Head Soup

The last two months have been pretty tough, not so much on me as on the people I love. As a result I haven’t had any time to work and, as I sit down at my desk again – back in Sao Paulo, with the air clear after a storm and the lit boxes of other people’s lives remote across the rain-sweet night – I feel horribly blocked up. And I keep suffering from the urge to use this space to try and say something which will sum it all up and perhaps make sense of it. But it’s not my place to do that and, also, I can’t get away from the feeling that it would make pretty heavy going for a disinterested reader.

So instead of talking about life-stuff, I’m going to try and throw down here some of the head-stuff which has been sluicing around my mental washing-up bowl for the past couple of months. I’ll try and write it as a one-shot (I’ve got a fearful-big pile of other stuff to be getting on with), and I’ll try and keep it short and sort of impressionistically interesting. Hopefully if you join the dots you might see some kind of pattern. 

1. When Baroness Mary Warnock claimed that we don’t recreate our moral outlook, but simply revert to the one we learned during formative educational encounters, it was really just the flipside to James Murphy singing ‘I wish I could complain more about the rich, but then / All their children would … Come to every show / Drugged and unwashed / And no one / Wants that’. The point is, kids listen even when their parents are too far gone.  

2. Don’t let your inner Mondeo driver tell you that poetry (a.k.a. philosophy) makes nothing happen. Ideas only gain substance in the act of transmission, after you’ve let them go.

3. The Occupy Movement is the latest iteration of non-conformist thought. The exact same impulse has existed ever since there was a feudal landlord or factory owner and someone became suspicious not merely of power but the mechanisms of power. The Diggers, Peter Kropotkin and the CNT during the Spanish Civil War are other examples.

4. Kropotkin’s idea that it is mutual aid rather than competition which determines the survival of a species (pace Darwin) is supported by the fact that homo sapiens ensured its survival by coalescing into farming groups and learning to mill and bake grains which were otherwise indigestible, thereby securing food sources unavailable to other species.

5. I nicked that idea from A History of the World in 100 Objects. Another interesting bit of trivia I picked up from that show was that the maximum number of contacts in most people’s mobile phones is around 200 – which happens to be the same size as the average Stone Age community. This suggests that we’re genetically programmed to live in small communities and everything we did after the invention of the wheel was a big mistake.

6. According to Rousseau, natural liberty is the freedom we enjoy in a primitive communion with nature. It’s antithetical to society, but that’s OK, because once we enter society we exchange natural liberty for civil liberty, which is the freedom to determine our own condition (morally, financially and so forth) within the limits imposed by the general will. This is the only way, according to Rousseau, in which man (or woman) truly makes himself (or herself) his own (her own) master (mistress).

7. You can walk into a restaurant in India and there’s a sadhu sipping his tea next to some workmen, a clerk from the railway, a couple of women travelling home for a wedding. That faraway look in his eyes could merely be the desire for another sandwich or a glimpse of the infinite. As far as I know, you don’t get that proximity to mysticism anywhere else these days. Europe had it in the Middle Ages, but the excessive power of the church led to the excesses of the clergy, which led in turn to Martin Luther, and mysticism was eventually buried beneath the austerities of Protestantism. And what filled the vacuum? Pleasure, consumption, the endless hunger of capitalism.  

8. A very tidy construction from Bernard Henri-Levy: theology is philosophy, he said, because even if you think God is dead, He left his testimony to man – and that testimony is philosophy.

9. Whenever you exit from the anxious, deracinated limbo of international air travel, passing up through the insomniac hum of the jet bridge, it’s the smell which first anchors you to your location: in Brazil, a warm blanket of cheese and cologne; in the UK, Chanel No. 5 and baked beans.

10. Remember that complaint from Fox News about how the new Muppet movie is the latest instalment in Hollywood’s unfair victimisation of down-trodden oil magnates and the hard-working folk of the American right? Well, I call shenanigans. Surely the illiberal contingent on this planet (Fox News anchors, dictators, psychopaths) get to call dibs on every action movie ever made, from Rambo to Spiderman to 300. And the reason for that is because any film where power and violence are fetishised is readily available as a massive wank bank for paranoid, violent nuts. Nerds (like me) love things like Spiderman because it fulfils our underdog fantasies. But Spiderman also speaks to the wacko, proto-tyrant who distrusts the government and wishes he could kill the man in front of him for taking too goddamn long in the ticket queue. 

11. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet should have won more awards. I suspect that it didn’t because David Mitchell put a postmodern engine beneath the bonnet of a historical fiction, and this juxtaposition was simply too much for most critics. By a postmodern engine, I mean that he took great delight in alternating not only between genres (from orthodox historical fiction to a love story, then a ghost story, a samurai story, a high-sea story, and so on), but also tones – from scatological humour to minimal, haiku lyricism to salty nautical prose. Perhaps the cognoscenti prefer the monotony of a serious novel, while the history fans prefer their history straight. If so, they’re forgetting that the age we live in is absurd and contradictory and that art has the option of reflecting this condition by distorting its surface. Then the distortion becomes the meaning. In this sense, which is to say in its structure, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet emerges as a thoroughly serious, intellectually rigorous modern novel fully the equal of the other big names on the list.

12. Trying to write something which looks delicate is just as bloody hard as hammering the ideas out properly – and takes just as long.

From Tristes Tropiques

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

This quote is very beautiful, and brings to mind two thoughts: 1) That we really might have graduated to a paradigm in which philosophy provides the most accurate reflection of the human condition (following the equivalent dominance of epic poetry - analogous with martial society - and novel writing, which was analogous with bourgeois society; and 2) that this sort of philosophy really does have a kind of formal, aesthetic value which constitutes part of the text's meaning.

Please note: this is the author with a monkey. I could not find a picture of him with a cat. Although, to be honest, I didn't try very hard. 

Mantiqueira Notes

You leave the city just as the storm hits. Brown rivers cut the roads in half, sudden lakes form and filthy gouts of water boil up through the tarmac. You join a convoy of vehicles which weaves in and out between the rising waters, through newly deserted bairros and under bridges where the motoboys and pedestrians with broken umbrellas wait out the rain. 

Dusk falls as you enter the countryside. The interstate swoops up and down, cutting a path between toy-town hills folded up like a rucked carpet.

The moon climbs between high ridges of cloud and people stand patiently by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere for buses which might be one, two or thee hours late, or not come at all. Out here patience is merely one of many daily acts of faith.

The further you go, the emptier it gets. By the time it’s properly dark, there’s nothing for miles, then you pass the dim-lit sign for a farm or roadhouse, and you wonder how they survive so far from anything. Two hours later you’re pushing your little car round the switchbacks that lead into the hills, and twenty minutes after that you pull up at the gates to the compound. When you get to the house, you crack the door and the car, sealed since Sao Paulo, fills immediately with the sweet, rotten smell of the jungle, the electric drone of cicadas.

That night, the wind picks up then dies away by three. The cicadas stopped hours ago, without you noticing, and from the bed you can see a single blue star above the shoulder of the mountain, between reefs of cloud.

Tonight is the kind of night where no one sleeps, and when you do you feel like you’re sleeping outside, and when you dream, you dream that you’re still in the room. Outside on the lawn, among the ordinary things made strange by moonlight, stands the tall dark pillar of a man watching you. When you wake again, or think you’ve woken, he is closer, and closer again, until eventually he’s standing over you. But this is a dream, so you cannot wake and whatever fear you feel is felt dimly, as if it were happening to someone else or through sound-proofed glass.

The next day, after breakfast, you go for a walk with your son to collect pine cones for the fire. The whole circuit takes an hour and you come back with your shopping bag full. On the way, you stop at a waterfall to show your son the sight of butterflies pirouetting around each other in a column of sunlight. You wonder why they like to dance in the sunlight; maybe it’s good for their wings.

After lunch two birds of prey, like kestrels but bigger, land in the bare branches of a dead tree and take turns shrieking at the landscape while the other pants and preens its feathers. Later in the afternoon, a toucan settles in the same tree and paces up and down its branch, croaking and ruffling its plumage like a country magistrate.

At dusk, as we’re sitting outside on the veranda with Lucas and the flying ants are rising up from the lawn, a humming bird darts into a pink-flowering shrub by the veranda and hovers there, sucking nectar and then piping loudly in what sounds like frustration before darting off again, incredibly fast.

When it rains, the cicadas stop. And start up again afterwards. The cicadas sound like rain, and the rain sounds like the sea. It pours in silver runnels from the eaves and the mimosa by the gate.

After it rains, the air is clear and still. Through the trees the last light of the setting sun leaps out in streamers of white gold. The hills recede down the valley, each one a paler blue. Close inspection reveals that the last hill is not a hill at all, but a reef of dove-grey cloud. As you move around the house getting ready to close up for the night, another skein of low-lying cloud drifts through the valley. Eventually it’s so thick the whole mountain vanishes, then reappears, then vanishes again. It is hard to shut the doors and leave behind such a beautiful sight.

The creatures on the roof are silent all weekend, but start up again on Monday night, playing games of chase, holding their AGM, arguing the endless, involuted politics of wild things.

The next day you all go for a walk up a road you haven’t taken yet. You pass the house with the strange pool and the barking dog, some workmen, an abandoned house with branches all over the roof and weeds in the drive. Further up the road there is a green water tank about twenty metres high with a rickety service ladder. You climb the ladder while beside you the tank clangs and thunks with its internal processes. Its sides are hot to the touch. At the top you take some pictures that entirely fail to convey how high up you were, and consequently how heroic. 

In the late afternoon you have a barbeque. The fire takes well and you put the meat, peppers and kebabs on. There are dark clouds in the distance and the occasional thunder. It gets closer until the first droplets drive mother and child indoors. You stay out to finish the barbeque under a golf umbrella you found in a junk room. Every time you lean away the rain makes the coals sizzle and smoke. It thickens to a deluge and the thunder is directly overhead. Flowerbeds fill with muddy water and the rain sizzles off the veranda. Your back is wet and cold, your front super-heated.

You bring the food indoors and start your son’s bedtime routine. A story is read, a bath is given, a feed is had until sleep comes. Outside the rain has stopped and thick mist has rolled in, obscuring everything but the nearest trees and flower beds. The farther trees are strange in the mist. Frogs croak and grumble. 

The next day you go to the shops. When you get back, you have a cup of tea while your son naps upstairs. As you’re sitting there a lizard walks into the garden. It is massive and prehistoric, with ancient eyes, a bulging throat sac and the toothless mouth of an old man without his dentures. Its skin is black, white and yellow, but mostly black. Its body is about a foot and a half long and its tail would easily double that if it weren’t for the fact that it has been neatly cut off about half way down. You all watch each other for five minutes or so, it blinking occasionally but otherwise not moving a muscle. Eventually your curiosity gets the better of you and you edge closer. It starts and backs away. Its claws are vicious, sweeping curves that drag through the grass. After backing away, it stops then rushes at you until it stops about three feet away, its forearms raised, its head angled to one side, studying you. You wander if it’s going to attack; certainly it seems to be trying to intimidate you. Neither of you fancies trying to grapple with that solid trunk, that elephant’s skin. Eventually, feeling vindicated, the lizard stalks off, its slow side-to-side slithering crawl quite casual. It disappears over the edge of the terrace and you go to see where it’s gone. You watch as it crawls down the slope, drops from one terrace to another, lands clumsily in a leaf pile and is gone. 

N.B. Portal da Mantiqueira is a beautiful little nature reserve-cum-holiday park near Santo Antonio do Pinhal and Campos do Jordão in the interior of São Paulo State. 

Impossible Brasil.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that America and Brazil have a lot in common: they both gained independence and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to embrace constitutional democracy; they both had a westward race for land and resources; they both have an uncomfortable relationship with slavery and their indigenous population; and they're both bloody huge. But Brazil doesn’t feel like the US. In the States, you somehow get the feeling that the immigrants have occupied the land so completely that they’ve effaced all but a few government-sponsored scraps of its pre-history; in my Hollywood-shaped imagination, every square inch of the U.S. is occupied by vast wheat fields, homely New England woods, Thoreau-style national parks, suburban enclaves like the ones in E.T. and the counterweight urban sprawls of the east and west coasts.

Brazil doesn’t feel quite so domesticated, so orderly and tame. In Brazil, it feels like the cities are a crust floating on top of impossible depths. Perhaps it’s the jungle which does that. A quick search reveals that Brazil is the fifth most populous country in the world, yet the population of Brazil is massively urbanised, with 78% living in the cities, and most of the big cities clingingfor safety to the Atlantic coastal region. Behind them waits the endless jungle, Heart of Darkness-style, and the equally endless plantations of corn, soy, tobacco and coffee which help power the Brazilian economy.

That sense of strangeness, of a wildness only partially contained, hits you in different ways. Sometimes it’s seeing a beautiful Indian place name on the highway, like Pindamonhangaba, Taubaté or Itaquaqucetuba. Sometimes it’s hearing a song you love in the morning sun of a strange café and having that sudden vertiginous glimpse of how far the inchoate strands of music and ideas can travel, across the jungle and the mountains and the sea. Sometimes it’s walking into a graveyard and finding a dead black hen with a cigar in its mouth, sacrificed as part of a macumba ritual, that strange, catch-all term for the syncretism of Catholicism, Candomblé and other imported and indigenous religions. Sometimes it’s the way you simply can’t tell where a Brazilian originally came from, whether Europe, Asia, Africa, or Brazil, combined with the fact that most Brazilians refuse to cling to and define themselves by their immigrant past like so many of their north American cousins.

Another way to try and convey the sheer enormity and sense of dislocation which Brazil induces in a foreigner is to consider how many languages contiguously evolved in Europe, and how many distinct cultural traditions these languages represent; all those revolutions and rivalries, those horrors and wonders; Norse gods, King Arthur, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jim Davidson, all crammed into a tiny, seething patchwork of warring principalities and fiefdoms and republics and picturesque scenes. Then you have to juxtapose that image with the fact that the whole of Europe fits inside Brazil, and yet Brazil has only one language and one overarching culture within which are swirled all the races, cultures, religions and music of all the millions of people who immigrated here and those who lived here for however many thousands of years (well, about eight thousand year) before the Europeans came.

It is this which makes Brazil so mind-boggling: the fact that it has so much richness and strangeness, but can never hope to reconcile all the various narratives. That’s not a bad thing. But it is, I don’t know, confusing; there’s always so much to take in, there are so many contradictions, so many examples of terrible inequality alongside wonderful, disarming instances of kindness, so many maddening incomprehensible accretions of old Brazil left behind by the glacial shift of history for you to trip over as you walk through modern streets. Perhaps that is both the tragedy and salvation of Brazil: it is too big to know itself, but it's big enough and strange enough to absorb the contradiction. 

B.O.U.R.G.E.O.I.S

I have decided that I love the middle classes. After years being ashamed of my bourgeois status because of the many abject twats I knew who were middle class and all the possibly fake working class people who inverse-sneered at my accent, my bag of toffees and my taste for scrumping, I can confirm that I have embraced with open arms my non-humble, non-privileged background. It’s not just me, either. I’m a zealous convert: I think everyone should be middle class.

Now hold on. Before you hate me, allow me to explain. I don’t mean that we should all be coveting semi-detached houses in Chiswick. I mean that we should all be aspiring to the middle ground. See, when you’re a kid, you feel ashamed of being stuck in the middle; you envy the working classes their inviolable cause and you envy the rich their inviolable entitlement. But the bourgeoisie are great precisely because they occupy the middle.

It’s no coincidence that Buddhism, a religion based on maximizing happiness, is known sometimes as the middle path. That’s where everyone should be, you see, sharing the middle ground. That’s where I imagine we'd all be happiest, with the same amount of education, the same buying power, the same access to nice things, the same opportunity to determine our futures, the same heightened awareness and, hopefully, the same sense of conscience.

The problem with Brazil, if I may venture to say so, is that there isn’t enough of a middle class. As I have said elsewhere, society here is polarised between the very poor and the very rich, with a huge gulf in between. Into this gap, this non-existent middle-ground, fall the few professionals who think more progressively, but they seem to be actively squeezed out or antagonised by the inability of the economy in its present state to accommodate their needs.

Things are changing, however; the working classes are getting more and more strident in their demands for proper jobs, rights and education. They are improving themselves. In short, they want to be middle class in the purely abstract sense of wanting to have enough equality to determine their own futures (which, ironically, is something the middle classes of the first world may be losing, but that’s another story). The rich of Brazil, however, seem to be seeking to prevent this transition, because the elevation of some people makes others want it for themselves, and suddenly all the serving classes, all their babas and drivers and maids, don’t want to be babas and drivers and maids anymore; they want to go to college and become librarians, beauticians and teachers. In that order. And then where would the rich Brasileiros be? Using eHow to learn to boil an egg.