One concept that is particularly dangerous is the perfectibility of humanity, which is associated with the less questionable concept of progress. Freud spoke of “human ideals, the notion, formed by human beings, of the possible perfection of the individual person, the nation and humanity as a whole”.3 It could be said that this was the road that led to the Gulag (Freud did not necessarily agree, as he was only listing the features generally associated with civilisation, as they were perceived in the late twenties, and he summarised positivist thinking very well while adding some healthy scepticism – an old man’s work and a great extended essay). Progress, if it exists, does not perfect society or individuals, who are and must remain mixed. Religions have a better understanding of this: they accept the world as it is, and some might say they are too accepting. Political movements are in a hurry, and that is understandable, given the magnitude of human misery, but you cannot perfect people and you can only change their behaviour rapidly through terror. Even then it is arguable that you can change them in the direction you want or that any changes made will be permanent. The best we can ask is better education that will liberate minds and allow future generations to make better decisions, but we cannot know what they will be like.
The arguments for and against progress are finely balanced. It appears that progress, like happiness, occurs when people are busy with other things. Progress, if it exists, concerns the ability of societies to organise themselves more efficiently and more equitably, often as a result of improving technology. We live in a period of increasing disorder and lawlessness, in which there is very little long-term planning and educational standards are slipping. That we consume more is meaningless, if these levels of consumption are not sustainable. Progress, when it occurs in the short term, creates new problems that could not have been predicted, but when such sudden progress starts to unravel, the negative features of progress remain in place. Even a statist like me, who wants to see renationalisation, an end to private education and the exclusion of private companies from the health service, is concerned by the constant state encroachment on our freedoms. All regimes, whether of the left or the right, have overseen increasing interference of the state in the private lives of its citizens. In the West, armies of officials – often not state officials but officials working for private corporations to which the state has delegated its powers – are poking around in people’s lives, making judgements on scarce information and handing down quasi-judicial sentences. Recent revelations demonstrate that the American and British governments are spying on their citizens to a level that the Stasi could only have dreamt of.
I have asserted that there is a soul, but my definition is, I admit, a little vague. Reason suggests there isn’t, but experience suggests that there is. If we’re hit by a falling brick and survive with a damaged brain, we are no longer the same person. Logically, it appears that we are, as Dr. Swaab said, no more than our brains. Nietzsche crumpled while embracing a horse that was being beaten, his brain destroyed by work and illness. Walter Kaufmann provides us with a dramatic portrayal of his working day, as his brilliance fought with everything: his isolation, his manic ideas, his failing eyesight and his failing health. Then all these things were gone. He was a shell, an object that could be manoeuvred by others, and emptied of intellect and integrity. He became an object wholly owned by his hellish sister.4 The will was gone, but what a will! That will, now broken, was highlighted by its absence. The body lived on, but the soul had died. Or the bit we didn’t understand had died. The animal husk was there, and in its tragic state was much more comprehensible. Which attracts our admiration more, the husk or the will? Clearly it is that indefinable will – the soul. How can we then say that it does not exist? That we cannot pinpoint it, does not mean that it doesn’t exist (it doesn’t mean that it does either). There is no reason to believe that the soul is immortal, just because this has been the dominant belief for millennia. But the mortal soul is something we should be looking for in others. It is the element that makes human relationships significant.
If I were to sum up my disjointed thoughts as they emerge from these assorted essays, I would say that they concern the quality of human relationships, as suggested by the thinking of Martin Buber. Those relationships are caught up in the triad of freedom, justice and cynicism. Cynicism is in our minds, freedom is both in our minds and in society, and justice is in society. The circular movement of the triad also concerns the relationship between ideas and society, and at the centre of that is the will which makes things happen, but we have to take into account the enormous constraints on what we can achieve. Cynicism is that brake on free will, a note of realism, but it should be no more than a thin voice, or it becomes something that debilitates us.
By the Metre
The Mystic
I died and having died
could no more feel the touch of life
but lived, and living, moved
within a shell, which hollowed out,
contains a wealth of emptied thoughts
that settle, like dried leaves, lining
the bottom of my soul, sediment
of a life that’s passed away.
My brother fights with hatred in his heart.
Because he fights, he lives and hopes.
Because he hopes, he builds
a future in this head.
Because he builds, he feels his body
move within a world to which he still belongs.
The foreign soldiers came and fought
a folly of a war.
They knew how to be killed and killed
in turn. They shone in our sun
and smelt of milk and acrid tears.
The fears they brought never left with them,
but clung like mist to hills and mountain roads,
and dampened our dry hearts
and dulled the brightness of our songs
the students later took.
And took for good; their rigid rules –
some vain hope of order where war
decreed the chaos of our lives.
The order clashed with other orders
better ordered, better armed and
driven by some rapacious force.
Then there was the wedding feast;
a column of our cars was snaking through
the hamlets, orchards, arid tracts
of this, our Afghan land.
And yes, the joy, the smiling crowds,
the waving wedding guests, gleeful
on the back of trucks, their open hearts,
their loving talk, the child’s excited chatter,
enveloped in a thin, translucent cloud of dust.
Fierce, so fierce, the horror came,
the airplane stumbled in our skies
and cast its bombs like seeds of death,
and swooped and swung like the groom’s mother
who moving in a trance does dance and show
her bitter jubilation.
Something starts and something ends.
Something changes now forever.
And so did I. I died when the moment died,
and quickly such a crop of bloodied bodies
stretched in the thicker dust of wailing sorrow.
Life died in me, but my hollow corpse
moves on, or stills itself in huddled form
beside the pleasant river.
Long hours I spend in empty thought,
while all around they argue, scream
and laugh again, bold builders
with foreign lords and my brother’s
band of fighters – each the image of their foe.
Like a diseased tree whose healthy bark
conceals its vacant trunk that stays erect
and dismal waits the blessed wind that’ll fell it,
I cross-legged sit and nothing stirs
the desiccated leaves of thought.
They call me mad for
looking on
the madness of their world in silence.
Life’s a Bitch
(or The Deist’s God Goes Walking in a Back Lane)
The father, silent in his thoughts, guided
the pushchair down the darkened lane.
The child, placid in its existence seemed –
unprovoked did scream an anguished scream
that parted from the heart, the centre
of his being. Red eyes, red face, red hair:
red fury scolded sky and all
the hapless clutter of that narrow lane,
where human life was only known
by it detritus. Father continued
unconcerned, unseeing of the fragile load
that life unloaded on his eternal tread.
He judged but did not intervene.
The Poverty of Wealth
“How poor you are, my gilded friend,”
I said and watched his wrinkled face.
“I?” he laughed and heaved his chest
with grandeur suited to his sharpened state.
“I have a corporation listed on the bourse,
a yacht whose cabinets are filled with drink
to keep my retinue tight within the joyless joy
the sycophant encounters while securing
comfort for his future days living in my shadow.
I have a house so large, I cannot know
the number of its rooms, the meanders
of its patronage to souls deflated by my power.
I am a king whose subjects do not know my name;
I little care for vassalage from those so low
they cannot see the strings I pull to make them move
their hollow carcasses across their broken dreams.
You call me poor, you ragged man who beckons
with the arrogance of thought. Clear my path
or I shall crush you like the worm you are.”
“A sorry state is yours indeed,” I sympathised
with all my heart. “What you call carcasses
are full of hope and gentle kindness
that lives forever in the human soul.
A carcass passive like a fallen leaf told one
such as you to cast away his riches
and then to follow. They crushed him
as the worm they reckoned him to be,
and then their children made him king of kings,
who pronounces on all their hidden wants
and justifies their power. His real children
are the poor, who hold eternal riches
in their sagging arms. His real children
are the abused whose names are dragged
through streams of mud. His real children
are the dispossessed whose voices
are not heard. And yet what riches
they encounter on their heavy trudge
through life: their loves, their likes, their losses
all come carrying them to the greenness of their death,
unlike yours, that lonely thing that divides you
from the barren fertility of wealth.”
“Away you madman. I’ll not touch the contagion
of your thought. I’ll not whip the fool, though
you deserve it well,” he seethed.
“I am a shadow of your own fear,” I answered him again,
“and similar fools will come as the sunlight
plays on each green budding leaf. I am each second
of your corroded brain. Each second that cries
for freedom from the stuff that in making stuff is fecund.”
Where the Beauty, Where the Hope
A young man walked his dog,
and his bravado too.
Behind, modern builds of square and Lego look
grouped their sadness in a lot
of awkward silence
at their lifeless dress.
He swung the stick that held a ball,
well-chewed no doubt, and off it went,
the dog in chase. Predictable
as the starting of that sullen day.
The parkland’s paths he held within his head,
and well he knew that none
could lead him from the drudge his life’d become.
Beyond, what else would be there but strangers
staring in disbelief at the ilk of conformity
he’d take with him? More dull hillocks,
shocks of weeds, and rivers running dark
and loaded with the discards of consumer life.
Where the beauty, where the hope?
Scientific Progress
The words that are not said,
but shouted from the roofs
are hollowed out, and stripped
of sense and sound that carries
doubt and complex quirks of knowing not
the whys and wherefores of the beauties
of this world…
The sea loch’s vast, and paints a mottled blue
before my eyes. Beyond, a strip of brownish flatland
catches a patch of brightness
the clouds have failed to grasp.
Below, near to the rocks, a man –
a darkened silhouette – busies in the wind,
as does his jacket – blue, I think.
The purpose of his rushing back and forth
eludes me, as do many things.
The kitchen clock is running late
but beats the rhythm of our time
no less. A half hour passes and still
he’s running left and right. He has a rope!
I’ve grown my knowledge base! And then,
he’s gone and took those busied moments
he’d displayed. In the stillness of the quiet field below
a grey goose waddles slow and sure
about the business of eating grass.
The empty washing line jerks rhythmic,
pointless, endless in the breeze. The clouds
closed off the light illumining
the drab thread of a Highland town.
All has darkened, and in that dull light,
my not knowing lifts my heart,
excites my sense of living
in this most intoxicating point in space.
Time and my Wife
I have wasted many things
and many things have taught me why
I wasted all these years. Life!
Ambition too came sneaking through the grass;
pleasure thickened lazy days
and busy times dried out the human humours
of my heart. I spoke and held too keenly
to my thoughts. I loved not women real
in heart and mind, but constructs of what
I wanted them to be. I gave, but wanted back
my gift with interest on account.
I studied, foolish in my wish to be the best at something
no one values any more.
And then you came and held me strong;
led me out and took me to the vantage
of my faults. The pleasure is in the act itself:
the giving, loving, feeling, seeing the tight
compactness of this lonely, cluttered world
in which a perfect sun does rise on Cox’s Beach
and wintry blasts do scour the Artic wastes.
Every life is a journey between the one and the other.
At the beach, you dug your hands deep and laughed apace
with all the brightness of your soul, and sand like snow
weeping fell and carried in the wind.
Riflusso1
All of the words the day had sprung
The night has buried now.
Now do the hopes we cherished then
Seem dark and shameful to our weaker sort
And those who took the ride.
From high upon our greatest chance,
The structures of our hierarking chiefs,
Whose loyalty to equal lives was largely
Founded on their grand usage of the state
And the comfort of their over-equal fate,
Made war and weapons quite grotesque
And not inclined to free mankind –
But to destroy it.
On Seeing a Photo of Victims’ Skulls from the Cambodian Genocide
The grinning teeth and vacant stares, they have no purpose,
nor do their daily cares sift and shake the fibre of their bones.
Which was the slender lad whose passions stalked a female frame
he could not banish from this thoughts? Where is the girl
who sang so sweet, her feelings echoed in her schoolmates’ heads?
The brooding teacher vanquished by the failure of her years,
the greedy trader whose mind just counts the movements
of his wealth, the sullen housewife once instructed in French
and foreign ways, the brawny warehouse worker who seldom sought
to cause offence or darken others’ days, they all vacated what was theirs
and hastened off or were. They left these shells, indictments of a crime so foul,
it weighs upon the human mind and questions who we are.
I see these skulls so neatly ordered on their shelves like books or pans
or useful things – they’re not. Read them if you can, I cannot find