Unconfirmed Reports

Two things I want to hold on to from India:

1. The day a group of villagers let me help with their work. I helped them carry huge hay-bales, which you balance on top of your head. A giggly girl called Lali, about 12 or 14, who could carry the hay much better than me, kept calling me over to make me carry her loads. She was very bold and fearless.

2. In Mysore, I started thinking about buying new sandles, because they have good ones there for a few dollars, and my current ones are falling apart in two places. But my friend Annabelle said don’t buy new ones, you can get your current ones fixed by the cobblers who work in the streets. It wasn’t until a few days later, in Mangalore, that I acted on this. An old man fixed my sandles with amazing skills and speed; the amount he charged was basically nothing in my currency, and he was surprised that I wanted to pay more. The rickshaw drivers nearby seemed to find this very funny. I had to walk past that spot three more times that day, and each time the old cobbler looked at me through the crowd, smiling and making the polite Indian greeting with his hand.

I am back now in “the West” - well, Singapore aiport actually. The horrible resource wastage and pointless luxury goods make me feel sad, so I need to remind myself of the good things I have seen.

Dubai World is such a heady mix of crazed ambition and complete frivolity - in retrospect there seems always to have been something fateful about such a scheme. It’s got “hot money” written all over it, “folly” written all over it… perhaps it has always been doomed to become a symbol of the 2000s finance bubble.

I was in downtown Boston yesterday evening, walking back to my hotel. It was just after a company dinner - I was totally exhausted, jetlagged, hadn’t slept well in days. On the clock it said 9pm, but in my head it was 3am. But one thing was enough to make me pause: on the side of a church, I saw a sign saying BOOKS, pointing down an iron stairway. At the bottom of the stairs I could see an open doorway. I needed a new (or old) book.

So I went down the stairs and poked my head through the doorway. Beyond a small “antechamber” was another doorway, again with a large sign BOOKS and an arrow pointing through the door. So I advanced, through the second door. I now found myself in a smallish room, aglow with white neon lighting. The room was full of boxes of bananas, and a few odd things like brooms and old chairs. There was no-one around. (I checked carefully, behind the door and behind all the boxes of bananas.) There were lots of boxes of bananas, a rich plenty. But no BOOKS, none at all. I took a banana and left.

I am tempted to see this experience as meaningful. No doubt some will say that this is an erroneous projection of personal feelings onto the material world… but who can be sure? We should in fact make things meaningful whenever we can.

Lying awake last night, I started thinking back, again, on the book Days of War, Nights of Love. This, along with the Idiot, by Dostoyevsky, are the two books that have most influenced my life.

Days of War, Nights of Love begins with a barrage of questions:

How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?

Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what?

Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?

How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?

What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?

… And throughout the book, it calls on the reader to answer difficult questions. My main reading of the book is this:

Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves - a sort of moral obligation - to live a meaningful life. And this “meaningfulness” must be something creative, passionate, personal and authentic: not a set of prepackaged meaning that we passively accept.

To create this sort of meaning, we must reject false authority. And false authority is any system of control that extends beyond people you can see and trust, any demand of obedience that goes beyond small groups where you can voluntarily give service and obedience for the good of the group.

(Does this mean then that we should all go out robbing and murdering? Not at all. We should each take responsibility for our own actions, and do what we hold to be right.)

False authority is not new, but it is something that has grown particularly intense in recent decades. Social “progress” and “development” have brought with them ever more sophisticated systems of social control (combined with carefully defined social “rights”). So the individual living in the late-capitalist West has a particularly strong obligation to resist such systems.

I said that this book has influenced me greatly, but I don’t mean that I have taken up its point of view as a means of making all my decisions. (Of course, anyone who knows me, and knows that I work in an office, for a large international publishing house, knows that this is not so.) But ever since reading it, the point of view has always been a consideration in each decision I make.

It was not until the majority of the items had been placed into specially greased railway cars that laughter was even considered. But, as is so frequently said (generally by persons who I wish to avoid), “When it rains it pours”. Chuckles, guffaws, titters, snickers, etc. came about in huge torrents. Using his tongue to quickly shovel milk into his mouth was Cornelia Hypertenuse’s slave, Mr Haggis. When his judgment told him that he had ad enough Mr Haggis wiped his lips clean and replaced his mask. This item was white and black and depicted a simplified smiling face: black eyes and mouth on the white part, white eyes and mouth on the black.

Having finished his milk, Mr Haggis looked towards Cornelia for further instructions. Cornelia’s eyes were not to be seen, suggesting that her mind was not present. He started to stealthily move away.

“You cannot escape,” she mentioned. Her eyelids remained closed. Squawking was heard outside. Mr Haggis gazed fearfully about to no apparent avail. “Draw, Haggis.” Mr Haggis knew what this meant. He used marking things to make dark marks on a big piece of paper. Cornelia directed him – telling him when and where to mark. Afterwards she shackled him to his Perch inside the railway car.

Mr Haggis had always been a slave. Why did he now wish to frolic with the birds? Nearby was a refrigerator. Beyond that was a fairly odd chap tapping into a lap top computer. If asked his name he would say “Nils”. That was not his name. Boris Fischer was. He had some kind of arrangement with the persons who install “snow” on televisions. Cornelia now made Mr Haggis seek the nature of this pact. Mr Haggis was not one to play with words like a cat with prey. He asked “Nils” directly. “Nils” did not cause anything to happen but asked Mr Haggis where he acquired such a preposterous notion. It became obvious to Cornelia that not many persons would give information to a known slave. Mr Haggis asked “Nils” about the arrangement every day, producing a cosy equilibrium.

One day “Nils’” lap top computer failed to work. Consequentially service persons came. They installed a brilliantly polished, whitish round thing. At the centre of this was a face. “Nils” felt that he should come to some sort of arrangement with this new device. Unfortunately the new device hated the installers of “snow”. It even wished great pain on them and their followers. “Nils” tried to conceal his own arrangement but after a short amount of time was shaking badly and was unable to keep his food down.

Cornelia made Mr Haggis open the refrigerator. There was a lot of milk in there. There were some jars of furry matter and some metallic spheres. Cornelia said not to touch these last things as they belonged to “Nils”. She made him remove a glass jar with a gauze cloth fastened tightly to the jar’s apex with a rubber band. No life was seen in the water contained in here but nonetheless Mr Haggis retrieved it and handed it to her. Cornelia’s eyelids displayed relief as she held it. Mr Haggis watched without emotion as Cornelia inserted a teat pipette, withdrew some fluid and placed it on a glass slide. She placed this on a microscope and gazed at it with joy.

“More have arrived,” she murmured, “I’m not sure yet if the reproduction is sexual or otherwise – I suspect otherwise because I have not seen anything which can be accused of being genitalia.” Cornelia did not see the many-legged white cylinder walk past, nor did Mr Haggis tell her. “Nils” was busy trying not to be harmed by the round thing. He assumed that he would be safe if he was quiet about the arrangement. This was correct, to some extent. Many times that he passed it, it would shower him with shower him with a mixture of food and saliva, sometimes with iron filings in it.

“Go to your place.” Mr Haggis knew what this meant. He ambled to a strong-smelling section of the carriage’s wall. Here was a basket with some cushions in it. “Sit. Lie. Go to sleep.” These commands were gentle. Later she peered past Nil’s prone form and out the bedroom door. The round thing’s face peered back.