A Visit to Colville

The Colville General Store
(August 5th, 2001)

"Colville" is one of Kendrick Smithyman's most iconic small-town New Zealand lyrics. (And, yes, I know - I hate that word "iconic," too, and agree that it's overused. It's difficult to find a good alternative in this instance, though).

Here's the poem in its entirety, from his online Collected Poems.

The editors, Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson, comment:

Colville: first published in Westerly 3 (October 1968), 33; also in Earthquake Weather [1972] and Selected Poems [1989]; a town on the Coromandel Peninsula

Succinct and accurate, but somehow not the full story. For one thing, on his Stout Centre recording of the poem, Kendrick remarks that the poem caused quite a lot of fuss when it first appeared, and that people kept on assuring him that "it's not like that now." As a result (presumably), when it was included in Ian Wedde & Harvey McQueen's 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, the title had been changed to "Colville 1964". Subsequently he seems to have gone back on that decision, though, and the title reverted to its original form.

So is it still "like that"? "That sort of place where you stop / long enough to fill the tank, buy plums, / perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick / while somebody local comes / in, leans on the counter, takes a good look / but does not like what he sees of you"? Is it still "intangible as menace, / a monotone with a name, / ... an aspect of human spirit / ... mean, wind-worn"? It's not exactly a pretty picture he paints.

Anyway, in the winter of 2001 I decided to find out. I'd been discussing and poring over the poem for years in class, so I felt it was high time to go and check it out for myself.

[Simon & camera]

I went with my friend Simon Creasey, which may not (in retrospect) have been such a good idea - but then he couldn't be said to have stuffed up any worse than I did, so I guess I'd better just stop blaming others for my own shortcomings.

Colville Store (interior)

The trouble began shortly after we first got into town, about mid-morning. I'd been snapping away with my camera, and just naturally lifted it up and took a picture as we walked into the store. There it is above, in fact.

Well, the way the guy glared it me, I realised at once that this went far beyond any conventional faux pas. And fair enough, too! I hadn't actually realised until them just how much people resent flash photography, when they haven't been asked permission (which I suspect he would have refused, in any case).

It was a supremely vulgar, touristy act, and the fact that I was desperate to get a shot of the counter to illustrate those first lines of the poem was neither here nor there. Mea culpa, that's for sure.

What's more, when I looked at the postcards he had on sale (one of which I bought - you can see it there below), it became obvious that the picturesque nature of his shop was part of his stock in trade. Basically, what I'd done was the touristic equivalent of robbing him at gunpoint.

Colville: the sunny side of the street

How do you recover from a thing like that? The obvious answer would have been to get the hell out of Dodge, but it was a misty, moisty morning, we were both pretty frozen, and since the general store doubled as a café, we decided that forking over some cold hard cash for a coffee and a muffin might help restore matters to an even keel.

Simon in the café

Lo and behold, it seemed to work! The coffee was good, the muffins were tasty, and we even found ourselves getting into conversation with some locals at an adjacent table, which almost never happens - to me, at any rate. Everything was going swimmingly, but then ...

The conversation had been cycling generally around Colville, the people who lived there, tall tales of the bush and the communes, and then Simon asked:

"Has Colville always been this small? I mean, you read about it as one of the big trading ports on the Coromandel ... has there ever been more to it than this?" (with a lofty sweep of the hand, indicating the four or five buildings in sight).

Man, you could almost hear those people stiffen! You treat a couple of random Auckland tourists as if they were human beings, and the next thing you know they're taking liberties. I hastily ushered him out of the café and into the car before he could say anything else, and tromped on the gas pedal.

"What's wrong?" persisted Simon. "What did I say? Is there a problem?"

I'm not sure he got it even when I stopped on the outskirts of town to read him a brief lecture on small town etiquette ("Rule 1. Never look around with a sneer and then comment on how small things are here; Rule 2. Never reveal that you hail from Auckland and that your beverage of choice is latte in a bowl; oh, and of course Rule 3. Never take photos of locals without their permission, especially if you have to walk right inside their dwellings to do so ...")

But maybe I'm just paranoid - perhaps they were just a bit surprised by the question, or genuinely didn't know the answer. One mustn't overreact (after all). We'd almost persuaded ourselves to believe that by the time we roared back into town, many hours later, after having been up to the tip of the peninsula and even taken a dip in the icy cold water.

To give you a slightly better idea of the context, here's a panorama of pictures I took just a bit out of town, with suitable captions from Kendrick's poem:

[Thames Estuary Panorama (1-10)]

Face outwards, over the saltings

the bay, wise as contrition

shallow as their hold on small repute,

good for dragging nets

which men are doing through channels

disproportionate in the blaze

of hot afternoon’s down-going

to a far fire-hard tide’s rise

upon the vague where time is distance?

I don't remember too much about our return to town. We were starving by then, and had (as I mentioned above) persuaded ourselves that there was nothing to worry about. So we went back into the café ...

The coffee was lousy this time round. That can happen anywhere, of course, but it had been quite good on the way up. I couldn't help thinking that something had been done to it. One thing's for certain: that latte wasn't made with love ...

these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial Hall

the store, neighbourhood of salt and hills

The road goes through to somewhere else.

That last line rather sums it up, I'm afraid: "Bleenk and you missed it," as the Australians say. But, then, someone has to live there, maintain the petrol pump and the dairy, organise the dances at the War Memorial Hall.

The poem ends rather equivocally:

Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

How is that sentence to be construed? Is "scars" to be taken as a verb? "It's not only geological faultlines which scar you - creating textures of experience"? Or is "scars" a noun: one of the items in a list (with commas omitted)? "Not a geologic faultline only, scars, textures of experience" ...?

One thing's for certain, he's positing a close link between the character of the inhabitants and the nature of their surroundings - or, at any rate, speculating (as an urban/e outsider) that such might be the case. I can't help feeling that he was onto something there, or is that just me being crass again?

COLVILLE

That sort of place where you stop
long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
while somebody local comes
in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
but does not like what he sees of you,

intangible as menace,
a monotone with a name, as place
it is an aspect of human spirit
(by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

as their hold on small repute,
good for dragging nets which men are doing
through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
of hot afternoon’s down-going
to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
upon the vague where time is distance?

It could be plainly simple
pleasure, but these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial
Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

11. 1. 68

[No wonder they gave me a bit of a hard time ...]

Children Of Earth

[Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009)]

I suppose like most nerds brought up on hard sci-fi - that trinity of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, shading off into new wave: Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem - I've always regarded film and TV as the poor cousins of "real" science fiction.

Star Wars on the big screen and Star Trek on the small screen set the tone: fatuous space-opera with spectacular (but mindless) special effects in the former, self-serving imperialist hogwash in the latter. There were exceptions, of course: the psychedelic insanity of Kubrick's 2001, the noir ambiguities of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but for the most part the real action in speculative fiction seemed to lie elsewhere: mostly in those anthologies of "Best Sf stories" I devoured all through my youth.

Of late, though, I've had to revise this attitude. Far from being the impecunious relative, filmed SF is beginning to assume a more dominant role. I put up a post a while ago about how surprisingly impressive the remake of Battlestar Galactica was turning out to be, but I guess I still saw that as a bit of flash in the pan. Now I'm starting to wonder. The main reason for that is Torchwood.

[Doctors to Date:
Query: How can there have been 10 Doctors already
when Gallifreyans are only supposed to go through
9 cycles of metamorphosis?]

Now I've been a Doctor Who fan for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest TV memories consist of crouching over a black-and-white set where an old white-haired sage was combatting strange monsters in a set which seemed smaller than the average broom-closet. After that came the fey, Chaplinesque Patrick Troughton, the mod Dandy Jon Pertwee, the sublime Tom Baker, and so on and so forth. There were some pretty fine ideas in some of the stories - some exciting moments - but one has to confess that they were never really good in any objective, demonstrable way. There was always an element of camp about the show, a need to suspend judgment in order to enjoy them. That's been as true of the latest, Welsh-based series as of any of its predecessors. David Tennant was a good Doctor, to be sure - even a very good Doctor - but there's only a limited amount that can actually be done with the role.

So the idea of watching a mere spin-off from Doctor Who never really attracted me much. There've been spin-offs before: the dreadful K-9 and Company comes to mind. Infantile was scarcely the word.

[K-9 and Company]

But then we were in the video shop the other day, and there was Children of Earth on the shelf, and I remembered having been assured by another hardcore Doctor Who fan that Torchwood was the bee's knees, so we succumbed to temptation and took it out.

Many hours later, tousle-haired and sleepless, we looked at each other and concluded that we'd have to persevere to the end - that there was no way we were going to get any sleep until we'd got to the end of this particular story.

It's not that the characters are particularly lovable. On the contrary, Gwen, the female star, is quite irritatingly self-satisfied and bossy (in my humble opinion), and I even find Captain Jack rather less than charismatic. There's a certain frisson in the homosexual subplot: boys kissing boys on prime-time TV! But that's not it. The star of this show is the writing.

It's exciting, action-based stuff, to be sure, but what really grabbed me about it - and reminded me strongly of the new look Galactica - was the disenchanted timeliness of its message. You might call it cynical, but I prefer just to see it as terrifyingly credible ...

[The Kiss]

[WARNING: plot spoiler!]

I don't want to wreck the show for those who haven't seen it, but I do have to specify that an alien power has come to earth and is demanding a tribute of children: 10% of the world's population of children, in fact. "Absurd!", you say. Well, of course. But mark how the writers deal with this somewhat improbable premise.

First of all, it turns out that these particular aliens have been here before. That time - in 1965 - they only demanded a ransom of twelve children, in exchange for a promise not to release a virus which would kill an estimated quarter of the world's population. Twelve lives against over a billion? Pretty good deal. The children (orphans, whose absence wouldn't be noted) were duly handed over by Captain Jack Harkness of the Torchwood institute himself.

Now they've come back - with a vengeance. What's the reaction of the British government? To try and cover up that earlier transaction by ordering the judicial murder of everyone involved in the 1965 operation. Then, to try and persuade the aliens to play along by not mentioning the reason why they've returned to the UK, rather than anywhere else on earth. Lies, prevarication, covering their own arses precede by far any instinct to try and actually combat this invasion.

But what do the aliens need the children for? Well, it turns out that they secrete a chemical which makes them "feel good." In short, this alien embassy is here to ensure that their supply of drugs is secure. The children, we're assured, "feel no pain" - they're simply strapped to a pump so they can give out the alien equivalent of crack cocaine. And, best of all, they can survive for decades like that! Hmmm.

Of course the government's first thought is to keep this secret. What would be the point of causing a panic? And how could you persuade people to hand over ten percent of their children if they know what their fate is going to be? This time the aliens say they'll destroy the entire population of earth if their demands are not met - pour encourager les autres, one supposes: to make sure that no other subservient species get too uppity in the future.

This is dark stuff. But it gets darker. There's a long - and fascinating - conversation around the cabinet table. How to choose the ten percent? Which children should go? A lottery is clearly the only fair way of selecting them ... but of course the children (or, rather, grandchildren) of cabinet ministers must be exempted from taking part!

"But what about nephews and nieces?" shouts one of them.

"Don't try your luck," growls the Prime Minister.

"If you think I'm going to try and explain to my brother what happened to his kids ..." she replies.

The meeting dissolves into bedlam.

But then it turns out that the nephew-and-niece question was meant solely as a debating ploy. Actually her point was that all of them are ready to make exceptions for children they know personally - but that's because these are good, worthwhile children: "the kind who become doctors and teachers and lawyers - who run our schools and our hospitals." What would be the point of wasting children like that? We all know, she goes on, that there's another kind of child: the yobbo, the dole-bludger. Children who'll grow up to be a burden on the state, worthless mouths to feed. Everyone is nodding solemnly by this point. They know the kind of kids she's talking about.

But how could one make sure that it's only this kind of untermensch kids who get handed over to the aliens? Simple. You exempt all the posh schools sight unseen, and just send the army round to the poorer schools, the slum schools - collect all of their kids for an "inoculation" programme.

Does this sound implausible, melodramatic? I really wish it did. I could hear behind them, all the time, the cringing, cowardly voices of those French cabinet ministers at Vichy, explaining how the alternative to rounding up Jews to be handed over to their neighbouring Nazi overlords would be far, far worse: "If we don't do it somebody else will."

And, as the aliens made their pitiless, disgusting demands, I could hear distant echoes of the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when Britain declared war on China to ensure the maintenance of its drug-trade with the celestial Empire. How dare the Chinese government attempt to stem the growth of commerce (meaning, in this case, the creation of vast armies of opium addicts in all their major trading ports)!

Then, at the end of it all, after our heroes had pulled out their somewhat unlikely deus ex machina solution to the alien menace, how implausible that the politicians' first order of business was to decide who to blame it on in order to avoid suffering electorally for having literally rounded up ten percent of the nation's children to be sacrificed to Moloch. How unlike Blair and Bush and their disgusting, lying toadies! I don't where people come up with such strange, unwholesome ideas! By waking up and looking around them, I guess.

[END of plot spoiler]

[Lynley Hood: A City Possessed (2001)]

I don't know. The other thing I've been reading lately is Lynley Hood's terrifying book A City Possessed, about the Christchurch creche debacle in the 1990s, and I couldn't help but see the analogies:

• The immediate instinct, on the part of those in authority, to shut up dissent, to ignore inconvenient truths, to look for a powerless, vulnerable scapegoat.
• The incredible effrontery of the establishment (legal as well as political, in this case), who concluded, at the end of one of the various whitewashing "inquiries" into the whole affair, that if it could be proved that there were a large number of miscarriages of justice in New Zealand, then there might be a need to overhaul a system which virtually never reverses a vedict once arrived at. But since the Arthur Allan Thomas case was such an "aberration", according to this looking-glass logic, there's clearly no necessity for such radical steps to be taken. Justice? schmustice ...
• The instinctive, unquestioning closing of ranks by the ruling class who know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the maintenance of order in society - i.e. the continuation of their own peculiar privileges - requires a few sacrifices to be made from time to time. Because the alternative (we're constantly assured) would be far worse.

I guess Torchwood and Galactica still have to be classified as light entertainment. But I have to say that what the public will tolerate in their TV dramas has certainly changed a lot of late. It's clear that nobody was expected to feel surprised at watching these venal, slimy British politicans paying with their children's lives for their own political futures.

Galactica had a rather more brutally functionalist agenda. "Every woman adores a fascist / The boot in the face" as Sylvia Plath famously asserted. Perhaps one could rephrase that to say that the American system of governance has always had a sneaking sympathy for - and uncomfortable resemblance to - fascism: the insistence on social conformity, the profusion of emotive flag-waving and symbolic reenactments of nationhood ... Galactica was interesting because it examined such attitudes - at length, with pellucid, dispassionate logic - rather than simply embodying them (unlike Star Trek and its innumerable sequels).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we've entered some kind of golden age of TV SF - that everything on that medium is now worthy of serious attention. What I am saying is that a few select TV shows have somehow managed to creep under the radar and say some very hard-hitting things about the nature of our civilization: the way we live now. For every Torchwood, there are still a number of fatuous, pointless miniseries like V and its ilk, but at least now the word is out. Where pulp fiction - in the hands of masters such as J. G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick - once led the charge, now it's the TV writers: mostly, to be sure, the Balzacian creators of such sprawling realist epics as The Wire or Deadwood, but also the humble, ill-funded script-writers of science-fiction TV.

[The Wire (2002-2009):
R.I.P.]

Wildes Licht / Wild Light

[Dieter Riemenschneider: Wildes Licht (2010)]

It's weird seeing yourself in a foreign language. Last night I was at the booklaunch of Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland, a bilingual English / German anthology of New Zealand poetry, translated and edited by Dieter Riemenschneider, and available from Tranzlit publishers (or from a bookseller near you).

The title comes from Michele Leggott's poem "Wild Light", and you'll find a really fascinating assortment of poems old and new in there. Why I'm in there is a little harder to say (you'll have to ask Dieter), but I have to say that I certainly value the opportunity to see my words through the transverse lense of his careful translation:

Situations ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

NO VACANCIES
at the “City of Sails” motel.
It’s hard to convey how strange that is:
dark, skid-marked streets; day after day
of grey …
Who the fuck’s there?

Two loonies
standing by the road
(blue parka, beige kagoul)
not waiting for anything
– just waiting.
By a roundabout.

It’s ten at night.


Rain-slick streets are cool.

has become:

Ortsverhalte ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

BELEGT
das “City of Sails” Motel.
's ist schwer zu sagen wie merkwürdig das ist:
dunkle Schleuderspurenstraßen; tagelanges
Grau …
Wer verdammt ist da?

Zwei Verrückte
stehen am Straßenrand
(blauer Parka, beiger Anorak)
warten auf nichts
– warten nur.
An einem Verkehrskreisel.

’s ist zehn am Abend.


Die regenglatten Straßen sind kühl.

The title (in the unlikely event you hadn't noticed) makes reference to Max Ernst's apocalyptic "Europe after the Rain" paintings from the 1940s - which seemed very appropriate to me in 1998, when this poem was written, as the whole city was blacked-out and diesel generators were chugging away in every shop door in the CBD.

[Max Ernst: Europa nach dem Regen II (1940-42)]

Beyond that, I particularly like the way that my loonies have become Zwei Verrückte [two crazies], and my "Who the fuck’s there?" has been transformed into the equally-heartfelt: Wer verdammt ist da?

Oh, there are joys innumerable to be found in this anthology. You owe it to yourself to read Allen Curnow's "Das Skelett des Großen Moa in Canterburymuseum, Christchurch":

Nicht ich, ein Kind kommt wunderbar zur Welt
und lernt den Trick, wie man sich aufrecht stellt.

(Pretty clever, getting it to rhyme as well), or Hone Tuwhare's "Keine gewöhnliche Sonne" [No Ordinary Sun], or Apirana Taylor's "Trauriger Witz auf einem Marae" [Sad Joke on a Marae] ...

Why is it so appealing to see these familiar poems in such a new guise? I have to say that I hope this is the first of many such anthologies. There was a bilingual French selection of New Zealand poets included in the journal Europe a few years ago: No 931 (Novembre 2006) – Écrivains de Nouvelle-Zélande, but that doesn't really compare with the epic breadth of Dieter's fascinatingly various sampling of historic and contemporary New Zealand poetry to date.

Anyway, check it out if you get the chance. The initial booklaunch in Auckland will be followed by a road-trip during which Dieter and Jan will launch the book at various venues in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. I'll put up more exact dates and details as soon as they come to hand.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favourite Curnow poems, "Man wird es wissen wenn man dort ist" [You Will Know When You Get There]:

Hinab geht mann allein, so spät, in den wogenschwarzen Bodenriss.

Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

Isn't that word wogenschwarzen wonderful? "Fissure" still wins out over Bodenriss, though, I think: such a weight of implication in just the sound of those last few words ...

Stokes Point

[Stokes Point, Northcote]

I'm co-editing a book on Auckland for our Massey University monograph series. The working title is A Super City: Views of Auckland, and it will consist of a series of essays by members of the School of Social and Cultural Studies, where I work, on various aspects of the city seen through the lenses of our diverse disciplines. You can find further details here.

Since our school happens to include Anthropologists, Historians, Linguists, Literary & Media specialists, Political Scientists and Sociologists, we're hoping the results will be pretty interesting. It's intended for a general audience as well as the students in our "Auckland: A Social and Cultural Study" summer-school course.

My co-editor Grant Duncan has already posted the abstract for his essay online, and you can request a draft of the whole piece from him here.

[Felton Mathews: Map of the Harbour of Waitemata (1841)]

My own essay is about Stokes Point, in Northcote (originally called Pt. Rough), which is the little reserve right under the Harbour Bridge, the spit of land from which it launches itself out towards the city. The particular angle I take on it might be seen as somewhat controversial, so I won't say any more about that here except to say that the working title is "The Stokes Point Pillars." If you want to know more, you'll have to read the book (due out in October).

What I thought I'd post here instead is a kind of suite of views of Stokes Point, from my visit there last Saturday with Bronwyn's digital camera.

•

[The View from the Shore]

[The Avenue of Pillars]

[Pohutukawas in Plastic]

[Car Park]

[Barriers]

[War of the Worlds]

[Plaque]

[Signage]

[Graffiti]

[Karnak]

[The Convergence of the Twain]

Strange Coincidences

[Jan Potocki: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. 1989.
Trans. Ian Maclean. 1995 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1996)]

Yesterday I went into town to return a few library books and meet up with some literary cronies. The bus was a bit late, though, so I had time to duck into the local Opportunity Shop. If you've read the post below, you'll understand how surprised I was to find this book, which cost me all of two dollars.

Yes, there it is, Goya's Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (though I notice that the translation on the back cover gives it as the "dream" of reason - an equally valid translation).

But there was something else waiting for me in that op shop - this:

[Jack Ross: Requiem. Hutchinson (London: Random House, 2008)]

I know I've made rather a song and dance in the past about doubles and doppelgängers and other such appurtenances of the Gothic (in fact, you may not have noticed, but in the sidebar to this blog I've got a little collection of "Jack Rosses": the Aboriginal Artist, the Alabama Treasurer, the Bearded Muser, the Brooklyn Copperhead, the Chartered Accountant, the Footballer, the Spoonerist, the Thriller Writer, and the Australian WW1 Veteran ...). This one was the Scottish thriller-writer.

So far so good. That's not the end of it, though. You see, I have a bit of a history with this Manuscript found at Saragossa novel. The reason I didn't already have a copy of this - very handsome - Penguin edition was that I bought the book in French when it first appeared in 1989, on the strength of a long and laudatory review in the TLS, which made it sound like the literary discovery of the decade.

[Jean Potocki: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Ed. René Radrizzani (Paris: José Corti, 1989)]

It's hard to separate fact from legend where this bizarre book is concerned, but it appears to have been written in French by the Polish Nobleman Count Jan Potocki sometime between the years 1805 and 1815 (when he committed suicide, allegedly with a silver bullet which he'd had blessed by his parish priest in advance). He published a few extracts from it in his lifetime - first in Saint Petersburg, in Russian, and then in Paris, in the original French. The complete manuscript is, however, lost, and while four-fifths of the text survives in something approaching Potocki's final text, the other portions had to be retranslated into French from a Polish translation made in 1847). This is probably what delayed the first complete edition of his book until 1989.

I bought my copy in Brussels, hot off the press, and promptly started to read it (I guess what attracted me was the pattern of nested stories within a complex frame, so like the Oulipo-ian fictions of Georges Perec, whose Life, A User's Manual (1978) I'd also recently discovered). There was, however, an error in my copy - a missing line (or lines) on p.403.

I had to wait till the second edition of the French text, in 1991, before I was able to fill it in. It turned out to consist of just one word: "parts".

[Potocki: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1989): 403]

The passage (spoken by the Wandering Jew, one of the innumerable storytellers in the book) translates more or less as follows:

At this time, the Essenes had already formed their bizarre association. They had no wives, and their goods were held in common: on all sides, one could see nothing but new religions, mixtures of Judaism and Zoroastrianism, mixtures of Sabianism and Platonism, and above all lots of astrology. The ancient religions built themselves up with pieces from everywhere.

The missing word comes on p.403 of a book written almost two centuries before the appearance of its first edition. Four and three make seven (just that weekend I'd been discussing the mystic associations of the number seven with a group of students, à propos of the seven gates of the Underworld traversed by the goddess Ishtar).

The passage comes from the 36th day of a story which extends over 66 days (allegedly written down by its narrator, Alphonse van Worden, in 1769, thirty years after the events described, and then sealed in an iron box form which it is extracted by a French soldier at the siege of Saragossa in 1809). 3 and 6 make nine, another number of mystic efficacy (three trinities, etc. etc.)

Hard to say what it all means (if anything), but suffice it to say that mysteries are all around us ... I hope all these omens promise good fortune and not bad. Not for nothing did I put down my religion as "irrational superstition" in the last census!

The Sleep of Reason

Francisco Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. … The rest is the madness of art.

– Henry James, “The Middle Years,”
Complete Stories 1892-1898, ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 1996) 354.

In 1781, Francisco Goya was asked to provide a group of frescoes for the refurbishment of the cathedral in Saragossa, his home town. The commission, which came to him through his father-in-law, the then far better-known painter Francisco Bayeu, proved to be a bit of a headache from the first.

At 35, Goya had already earned himself a solid reputation in the capital, Madrid. Discovering just how much of a nobody he still was to the folks at home can hardly have been a comfortable experience, and when the "licentiousness" of his designs for the four cardinal virtues (Faith, Fortitude, Charity and Patience) was criticized by the cathedral authorities, he responded with an immense document detailing his intentions as an artist and his disdain for their ill-informed views (most cutting of all, perhaps, was the suggestion that his father-in-law "correct" his anatomy and choice of colours).

This letter could be seen as the birth-cry of the Romantic Artist, at odds with his time and convinced that his only duty was to listen to the promptings of a higher voice. It's the threat to his own livelihood that Goya begins with, though:

a master's reputation is a thing of great delicacy: his very subsistence depends upon it, and once darkened by some cloud his whole fortune may be destroyed ...

- Goya: A Life in Letters. Ed. Sarah Symmons.
Trans. Philip Troutman (London: Pimlico, 2004): 103.

He goes on to denounce the general frivolity and ignorance of those making the complaints:

after his professional work was presented for public examination at the unveiling of the paintings in the Cathedral of Our Lady of El Pilar, his attention was drawn to a certain group of people whom he overhead seeking to criticise his work and whose intention was clearly not inspired by any impartial criticism, or at least had nothing to do with the art of painting, which alone is relevant to just criticism of his work.

The points that Goya makes in his letter have a continuing relevance for any criticism of the arts. It's easy to feel that subjective irrelevances constitute the main criteria of judgment for those uninformed in the technicalities of one's metier; also (alas) that professional jealousy and feuding colours the assessment of those who are.

And yet, one can't help feeling that Goya's paintings, then and now, can be quite difficult to assimilate. Their blurred outlines and exaggerated figures make them far less sensuously appealing than his immediate predecessors (Velázquez, in particular). The fact that Goya's titanic genius would come to tower over his contemporaries can hardly have been apparent to those shocked and horrified by his brutally uncompromising series of engravings The Disasters of War, or the nightmarish intensity of Saturn Devouring His Chidren.

Goya, in short, had a lot to say. But his continued success as a professional painter at the Spanish Court depended more on his technical dexterity as a portrait painter than on his self-appointed task as chronicler of the abuses of the age.

You're all (I presume) familiar with Goya's print "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1799). A man resting with his head on a pen and piece of paper on top of a desk is besieged by bats and creatures of the night. The design is generally seen as a comment on the French Revolution, or the Age of Reason generally – the return of the repressed unconscious forces of nightmare the moment one is distracted from the pursuit of Enlightenment.

Francisco Goya: Preliminary Sketch for The Sleep of Reason (1797)

Goya himself wrote an interesting caption for an earlier state of this engraving:

The author dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful, commonly-held beliefs and to perpetuate in this work of caprices the solid testimony of truth. Universal language drawn and engraved by Francisco de Goya in the year 1797. [52]

The sleeping figure is intended to be the author, then. And the "universal language" he refers to is, presumably, the language of art. Any suggestion of satire on the pretensions of Enlightenment savants seems entirely absent here. And yet, when Goya's print was actually published two years later, Robespierre's reign of terror was what it appeared to be commenting on.

Perhaps that's the lesson to be drawn from this little artistic parable. When we're most sure of what we're trying to express, we're most liable to be misinterpreted - or, rather, even more disconcertingly, to find out that we were really talking about something else all along.

Diego Velázquez: Las Meniñas (1656)

What is the "meaning" of "Las Meniñas", for instance? The observer being observed is clearly part of it - Velázquez can be seen painting the actual picture that we're looking at, overlooked by the Spanish King, who's standing by the back door. Is it the claustrophobia of court he means to comment on? The maids ("meniñas") tending to the famous troop of royal dwarfs? Or is it some larger mise-en-abime of self-reflexive consciousness he wants to set up in our minds? Nobody knows. One doubts that the painter himself could provide much elucidation on such complex and teasing subject-matter. Quite apart from the instinct for survival which led him to cloak his meaning in airy allegories.

I quoted, above, from Henry James, never the easiest of authors to fathom. The Sacred Fount (1901) is not popular even with his greatest admirers. Rebecca West denounced it as a “small, mean story” in which:

a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant … in an unsuccessful attempt to discover if there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows.

I could never quite see where the sparrows came in, but (leaving that aside for the moment), we can say that it is the story of an unnamed – and almost certainly unreliable – narrator, who is attempting to find the source of a strange influence on two acquaintances of his. One, a woman, looks much younger than before, and the narrator equates this with the fact that her youthful husband now looks much older. The second, a man, has grown far wittier, and most of the book is occupied with an increasingly frustrated (and finally futile) search for the “fount” of this enrichment.

Edmund Wilson decided that the point of the book was that it contained “two separate stories to be kept distinct: a romance which the narrator is spinning and a reality which we are supposed to divine from what he tells us about what actually happened.” The strange story of sympathetic vampirism is therefore the narrator’s invention, which is meant to mask a more sordid – but still deducible – reality. It is, in essentials, the method of "The Turn of the Screw," but Wilson sees it as working well in the latter context and falling flat in the former: “Henry James was not clear about the book in his own mind.”

It's difficult not to value the strident courage of a Goya above the sinuous emblematic subtleties of a Velázquez or a James. Were either of them ever really "clear about" their work even (especially) in "their own minds"? Yet the burden of bolshie Goya's greatest works seems to be precisely these forces of irrationality that redirect us when we feel most clear.

Perhaps the best model for the artist, then, remains the Haruspex, that Roman priest, trying to divine the future from the entrails of a bird?

Francisco Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children (c.1819-21)

"The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name"

[William-Adolphe Bouguereau: Love on the Look Out (1890)]

I imagine you're all pretty familiar with the phrase above. It actually comes from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's friend, better known by his nickname "Bosie". The poem, "Two Loves", first appeared in a short-lived student magazine called The Chameleon in 1896:

'What is thy name?' He said, 'My name is Love.'
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, 'He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.'
Then sighing, said the other, 'Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.'

But actually that aspect of the matter doesn't interest me too much. I certainly don't want to go back over the twice-told tale of the Oscar Wilde trial. What would be the point? What fascinates me is the idea of the power of something - person or concept - which dares not speak its name.

[J. L. Borges]

Jorge Luis Borges expresses it interestingly in his story "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" [The Garden of Forking Paths], from his 1941 book of the same name:

– En una adivinanza cuyo tema es el ajedrez, ¿cuál es la única palabra prohibida? Reflexioné un momento y repuse:

– La palabra ajedrez.

– Precisamente – dijo Albert –. El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan es una enorme adivinanza, o parábola, cuyo tema es el tiempo ; esa causa recóndita le prohíbe la mención de su nombre. Omitir siempre una palabra, recurrir a metáforas ineptas y a perífrasis evidentes, es quizá el modo más enfático de indicarla. Es el modo tortuoso que prefirió, en cada uno de los meandros de su infatigable novela, el oblicuo Ts’ui Pên.

- Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones: El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan / Artificios. 1941, & 1944 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987): 114.

["In a puzzle whose solution is the game of chess, what is the one prohibited word?"

I reflected for a moment and replied: "The word chess."

"Precisely," said Albert. "The Garden of Forking Paths is an immense puzzle, or parable, whose subject is time; that hidden motive prohibits the mention of its name. Always to omit a word, to resort to awkward metaphors and obvious periphrases instead, is perhaps the most emphatic way to signal it. It is the tortuous way which the ingenious Ts’ui Pên followed, through every meander of his interminable novel." (my translation)]

So if The Garden of Forking Paths, the imaginary novel by the equally imaginary Ts’ui Pên, turns out to be an expression of his theory of time - indicated by the fact that of all the philosophical problems that preoccupied him, this is only one which is not discussed in its pages, what might "The Garden of Forking Paths," a short story by a certain Jorge Luis Borges, actually turn out to be about?

Like Nabokov's Lolita (1955), Borges's story takes the form of a murderer's first-person confession, with occasional editorial notes and interventions. This editor, presumably a patriotic Englishman, takes issue with some of the statements in the story (the "hipótesis odiosa y estrafalaria" [bizarre and despicable assumption] that an officer in British Intelligence might shoot a spy in cold blood under the pretext of "arresting" him, for instance {102}). What's more, the first two pages of the statement are "missing" - for reasons which we may be able to conjecture later.

The story concerns a crucial meeting between a Chinese spy, Yu Tsun, working for the Germans during the First World War, who just happens to be descended from a celebrated Chinese man of letters called Ts'ui Pên, and a British scholar named Stephen Albert, who just happens to have devoted his life to translating the fragmentary manuscripts of a novel left behind by Ts'ui Pên on his death centuries before ("la mano de un forastero lo asesinó" [the hand of a foreigner assassinated him] {106}). An outrageous coincidence? Of course.

When it turns out that the real reason for their meeting is that the spy has to kill someone with the surname "Albert" in order to get this crucial word into the newspapers on the eve of a planned British attack on the French town of Albert, we begin to see the coincidence as more of a cruel irony.

When it turns out that the British scholar has solved the mystery of Ts'ui Pen's allegedly-fragmentary novel (entitled The Garden of Forking Paths), and demonstrated that it is a huge puzzle whose answer is "time" ("He confrontado centenares de manuscritos, he corregido los errores que la negligencia de los copistas ha introducido, he conjeturado el plan de ese caos, he creído restablecer el orden primordial, he traducido la obra entera; me consta que no emplea una sola vez la palabra tiempo" [I have collated hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors that the negligence of copyists have introduced, I have constructed a map of this chaos, I have attempted to re-establish the original order, I have translated the entire work; and I can state that not once is the word time used in it] {114}), then we begin to suspect that there is more to this series of coincidences even than that.

Rather than just being an elegant puzzle, the novel (according to Albert, at any rate) embodies Ts'ui Pen's theory of cyclic time, his belief in "infinitas series de tiempos, en una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos" [an infinite series of times, a growing, vertiginous net of divergent, convergent and parallel times] {114}:

No existimos en la mayoría de esas tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que en favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismos palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma. {114-15}

[In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I don't; in others, I do and you don't; in still others, both of us do. In this one, which a favourable chance has dealt me, you have come to my house; in another, when you came through the garden, you found me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a phantasm.]

There's clearly far more than chance behind the meeting of these two. Nor can it be seen as purely accidental when, in this particular time-continuum, our narrator picks up his pistol and shoots Albert dead, immediately after declaring his gratitude and veneration for him.

The story, then, is a meditation on the subject of time, but also on the fickleness of human emotions - our propensity to be driven to monstrous acts by essentially frivolous and self-created motives. What is the missing word from Borges' own story? Such a question can obviously not be answered through the medium of a translation, so, like Stephen Albert, I have had to return to the original Spanish for an answer.

First, though, another sidelight on the question (rather like Borges' narrator's invocation - at a crucial stage in his own progress - of the Thousand and One Nights, and the unforgettable night when "la reina Shahrazad (por una mágica distracción del copista) se pone a referir textualmente le historia de las 1001 Noches, con riesgo de llegar otra vez a la noche en que la refiere, y así hasta lo infinito" [Queen Scheherazade (through a magical slip of the copyist) begins to retell word-for-word the story of the 1001 Nights, at risk of again reaching the night she is in, and so on into infinity] {111}).

One of the most controversial aspects of Hans Walter Gabler's (alleged) "corrected text" of Joyce's Ulysses, unveiled with so much hoopla in the mid-eighties, only to sink almost immediately under the weight of scholarly disapproval, was Gabler's claim to know substantially better than the author himself. Gabler not only believed that a scientific editor, armed with knowledge of every manuscript, proof and printed textual variant, and all the sets of corrections to each, could navigate among them with more certainty than poor purblind sottish Jimmy Joyce, he proceeded to act on this belief in compiling his edition.

The most famous (or notorious) instance is discussed approvingly by Richard Ellmann (at that time the undoubted doyen of Joyce scholarship) in his preface to Gabler's edition - perhaps on the principle of putting the biggest mouthful to swallow first:

For purposes of interpretation, the most significant of the many small changes in Mr. Gabler's text has to do with the question that Stephen puts to his mother at the climax of the brothel scene, itself the climax of the novel. Stephen is appalled by his mother's ghost, but like Ulysses he seeks information from her. His mother says, "You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery." Stephen responds "eagerly," as the stage direction says, "Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men." She fails to provide it. This passage has been much interpreted. Most readers have supposed that the word known to all men must be love, though one critic maintains that it is death, and another that it is synteresis; the latter sounds like the one word unknown to all men.

You begin to see the relevance of this discursus to our discussion of a problem whose answer is "chess", and where the word chess cannot appear? of a novel about time where time is never mentioned? of a story about ... whatever Borges' story (or book of stories) might ultimately be thought to be about? Ellmann continues:

Mr. Gabler has been able to settle this matter by recovering a passage left out of the scene that takes place in the National Library. Whether Joyce omitted it deliberately or not is still a matter of conjecture and debate. Mr. Gabler postulates the skip of an eye from one ellipsis to another, leading to the omission of several lines - the longest omission in the book. The principal lines read in manuscript: "Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ..."

The Latin conjoins two phrases in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles. Aquinas is distinguishing between love, which, as he says in the first six words, "genuinely wishes another's good," and, in the next five, a selfish desire to secure our own pleasure "on account of which we desire these things," meaning lovelessly and for our own good, not another's. In Joyce's play Exiles, Richard explains love to the skeptical Robert as meaning "to wish someone well."

Now that the word known to all men is established as love, Stephen's question to his mother's ghost can be seen to connect with the hope his living mother expressed at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that outside Ireland he will learn what the heart is and what it feels.

Even at the time Ellmann must have known he was on shaky ground. There's something very shocking in the notion that that supreme craftsmen among twentieth-century novelists, the precise, painstaking Joyce, might simply have skipped "from one ellipsis to another", and thus not noticed that he'd actually been intending to answer Stephen's mysterious question to his mother all along.

THE MOTHER

(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.

STEPHEN

(Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

THE MOTHER

Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

STEPHEN

The ghoul! Hyena!

I'm sorry. I just can't swallow that he somehow "forgot" to answer the question, or that it would have been "better" to settle the question once and for all by providing a nice quick answer with a bit of Latin thrown in as a bonus ...

In any case, you can easily take a look for yourself, if you like. The passage can be found in Episode 15 [Circe], the famous "Nighttown" sequence of Ulysses. If you wish to see how it looked in its original printing, you can find it on page 540 of Jeri Johnson's edition of Ulysses: The 1922 Text [The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.]. Gabler's emended version can be found either in his original 1984 three-volume critical edition, or else in the diplomatic text published as Ulysses: The Corrected Text [Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. 1984. Preface by Richard Ellmann. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986].

So how does all that help us with "The Garden of Forking Paths"? To put you out of your misery, I can now reveal: that I have checked the Spanish text of the story, and have found a series of "awkward metaphors and obvious periphrases" for the Spanish word "amor" [love] or "amar" [to love]. I find "querer" [desire]; I also find a suggested motivation for the narrator's determination to succeed in his quest in his desire to overcome the arrogant European colour-prejudice of his German paymaster against the "yellow" [amarillo] races: "Yo quería probarle que un amarillo podía salvar a sus ejércitos" [I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies] {104}.

This essentially perverse desire, which inspires him to waste his own life and that of another man, a modest man, yet "que para mí no es menos que Goethe" [who for me is as great as Goethe] {104}, inspires him to set aside all other natural emotions: veneration for his ancestors, respect for this noble-minded student of Chinese culture, and, yes, love for his fellow man.

And yet the equation is not quite so neat as that. "In a puzzle whose answer is the chess, what is the one prohibited word?" As Borges' story reaches its climax, with Stephen Albert's explanation of Ts’ui Pên's novel (or labyrinth) complete, and the English spycatcher Richard Madden (another significant name?) advancing on our narrator from the garden, he concludes his account of their conversation thus:

En todos – articulé no sin un temblor – yo agradezco y venero su recreación del jardín de Ts’ui Pên.

– No en todos – murmuró con una sonrisa -. El tiempo se bifurca perpetuamente hacía innumerables futuros. En uno de ellos soy su enemigo.
...
– El provenir ya existe – respondí –, pero yo soy su amigo. {115}

["In all futures," I said not without trembling, "I appreciate and venerate your reconstruction of the garden of Ts’ui Pên."

"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time bifurcates perpetually into innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
...
"That future already exists," I replied, "But I am your friend."

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend," as Wilfred Owen put it in his own great First World War poem "Strange Meeting". More to the point, though, the word our narrator Yu Tsun uses here, "amigo", is clearly derived from "amor". Does that invalidate my point? Is it the equivalent of a partial, shaded reference to the word "chess" (checkmate, say?), or to "time" (temporary, timely?)

It isn't enough simply to say (or not say) the word "love", apparently. The essential thing is to know what it means, to feel it as one speaks the word, to break out of the cycle of destruction which is Yu Tsun's unwilling murder, and the whole immense madness of the Western Front. In that sense I am forced to agree with Ellmann's analysis, and the way he connects the word with:

Leopold Bloom, who in an equally tense moment in Barney Kiernan's pub declares, "But it's no use. ... Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life." "What?" he is asked. "Love," Bloom is forced to say, and adds in embarrassment, "I mean the opposite of hatred." He drops the subject and leaves. That simple statement of his is immediately mocked by those left behind.

Of course it is. "Love - the opposite of hatred." Its very banality and predictability makes it increasingly difficult to articulate with a straight face.

Borges has found a perversely ingenious way to signal it without ever overtly mentioning it; so (in his own way - in the brothel scene, at least) has Joyce. Gabler and his nemeis John Kidd no doubt take their place in the picture too (as do Oscar and Bosie) - the "monje taoísta o budista" [Taoist or Buddhist monk] {109} who insisted on publishing Ts’ui Pên's manuscript against his family's wishes, and (more equivocally) the "forastero" [foreigner] {106}, who killed him - for whatever reason - before he could finish it.

But which of them is which? In this time, or any other ...

[Joyce's Garden of Forking Paths]

In Flanders Fields

[Passchendaele (1917)]

It seems like ages since I last posted anything on this blog. What can I say? Summer intervened.

I feel like I spent most of it moling through stacks of books and typing up long lists of them for my bibliography blog (still, alas, a long way from completion - though sometimes I delude myself that the end might be in sight).

Bronwyn and I did have a nice little break by the banks of Lake Rotorua, though, during which I managed to read the whole of Anthony Beevor's horrifying account of the Battle of Stalingrad. I found it in the shelves of the friend's house we were staying in.

Which brings me to the subject of history books - more specifically books of military history. I seem to have read an awful lot of them lately. First there were the First World War books:

• Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The First World War. 1930. Rev. ed. 1934. London: Pan Books, 1972.
• Middlebrook, Martin. The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
• Middlebrook, Martin. The Kaiser’s Battle. 21 March 1918: The First Day of the German Spring Offensive. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
• Prior, Robin, & Trevor Wilson. The Somme. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.
• Taylor, A. J. P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
• Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963.
• Wolff, Ian. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. 1958. London: Pan Books, 1961.

Some of them I found in my own shelves, others I borrowed from the library. After that I found myself moving on to the Second World War:

• Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
• Lord, Walter. The Miracle of Dunkirk. New York : Viking Press, 1982.
• Shirer, William L. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940. 1969. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1972

Now, however, it's back to the Napoleonic wars, and even further back in time - all the way to antiquity:

• Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane, 2007.
• Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007.
• Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. 1874. Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson. 1996. New York: Free Press, 2008.
• Zamyoski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.
• Zamyoski, Adam. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon & The Congress of Vienna. HarperPress. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

Why? You may well ask. I've always been a bit of a fan of such books, but I hope I'm not just one of those war junkies who spend their time prying into the more gruesome details of ancient battles because it gives them some kind of perverted thrill.

I do remember the sheer shock of seeing the Menin Gate and those immense fields of immaculately tended white crosses on the former Western Front when I went there with my parents as a teenager.

I guess my excuse, then, has to be relevance. The more of these books I read, the more applicable they seem to everyday life - my own, where I get to watch bureaucratic decision-making processes on a daily basis - but everyone else's, too, as we all experience the dreary parochial soap-opera of New Zealand politics.

[The Honourable John Key
Prime Minister of NZ]

It was interesting the other day, in fact, listening to John Key's response to the news that unemployment was far, far higher than anyone had feared, giving the lie to all his optimistic statements around New Year. His comment was that the recession was very bad, the worst since the 1930s, so there was really nothing anyone could do. "It could be worse," he added with a toothy smile.

I guess an outsider might find it a bit odd to find the man in charge of the overall direction of the nation's finances saying, in effect, that there was nothing to be done and it was all in the lap of the gods. But it's not so surprising if you've recently had the experience of reading William Shirer's appalling, terrifying account of the breakdown of France in 1940 - the pusillanimous refusal to take responsibility for anything on the part of the generals; the active, gleeful desire on the part of so many politicians to grovel before a Dictator (preferably a senile one - like Petain - who would allow them to pull the strings); the instinctive preference of the middle classes for Hitler and his Germans over the opposition at home. It made perfect sense to them at the time, but the harvest was a bitter one.

Watching the way decisions actually get made in a big organisation inspired the following poem, in fact. How else it it really possible to understand why people sign up to a solution they know to be unworkable and wrong? It isn't cowardice, exactly - or even complacency. It's just that things tend to develop a momentum of their own, and it's very difficult for novel and creative ideas to be heard, even, in an atmosphere where wiseacre "realism" rules.

Luckily the consequences seldom entail the violent deaths of half a million men. Seeing Key's complacent, vacant face proclaiming his inability to think of anything to do to reduce unemployment in the slightest, though, made me it far easier for me to imagine him or his kind signing up to yet another pointless, bone-headed war. We've seen his sort before. They used to be called Chamberlain or Herbert Hoover (or G. W. Bush and his toady Blair, for that matter):

Last Conference before Passchendaele

(5th-7th January, 1917)


Everyone knew it wouldn’t work, but nobody
could think of a way not to go through
with it. Lloyd George knew
Douglas Haig was self-deluded,
believing every ‘intelligence report’
from crystal-gazing Colonel Charteris
– God (after all) was on his side.
Sir William Robertson (Chief
of the Imperial General Staff) knew
Haig was next door to an imbecile
but backed him – lacking better –
against any alternative. Haig knew
the Fifth Army Staff, Gough’s boys,
were capable of stuffing up
the most elegant and foolproof
plan. Everyone knew
it always rains in Flanders
in the Autumn. The result was
the ‘most indiscriminate slaughter
in the history of warfare.’
No-one could find
a good way to avoid it.

Without losing face, that is.

All in all, it's hard to feel that I've been entirely wasting my time with these books.