On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  “Animals are governed wholly by necessity,” the fool continued, “and free will draws humanity towards God, because only through free will can humanity enter a moral universe – a new and separate existence. But the eternal gods cannot have morality either, because morality – quite strangely – is also created out of the contingency of necessity. In other words, absolute free will is as inimical to morality as is necessity, and morality can only exist where there is a mixture of these two opposites. If God exists, then He is a combination of free will and the tragic contingency of this world.

  “Not only disease, diet, DNA, environment and chance govern and constrict us, but also the ideology we live within: consumerist capitalism drives us back down towards the animals and we elect to be no more than our mere wants. Earlier capitalism secularised morality, but in many ways made the moral choices starker and more complex.”

  I pulled up a chair, sat down and looked at the man: “You’re a queer fish,” I said, “and I won’t argue with you, because I hardly understood a word you said. This much I did get: you reject material wealth. Perhaps it isn’t envy, I’ll grant you that. But do you look in the mirror and say ‘I am a good man’?”

  “Then I would really be a fool in every sense,” he laughed. “I live the way I do because it makes me happy. No more, no less.”

  I always say, “Distrust a man who says he’s happy.” I say this with good reason: it is a claim I often make myself, and I know myself not to be trustworthy. But I did not say this; perhaps I should have. Instead I wanted to lower the tone of our conversation, but that isn’t easy with the fool. “So what will you write about next?” I asked.

  “Death,” he said, and I should have guessed. “Writing these stories has made me think about death. It starts to occur long before the heart stops. My feelings are more leaden, and my energy is low.”

  “Was it ever high?” I asked.

  He smiled: “Even lower.”

  “A slow death then,” I exchanged his smile.

  “Yes, maybe the slowness of my death will cure me of my folly. Maybe there’s a post-modern writer in me yet – who will rise up sullenly from the moulted skin of joyous folly to give vent to atrophied emotions.”

  The fool is the most harmless of these four writers, as you’ve probably guessed. But he’s also deceivingly entertaining, and I cannot trust him because I cannot understand him in any way.

  “Why do you write then?” I asked, “to predict the future or to examine the present?” This was the moment when I decided that I really had to tell you about this lot.

  Like putting a coin in a vending machine, asking the fool a question results in him spitting out your chosen flavour. “The future? Don’t ask me. It is surprising how many cannot see what’s happening in the present. The future is and always will be utterly beyond our comprehension, although we must always plan for it if we are to live decently in the present.

  “Those who do not listen to the rumble of the distant future, but play with the received truths and prejudices of their own times should at least be aware of the immediate future, if they are to succeed: they’re like the young men at the Pamplona bull run – they wait until the last possible moment to shelter from the new oncoming wisdom that will demand a new conformism. This activity requires skill, good reflexes and bravado, but personally I can never see the point of it.”

  “So you write to change the present,” I sneered, always uncertain of what I thought of that elusive fellow.

  “Nothing so grand. To mutter in the wind. To subvert it perhaps. But only by questioning and pointing to the many gaps in our knowledge. A literary work should produce a plurality of interpretations – and a compromise between the reader’s mind and the author’s. If there is to be a struggle for progress, it will be through information. Great minefields of lies will have to be cleared, and many will succumb to the cruel lacerations of black propaganda. In this literature will play an auxiliary role in a wider struggle of whistleblowers and leakers against power, which is ruthless and shameless. I am not optimistic, and if there’s to be no progress, it’s better for the individual to withdraw from society and think.”

  “You’re remarkably frank with the enemy for someone who takes his role so seriously.”

  “Is it taking oneself too seriously to demand the right to mutter in the wind?”

  “Well, put it another way: you have been generous to discuss your ideas with someone who clearly doesn’t share them.”

  “To people like Charles Crawford-Mackenzie and myself, it’s much more fun to chat with people we disagree with. Charles and I agree on very little, except the utility of disagreeing.”

  “What do you think of that Eyetie?” I asked, suggesting complicity and pressing for a division.

  The fool looked at me sharply, and I immediately realised he was not fool enough not to know I was winding him up. “Bonetti-MacDonald has interesting things to say. None of those three downstairs are interested in provoking the bull of oncoming fashion. They’re more interesting in pricking the elephant of power and then doing a runner. Sadly the elephant doesn’t even notice, being fully aware that rational argument barely affects the manner in which humans consort with each other. All three of them believe too much in improving society and too little in the chaos and madness of mankind. This is the charming disease of rationalism.”

  Exasperated, I said, “At least they believe in something they can communicate. You never have the courage to take a stand on anything. This conversation would have been more useful if you had explained what you actually want and how to get it.”

  “You don’t come to a fool for answers, only for questions.”

  “And I don’t believe you’re such a fool, either.”

  “What is a fool if not someone who doesn’t understand anything, and I don’t understand anything. Ergo, I am a fool.”

  I shook the fool’s hand warmly – God knows why – and went downstairs in search of Bumper. He was already in the hall, and getting ready to go. I togged up as well and asked where the others were.

  “In the garden. Big event. That fine-looking tree in the corner came down in the storm.” We went out into the garden and two men in blue overalls – neighbours we were told – were busying around, one with a chainsaw and the other putting the cut wood into a neat pile. Hamilton-MacNiff was helping out in his usual desultory manner and Bonetti-MacDonald was inspecting the shape of the tree rings in each cross-section, as though it were a question of great moment. Our host was joking in Gaelic with the man wielding the saw, who could probably have done without the interruptions. They had started in the middle of the tree to open up the pathway it fell across, and it was now clear for us to go. Everyone was engaged with the tree incident – for them it was like a 100-point fall on the FTSE-100. We waved to them by way of a peremptory leave-taking. As we left the garden, I heard Crawford-Mackenzie say in a low but clear voice, “Who was that creep? Yes, I know he’s a friend of Jones’s, but what does he do? Used-car salesman?”

  I heard laughter and Geoffrey Hamilton-MacNiff said in a louder voice, “Come off it, Charles, you know that’s not the case. Big bucks there.”

  But I cannot say that I dislike them. Actually Crawford-Mackenzie was a pleasant enough chap, and this made me think about the circular nature of the likes and dislikes in that room. Writers admire politicians and seek out their company in the hope that they can influence them with their crackpot ideas, while politicians find them absurd, rootless non-entities. Yet politicians like Lord Archasamby love bankers because they went into politics to exert power, and discover that the real power is held by people like me. We bankers, however, find politicians venal, and although, as men of the world, venality does not shock us, there is nothing more pathetic than the venality of jumped-up moralisers who are always looking over their shoulders at some ill-defined public opinion. Yet in our hearts we also know that our power, which undoubtedly brings us great wealth and security, does not give us real control over
events or even understanding of them. We’re attracted to writers because part of us envies the freedom of their world of ideas, however ineffectual, self-deluding and often escapist it may be. They of course dismiss us, because our kind of power is not power they desire, comprehend or even find intellectually interesting. I am not talking just about ridiculous people like the enjoyably obnoxious Bonetti-MacDonald, I also mean upright and pleasantly eccentric writers like Crawford-Mackenzie, in particular, although Hamilton-MacNiff seemed a good sort, in spite of his leftie tendencies. Not, of course, that I will ever have time to read any of them.

  There is something professional about Lord Archasamby, but that is deceiving. There is a hardness in him, the hardness of a businessman or financier like myself, but I don’t adopt an air of moral superiority. If you pursue an amoral existence, you should be honest enough to put aside all moral codes. My amorality, or some may call it immorality, is quite sincere, just like these writer fellows. Their ideas are not real, but their sincerity cannot be doubted.

  They’re a curious type of fauna, and like any species in danger of extinction they provoke a nostalgic regret that approximates to compassion, but isn’t. It is too weak to provoke any kind of action or reaction. When the last of them dies, it will mark the end of a pointless rebellion that cost too many lives. I like these ones because they amuse me, but if they were flourishing, I would be the first to insist on their extirpation, whatever the human, ecological or financial cost. In the sixties, seventies and even eighties, we had them bombed, napalmed, shot, thrown from planes and killed individually and anonymously in the night. Nothing to be proud of, but it had to be done. We won, and I cannot see us ever being challenged again. We can pursue our own business, which is what we were put into this world to do. The silly leftist ideology never took account of human nature.

  Out on the road I saw for the first time the view down to the sea: an expanse of white sand, whose magnitude defied reality, stretched out to a shore of bright turquoise, where the shallows reflected the whiteness of that sand and mixed it with the pure blue we could see further out to sea. Visibility was as heightened as previously it had been diminished: the extremes between the different ways the same landscape dressed itself seemed almost supernatural.

  “Nature,” I exclaimed. “Nature trumps it all, including itself: the tree, the view and sudden change of weather. Where is man in all this? Like a limpet clinging to the rock.”

  “You don’t say,” said Bumper with distaste. “You came all the way from London to tell me that?”

  “That’s the point. In the city you can forget about nature, even as you walk through a leafy park. That’s subservient nature; this is nature triumphant.”

  “Well then, you’ve learnt something on your trip north.”

  “I have, Bumper, I really have, and not just that. I’ve learnt that not all the world thinks like me, and I’ve learnt that I’ll be damn glad to be back home, amongst my own hubbub, my own certainties, my own tribe – my own delusions. It has been much more fun than I would have thought, Bumper, but I won’t be back.”

  “Very sensible. It’s good to be reminded of who you are not, but only occasionally – otherwise it becomes unsettling.”

  Other works by the same author:

  The Golden Menagerie (Luath Press, 2004)

  The Berlusconi Bonus (Luath Press, 2005; Vagabond Voices, 2010)

  In Praise of the Garrulous (Vagabond Voices, 2008)

  Presbyopia (Vagabond Voices, 2009)

  Can the Gods Cry? (Vagabond Voices, 2011)

  Copyright

  © Allan Cameron 2012

  First published in July 2012 by

  Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.,

  Glasgow,

  Scotland

  ISBN 978–1–908251–10–7

  The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

  Cover design by Mark Mechan

  Typeset by Park Productions

  The author and publisher acknowledge Creative Scotland’s subsidy towards the writing and publication of this e-book

  For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website,

  www.vagabondvoices.co.uk