You can read Will Self writing about his addiction to vaping at Esquire magazine here.
On freedom and determinism
You can listen to an edited version of a recent Guardian Live talk between Will Self and John Gray here.
On location: Maps, territories and train toilets
Can I be alone in finding the new toilets on trains peculiarly unsettling? There is something about all those buttons and lights, about the way the curved door groans shut, that contrives to make these smallest rooms feel provisional and exposed. I miss the heft and security of a toilet door you can shut and bolt manually: what automation gives, it can so easily take away, leaving your buttocks exposed to the commuting multitudes.
Anyway, I was meditating on this the other day as I wandered along the 7.13pm Brighton-to-London train. The first toilet I got to was of the robotic variety, and the automatic door was broken – confirming all my unease – but the second was of the traditional type, so I shuffled happily inside, snibbed, and was preparing to answer the call of nature when I noticed that the toilet seat was haloed by a photographic transfer depicting the London Eye Ferris wheel.
It wasn’t the end of this decalcomania by any means: the dinky sink was backed by Big Ben; the ventilation panel in the door was bracketed by the dome of St Paul’s and Nelson’s Column; and the soap dispenser was implanted in the façade of Westminster Cathedral, while one of Battersea Power Station’s chimneys formed a sort of trompe l’oeil pilaster. So I sat there, lurching towards Three Bridges yet surrounded by images of London, and naturally my thoughts turned to the way images of places are stuck on to other places.
Of course, the whole go-round of commoditisation depends on images – but while you seldom see a photograph of a brand new toaster stuck on to an old one, you will often see a beautiful Barbadian beach adhering tenaciously to a grotty billboard in Solihull, or an Andean mountaintop looming above a jumble of cardboard boxes outside the service entrance of a Tesco superstore near Uttoxeter. Particularly at this time of year, the vertical surfaces of the cities and towns we neglect are camouflaged with the holiday destinations we fervidly desire; indeed, for the next few months many of us will happily wade through our daily shit while fantasising about our fortnight of sauntering barefoot across sable sands. But it’s not only exotic places we plaster across our ordinary spaces; in recent years the city’s exterior has become a corkboard on to which are pinned images of putative interiors.
No new development, whether it be office, industrial, commercial or residential, is complete without its own computer visualisation of how it will look once built, stuck to a massive hoarding that obscures the actual construction. Once upon a time such images were simple statements of intent; however, in recent years they have come to embody subtle narratives concerning the good life. Giant and pristine thirtysomethings sip cappuccino, romp in Terry towelling robes, or, clad entirely in Cameroonian casuals (think a pink Pringle cashmere woolly loosely knotted around a lightly tanned neck), stroll hand in hand past postmodernist water features. As our housing stock grows older and older, so these Potemkin village posters grow more and more strident – exhorting us to aspire to being anywhere else than where we in fact are.
The Polish-American mathematician and philosopher Alfred Korzybski coined the expression “the map is not the territory” to express the idea that there is a fundamental disjunction between a representation and what it represents. He believed that it is in the depiction of geographical features that this is most clearly demonstrated – after all, how could anyone mistake a few ink marks on a crinkly bit of paper for a hill or a wood? Nevertheless, Korzybski realised, we do: I, for one, have had the deranging experience of staring uncomprehendingly at a vista, convinced it must be “wrong”, because a feature detailed on my map was nowhere to be seen. The errancy used to creep in when we were confused about our location, our orientation, or both – but nowadays, with GPS-enabled hand-held technology, we always know where we are, and which way we’re facing has become quite immaterial.
Why? Well, if the map is not simply of the territory, but stuck on to the territory; and if the map doesn’t represent the territory as it is – albeit at a reduced scale – but rather the territory as we would like it to be, either now or some time in the future, and at an enhanced scale, then who can dispute that its epistemic value is greater than that of some scabrous office block or muddy building site? We no longer live in real cities, towns and villages, but rather in virtualisations of bizarre, chimerical places: the Blue Danube waltzes along beside the Manchester Shipping Canal, while the Potala Palace hovers mystically above a Portaloo …
… Which brings me, rather neatly, back to the 7.13pm Brighton-to-London train. Why, I thought to myself, need I go to the Smoke at all, when I’ve experienced most of its iconic architecture simply by squatting in this malodorous cubicle? And so I rose, girded myself up and detrained at Three Bridges, only to find myself standing in front of the Bridge of Sighs. I would’ve been discombobulated had I just left Brighton – because so far as I’m aware there’s no direct rail service from there to Venice. However, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express departs daily from St Pancras station, an image of which was plastered across the bin in the facility I’d lately quit. So the old toilet was, indeed, deeply reassuring.
Madness of crowds: individuals and society
In his story “An Outpost of Progress” – a prototype for the novella Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad writes of his colonialist protagonists that they were “two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organisation of civilised crowds”. This perspective on the crowd is alien to us; we are perfectly prepared to believe that the crowd “dehumanises”; that when we find ourselves in a stampeding herd of crazed people, we ourselves may lose our reason and thereby our very individuality. What we find it harder to accept is that we may be who we are at all solely by virtue of the crowd. Conrad continues: “Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”
So safe are those surroundings – for the average New Statesman reader, at least – that we forget all about the way our being is shaped socially, and start bellyaching about our fellows; as if it is they who constitute “the crowd”, with its weird panics, fads and delusions, while we mysteriously arrogate to ourselves the most exalted freedom of the will. I am always on the lookout for evidence of swarming behaviour in Homo sapiens, and I find it most tellingly in the epiphenomena that result from collective behaviours it is quite impossible for us to change.
Take the BlueMotion Volkswagen Golf. I drive one of these from time to time because the car club I belong to uses them. They’re perfectly sound examples of German engineering, but for some daft reason every time you come to a halt – at a traffic light, say – and disengage the clutch, the engine cuts out. Then when amber glows and you re-engage, the engine snorts back to life. Madness! Yes, yes, I know the thinking that informs such technologies (we’re going to use them to avert global warming); but even a few seconds pondering the matter leads to the conclusion: this can’t possibly work. Humanity burgeoned precisely because of its interaction with technology, but progress – inasmuch as it’s occurred at all – has never been a function of central planning, but rather a piecemeal series of fixes.
And that’s what BlueMotion is: a way of making vaguely “environmental” types with large chunks of disposable cash feel better about themselves – because any reduction in CO2 emissions the technology affords will be cancelled out many times over if they take a single plane flight. The melioristic view about global warming, advanced in the Stern report and now given a new lease of life by Naomi Klein (World’s Most Earnest Person), is that we can fix it by being better, kinder, more co-operative and cleverer people. Easy-peasy, eh? Yet if we listen to Conrad, who we are is solely a function of who everyone else is: “The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd . . .”
Note well: “every great and every insignificant thought”. So, even if we all have the thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if we all worked together to lessen inequality, curtail consumption, and so at least palliate the fervid atmosphere,” as night follows day this is obviated by the insignificant thought: “Wouldn’t it be great to fly to Faliraki”, or, “I bet a 56-inch ultra-high-definition TV would look great in that corner.” We like to envision society as an orchestra; individual players may fluff the occasional note or phrase but the overall coherence of the band mitigates this, and so the piece being played still sounds harmonious. However, Conrad was perfectly clear about the nature of our crowd mentality: “[It] believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion.”
This isn’t a subtle, supple, self-aware and self-correcting orchestra at all – rather, it reminds me of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an experimental musical group set up by the composer Gavin Bryars in the 1970s. The only requirement for joining the Sinfonia was that you couldn’t play your instrument. The results were great chuntering and yawping versions of popular classics; nevertheless, from the squalls of sound the alert listener would still piece together the traduced melody of Thus Spake Zarathustra, or “The Blue Danube”. The Sinfonia were so successful that their single “Classical Muddly” reached the Top 40 in 1981. How can we account for this lunacy if not by evoking the blind faith in institutions of which Conrad wrote?
We believe so blindly that when a group of people in evening dress sit down in a concert hall and begin to play they will produce music, that we are prepared to ignore the racket; and, by the same token, we believe so blindly in our own ineffable individuality that we neglect to notice how beautifully articulated our stereotypies are: we saw away at the same old tunes – reason, progress, the good, the beautiful and the true – quite convinced that it’s our arm willing the bowing. Yet if we allowed ourselves even an infinitesimal fermata, we would be assailed by the cacophonous crowd of automata surrounding us. This is the “high organisation” that renders our very existence possible – not the music of the spheres, but a caterwauling classical muddly.
On skyscrapers
Read Will Self writing about the meaning of skyscrapers for Guardian Review here.
Real meals: Virgin snack boxes
Sometimes I ask myself in all sincerity – is Richard Branson real? Please note, the question is not “Is Richard Branson for real?” (the sort of locution he himself might have used back in the days when he edited Student), but rather: “Does he exist in any meaningful sense at all?”
I continue to ask myself this question even though I have actually met Branson and shaken him by the hand. Seeing wasn’t believing – nor, it appears, was touching; Branson will have to work much harder than Jesus Christ, for instance, if he wants me to lend him any credence, let alone have faith in his heavenly transport. True, he does have important similarities to the Christ: both are depicted as bearded and long-haired; both are fair-skinned; both have a message for all of mankind. But in Branson’s favour: although I have only hearsay to go on when it comes to Christ’s catering, I have feasted on Virginal loaves and fishes many times.
All of this flashed through my mind the other day when a steward plonked a complimentary Virgin snack box down on the Virgin table in front of me, and then strode on along the carriage of the 12.35 Virgin Trains service from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. “Wow,” I said to Barry Sheerman, the MP for Huddersfield, who’d come looking for the steward and found me instead, “that’s a hell of a snack box.”
And indeed it was: a foursquare little thing, its flimsy cardboard manifold cleverly printed with trompe l’oeil wickerwork, leather luggage labels and handle so that it resembled a miniature picnic hamper. I knew that as far as Barry was concerned, fakery was the order of the day, because when he’d clapped eyes on me he said: “You’re an actor, aren’t you?” I had to spend some time disabusing him – after which we both had to spend a lot more time chatting, because Barry was taught by my dad at the London School of Economics, back in the days when there went out from Caesar Augustus a decree that all the world should be taxed.
To me the pseudo picnic box was yet more evidence of Branson’s unreality, and yet Barry believed the Virgin Richard’s corporeality was evidenced by a simple fact: “You realise he’s won the East Coast Line franchise, don’t you?” I did indeed know that, but I was still worshipping the iconic snack box, and although I tried to explain its significance, eventually Barry grew bored and wandered back to his own seat. I remained staring at the snack box – it wasn’t the most bizarre foodie-industrial skeuomorph I’d seen that week, but it was up there. As regular consumers of this column will know, a skeuomorph is a once-functional design element repurposed to be purely decorative. In the case of the snack box this was its printed wickerwork’s evocation of lazy afternoons on the river at Henley, with Montmorency performing tricks, and with the hamper’s lightweight yet sturdy construction keeping sandwiches and bottled light ale gently aerated.
However, my youngest son had spotted a weirder bit of trompe l’oeil earlier in the week: a Chicago Town Stuffed Crust Four Cheese Melt pizza box that had, printed along its edge, the fake edge of a cardboard box (two-ply cardboard, with a wavy cardboard line in between). We both examined this packaging mutation, marvelling at a world in which a product designer would choose to camouflage a cardboard box as a cardboard box. Mind you, the Chicago Town pizza itself was only masquerading as a pizza – yet this didn’t help much when it came to accepting the reality of the Virgin snack box and, by extension, the existence of Richard Branson. Abandoned by Barry Sheerman, whose ministerial experience might have shed some light on the problem, I fell balefully to examining the snack box. It inspired me to an act of epoché or “bracketing”, as defined by the philosopher Edmund Husserl: I suspended all judgements about the existence or otherwise of the external world, and therefore my own capacity (or Richard Branson’s) to act within it.
Thankfully this scepticism worked, and the reality or otherwise of box and Branson ceased to trouble me. Then I tried rebooting by examining the phenomena that were given to me immediately in consciousness – and the trouble instantly recurred, because the phenomena I perceived were: first, an idea of an egregious bearded entrepreneur; and second, a snack box printed so as to resemble a miniature picnic hamper. It was a devilish conundrum, one such as might have been devised by Descartes’s malignant deceiver. As to breaking the spell by, say, opening the snack box and eating its contents, such an action was anathema to me. What if it contained a Branson homunculus, one that tried to sell me Virgin Money?
I resolved instead to take the snack box home with me and keep it for ever, for ever sealed. It is sitting on my desk as I type this, and although it has the innocent appearance of a mass-market catering pack, I know that it is really a veritable Pandora’s box, from which all the world’s ills might erupt, should I be foolish enough to fancy a light bite.
In search of the blues
All You Need is Cash is a 1978 TV mockumentary written by and starring Eric Idle of the Pythons and his long-term comic collaborator Neil Innes. In the film, The Beatles are satirically reformed as The Rutles, but as well as taking an affectionate swipe at the Fab Four (re-dubbed The Prefab Four), Idle and Innes extended their comic vision to the British blues revival of the early Sixties.
In one sublime scene, the hapless reporter journeys to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the origins of The Rutles’ distinctive sound; upon interviewing some blind, crippled, or otherwise disabled old bluesman on the broken-down porch of his cotton-pickin’ shack, he is bamboozled by this strange inversion of musical history: “We learnt everything we know from The Rutles,” the ancient man croaks, “there was no music here at all before we heard their records.”
As it happens, having a nascent teenage guitar hero in the house, I’d watched All You Need is Cash not long before I myself trained, planed and automobiled my family all the way to Clarksdale, Mississippi, the so-called “cradle of the blues” – even so, I was shocked when the man who was checking us into the Shack Up Inn outside of town looked up from the register, and in reply to the question I’d put to him said: “Well, y’know, hereabouts we learnt everything we know about the blues from… The Rutles.”
OK, granted, he didn’t actually say this, but he did utter words pretty much to the same effect.
It was a modest 90°C with 90 per cent humidity in Clarksdale; I hadn’t so much walked as splodged my way into the corrugated iron lobby of the Shack Up Inn. With heat like this, my conversation with the man on the desk was of necessity to the point: “Have you got a guitar we can borrow?” was my first sally, to which his reply was a thumb jabbed at three nearby acoustics on stands, and a growled, “Them are all loaners.”
My next question was equally direct: “Do you know where the crossroads are at which Robert Johnson bartered his soul with the devil so he could become the greatest blues guitarist of all time?”
Again, the Shack Up Inn man didn’t hesitate for a second, and much in the manner of anyone in the hospitality industry directing a wayward tourist, he told me that while the officially recognised “crossroads” was where Highway 61 and Highway 49 intersect in what passes for downtown Clarksdale, he personally favoured a more secreted junction, where the old Simmons Road intersected with Ritchie Avenue. This was, my informant vouchsafed a far “shadier” part of town, full of the kinds of authentic juke joints where, to put it bluntly, white folks don’t go.
Read the rest of Will’s article at Esquire here.
On location: statues
The 20ft-high statue of brave Achilles that stands at the southern end of Park Lane, beside Hyde Park, wears a curious aspect. The first male nude statue to be erected in London since the Roman era, it was cast from captured French guns and dedicated by “the women of England to Arthur, Duke of Wellington and his brave companions in arms”. The women of England turned out when, in 1822, Richard Westmacott’s statue was conveyed through the streets to its plinth; however, it isn’t recorded whether they were abashed or amazed by Achilles’s, um, classical proportions. The critic Leigh Hunt described the statue as “manifesting the most furious intentions of self-defence against the hero whose abode it is looking at”. And indeed, the great bronze warrior cowers to this day, shield upraised, as if Apsley House (aka “No 1, London”, the nearby house given to Arthur Wellesley by the grateful nation) were about to rise up into the heavens and drop on his head.
Whenever I drive up Park Lane and see craven Achilles it makes me feel naked and vulnerable – and that’s before I’ve clapped eyes on the rest of the so-called public art cluttering up the median strip between the Hilton and Marble Arch. Over the years we’ve had upturned horses’ heads, an anodised Fiat 500, Gordian knots of extruded steel and God knows what other botched attempts at realistic figuration, subjective expression, or conceivably both.
I blame the women of England: before Achilles began his (to date) 193-year-long flashing incident, statues were first and foremost hieratic, either expressing the sacerdotal nature of power or emphasising the power of the sacred. Just like the nobs who commissioned them, the nudes of the 18th century only gradually came creeping out of country-house salons and into the landscaped garden – but by the mid-19th century there were all sorts of bizarre statues being plonked down hither and thither.
That certain mega-figures became associated with their respective cities only goes to show … Well, what? I’ve ridden the switchback railway up Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; standing at the summit was Christ the Redeemer, performing a benediction while wreathed in clouds. He didn’t look very happy – and nor was I. On the flanks of the mountain, and spreading away inland, are Rio’s favelas, where the homicide rate is such that more people have died in the city since the beginning of the First Intifada (1987) than have perished in the whole of Israel-Palestine. If Jesus Christ is Rio’s genius loci then He is not the milquetoast depicted in the New Testament but one of the manifestations of Olodumare, the creator-deity of the Brazilian Candomblé religion, a syncretism of Catholicism and Yoruba beliefs whose adherents believe not in striving to be moral, but in fulfilling their individual destiny whatever the consequences.
The figuration of the Roman goddess Libertas that stands, torch upraised, on a plinth-island in Upper New York Bay formed by the shells of myriad extinct bivalves could be viewed in a similar light. This touchstone of the Enlightenment is the default destination for all benighted tourists. I took the boat trip round the statue for the first time last year. It was the climactic day of the week-long Gay Pride celebrations in Manhattan, and, dragging my offspring through overcooked streets crammed with revellers, I began to feel a certain – wholly unjustified – heterosexual resentment. It looked to be cooler out in the Bay, but in fact we were treated to a wittily bilious hour-long commentary by a woman from Queens whose native New Yorker pride was offset only by her animus towards Wall Street’s deluded Masters of the Universe.
In his poem “For the Union Dead”, Robert Lowell anatomises the memorial that stands in the north-eastern corner of Boston Common, featuring a bas-relief of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first volunteer force of African Americans raised to fight for the north. Lowell writes:
William James could almost hear the
bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
I’d argue that all such monuments – godly or temporal – stick in cities’ throats. In Straw Dogs, his chapbook of aphorisms, John Gray notes: “In cities, persons are shadows cast by places, and no generation lasts as long as a street.” An aperçu that makes of every civic dignitary an Ozymandias, drawing a bead on us through the gunsights of Time.
This isn’t at all reassuring, because I don’t think I can bear the thought that some (if not all) of the tat that passes for public art in Britain will long outlast me. It’s just as disturbing as the inverted scenario whereby an ancient statue of great beauty – such as the Bamiyan Buddhas – is destroyed within one’s lifetime. Yet it is chilling to picture some survivor of the apocalypse clambering through the rubble of St Pancras and coming upon the sightless eyes of Paul Day’s crappily kitsch giant lovers. Will they see the statue as evidence of a long-gone civilisation populated by cartoonish humanoids? Or will they set to excavating the rubble from the embracing figures so as to find out whether the male one has a more impressively thrusting sword than … Achilles?
The Nature of Time
The madness of crowds: monitoring extremism in universities
On 2 February a crowd of maddened professors wrote to the Guardian to protest against the government’s latest counterterrorism and security bill, which was being hustled through parliament with unseemly haste. The larval bill has now emerged from its neo-Gothic chrysalis to become a beautifully inelegant act. What the professors were so crazy about are the provisions in Section 5 that place an obligation on their universities to assist the police and security services in monitoring extremism. In fact, the so-called Prevent strategy has been in place and affecting universities for over a decade. It has hitherto been incumbent on universities that have been signed up to the strategy to allow the state authorities access to relevant computer data, including students’ emails and web history. Now that requirement will become universal and mandatory.
The maddened crowd of professors sought to remind our legislators that academic freedom is enshrined in the Education Act 1986, which places an obligation on universities to “ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and visiting speakers”. Those ludicrous Branestawms seemed to think there was some conflict between the law on the statute book and the new legislation. In fact, any British student who’s a member of a group affiliated to Fosis (the Federation of Student Islamic Societies) is almost certainly under some kind of surveillance; not – as regular readers of this column will know – that I regard this as being particularly intrusive, given that the secret affairs of HMG are more often typified by egregious cock-up than by effective conspiracy.
Nevertheless, as a Muslim student recently put it to me, “I came to university believing that I was going to be educated in the Socratic method: that there’d be no bounds on what could be thought or said, and that this was an integral aspect of the inquiry.” No, really, this is pretty much verbatim – and I was tempted to reply: “With eloquence like that at your disposal, you hardly need what passes for a higher education nowadays.” But of course I didn’t, because the truth of the matter is that although I’d heard this debate rumbling on in the background since the 7/7 bombings, I never really considered what its impact might be on young and impressionable minds.
The nub of the problem is that if the aim of Prevent is to, um, prevent young people from thinking extremist thoughts, then any course of study that encourages them to consider extremist viewpoints is, ipso facto, against the law. But if the aim of Prevent is to encourage our espoused values – such as tolerance for different viewpoints, critical thinking and democratic accountability – then precisely such a course of study must be mandated. This catch-22 epitomises our confused and paradoxical thinking about the threat that Islamist extremism represents to our society. (And I say “our society” advisedly: the threat Islamism represents to people in, say, Raqqa, is entirely different.) At a White House conference on extremism and terrorism on 18 February, Barack Obama bloviated: “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” and added: “No religion is responsible for terrorism – people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”
It’s difficult to know how to unpick this conceptual tangle, but one place to begin might be to say: OK, clearly nobody can be “at war” with an abstraction such as religion (or “drugs”, for that matter) but surely we can agree that religious ideas are present in the disturbing ideological gallimaufry of Islamist extremism? Well, no, not if you’re a western policymaker, because to acknowledge that religious beliefs can be a prime political mover is to lend them the very sort of credence they claim to represent. In the States, where millions of voters regard their religious beliefs as precisely that, Obama’s words must induce still more cognitive dissonance into the collective consciousness; yet for him and our own rather more secular leaders, “politicising” the militants doesn’t help either. After all, to concede that the terrorists may have political aims is implicitly to acknowledge that Muslim communities – in the Middle East and globally – may have justifiable grievances.
And so the whole sad, sorry go-round of equivocation-masquerading-as-moral-certainty continues. Fatally compromised by its own historic compromise between religion and politics (as if the two could ever be entirely decoupled), the west continues to substitute paranoia for the quality most needed to combat extremism: belief. Belief and, dare I say it, nerve. We need to believe in just those values of tolerance, openness and free speech that the new act so clearly vitiates; and we need the nerve to maintain such beliefs in the face of threats against them. Naturally, if we western secularists could admit to ourselves that our own values are articles of faith rather than demonstrable truths we would probably have more success with the young and impressionable crowd of potential jihadists. They may not all be as acute as the student I spoke to, but if there’s one thing young people detect in their elders – and one thing that repels them from their elders’ values – it’s a urinous tang of hypocrisy, such as hangs over a crowd of MPs as they rush through a division lobby.
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