Can the Gods Cry?

by Allan Cameron

  “Bullshit. What happened to your much-vaunted honesty? I know you, and I know that you couldn’t write anything that wasn’t political. You’re being evasive. You’re trying to fob me off.”

  “I am, and in your case, it was foolish. I am tired of this conversation. I want to forget about Kray and …”

  “Come on, get over it,” Cary snorts. “You’re becoming obsessed with this alter ego of mine.”

  “Of yours?”

  “And he is only a shadow of myself. An altogether lesser creature.”

  “I am not obsessed with him,” Lochrie counters with complete confidence, “but I am struck by the words of this wordless man. The Krays of this world are everywhere: in Russia they took the oppositionists off to the firing squad by the hundreds of thousands, they battered their victims to death in short-lived Kampuchea, and they tortured and killed insurgents in 1950s Kenya. Most of these Krays were even worse than Kray and these soulless beasts will always be with us, like famine, plague and pestilence. They are an ill we must learn to control, and they are the justification for having a state.

  “As I say, I am obsessed with his words: he the dapper sadist and his idea of himself as the crusader against communism, ‘the common enemy’. Every age has its witches – the people condemned by their very existence. Then it was ‘communist’ on one side and ‘counter-revolutionary’ on the other. Today, in a particularly bizarre war against shadows, it is ‘terrorist’ or ‘Islamist’ and ‘decadent Westerner’. In almost all cases, the victim is nothing like the official stereotype.”

  “Really, you are enough to drive a man to drink,” says Cary lightly and jokingly affecting an expression of exasperation. “All that stuff is gone. Wakey wakey! Revolutionary communism is dead.”

  “Of course it is,” retorts Lochrie, “for many reasons. Firstly, where are the peasant masses willing to fight? You could no more fight a revolution and the inevitable war that follows than you could fight another First World War. The young no longer have that sense of sacrifice, and that is a very good thing. Lenin might have sold revolution as a ‘festival of the oppressed’, but he was wrong: revolutions are acts of desperation, anguish and hope, always teetering on the point of falling back into themselves. Now sixty-eight was a festival all right but not of the oppressed; it was the festival of a pampered generation – my generation, our generation.”

  “Thanks for counting me in,” says Cary grumpily.

  “Well, a revolution with slogans such as ‘it is forbidden to forbid’ or ‘we are realists, we demand the impossible’ was not a revolution but a holiday from reality with no intention of taking the difficult decisions that revolutions involve. That too was probably a blessing.”

  “Fine revolutionary you are. Is there anything you know how to do properly?” Cary restates his exasperation. Lochrie remembers the day his friend Pino took him to see a mad revolutionary. The man was a violent hothead, but what has he now become? Impossible to say, the conceivable outcomes of such mental instability are infinite.

  “Lochrie, can you not see that you have been just a mirror image of this Kray, to whom you feel so morally superior,” says Cary with his mischievous grin. “You rebelled against the discipline at Middleton, but then went off to find an organisation that imposed a similar discipline.”

  “But it was my choice,” protested Lochrie.

  “Now that is just silly. What is ever just our choice? We act out of necessity – out of a response to certain needs. You had been trained to discipline and you needed discipline to keep yourself together. Subconsciously you knew that. And look at you now you don’t have any structure in your life. Are you happy?”

  “Happy, what is that?”

  “Happy. You know what happy is: it is getting what you want, and what you want is discipline, which you are incapable of generating within yourself. So you go off in search of political justifications for your failings.”

  “Please. Don’t make me laugh,” Lochrie laughs.

  “Seriously, the harder you fight against something, the more you turn into it. That’s what happened with your revolutions. An eye for an eye, and no one remembers whose eye was first. And to make a nation, you need the existing human material, and who made the existing human material? The ancien régime of course. That is why your revolutions will never work – can never work. It is much better – much more enlightened – to simply follow your own selfish interests and see what happens. Enjoy the chase, and forget everything else!”

  “I am not Middleton’s mirror image. That is absurd. My life has been about absenting myself from power.”

  “Hah! The self-delusion of the liberal – particularly the failed liberal. You hate power because you were never good at it. And therefore dream of getting rid of it,” Cary shouts triumphantly.

  “No. There is one thing worse than power: the complete absence of power called anarchy. That is what they have had in Iraq over the last few years: an absence of the state. And an absolute dictator, however evil, is better than that. But that surely is not going to be our yardstick. The state is necessary, so how do we tame the state? Not by diminishing its benign functions, privatising everything and handing over sovereign rule to corporations, but by hemming it in with legislations, constitutional checks and an educational system that encourages freedom of thought.”

  “Well, well, well, you have got it bad! But there is some truth in what you say,” Cary admits. “The bit about anarchy, not the rest. The individual always has to strike out for himself, and change of regime merely means a change of rules. In the end, it is all about power, and without it you can never do what you want.”

  “True, but nor can you when you have it. You are still a puppet of those rules.”

  “You don’t understand. The fun is in getting your own way, even if you don’t really care that much what your own way is,” Cary smiles as he explains. “Once you have made up your mind, you must, if you have any balls, follow through and do everything that logic demands in order to get that way of yours. You’ll probably say with your usual miserabilist obsession with the ‘bigger picture’ that someone who gets their own way has probably not guessed the outcomes correctly and what seems important in one moment proves to be rather insignificant in another, particularly after it has been successfully obtained. So what? You focus on another aim and carry on. People are not in power primarily to obtain ends but for the pleasure of exercising power itself. That is what I want you to give me: a chance to seek power. I really don’t mind if you kill me off in a car crash. No one lives forever, and no one holds power forever. Power’s the thing, and obtaining power by building each little success on the previous one. You just don’t get it, do you? No wonder you’ve been unable to write this book.”

  “Cary, what do you take me for, you foulmouthed fucking bastard! With your blasphemous cult of power! You take me for a sucker. I’m telling you that you simply will not do, because no one is quite so self-aware as you. You’re just too damn honest for your own good.”

  “What do I take you for, Lochrie? I take you for a weak fool and a pathetic liberal, which are the same thing. You remember that character in a Trifonov novel you read recently – the one who looked at a soldier in the war against the Whites and said, ‘that man is one quarter Bolshevik, one half Socialist-Revolutionary, and one quarter Tolstoyan romantic.’ Well, I would describe you as ‘ten per cent communist, twenty-five per cent romantic socialist, fifteen per cent peacenik hippy from the sixties, forty per cent pathetic liberal and ten per cent crabbit old fool.’”

  “I have no problem with that, although I might toy with the percentages.”

  “Which says it all.”

  Cary is right: all states do the same things, only they do them differently and wrap them up in different terminology that often suggests the opposite of what it really is. A state does not become socialist by calling itself socialist; its emphasis on socialist rhetoric may mean that it wishes to jettison elements of its socialism. Now there is
much talk of freedom and democracy, but civil liberties are being torn up in the name of the “war against terrorism”, and bizarre and often unreported reforms to electoral laws are changing the nature of our already flawed democracies. Then there is the rule of law. Lochrie remembers the day two policemen propelled themselves into his home in the late seventies. His wife told him the story when he returned from work. They pushed her aside without showing her their identification and simply announced that they were Special Branch. After finding the kitchen empty, one stopped to question his wife, and the other went off to inspect the rest of the flat. Almost immediately he reappeared slightly flustered. “Out of here,” he said, “there’s a baby asleep in the back room.” His wife reported that one almost apologised as they rushed out, and from the exchange between the two she inferred that they were unhappy with those who had sent them off on a false errand. But isn’t that the problem: intelligence is so rarely intelligent. Without barging into the house, a cursory investigation would have shown that Lochrie could not have been a member of the IRA, the Angry Brigade or the Baader-Meinhof Group. Instead he was at that time a shop-steward with communist leanings who worked as a labourer for a miserable sum that hardly fed his family and could not paper the crumbling plaster walls. But what if they had not found this slightly tattered domestic bliss? How would they have acted then? Very differently, it is quite clear, as their initially forceful behaviour showed that they thought they were going to be tangling with a potentially difficult situation. Had they found Lochrie at home while his wife and child were at the supermarket, things could have taken a very different course.

  All states have their fears and suspicions. Did the KGB agents who went to arrest innocents in the night do this out of sheer badness, or did they honestly believe that they were defending their socialist homeland? The latter must often have been the case, although cynicism would have crept in with the passing years. All states do indeed have their fears and suspicions, but they dismiss those of other states as paranoia, a convenient modern word that turns an understandable phenomenon into a clinical condition. The state’s overreaction often exacerbates terrorism, and terrorism make states more repressive. This has been so since People’s Will, a tiny clandestine organisation with about sixty members and no more than three hundred fellow-travellers, murdered a Tsar. From then on, states with a repressive vocation and no justification for it have seen fit to provide the terrorist acts themselves – to create disorder so that they can re-establish order in ways more congenial to those in power. In this environment of fears and counter-fears that obscure the issues, Lochrie feels that only non-violent actions that are entirely transparent can bring about positive changes. Their aim should be not to take power, but to curb it.

  “But we must act as optimists,” Lochrie says aloud.

  “As optimists?” Cary objects, “that’s insane. Optimism is not just a repudiation of the intellect; it is a dereliction of duty – our duty to live our lives intelligently in the real world, which frankly leaves little room for anything as asinine as optimism.”

  “I did not say we should think as optimists. You know my views on this. We must act as optimists because, if we cannot believe in our future, then our future is lost forever.”

  “So? Let the future look after itself; the present is much more fun. We need to experience life, and to experience life, you have to live in the present. You cannot feel anything in the future; you can look forward to a pleasure but you can’t actually experience it. Even that pleasant feeling of anticipation is actually experienced in the now, not at the time when the future pleasure is or is not experienced. Life is to be lived, and the winner takes all. Everything else is just froth.”

  “You, my friend,” says Lochrie cruelly, “are not going to experience anything – not even in the imaginative world of my mind. You are finished.”

  “Don’t rub it in,” says Cary in a voice full of mock hurt, “but you won’t find me weeping into my whisky. To hell with it, go ahead and write whatever shit you want. They’ve written enough about lovers who go clink when they meet and then quarrel over whose self-obsession is more meritorious. They’ve written enough about quirky policemen and heaps of bodies murdered by the least important characters. They’ve written enough about which dull politician quarrelled with another and slept with a third, and where they left the contraceptive equipment. Write your leftie stuff. No one cares any more but it’s another taste. Everyone wants this year’s flavour – and yours might be it! Old-Labour humbugs have suddenly been found to be good for our cholesterol levels – that would sell it.”

  “You’re a child of your times, Cary. What I like about this age is that it doesn’t believe in anything too much and what I hate about it is that it believes in nothing with such a passion.”

  “And I sure do believe in nothing. I’m your man, I tell you. I am your foil – your cunning weasel who steals off with your egalitarian values like the bandit who kidnaps the virgin. Let’s be honest though, nobody’ll read your shite. Take me on and it’ll give me a new lease of life. We could have fun together.”

  “You’re finished, Cary. You simply won’t do. A story postponed is a story that will never be completed, and a character who hangs around too long is just an irritation.”

  The new generation of writers and intellectuals, comfortably looking down from the lofty heights of their own urbane moral superiority, cannot understand why anyone in another generation would have wanted to be a communist. This is in part because, being so inured to the miseries of this world, they find it difficult to understand why anyone should care so much that they would reach out for radical solutions to impose justice, and in part because hyper-capitalism’s wear and tear of the planet’s fragile fabric makes it look futile to make any attempt to reverse and even halt the machinery of greed. The first reason merely shows the provincialism of the Western enclave of affluence, but the second is terrifyingly unanswerable. Humanity may have passed the “tipping-point” that tips the entire species into oblivion. If you believe this, then a broken humanity is as incapable of avoiding self-destruction through over-consumption as poor broken Lochrie is incapable in the very short term of preventing his internal organs from rotting through over-consumption of alcohol.

  The copy of The Old Middletonian that Lochrie has received is clearly a message. One day Lochrie might write a short story rather than a novel to narrate the meagre and squalid realities behind the photo that comes from the past. And in the meantime, Chris Cary quietly dies as Lochrie’s drunken sleep rearranges the information his brain has gathered during another solitary and formless day.

  AFTERWORD

  Author’s Afterword

  “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto

  c’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva”

  Michelangelo, Rime, 151

  In my first short story, which is in fact part story and part introduction to this collection, the Narrative Voice asserts, “Society moves an inch and they [intellectuals] think it has moved a mile. To my mind, there was only ever a trickle of compassion, and if it’s changed, it hasn’t changed that much.” This caution has to be justified, because it is so difficult to assess something as elusive as compassion, which is by its very nature hidden. What we do have are words, which are still pretty opaque, because the motivation behind words is often mediated by self-interest, although our experience of their tone and content can give us some guidance in interpreting them.

  Next to compassion and not unrelated to it, I develop the theme of passivity, which is represented by the obsessive metaphor of the leaf blown by the wind (I have always been influenced by Borgese in this, whose masterpiece, Rubé, establishes a compelling link between water and death). Passivity is not an absolute (little is) and in “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”, that inability to react has fatal consequences, but the “activism” of Western thought is an irrational intensification of rationalism that exaggerates our ability to make things happen.

 
The idea that something in our lifestyle is already damaging our psyche has become a recurring theme in recent years, and this possibility was foretold long ago in such works as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We or perhaps even in sixteenth-century utopias starting with Thomas More’s original one. However, the inspiration for “The Difficulty Snails Encounter in Mating” came from a radio interview with a former curator of Roslyn Chapel who complained about the increasing numbers of visitors there, following the publishing success of The Da Vinci Code. He was concerned about their footsteps, their breath and, most particularly, their touch. The poor builders of the chapel could never have imagined the fragility of their workmanship or the corrosive power of the human body. Here are the wondrous banality and heroic absurdity of the dreams, fears and fixations that fill our lives. Here is the modern obsession with conserving everything, which is perhaps a reaction against the speed with which our human environment changes. Some Bolsheviks spoke of “permanent revolution” – a doubtful concept, but modern capitalism is the economic form that brings constant disruption and change which undermines our human achievements. Too little change stultifies; too much leaves no room for the solid human relationships that make life bearable and are much more important than affluence.