Allegorizings

by Allegorizings (retail) (epub)

  Leonardo drew at least one working sketch for the structure, and though the project came to nothing, and the Golden Horn remained unbridged until 1845, this sketch survived. Five centuries later Sand resurrected it at Ås, and his miniature masterpiece demonstrates that great art and engineering can never seem out of date—for the bridge looks as though it was devised on some virtuoso’s drawing-board the day before yesterday.

  But Vebjørn Sand had a profounder allegory in mind, too. He saw da Vinci’s design not simply as a bridge for the Sultan, but as a tangible image of The Bridge, in the abstract. His bridge crosses no Golden Horn, after all. It stands alone on the plain there, far from a river or a gorge, taking only a few sightseers and harumscarum bikers over the not terribly busy road below. But the absence of practical purpose, the mere representation of an idea, gives Sand’s visionary project extra metaphorical power. He wanted not only to unite past with present, but also to remind the world that technology is at its best when it is informed with a sense of the transcendental. He saw his and da Vinci’s bridge as “a meeting between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the material realms.”

  I cannot help wondering if old da Vinci thought of his Stamboul bridge in such terms—he was also an enthusiastic designer of war machines. As I sit there with my coffee, though, contemplating the meanings of the bridge, I warm to Sand’s last symbolism. He sees The Bridge itself as a sort of logo for all the nations, and he wants the da Vinci design to be copied all over the world, in every continent, built in local materials and expressing local traditions.

  Perhaps it will never happen, but his little bridge over the E18, where the bikers play, really does seem to me to express a universal hope. No doubt in its original version, if it had ever been built, the brazen armies of the Sultan would have marched over it towards the conquest of the world, but in its cut-down version nothing could look less aggressive. It is an allegory of humanity’s better whole. It is at once a bridge and The Bridge, bigger than itself, but no less beautiful.

  And when I pay my check, drive away towards Stockholm and see for the last time in my driving mirror the gracefully retreating insect form of The Bridge at Ås, what I like best about it is this: that it goes from nowhere to nowhere, which is to say, from everywhere to everywhere else.

  Sex and All That

  IN 2012 THE Church of England, a world-wide Protestant sect of Christianity owing allegiance to the Archbishop of Canterbury, was hopelessly embroiled in controversy about the meaning of marriage, because many members of the homosexual community, male and female, wanted to have weddings in church. Dispute raged among the Anglican divines, meeting from time to time in holy synod, over the notion of men marrying men, and women women, in the sight of God in a consecrated place.

  I know nothing about Christian doctrine, and care even less, but this esoteric dispute incited me to write a letter to the editor of The Times, whose columns had been full of the affair. Could anybody guide me, I wondered, to any religious movement that would marry me and my cat Ibsen?

  I was not joking. I was genuinely perplexed, as I still am, at the absurdities of organized religion, and its insistence that, if there is such a thing as God, the divine blessing can be categorized. Why should my affection for an animal, any less than my affection for a human being, not be worthy of celestial approval? And why, for that matter, should love between men, or love between women, be less sanctifiable than any other amatory arrangement?

  Because of sex, that’s why.

  IT SEEMS TO me that sex is at once a blessing, a necessity, and a bore. A blessing, of course, because it gives us all pleasure, a necessity because the maintenance of life depends upon it, and a crashing bore because one simply cannot evade the subject of it. It pervades everything, from theological debate to stand-up humour, and every year it seems to grasp a younger generation, so that mere infants are paraded in beauty contests, lipsticked and befeathered, or figure in crimes of erotic passion at juvenile courts.

  Mind you, in a way the younger the better, because future generations may tire of the obsession sooner. It really should not dominate the thinking of mature grown-ups. The biological necessity of procreation, after all, is fulfilled long before middle age, and sex should no longer occupy the minds of clergymen or TV audiences. Grow up! Rape apart, the matter of sex is really irrelevant to civil affairs, and one of these days must surely bow out of the comedic repertoire of adults, too. When we are children, we may reasonably find humour in poo or penis, bums or tits, but, dear God, after 9:00 p.m. on Channel 101 we should do away with childish things.

  For the truth is, I believe, that sex is a mere appendage to love, and a minor, purely practical appendage at that. Nature devised it as a means of reproduction, added pleasure to it as an inducement, and attached it to affection as a convenient vehicle—for in my view the grand, majestic, infallible, eternal abstraction of love must surely have taken precedence in the order of creation.

  SO WHY, I cry, should the matter of sex be of more importance to the clergymen than the matter of love? “You must believe in God,” as the Oxford divine Benjamin Jowett used to say, “despite what the clergymen tell you,” and he was right there, if there is a God. What nonsense—what impertinence!—that they should value a mere physical mechanism above the ultimate emotion!

  Of course it is not so long since many of them thought mere miscegenation (by which they meant the union of humans of different colour) was not only a crime but actually a mortal sin. Most of them have progressed since then. Nowadays only the most bigoted of Anglican theorists would balk at the idea of black people marrying white people, so perhaps before long the synod will even recognize holiness in relationships between species. Then God’s blessing might fall upon the love between a donkey and a giraffe, say, or a slug and a mosquito, or a tiger and an ostrich, or even, a bit late in the day, upon my old cat Ibsen and me.

  On Whistling

  ONE NIGHT DURING World War II, on leave in London, I penetrated the blackout to see a show at the London Hippodrome called The Lisbon Story. I forget what it was about, I forget who was in it, but I still have at the back of my mind its theme tune, which was called “Pedro the Fisherman.”

  This is because I have always been fond of whistling, and “Pedro the Fisherman” is the quintessential whistling tune—jaunty, catchy, with a touch of the sentimental and an unobliteratable melody. I like to think that it also expresses the generic character of people who like to whistle, and although I know it can sometimes be intolerable to have an habitual siffleur in the family, forever performing “Pedro the Fisherman,” still I mourn the decline of the whistlers.

  For they are almost a vanished breed these days, and with them has gone a manner of public thought and conduct. Something cocky has left society. The whistling errand boy, the whistling postman, the whistling housewife in her flowered apron, Pedro himself, all were expressing in their often discordant music something at once communal and defiant. On the one hand it was a declaration of liberty, on the other it was a kind of mating call, inviting anybody of like mind to share in its attitudes. By and large, whistlers didn’t give a damn, and if whistling was a cock of the snook at respectability, decorum, and frequently musical good taste, it was fundamentally honest. You might be maddened by the sound of it, but at least you knew you could trust a whistler.

  I don’t know when whistling started, primevally I imagine, but all down the generations the practice has helped to ease the passage of the nations. Think of the marching armies, whistling their way to war! Think of the illicit lovers, whistling home the morning after! Or the errant schoolboys, whistling up their bravado as they make for the headmaster’s study! Whistling not only cheers up the whistler; it invites the world at large to cheer up too.

  Sometimes the practice of whistling is indeed resuscitated, when a whistle tune is made transiently popular by a movie or a TV ad. But it’s never the same. It is whistling, so to speak, to order. It doesn’t spring from the public heart. It c
ontains neither the fine careless rapture nor the spirit of independence that comes from random whistlings in the street.

  Perhaps it takes either joyous success or optimism in adversity, to set the nations whistling again. We of the twenty-first century are in limbo time, injury time maybe. Popular music has mostly abandoned the melodic line, and when I myself need a shot of the old exhilaration I often return to the end of Pedro’s song, which has the fisherman merrily whistling his way to sea with his love in his arms. The tune goes like this—but no, dear friends, I’m afraid you must imagine my lyrical whistle for yourselves.

  On Kissing

  YEARS AGO MY daughter-in-law, learning that I was just off to California, had a T-shirt printed for me with the slogan NO HUG ZONE. She was aware of Californian proclivity in these matters, and she knew how I felt about unsolicited expressions of indiscriminate affection. I wore the shirt sometimes in America, to minimal effect, but anyway I have since been reconciled to off-the-peg hugging, despite the preposterous antics of footballers (and even cricketers these days, dear God!). At its best, of course, a hug is a generous gesture of friendship, reconciliation, and shared enthusiasm, but even at its worst I see it now as a harmless display of camaraderie, even of common fellowship in the family of man. Long ago it used to be a useful physical device for stabbing an enemy in the back, in the most literal sense. Nowadays even its hypocrisy is mild.

  But profligate kissing is a different matter. To my mind a kiss means infinitely more than a hug. I know that many peoples around the world have always used it as a casual form of greeting­—in London the quick peck on either cheek used to be the standard onstage identification of a Frenchman—but its adoption in the English-speaking nations has got out of hand. In my opinion it must be curbed. Aesthetically, morally, hygienically, even functionally it has been degraded into the silliest form of social cliché.

  Today it is not only the theatrical sort of folk who cry “Darling!” at plush restaurants and assault you with kisses. Everybody does it now. Meet for a coffee at Starbucks, and it starts and ends with kisses. Run into your next-door neighbour at Tesco, and you get a smacker. Hardly have you been introduced to some total stranger, indeed, than you are air-kissed when you part. Mistletoe? Who needs mistletoe!

  But in fact those old sprigs of Christmas were a reminder of the marvellous and mysterious heritage of the kiss. It was no mere peck on the cheek, it was history’s most notorious moment of betrayal, when the traitor Judas kissed his master Jesus in the garden. A kiss is not something to be given lightly, or even light-heartedly. It has to it the quality of a pledge, together with intimations of destiny. When the clergyman says to the bridegroom, “You may now kiss the bride,” he is (or should be) inviting them to remember Judas, and seal their own solemn promise with the very talisman of trust, a kiss.

  In high art, too, the symbolical power of the kiss has often expressed itself. The Kiss, with a capital K, was the title Auguste Rodin gave to his iconic celebration of love’s meaning—two people in the ultimate embrace of embraces, physical sex and mental emotion transcendentally united in erotica. Gustav Klimt famously painted The Kiss, too, but in his version the lovers had actually become part of the kiss themselves, transformed by its golden sensuality.

  But nowadays it’s just “Wow! Haven’t seen you for simply ages”—and plonk comes the inevitable kiss. It may not even be plonk, indeed, but only one of those trendy near-miss kisses, or maybe one of the lubricious kind that leaves lipstick everywhere, or the careful sort where the two combatants both wear spectacles, or the fastidious sort wary of flu or halitosis.

  Whatever kind it is, there is no nobility to it—and of all the human gestures, to my mind, the kiss from the heart, the kiss of conviction, the kiss of true love—of all the signs we humans make to one another, the Kiss, with a capital K, is surely the noblest of all. Dumb down your humour, if you like, trivialize your bedroom sex, degrade your religion, infantilize your animals, but give your kisses the grand mystical respect they warrant.

  A Plea for Bad Language

  IT SEEMS TO me that bad language is not what it was, at least in English. The blasphemous oaths of old have lost their potency, and except in comic books one seldom sees those explosively suggestive rows of asterisks, exclamation marks, and such that used to stand for bowdlerizing.

  The blasphemy, of course, means little nowadays. A religious reference used to give a curse or an oath extra authenticity, but nowadays most of us don’t for a moment hesitate to take the name of God in vain, and anyway most of the sacred content was long ago elided into the language. How many of us, when we use the grand old expletive “bloody,” recall that we are invoking (“by our Lady”) the mother of Christ? Not a stage Cockney in a million, brought up on My Fair Lady, knows when he utters the compulsory “Gorblimey” that he is really challenging God to blind him. When a Welsh-speaker exclaims “Godacia!,” his equivalent of Damn!, he little realizes he is echoing the old English curse “God ache you!”

  But as religious conviction faded, so did the power of the blasphemous idiom. Even in the nineteenth century a British imperial official, submitting a bulletin about one of the remoter possessions, could report without fear of reproval that the country was bloody, and so were the people. When sex began to supplant religion in the public consciousness, its excitements and taboos became more fertile sources of bad language, but now they, too, are weakening. Only a year or two ago I was proud to get away with using, in the pages of an eminent London daily, the word “bugger,” one of Churchill’s epithets, but today it is edging its way into polite conversation. “Arse” has just about made it already, and in fact sexual idioms are so commonplace these days that their contribution to bad language has lost all meaning. As long ago as the Second World War I learnt that when a sergeant major barked, “Get a fucking move on,” he was being more or less convivial: it was only when he omitted the obscenity that he really meant what he said.

  By now the F-word has become so commonplace, throughout the English-speaking world, that one does not even notice it. Children use it in the street. Novelists make the most of it. It has become, in the lexicon of scurrility, a word without meaning. And it is in this way, I fear, that the whole repertoire of bad language is losing its true function and its style—the function of shock, the style of effect. “Bugger off!” really meant something when Churchill used it half a century ago: today it is milksop stuff.

  Time has overtaken the vocabulary, because it was based upon now unfashionable conceptions—the mystery of religion, the taboos of sex. What we need now, if the tradition is to be revived, is a glossary of bad language based upon contemporary obsessions, and in particular upon the universal influences of the computer—the Grand and Universal Mystery of our time. Already we think far more about the Internet than about the Last Judgement, and one day, I dare say, reality sex will outdate copulation itself.

  We need some cyber-swearing, some reality expletives, to reflect these changes. “Blog off!,” perhaps, or “Up your USB!,” or “What a load of apping, synching, twittering b——ls.” And in case some prissy editor bowdlerizes that last word before it gets into print, let me conclude with this one:

  On Kindness

  MOST POLITICIANS WOULD give their eyes for a dedicated spiritual constituency. Islamic leaders have one, in the mass of their fervent fellow believers. American presidents, if they are sufficiently evangelical, can rely upon that huge body of American Christian fundamentalists who will see him as one of their own. Much of western Europe, though, is now almost impenetrably secular. Few of us go to church or chapel, most of us are probably agnostic if not decidedly atheistic, and the rest are split into infinite sectarian divisibilities of faith.

  But potentially uniting us all, as a force of incalculable strength, is the power of kindness. Kindness, it seems to me, is the one abstraction that can guide our conduct while we await the final revelation (if there is one). It does not pretend to know causes, it does not demand explana
tions, it accepts all that is loftiest in the religions, and everyone knows what it means. It is a homely conception, unlike love, the Christian preference, which has more complex emotional or sexual connotations, and makes impossible demands upon us. It even stands apart from allegory, because it has no deeper meaning than itself. When Shakespeare set out to characterize a despicable villain, he called him bloody, bawdy, remorseless, treacherous and lecherous, but the climax of his invective, his ultimate, absolute adjective of evil, was—“kindless.”

  I believe kindness to be a vastly potent asset, for anyone who can harness its energies. It is not just that it is non-religious, or inter-religious. It is omni-religious! Everyone understands the meaning of kindness, and all the great faiths pay service to it. We need no theologians to explain it to us. The least literate of tabloid readers knows what it is about.

  Most Western politicians dare not venture into the transcendental, because the moment they tread any religious path, they bore to death most of their electors, and antagonize nearly all the others. But in my opinion there is no context in which the idea of kindness could not play a winning role. The kinder the party, the greater its majority would be; the kinder the leader, the more securely in office; the kinder the State, the more stable. Kissing babies has always been a messy and unconvincing duty of electoral candidates: extending the same emotion as a political manifesto, preferably with a more sincere enthusiasm, could sway the opinions of millions.

  In short I believe there to be, latent in kindness, a great conceptual weapon only waiting to be brandished: grander than mere religion, far nobler than greed, more convincing than any political creed. One day years ago, sitting with a friend in a bar in Edinburgh, I embarked upon an impassioned spiel concerning the power of the notion, and in my heightened condition told the barmaid that one day there would be a plaque where I sat, commemorating the birth of the Party of Kindness. “Is that so?” she simply said. “And will I fill your glasses in the meantime?” I wish I really could have seized the idea when I was young, and set out to change the world, but it’s too late now.