Been brooding, in these toxic times, over the story of Manfred Gnädinger, the German-born hermit whose sculpture garden in Camelle, on the Galician coast, was damaged by the oil spill from the tanker Prestige, and who subsequently died, according to those who knew him, of melancholy.
Not enough of us die of melancholy. And when we do, the doctors call it something else. Depression, usually. But depression and melancholy are not synonymous. Depression is a condition you are meant to deal with. Take pills, get pissed, play with your genitals, leave your genitals alone, join a gym, find a partner, leave a partner, try liposuction, put your buttocks where your mouth is, go on Big Brother, get kicked off Big Brother, change your sexual orientation, get thee to a nunnery, expose yourself to light – fly to Galicia even.
Melancholy, on the other hand, though it was long thought by the ancients to be a morbid condition caused by excessive secretion of black bile, was also called by them ‘the sacred disease’. Which might have meant that the gods had a hand in it, or that those it claimed enjoyed other privileges as a consequence. There is argument as to whether it was Aristotle or his pupil Theophrastus who made the famous connection in the Problematica – ‘Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics, or poetry or the arts, are clearly melancholics?’ – but it’s a true observation, whosever it was.
True if you leave out politics that is, politics no longer being a calling with which eminence has anything to do.
Depression happens to you, melancholy is an option. ‘I imagine that for one to enure himselfe to melancholy,’ that distinguished melancholic Montaigne wrote in an essay on the variegations of our natures, ‘there is some kinde of purpose of consent and mutuall delight.’
How much delight there was in Manfred Gnädinger’s decision to die of melancholy I would not dare to guess. But we must assume, since he had been a hermit in Galicia for more than forty years, that he had consented to the sadness of that calling. The Galicians called him Man, short for Manfred, but suggestive of something pared down and elemental in him too. ‘I was looking for a place to be alone,’ he told a journalist just before his death. ‘This is my world. I don’t think I like other people.’
Misanthropy, we are inclined to call that. A judgemental term. We are not meant not to like other people. I prefer melancholy. It restores dignity and refuses the tyranny of normative behaviour, there being no reason on earth why we should like other people much, and every justification, even in the blue and green of Galicia I would imagine, for not liking them at all.
Photographs and descriptions of Man’s sculpture garden, known locally as el museo del alemán, suggest one of those domestic eccentricities you sometimes drive past in remote areas, art and dereliction mixed, amorphous forms, piles of twisted stones, things thrown away as much as thrown together, but nothing wasted, the detritus of life somehow making a terrible sense. Normally you accelerate by such a place, for fear of who you’ll find there, and because it calls into question the ordered nature of your own existence – nice things here, rubbish there, and no melancholy commingling of emptiness and meaning. But tourists visited Man’s garden, for which privilege he charged them a dollar – chicken feed.
He could see the sea from his tiny hut. And presumably would have watched the oil approaching. Shortly before the end, the authorities gave him a pair of wellingtons to wear with his loincloth, so oil-drenched had his garden become. Wellingtons and a loincloth – I wish I had seen it. Not to smirk but weep. You try to keep it simple but the bastards always have to complicate it for you. Nobody has ever told me how wellingtons are made but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is oil in them.
Man’s final wish was that his ‘museum’ should be left untouched, as a permanent reminder of the spill.
Behold what I bequeath – ruination.
No doubt he wasn’t a laugh a minute, Manfred. And would probably have shooed me off had I tried to talk Montaigne or Theophrastus to him. But I have grown attached to him as an idea. We don’t do hermits any more, for the same reason we don’t do melancholia. We do good works or Viagra instead, go clubbing, waylay the unwary with charity boxes. Refuse the body its needful hour of rest; refuse the mind the indifference to desire it craves. We grind away, making ourselves rich or famous or purposeful. Anything not to look unhappy.
‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,’ Hamlet told his friends, and even then, when melancholy was all the rage, they had to set about searching for the cause. Women, ambition, madness. Leave the man alone. He simply didn’t find the world funny any more. Russell Harty once asked Peter Cook if he had returned from America in order to recharge his batteries. I forget the exact wording of Cook’s reply. Something to do with would have if he could have, but frankly did not know where his batteries were to be found. But I haven’t forgotten the depths of distracted melancholy in his expression.
Misogyny, we charge Cook with. All the mises – misogyny, misanthropy, misorder, with envy and drunkenness thrown in. We can’t allow that he had forgone all his mirth, misplaced the batteries and consented to those losses, full stop.
The heroes of our time are too hectic. They don’t mope enough. Young Werther’s sorrows once had all of Europe by the ear, but he wouldn’t do for us, he’d be too listless to solve a crime or fabricate a fantasy.
Ah! Sun-flower – I have always loved that most languorous of Blake’s Songs of Experience, ‘Where the Youth pined away with desire.’ So I sorrow for Manfred, who pined away on my behalf, I being too busy.
Jordan or Iraq
Which would you say is worse, what’s unfolding in Iraq or what’s happening with Jordan? Both were discussed with chilling incision in this newspaper last week. Iraq by the philosopher John Gray in an article entitled ‘The Road to Hell’. Jordan by the Independent columnist Terence Blacker. In a piece full of foreboding, Blacker eyed the ongoing Jordan situation and concluded that there was reason to be scared, very scared, if the much-implanted celebrity in question – yes, I’m sorry, that Jordan – had indeed become a role model for women in their teens and twenties.
Myself, I’d seen it coming. Whether Baroness Warnock was among the 36,000 readers who bought Being Jordan in the first few days of its publication, I have no way of ascertaining. Nor whether she joined the queue several thousand strong outside a bookshop in Brent Cross to get the authoress to autograph her memoirs. It is likely that Baroness Warnock has not read a single word more of Jordan’s prose than Jordan has read of hers. But the Baroness was vocal on Jordan’s behalf several months ago, when the latter was firming up her readership in a clearing in the Australian jungle. Not wishing to appear stuffy – though I would have thought that stuffiness, as a professor of ethics, is what she’s for – Baroness Warnock joined other women of intellectual distinction in praising Jordan for independent-mindedness vis-à-vis the size and constituent materials of her breasts, candour vis-à-vis her sexual relations with men, womanly ingenuity vis-à-vis her quest to win I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, and exemplary resolution vis-à-vis making herself more rich and famous than she already was. Thus ethics in our time: if it earns, it must be good.
The manner in which celebrity demeans all that comes within its ambit (including, it would seem, feminism and the academy) is deserving of a socio-psychological study of its own, always assuming there’s a socio-psychologist out there who is familiar with the verb ‘demean’. In the meantime I reckon we could do worse than purloin the language of indignation employed by philosophers when they survey the wreckage of American policy on Iraq. No dread of appearing old-fashioned, out of it or confined within an ivory tower, inhibits Professor Gray. He calls an inhumanity an inhumanity, and a debasement a debasement. He is not alone in saying it but he says it well: that the Americans have come to see the people of Iraq as ‘virtually subhuman’, in proof whereof he cites the parading of Iraqi prisoners naked in front of American women soldiers, on dog leads, with women’s underwear on thei
r heads, and understands this as not just any old humiliation but a systematic assault on their ‘identity and values’. You locate the prisoner’s locus of shame – in this instance very different from your own – and you outrage it.
In war, it seems, we can say what we cannot say in peace. In war we become moralists again. We acknowledge the existence of depravity. We allow that men can demean and be demeaned, and we recognise the powerful part that sex plays in that process. We take it as axiomatic that of all the ways open to us to render another person inhuman, affronting his sexual dignity is one of the most effective. Which in itself presupposes what celebrity-driven television denies – that sexual dignity exists.
There was a dramatic passage in ITV’s excellent William and Mary the other week, in which William’s older daughter embarked on an erotic adventure which was both necessary to her and demeaning of her. The way such a thing can take you in those contrary directions was wonderfully written and acted. But what struck me about it particularly was the sadness it released. The girl’s younger sister wept for she knew not what – her being marooned by her sister’s actions, her being left alone at the end of her own childhood, the fracturing of the idyll of the family, and in some way, too, the loss not simply of her sibling’s innocence but of innocence in general. Sex in the age of Jordan and the thousands who will waste their lives trying to emulate her is ignorant of itself. To be reminded that it has the power to capsize us, that it shares a home with our deepest emotions, and is as soon the cause for regret and sorrow as it is the occasion for greed and gossip, was like being locked away for an afternoon with your granny’s photo album. Sadness – God, yes, I remember that. Innocence . . . innocence . . . wasn’t that something to do with embroidery?
There is, of course, in pantomime and other forms of clowning a place for actions which invigorate by demeaning. When I first caught sight of Jordan’s disfigurements I wondered if she intended herself to be a species of clown, an embodiment of the grotesque, a carnival figure who turns everything upside down for a brief fly-sprung hour, making us long for excesses we know we can’t afford, before the clock strikes and brings us back to normality. And if liberation through the hyperbolic-grotesque body of a clown was what those girls were queuing for in Brent Cross, I beg their pardons. But clowns aren’t role models. Clowns are role-reversal warnings. They do low that we might glimpse high. And something tells me that that wasn’t quite where Jordan’s readers were going.
As for my opening question – which is worse, Jordan (to borrow her name for a tendency) or Iraq – I am unable to decide. Both attest to our limitless capacity for low behaviour. Why it is that we are shy of moral judgements in relation to the one, when our outrage knows no bounds in relation to the other, I don’t know. But human beings cannot function except critically, and it is possible we have chosen to attack our culture through its foreign policy because we have grown inured to its domestic grossness.
The Great Chain of Being
I saw God in Selfridges the other day. To those on more familiar terms with the deity than I am there is probably nothing surprising about that. They see Him everywhere. But as a non-believer I have always been more picky. If I am going to encounter God I want it to be somewhere special. On a mountain top at sunset, or after a particularly good paella on the Ramblas, or where the Ganges spills into wherever the Ganges spills. Not in the basement in Selfridges. Not in a demonstration of domino toppling.
To be fair, this was not just any domino toppling. Empty your mind of two old men losing their temper with each other in a pub in Pocklington, and imagine, instead, tens of thousands of dominoes arranged, narrow ends up, on snaking tracks, now level, now precipitous, now rotating on a merry-go-round of their own making, now setting off the most unexpected reaction, not only in themselves but in other hairspring devices which agitate more dominoes to fall in sequence, the whole thing culminating in two great walls of dominoes collapsing in a shower of tiles that would gladden any vandal’s heart. Except that this isn’t vandalism we’re watching but order. Myself, I’d go further: to see the topple of a single tiny tile in one corner of a room effect such mayhem in another is to be witness to meaning. That providence which is in the fall of a sparrow.
What Selfridges was doing staging this exhibition I am not sure, but I understand that what they originally wanted was a live version of the ‘Cog’ commercial for Honda in which components of a motor car set off an ingenious chain reaction that seems to know no end. But ‘Cog’ is cinematic and requires countless takes, whereas the dominoes topple before our very eyes.
So wherein lies the satisfaction of these chain-reaction installations? In the wit, partly. In the elegant comedy of pitting small cause against large effect. It is possible we are back to chaos theory, the butterfly beating its wings in Shanghai as a consequence of which (maybe) an earthquake shakes downtown Los Angeles. Not that that’s particularly witty, least of all if you happen to live in downtown Los Angeles. But then chaos theory originates in speculation about the weather, and weather is never witty. Whereas the car components performing their functions in a new way, creating unexpected dependencies and consequences, are.
In fact, the ad’s conclusion, ‘Isn’t it nice when things just work?’, doesn’t adequately render our pleasure, although we do of course enjoy the precision functioning. What it should say is ‘Isn’t it nice when things display a codependency, when small and large cooperate, even exchanging roles, in their ineluctable progress towards a greater good?’ But that might only persuade you that I was right not to go into copywriting.
The last I heard, a couple of conceptual artists were threatening to sue Honda for ripping off a film they’d made years earlier, showing everyday objects affecting one another similarly. Der Lauf Der Dinge, it was called – The Way Things Go. But then plagiarism, whether the charge is true or false, is only another word for influence, and what is influence but the motivating force of a chain reaction. Which goes to show that all might not be well if you happen to be at the wrong end of the chain: the ball bearing envying the silencer, the silencer the steering wheel, and the steering wheel the car.
A couple of days earlier, out of vulgar curiosity, I had gone along to see David Blaine swinging comatose in his glass box. Or rather I had gone along to see people behaving loutishly, hurling insults and chipolatas, and with a bit of luck baring their breasts. I wanted to test the theory that the medieval mob was still alive in us. There was the BBC thinking that the only way they could get us to appreciate Chaucer was to update him, set him in a world of karaoke and soap operas, as though such things define our modernity, while all along it was still the Middle Ages in our hearts. But in fact a couple of hours of Blaine-watching yielded nothing rumbustious whatsoever, a couple of cries of ‘Wake up, David, you lazy bastard!’ and that was it. Maybe you need to see the eyes of your victim before you can bait him in earnest. Maybe prone he excited more pity than resentment. Or maybe we were just baited out.
Nonetheless, my head was still sufficiently full of stories of irrational hatred to fear for the safety of the dominoes before the toppling began. What was to stop one of these mindless louts I had read about knocking them over for the sheer spite of it? Well, the fact that he was unlikely to shop in Selfridges for a start. But even in the blameless, ten thousand poised dominoes can excite instincts of wanton destructiveness.
In the event no one did anything to spoil the show. We watched quietly, delighted, as every domino performed its task, and then stood around with broad smiles on our faces when the walls came down. It was not like staring up at David Blaine in his ugly box with its white sheet flapping in the night. It was more pleasing aesthetically for a start. And it demonstrated some law, or some fallacy that looks like law, in nature. The great chain of being, that discredited system of social theology which declared that all was ordered for the best, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. An intolerable concept to us now, though it is hard to believe we have put anything mo
re calming in its place. But at least where Blaine established distance between himself and us, by that means instigating animosity, the dominoes reminded us of harmony, that great illusory chain of human interdependence ensuring that things work out as they are meant to. In other words, God.
In domino dominus.
Auschwitz
The philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous assertion – that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ – was not his final thought on the subject. ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream,’ he later wrote, ‘hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.’
So that’s all right then. We can write our poems as we can scream our screams, it’s just living to which, after Auschwitz, we have lost our entitlement.
Adorno’s logic would seem to lock us in a terrible circularity: the very act of survival calling for ‘the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz’. In other words, if we are human we die, if we live we do so at the cost of our humanity. But it is by no means intended punitively. Far from precluding survivors from what remains of the human family, Adorno asks us to imagine how, by virtue of their survival, they might feel they have precluded themselves. So his argument is an expression, if this isn’t too bourgeois and banal a word, of pity.
That survivors will be plagued, as Adorno further imagines, by dreams that they are not living at all, that their whole existence since has been imaginary, would seem to be borne out in many cases by their long silences, as though words have lost their sufficiency, and then later, as though the walls containing silence have suddenly collapsed, by the terrible urgency with which they deliver their testimonies at last. Like so many Ancient Mariners, they tell their tale wherever they can find a listener, and having told it they must find another listener to tell it to again. It is without doubt a crucial calling – to keep alive the memory of what happened; to memorialise the names and maybe even the faces of those it happened to; and yes, yes, to ensure there will be no repetition, though repetition peeps at us every day wherever one person is granted sovereignty over another. But the Ancient Mariner’s compulsion is like a death in life, no matter how necessary his horror story is to us – the now sadder, wiser recipients of it.
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