal life go in under  these circumstances?

The movement of the peninsula sets off a double  reaction – centrifugal and centripetal  - that tears each of the five main characters away from the duties and adhesions of their normal working and domestic lives and  towards one another. They find one another and form a new, more powerful, more meaningful  ‘family’.  

As a family, they set out on a perpetual journey traversing Iberia with abandon and utter freedom:

“In times like these you rarely find people where you would expect to find them” (271)

There is no real aim to their journey.

They go to Mediterranean coast to see Gibraltar pass but leave before it does so.

They eventually get to the cliff where the Pyrenees split in two but there is not much to see there.

Of course, remembering Saramago’s short story The Unknown Island we know that this state of aimless, open minded wandering is, for this author. a much preferable way of life than what is usually on offer when the ground doesn't move so radically beneath our feet.

The author’s communism bleeds into the narrative at points: the population of the Algarve decides to seize control of luxury hotels which had been vacated by tourists fleeing the ‘disaster’. Their own homes were nowhere nearly as well appointed as these exclusive accomodations.

There are frequent references to the geopolitical calculations of the Americans, the Russians and Mainland Europe but really, the main focus of this novel is on the lives, and most particularly the love lives of the five main characters.

Although the five main characters remain together as they travel the roads of Spain and Portugal under a horse – drawn carriage, the two younger men and women pair off and fall in love, leaving for much of the time, the older man, Pedro Orce,  in the company of their dog, Constant.

Towards the end of the novel both women become pregnant at the very same time.

However, because both women had – out of pity - slept with the older man the paternity of these children is uncertain.  

These pregnancies and their uncertainty point to the philosophical core of the novel.

For Saramago, pregnancy is both symbol and metonymy of life and freedom. Maternity is therefore a vehicle for the novelist’s vision of a life well lived.

It is tempting to reduce this book this metaphor. This is especially because, it is, in my opinion, overlong and excessively digressive and ultimately tends to reduce itself in just this way by equating the movement of the island/peninsula with the movement of a child as it is about to be born:

“…the peninsula is a child conceived on a journey and now finds itself revolving in the sea as it waits to be born in its watery tomb….”

Pregnancy then becomes widespread! Every woman in Iberia becomes pregnant at the same time:

“…why should we be astonished that the wombs of women should be swollen, perhaps the great stone falling southward fertilized them…”

Just as amongst the five characters in the novel’s central ‘family’ paternity is uncertain:

“…how do we know if these new creatures are really the daughters of men rather than the offspring of that gigantic prow, that pushes the waves before it, penetrating them amid the murmuring waters, the blowing and the sighing of winds ” (283)

Saramago’s  wandering island celebrates motherhood and denies the proprietorial claims of paternity. 

It is a place that gives birth but it is not a place that allows that offspring, that new life, those births to be claimed, possessed, controlled:

“One of the most interesting consequences of that inspired comparison [island equals child being born] was the resurgence of the maternal spirit, of maternal influence….The women undoubtedly triumphed. Their genital organs, if you’ll pardon the crude anatomical reference finally became the expression, at once reduced and enlarged of the expulsive mechanism of the universe….” (281-2)

So, in summary, this moving island shakes things up so that maternity is celebrated as the highest value. 

I suppose feminists would have field day with these ideas. Is this book a novel length rephrasing of the Freudian cliché “anatomy is destiny”? 

Is Saramago wrenching Iberia out into the Atlantic to found a matriarchy or an enormous maternity ward?

I suppose that would be a question for the inhabitants of a country where every single woman of child bearing age suddenly became pregnant simultaneously. Would anything change? Clearly the arrival of tens of millions of children all more or less on the same day would demand a total and utter rethinking of how society is organised.

But again: matriarchy or maternity ward?  Would such a mass pregnancy result in a transformation  of how power is held and wielded, would it give women more power in politics, in education, in the workplace or would it send them back to the dark ages of perpetual child rearing and exclusion from public life?

Saramago leaves this question open - obviously if the only thing that life has to offer women is childrearing then this island has been moving around to no other end than to become a place as deathly as the static islands that I mentioned in previous posts signifying 'the end of curiosity, the stifling of growth, the closing off of the future, the stagnation of imagination and the tyranny of ignorance'.

At the same time Saramago raises the question of exactly what value is to be placed on maternity. 

Just because he celebrates it does not mean that he is recommending that as the sum total of all that woman can aspire to. 

At the same time, what is more overlooked and taken for granted than the unpaid (slave) labours of motherhood? 

Any politics that seeks to widen the range of possibilities for women by adding to the historical erasure of motherhood is just as misogynistic as the structures, practices and discourses it opposes.