I did not see a knife

It’s nineteen eighty five, October, a Tuesday evening, and I’m in the Library of the Bolton Institute of Technology, as was. It’s been a long day; ten hours of lectures so far, and another two to go. It’s pitch black outside and raining, and I’m reading something up on the mathematics pertaining to electrochemical erosion. My diary tells me this much. It also tells me that across from me there’s a bunch of girl students in their teens, and at twenty four, I’m already feeling like an old man.

It’s hard to say what attracts a man to a woman other than, like I’ve said elsewhere it’s the reflection of something as yet unknown within himself, though I understand this makes little sense when you play it back. But there’s this one girl in particular and I don’t know why she stands out but she does. She has long, dark hair, wears a denim jump suit with a small enamel teddy bear in her lapel. She speaks to her friends with a soft, Scottish accent, never looks my way, never notices me at all.

Twenty years later she becomes a character in a short story I’ve hawked about pointlessly before sticking it up on Feedbooks – The Man Who Could Not Forget. And, like the man who could not forget, and with a little help from my diary, I have not forgotten her, but it’s not her I want to talk about tonight.

There’s this other girl in the library that night, a psychology student. She’s gorgeous, as all girls seemed to be back then, or maybe, like sunny days, I only remember the pretty ones. I’m up at the book shelves now seeking out another reference, and she comes up to me with a piece of card.

“I want you look at this,” she says. “It’s a picture of two people arguing.”

Thus primed, she flashes this card at me. It shows a cartoon of a black man and a white man. Their arms are out, as if gesticulating. Right. So, these guys are arguing.

She covers the card and asks me: “Which one had the knife?”

There’s something of a challenge in her tone, like she already knows the answer I’m going to give.

I’m confused for a moment, and want to see the picture again, because for the life of me I don’t remember either of the guys having a knife, but I understand this will defeat the point of the exercise. Yet, if there’s no knife, she’s forcing an answer to a false choice. Why would she be doing that? There must have been a knife. I must have missed it. By the way, did I tell you I’m basically this young white guy, and she’s this beautiful Asian girl, with long shiny hair and glittery eyes?

Then it clicks. There was no knife, and yes, she is forcing a false choice on me. I can read her mind, and I’m a bit upset by it. I’m supposed to say it was the black guy who had the knife, because I’m a white guy, and all white guys are supposed to have these prejudices about black guys, or any other guys not the same colour as myself, so even if I’m not sure there was a knife, if I’m forced to admit there was, because she’s saying there was, then I reveal my racism by saying it’s the black guy who had it.

At the end of her survey she expects to count up all the ticks and show a graph that most white guys like me are basically racist. But even in Bolton, in 1985, if racism was an issue, I was unaware of it, but then I had my head in things like Electrochemical Erosion, so maybe it was. I don’t know.

Perhaps I should reverse it, I’m thinking, say it was the white guy who had the knife. Then maybe the girl will think I’m not a racist and might be more inclined to like me, because the goddess is strong in this one and I really want her to like me. But this is too deep, and a pointless application of reverse psychology anyway, one than can only screw up her experiment. The inside of my head is strange sometimes. People think they are sealed up, secret from others, when by the slightest thing they render themselves nakedly transparent.

“I didn’t see a knife. Sorry.”

Her expression gives nothing away. She does not thank me for my participation. I think she’s beautiful and I wish we could talk some more. I manage a smile. It is not returned. I think the experiment was flawed anyway – a definite experimenter effect. I do not ask her if she fancies a coffee sometime. And not because it would be a crass and desperate thing to do in that situation, nor yet because she’s the daughter of another culture and I’m a white guy, because really I’m too naive to take such things into consideration. It’s more that she’s beautiful, and I’m afraid she will reject me.

There was a time when I saw the goddess in all women. She has many aspects, sometimes alluring, sometimes scornful, sometimes challenging. She is the thing that animates a man, but projecting her into the material world renders him vulnerable to the fallacy that women are something other than human. It’s a fallacy that fades with age and experience. A fallacy also that in trying to understand the goddess within ourselves, a man should expect women to know anything about it at all, like expecting the canvas to understand the painting. More likely she will look at him blank, or suggest he goes to see the doctor.

I muddled through my final exams that coming summer – mostly an average student on that course, having reached the limit of my mathematical and technical ability by then. But over the years I’ve found little use for mathematics anyway, that intuition is a surer guide when it comes to the oftimes shady byways of the daemon haunted world I live in now. I rest assured neither aspect of the goddess in the library that night remembers me, and it’s puzzling I should remember them, when there are other human beings I have more reason to remember but do not.

I’m not sure what else I’m trying to say here, except I swear I did not see a knife.

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Winter on the Hill – Thirty

Early March, and Coronavirus begins to infect both England and the work in progress:

Junction six, Walkden, M61 South. The Beast is purring down to the line from the off-slip. The grassed embankments on either side are awash here with a tide of rubbish. It’s where people wind their windows down while they wait for the lights to change, then toss out the waste packaging of Macmeals, miscellaneous wrappers, sachets, plastic bottles, beer-cans, and all those little nitrous oxide cartridges. This morning there are also nappies, tee-shirts, and a pair of trousers snagged in the bushes.

It’s places like this we void ourselves, sick up all the over-consumption, spoil any vestige of green. How can the natural world take this? Any other creature that fouls its own nest like we do lasts barely the blink of an eye. Why are we still here?

The guy in the white van beside me is wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves. He catches my fleeting double-take and responds with a finger. He’s either about to rob a bank or he’s paranoid about infection. This virus is beginning to spook everyone now. I’m not sure if it’s warranted or just scare-mongering in the press. Hard to tell. We’ve had years of one thing or another, and seem, as a people, permanently jittery, therefore easily suggestible, and vulnerable to tyranny.

So far as I can gather from my limited tolerance for current affairs these days, there are only a handful of cases in the UK as yet, though I suppose it’s a matter of time before that explodes. The challenge is to isolate against it, have it die out. Worst case it becomes endemic and circulates permanently in the population, scything through us in annual waves. It’s more deadly than flu, kills one percent they say. The government seems willing to tolerate an infection rate of 60%, thus allowing herd-immunity, but on that basis simple arithmetic suggests a quarter of a million of us are expected to die.

Can that be right?

For now share indices are plummeting, and the smart money is buying up bargains while prices are low. Astonishing, how a virus can mutate randomly into such a deadly coherence, and be half-way round the world in the blink of an eye. Yet with all our superior faculties, we cannot even protect our poor from cold and starvation.

Well, we can,… we just don’t.

I’m out this way on the edge of Greater Manchester’s conurbation, having come to see my old boss and mentor, Chester, who I find sitting now in the corner of the day room at the care-home, oxygen mask at the ready in case of breathlessness. Access was not the usual informality. I was interviewed briefly by Anita, the duty care-worker, who looks about twelve yeas old. She asked me if I had visited China or Italy recently, or did I feel unwell? Since I have not and do not, I was admitted. I took care to squirt my hands with the gel-stuff, as per habit, or rather I would have done, but the dispenser was empty, and Anita told me they had run out. There was no chance of resupply either, she added ruefully, and the country was running out of surgical masks, all of which has left me wondering if I am missing something.

If this bug gets into the homes, the old folk are done for.

Anyway, he was quite the thing in his day, old Ches – sat on committees that determined international standards, so engineers around the world could speak the same language – well, except for you Yanks who prefer still to talk in feet and inches which we Europeans find rather quaint.

Yes, I do still consider myself European.

He looks a little more sunken into himself than the last time I saw him, and his chest is wheezy, the fags catching up with him, but he’s eighty-five now and not had a bad run for someone of his questionable habits. It’s only in these last years when everything seems to have fallen apart for him: wife passed on suddenly, his knees gone to arthritis, hands curling up the same, the breath being squeezed out of him bit by bit, as if by a weight on his chest.

He has kids somewhere round the other side of the world. They come and sit and stare at him once a year, like he’s a stranger. In olden days and other ways of working, there would be ample opportunity for his kids to live and work closer to home, and the generations would co-habit, tend to each other more closely and with greater compassion than we do now. But he’s better off than me in that respect. I’ve no idea where my kids are now, or what they’re doing. I send cards out for birthdays, but I’m not even sure I have the right addresses for them any more – they move around so much with their work. And their emails have started bouncing back. It leaves me feeling empty, disconnected.

I’ve always looked at Chester as a way of gauging my own prospects, physically, I mean, at some point in the future, and lately these visits have begun to focus my thoughts on contingencies.

He was always what we used to call a middle of the road Tory, and worth debating intelligently, though of late he has caught the fever of racism to which, like flu, his generation seems particularly prone. He has discovered an especial dislike of Eastern Europeans, though seems not to have noticed most of the kids looking after him are from that part of the world. He has also matured, naturally enough, into an arch BREXITEER, still salivating for a no-deal, and presumably a return to wartime rationing too, which I cannot believe he remembers fondly. Given my own leanings in the opposite direction, we tend to avoid talk of such matters now, speak instead of technical stuff, as if we were still in the business of measuring things and that we matter in the world of work.

It’s an act then, yes, but he thrives on the illusion of it, lighting up as we converse.

Do you remember old so and so?…

But people are such liars, Rick. They lie to each other. All the time.

Yes Lottie, it’s true, we do.

Sometimes it’s the only way we can get by.

 

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The landlord smiles

They look a bunch of toughs,
these guys, red-cheeked,
strutting, chests out, like cockerels.
Already drunk, by noon
they laugh in pork pie hats.

Their eyes are bloodshot, noses swollen,
pockmarked with the corrosive booze
of long years. Their jokes are coarse,
take cheap shots at women
and immigrants.

Self importantly they cruise
the public houses,
puffed up,
in search of inanity,
exchanging pithy barbs,
and seeking revelation,
In the bottom of  another glass.
Meanwhile while their bodies turn their beer
To gas and pee.
The landlord smiles his sly welcome,
rolls out his bonhomie,
and cheers them on.

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Breeding the Super-man?

We note this week the blog-musings of a government advisor in which he claims people of colour are innately less intelligent than white people. This same advisor is also on record as supporting the idea of compulsory contraception for the lower classes in order to avert the emergence of a mentally retarded underclass, because by certain selective and elitist measures, poverty – as well as colour – is held as an indicator of low intelligence, all of which is passed on genetically, thus souring a nation’s gene pool. Said advisor, having been outed by the lefty press, has now gone, but it ought to worry us – even if it does not entirely surprise us – how anyone espousing such views might ever have crossed the hallowed threshold of Number 10, all of which suggests the direction of travel is pretty much as we feared it would be.

My own understanding is that intelligence can indeed, in part, be inherited – perhaps as much as 50% – but whether we’re able to capitalise on those particular genes depends very much also on the environment we grow up in. Poverty does therefore have a bearing on intelligence, but only in so far as it’s correlated with poor nutrition and the multiplicity of social stresses that might be suffered when one is grindingly poor.

All things being equal, intelligence is gifted with no regard to social class or race. Just because you’re a king does not mean you’re also a sage. Conversely, if you grow up in a poor family, but feel otherwise secure and loved, you’ve as much chance of being an Einstein as anyone else. So, next time you’re passing one of those tower-blocks where the nation houses its poor, pick a window and imagine the life that lives there. The only difference between the potential of that life, and the most accomplished – and by that I don’t mean the wealthiest, but say an artist, poet, musician, dancer, industrialist, scientist, and, yes, a decent politician – is opportunity. In a successful society the door to opportunity is opened by talent, ambition and hard work. In a failing society it is opened by money.

When looking to science for solutions, we do well to be careful with the sciences from which we choose to selectively quote. If we want a healthy, happy population, if we wish to avoid that so called “underclass”, all that’s needed is the means to earn a living decent enough to put good food on the table, and the social infrastructure to provide a pathway for us all to realise our dreams. We do not need a program of enforced sterilisation, or selective breeding to maintain the vitality of a nation. We have been there before, all be it a long time ago with the evil of eugenics and its ideal of a super-race. This was a line of thinking that ended at Nuremberg, but only after the letting of much blood and a generation scarred by unimaginable cruelty.

But that we speak of eugenics again, now, in 2020 it seems to me we have begun another retrograde phase in the evolution of self awareness, compassion and simple decency, that the eugenicists cannot see how the very eugenics of which they speak and its aims of racial purity and intellectual supremacy, is itself evidence of rottenness, theirs the impure and soulless thinking we could well do without visiting again.

I hope this is something we can wake up to and avert by our collective revulsion, and that we don’t have to live through the first half of the twentieth century all over again before we do. But I look at where we are now, and I’m not optimistic. It’s one thing to be clever, quite another to be wise and honourable. I’m sure there are a lot of very clever people running the show, but at the same time we seem to be seriously lacking wisdom, while all sense of honour is routinely trampled into the dirt of lies, and political expedience.

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The ultimate act of subversion

Normal is whatever we are prepared to put up with, and whatever we are prepared to put up with becomes normal. I’ve witnessed a lot of stuff this week that strikes me as being symptomatic of a new normal, one existing on the surface of an anger that’s coming to the boil. I’ve witnessed bad tempered exchanges between usually placid individuals, I’ve received emails in SHOUTY CAPITALS. I’ve also been expected to laugh at racist jokes, and to share in racist opinions.

My resistance to all of this has been to meet grumpiness with calm. I respond to shouty capitals by not responding at all. As for the racist jokes, I do not laugh at them. But as a strategy, I fear such mechanisms are as effective as hiding my head in the sand. I can pretend all I like, but the world is still out there, and its normality is morphing in ways that disturb me.

To make matters worse, I’ve been accused of grumpiness myself. Perhaps it’s true. I excuse it by claiming the reason is I’m witnessing an eclipse of the sun by a giant, black, angry balloon pumped up by all this hot air spouting from a million snarling mouths. It’s not normal, this thing, and I want to resist it, because only by our collective acquiescence can it ever become established as the New Normal. If I am negative it is out of desperation, searching for the pin that will burst this vile bubble, and restore daylight to the world.

To push the metaphor a little further, the greater the eclipse, the harder it is to see the decay, in the same way candlelight will hide the dust and mould of the most toxic environment, render it normal, even cosy until it makes us ill. Daylight reveals the world as it is, reveals it lately as disturbing – disturbing also we risk no longer being disturbed by it, that we are so easily habituated, normalised to this thing, this tide in the Zeitgeist that is definitely not normal.

Contrary to all of this, contemporary spiritual belief speaks of an imminent awakening, a blossoming of consciousness, likening it to the exponential rate of change of technological development, at present bewildering and exploding wonders on a daily basis. Yes, our flowering is imminent, the gurus tell us, even though all evidence is pointing the other way, that we are returning to a state of unconsciousness, one our technology is aiding and abetting, as much as it is resisting.

I read back over my stuff and wonder if I’m all right, if I’ve simply grown too old to be of use any more, or if I’ve been crawling about on the plain for too long and need to haul my bones up a hill, gain some fresh perspective and some real oxygen, rather than hyperventilating on this synthetic stuff we’re all breathing now via online media. Maybe that’s it – only the dead-zones provide us with anything approaching the real normal any more, places where the Internet struggles and 4G is but a distant dream.

I know of a few places like that, lost valleys, remote bays, high passes. Perhaps I should flee there and become celibate, in the literary sense I mean, shield my flame in the privacy of private journals, instead of standing out in the rain and wind all the time. Let me remind myself Normal is the sigh of the wind in the trees, the sparkle of sunlight on water, the sound of birds and the scent of the wild. Everything else, the good and the bad of it, is just the stuff we make up in our heads, reflective of all the ups and downs of the psyche.

If I am grumpy then, it’s because I do not accept any other normality as genuine, and reject it as unwholesome. Grumpiness feels like a pin to burst the balloon, but it’s not. It only adds to the pain of the world, just as every frown aids the eclipse, hastens the transition to the new, darker normality. I know, it’s just easier, when surrounded by frowny-faces to forget how to smile, how, when met with grumpiness, to respond with an even temper, and how when met with bigotry and racism, to call it out for what it is. This, this is the pin to burst the balloon, and we all posses it.

So breathe, relax, smile. At times like these, it is the opposite of what’s expected. It is the ultimate act of subversion.

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