The last post

For the moment, and probably forever, I've grown tired of writing a blog that almost nobody reads. But I remain grateful to the small band of readers who've tuned in to my efforts over the past 12 months or so. If you're interested in checking out my future writings, keep an eye on the new online magazine The Ember, to which I'll be a regular contributor. And there's always my novel ...

Depressing quote for the day

As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, and pain much more painful, than we had expected. A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.

Schopenhauer, "On the Suffering of the World"

Credit where it's do

Here's an odd fact about Sarah Palin. She appears to know something about the finer points of English grammar. For example, she uses the word whom a lot while being interviewed -- and she always uses it correctly.

This is a dying art. I've seen men of letters on TV who are content to say "who" when they should really be saying "whom." And I've certainly run across professors of English who are capable of making the same mistake in print. Even Shakespeare was known to drop the ball on whom.

But Palin, quite correctly, says "those whom I have talked with," or "the people whom we're accountable to." I suppose you could point out that there's no real need to say either who or whom in sentences of this kind -- i.e. that Palin is engaging in her old trick of filling the air with unnecessary words. But the fact remains that her grammar is spot on. (And don't give me any pedantic backchat about not ending sentences with prepositions.) She also -- very commendably -- says "set foot in" rather than "stepped foot in." But let's not reach too far across the aisle. She still likes saying "be all end all" instead of "be all and end all" -- I don't think there's much authority for that.

On the other hand, it pains me to note that Barack Obama recently dropped this grammatical clanger: "President Bush has graciously invited Michelle and I to the White House." Conclusion: good grammar isn't the be all end all of American politics.

Watching Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren, I thought Palin came across as a marginally less nasty and stupid person than she had appeared to be before election day. To put it another way, some polling guru must have told her, at the outset of the campaign, that pretending to be nastier and stupider than you really are is a good way of getting elected to the second-most important office in the world. Let's hope that idea is dead forever.

The Van Susteren interview made me discard another one of my short-held views about Palin. She does not, after all, possess the most disagreeable speaking voice on earth. Greta Van Susteren does. The woman talks like a cockatoo on helium. She makes Palin sound like Eartha Kitt.

People who run hot and cold

Is it just me, or do you have about five to ten people in your life who, owing to some strange perceptive disorder, are only capable of recognizing you about half the time? I find these people incredibly hard to deal with. Sometimes they make you question your own visibility. Sometimes they get you wondering if, without knowing it, you might have crossed over to the other side Bruce Willis-style.

People who do recognize you but pretend not to are a different matter. They're just total assholes. There's no mystery about that. But what about people who greet you heartily on some occasions, and the rest of the time give you nothing? What goes on in their heads?

I take the same bus every morning, and it's always driven by the same guy. In theory, the guy should thoroughly recognize me by now. He sees me in the same place at the same time every day, and I very rarely board the bus in disguise, and I certainly have no trouble recognizing him.

But here's the enigma. Some days he does recognize me, and on other days he clearly doesn't. One morning I'm "champ," the next he's looking at me like I'm the prime suspect in the desecration of his mother's grave. Once when I asked him how he was he actually kept the bus parked for about three minutes in order to give me a detailed run-down on the full state of his health. It was a little odd, but I really felt we'd made a breakthrough. The next day I asked him the same question and he just looked straight through me. It's a rancid moment when you ask a man how he is and he simply doesn't reply. Asking him again in case he didn't hear you is a high-risk play, because it opens up the horrific prospect of getting no reply twice.

Incidentally, the guy is neither deaf nor -- in any obvious sense -- mentally defective. Nor is it possible that he can't see me properly. He's got glasses the size of Fast Eddie Felsen's. So I don't know what's going on, and I guess I'll never get to the bottom of it. I'm pretty sure I can't be dead though, because he always makes me pay for a ticket.

There was once a girl who treated me in a similar way, to the point where I briefly but quite seriously entertained the theory that she was in fact a pair of identical twins, or possibly even triplets. But good-looking girls are allowed to behave this way. They have to. It's in their DNA. Ageing bus drivers who look like Dick Emery have no excuse.

Charlie don't surf

Now that I'll never have to listen to Sarah Palin's voice again, I should probably confess that I also have a tiny issue with Barack Obama's vocal stylings. He does tend to talk like a man who's raising his voice on a helicopter. Or, when he takes it down a bit, like a man who's standing quite near the spot where a helicopter is landing. I keep expecting him to announce that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning. 

Other than that, I'm looking forward to the next four years. 

The higher horseshit

Last night, in a documentary about the writer Richard Flanagan, no less an authority than Baz Luhrmann proclaimed Flanagan "the Australian Hemingway." These days, of course, it's quite permissible to make such comparisons without necessarily having read anything by either party -- and indeed it emerged, as Baz fleshed the comparison out, that what he mainly had in mind was the fact that both guys were, in addition to being writers, quite keen on the outdoors. But he did, I think, throw in a token reference to the excellence of Flanagan's prose after that.

Never having read anything by Flanagan, I thought I'd better seek out some of the guy's work. Fortunately these days you can get a fair sense of a writer's merits without having to lay down thirty bucks. Here, free from the Web, is the opening to Flanagan's latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist:

The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth.

Jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. The innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love. He demanded it, as Nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. In the end he created a god who was "wholly love" in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of human love.

Jesus, who wanted love to such an extent, was clearly a madman, and had no choice when confronted with the failure of love but to seek his own death. In his understanding that love was not enough, in his acceptance of the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him, Jesus is history's first, but not last, example of a suicide bomber.

Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, I am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer. Every day now somebody somewhere is dynamite. They are not an image. They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.

Nietzsche began to fear that what drove the world forward was all that was destructive and evil about it. In his writings he tried to reconcile himself to such a terrible world.

But one day he saw a cart horse being beaten brutally by its driver. He rushed out and put his arms around the horse's neck, and would not let go. Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Nietzsche had even less explanation than Jesus for love and its various manifestations: empathy, kindness, hugging a horse's neck to stop it being beaten. In the end Nietzsche's philosophy could not even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrificed his life for a horse.

But then, ideas always miss the point.

Hemingway, you might recall, said that a writer's key piece of equipment was a built-in bullshit detector. If Flanagan ever had such a device, it surely maxed out and blew at some point during the composition of that third paragraph. About the best you can say for such stuff is that it seems to be aimed at -- and was quite possibly written by -- the kind of person who believes that the mere mention of figures like Nietzsche and Christ is enough to establish that things are being discussed at a high level. But what is actually being said? It takes a fair bit of readerly sweat to find out. There are a lot of non-sequiturs in there. ("They are the walking dead, and so are the people who are standing round them. Reality was never made by realists, but by dreamers like Jesus and Nietzsche.")

Maybe you're not even supposed to make sense of it all. Maybe you're just meant to feel the tone: highbrow, literary, mystical, profound. Maybe you're just meant to feel generally assured that this will be the kind of novel in which current events will meet with deep thought. Maybe all you need to know is that the right thing is being said -- that the figure of the suicide bomber is being understood, contextualized, rescued from the demonization he's suffered at the hands of the George Bushes of the world, who dig on Jesus but probably haven't even heard of Nietzsche. Maybe you're just meant to get a whiff of that heady atmosphere and move on.

In any case, I'm about to do something that might be a bit rash. I'm about to comb these paragraphs for truth-content. Perhaps I am gravely missing the point. Perhaps I'm about to examine these wishy-washy propositions far more carefully than Flanagan did when pulling them out of thin air. But here I go.

Let's start with Nietzsche. Reading the above paragraphs, you could run away with the impression that Nietzsche never really went mad. You could run away with the impression that "one day," for perfectly sane and indeed impeccably eco-friendly reasons, he embraced an oppressed horse. And then: "Promptly diagnosed as mad, he was locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life." I love that sentence. I especially relish that first word: promptly. It superbly captures the kind of writer Flanagan is. He is the kind of writer who will say, for effect, things that are flagrantly not true. Nietzsche, without question, did go seriously and permanently mad, possibly as a result of contracting syphilis. He may or may not have embraced a horse during the early stages of his decline. His alarmed friends and family took him to various clinics, but at no point was he "locked away for the rest of his life." In fact he spent his final ten years in the care of his mother and sister.

But Flanagan wants to believe in the kind of world where sinister and nameless authorities will lock away an entirely healthy man just for hugging a horse. Or anyway he wants us to believe that. He can't possibly believe it himself -- can he? He must know that Nietzsche really did suffer a catastrophic mental breakdown. He can't not know it. Which means he is deliberately -- and a little tastelessly -- telling us things he knows to be untrue. Why? I can only assume he thinks some sort of higher truth can be arrived at by stringing together a succession of quarter-truths and distortions -- some sort of lyrical, poetic truth that soars gloriously free of the factual record. I suppose some people think such irresponsible violation of the facts is the stuff of literature. I'd reply that literature minus truth is no longer literature: it's pulp. It's a cartoon.

On the whole Flanagan drags in Nietzsche not because of what he wrote when he was sane, but because of something he did when he wasn't. This is an odd tribute for one writer to pay another. But there is some reference to Nietzsche's actual writings, from which Flanagan has derived the big idea that Nietzsche was a "dreamer":

Nietzsche wrote, "I am not a man, I am dynamite". It was the image of a dreamer.

Why? Why is that the image of a dreamer? Surely it's the self-image of a man -- the philosopher with a hammer, as he also called himself -- who saw it as his mission to blow away large quantities of untruth. If Flanagan really must engage in the lame high-school pursuit of dividing humanity into realists and dreamers, can't he at least see that Nietzsche belongs firmly with the realists? Nietzsche was all rigor: a far fiercer enemy of bullshit than Hemingway. Plus he was a philologist by training: a grounded student of word origins, a fiery pinner-down of exact meaning. To say that "Nietzsche's philosophy couldn't even explain Nietzsche, a man who sacrificed his life for a horse" is to base an inane non-point on a total untruth, and Flanagan must know it. Nietzsche went tragically insane: it's a medical fact, and his philosophy was and is under no obligation to "explain" it. And the claim that he "sacrificed his life for a horse" is just trivial and false, and any argument that uses it as a buttress is built on nothing but bad faith.

So what about the Christ-as-suicide-bomber motif? I can't say that this offends me as a Christian, because I'm not one. But it does kind of miff me as a respecter of truth. To start with the basics: doesn't suicide bombing have something to do with violence? A suicide bomber doesn't just sacrifice himself. If that was all he did, I doubt he'd be such a controversial figure. But really he sacrifices himself only incidentally, as the best means of killing and maiming as many of the people around him as possible. The more, the merrier. Women, children? Bring them on!

The idea that Christ the man had anything remotely to do with that is just off-the-charts horseshit. A lot of his later adherents practiced terror, without doubt; but not the man himself. Indeed he went around saying a lot of things about turning the other cheek and not casting the first stone. So if you're going to proclaim him history's first suicide bomber -- on the face of it an obscenely false proposition -- you'd better have some pretty good reasons. Flanagan advances two incredibly feeble ones. He, Christ, saw that "love was not enough" (enough for what?); and he accepted "the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him."

These two things might well have motivated Christ. But what on earth makes Flanagan think that they define the suicide bomber? Was Mohamed Atta a man for whom love was not enough? Next time you get a chance, take a look at his contorted mugshot. Does that look like the face of a man for whom love was not enough? It looks more like the face of a man for whom hate was not enough. (Again Flanagan's knack for hitting on the polar opposite of the truth shines through.) And did Atta sacrifice himself to "enable" -- whatever that means -- the future of those around him? No: he sacrificed himself because it was the simplest way of killing an incredible amount of other people. Exactly why he wanted to kill them all is a question I don't really have the stomach for at the moment. No doubt he had his own fevered notions about what an ideal world would be like, but those are dreams that no thinking person -- least of all a writer who enjoys having the freedom to speak subversively -- would want to see "enabled."

All I'm saying is this: if you honestly do see deep connections between people like that and Jesus Christ, you owe it to your readers to state your reasoning plainly. I mean, it's quite an insight. Nobody's ever had it before. So why not clearly explain why it's true? If you half-hide it behind clouds of loose prose and flaccid illogic, you kind of convey the impression that you don't even believe your own nonsense.

Ideas don't "always miss the point," by the way. They only do when they're wrong.

Not a bad point

Montaigne, "On Fear": 

It is fear that I am most afraid of. In harshness it surpasses all other mischances ... People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep, whereas those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else.