On the Supposed Fatness of Spaniards

I have just remembered that blogging involves reading the Guardian.

Thisarticle says that Mediterraneans are the fattest people in Europe, naming Spain specifically. I find this very odd, because I don’t know where all these fat people are.

Not only do I live in the south of Spain, but I interact daily with large numbers of teenagers and young people (I was very bad in a previous life, I suspect) and very few of them are fat. Casting an eye over the groups I was teaching this morning, sizing them up as it were, I don’t think one in ten, one in twenty, could even be described as slightly fat, let alone obese. Chatting breezily with colleagues, the number of children we might refer to as ‘that fat one’, is very small indeed. In the street, also, by way of experiment, I tried applying the first adjective that came to mind to those I passed, and ‘fat’ crossed my mind very rarely.

I also know that, to my students, eating fruit is a natural and enjoyable thing, we have conversations about which are their favourites, which is hard to imagine with English children, and most of them play some kind of spot regularly, again, it is a natural thing to do.

On the other hand, I visit England most summers and I am always struck by how big people (and dogs) are. Bulging thighs and upper arms, flabby stomachs and wobbly jowls seem to be everywhere you look.

South Americans and gypsies tend to be big and flabby around the backside and the midriff, but there have always been gypsies here, and I doubt if the recent increase in South Americans is large enough to skew the figures that much.

So I declare myself non-plussed, but I offer these observations from the theatre of action anyway. Perhaps someone can shed some light.

A Stupid Question I'd like to know the answer to

A question has occured to me, probably an egregious, that is to say, a stupid question, but it is a question to which I am not certain of the answer. Why do governments tax at all? Do they need to tax? In the modern world, where money is what governments define it to be, not just the money supply but the existence of money, where they pay in credit notes and not in gold or hard cash of any kind, in a system and a society where there is sufficient confidence to do this, is it actually necessary to impose taxes at all? Could they not simply define the money to exist in an account of their own, and then pass it to the accounts of the people they wish to pay? In theory I don't see why not. In practice it would cause inflation, I expect, but governments are good enough at that anyway. Would it actually destabilize the economy in such a way as to be impractible? Is it not, to some extent, what they do anyway? It would mean the destruction of a vast number of bureacratic systems and the resources they consume uselessly, it would  solve a lot of problems artificially imposed upon the normal working man and would make businesses much more productive, to the advantage of absolutely everyone.

I know I have the odd economically literate reader, so if there is an answer worth giving I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, feel free to cough politely, avoid eye contact, and talk amongst yourselves.

Public Art in Sweden

Public art appears to be less subject to any constraints of quality or taste or return on taxpayers money than even in England. The place, the country, is dotted with abysmal creations that I am sure no one has paid for willingly. There are big display cases with pointless, as in having neither purpose nor anything to say, stuff in them, there is a poorly made figure of a pink giant urinating into the river. There was, in a nearby square, a great structure of wires strung with bathroom furniture and other objects in a meaningless parade of tat. Someone is laughing as they take the money. In front of the castle in the river there are three figures of businessmen standing in shopping trolleys. There is at least a touch of humour in this, probably Marxist humour of course.

It turns out that these piles ofuninspiring junk  are part of a festival called OpenArt. The woman in the tourist office encouraged us to do a tour of all the pieces. We shan't be doing that. What we have seen of it captures everything that is wrong with taxpayer-funded artists. It is lazy and dull. There is never more than a single idea, usually trite and poorly executed. There is no attempt at doing real work or conceiving a more complex idea, something worth expressing, and working on the best way to express it. For 'public' artists it is always and only about money. Other people's money. The art itself doesn't matter, as they are not communicating with anyone, not even themselves.

It was a pity to have to navigate all this stuff in order to see the simple beauty of the town.

Impressions of Swedish Churches

Scandinavia in general seems to have a distinctive style of ecclesiastical architecture. Partly because they are not us, and partly, mostly I think, because they didn't built much with stone until the late 19thC. The result is that many of the older churches which still stand are either made of wood or, if ma
de of stone, look as though they would be happier if they were made of wood. They tend to have very high, thin, metal spires, usually black,




which give them great vertical presence. Inside they seem to be similar to southern churches. The frescoes are fresher, there is more wood, but the ceilings and the columns look familiar and the design and distribution of high altars, side altars and choir stalls is, too.

We saw an old German church on the water near the railway station at Stockholm. It is said to be the oldest building in Stockholm, with a wrought iron latticed spire. A remarkable piece of work, and rather beautiful. You had to pay to see the inside and it didn't look worth it. The Cathedral was much more interesting, with a mahogany and silver reredos and skulls on the tombstones on the floor, and simple frescoes on some of the roof vaults. The pianist was practicing for a concert on a piano in front of the altar. The sound carried beautifully. We saw another Church with a lot of wood all around, simply but well-carved, and with many paintings of bucolic scenes and the lives of saints on the wood.

 

We walked down to the river and up to the Cathedral at Uppsala. The service was starting. As churches mostly are here, it was tall and thin, and in this case very large, the biggest in Scaninavia we were told. The spires are thin tall and black, the body is good brick, there are weell-executed frescoes on the walls of biblical scenes and sparing designs on the vaults of the ceiling. See the photos as usual. There is great variety of styles among the altars, tombs, gravestones and statues in the place. The high altar was curious, with a simple grey cross and no reredos,but a further space behind. Behind this part was a waxwork of a beggar, very lifelike. There were two organs, one a magnificent old set of pipes over the front door, and another more modern one to one side of the high altar.

100 yards away there was another church, this time a more Romanic type, simpler but also quite interesting in its way. Service was also going on, so I assume it was another denomination, as neither was full. It's a difficult question to ask, of course, 'Why don't you all worship the one God and love your neighbour together?' The answer probably contains the phrase 'spawn of Satan...'

The Church of St Nicholas in Orëbro has its own unusual frescoes and a reredos consisting mostly of a painted Calvary scene surrounded by sculpted apostles making up the rest. Also two organs, one grand and old, one smaller and newer and more accessible. And again a grand piano near the altar. They certainly like their keyboard music in this country.

And then there is the 'Frälsarkransen', which I saw in a number of places. It appears that an old bishop, called Martin Lönnebo, having given up playing pool because his cue arm wasn't as straight as it once was, decided to string his balls together and use them for devotion (I may have misunderstood part of the story). In any case, he created a Rosary in which the beads have the following symbolism:


Schematic Presentation of the Wreath of Christ
1. The bead of God 
2. The bead of Silence 
3. The I-bead 
4. The bead of Baptism 
5. The Desert bead 
6. The Carefree bead 
7. The bead of Love 
8. The bead of Secret 
9. The bead of Darkness 
10. The bead of Resurrection

I found this very interesting, and I offer it for what it's worth. It could be a very comforting thing to hold and to pass through your fingers and your mind at times when life is getting unnecessarily complex.

On Nudity

Update: In the comments, Vincent points out that this post is badly in nearly of illustration. Although I am told that it is possible to find pictures of naked women on the Internet, I have added some here to give artistic coherence to the post (Never Knowingly Artistically Incoherent, me).

A Quick Sketch

I have spent a couple of afternoons trying to find a nude to draw. I first looked at Greek statues and eventually decided that there was no actual nude that was what I was looking for. Then today I tried modern photos in diffetent styles. Again I found nothing that wanted me to draw it, but I was struck by the variety of results of applying imagination to the representation of the human form. Not for the first time, I fell to thinking about it all.

The Original

Flesh in Stone, by the Genius of Bernini

There is great beauty in the human body. And great possibility. Despite the great beauty and plasticity of many animals, there is much in the human body that is, or can be, superior to them. One reason is simply the lack of hair, which allows the details of flesh texture and muscle tone and form to be clearly seen even at rest. The ability to be conscious of one's own body, to control its movements in detail, to conceive them with knowledge of how observers will react to them and to present them in a specific context independent of the movements themselves. There is also the important point that the lack of hair allows the play of light and shadow to exist, to be refined and exploited. The animality of the human body is more clearly visible than in other animals.

Naked Flamenco

Then there is the fact that we know and understand the human body, its functions, sensations and responses, far better than those of other animals. And then there is sex. We don't think of want cheetahs sexually.

But sex is not necessarily an important part of this perceived beauty, or even any part of it. I can see beauty in the male as well as the female form. On the other hand, it does appear that the female form is intrinsically more beautiful than the male. Women who appreciate beauty seem to agree with men on this. A beautiful woman is a beautiful thing. A man's beauty cannot so easily be appreciated by other men. Nevertheless, the beauty of the human body is not limited to the female.

Roman, not Greek, but one of the best

Nor is it limited to the young and well-formed. In many kinds of dance the performers tend to be youngish and slimmish, but then many forms of dance are too demanding for the old and fat. Some forms do allow for this. Flamenco rhythms are often danced to by old women. When it is well done, with skill and duende, not only the dancing but the women themselves become beautiful.

I remember a story I once heard about Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, in which he cried because he had seen an artist capable of making a chaste Venus. The story was probably apocryphal, carefully crafted to illustrate a point, as so many of the stories he told were, but it means, at the very least, that he thought it could be done, and that it was important.

Looking at pictures of attractive naked women purely- as it were- as beautiful objects, or the subjects of beautiful images, rather than as objects of male enquiry, is very interesting and instructive. The curiosities of anatomy, the signs of life lived and suffered, the differences that exist between what you may think of, at first glance, as similar examples of the Standard Pretty Girl, the ways in which the human body can be twisted, distorted, lit up, perceived, conceived, expressed and impressed. Their is apparently unlimited potential for teh creative mind to find new and beautiful ways to show it to us. I like this fact.

It is possible that that drawing will never be made. These reflections will have to stand in its place.

Poems to Remember the Past By

Byron

SO, we'll go no more a-roving 

  So late into the night, 

Though the heart be still as loving,

 And the moon be still as bright. 

For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast, 

And the heart must pause to breathe, 

  And love itself have rest. 

Though the night was made for loving, 

  And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving 

  By the light of the moon.

Francis Thompson

* For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast, 

* And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost, 

* And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host 

* As the run stealers flicker to and fro, 

* To and fro: 

* O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

 The story goes that “Not long before his death and long after he had watched Hornby and Barlow bat at Old Trafford, Thompson was invited to watch Lancashire play Middlesex at Lord's. As the day of the match grew closer, Thompson became increasingly nostalgic. At the end, he did not go for the match, but sat at home and wrote At Lord's. The original match in 1878 ended in a draw…”

I was reminded of both of these poems the other day (the second is a fragment of a longer poem) and remembered that I wanted to write about this. About the stark feeling of having done everything worthwhile that you are ever going to do. Good memories are good, but they shouldn't remind you too clearly that they are now only memories. These lines do.

There are many things I will never do again, or never do at all. And there are many things I will do, if I choose to or am lucky enough.  It is these last that are the future, that make the present worth prolonging, that cause optimism, happiness even. And memory is good, even memories of what is gone forever.

But there is a finality about these lines. The simplicity of the metres, the bareness of the images, the lack of any contrast with a worthwhile present, lead to a feeling that what is good is lost. And perhaps was never truly had.

Just poetry, and I like it. It provokes an emotional response, which is one of the things I like in writing. But don’t read them under the influence.

Idolatry of the Abstract

We need to group together to get our ideas heard, to express them with confidence, in order to clarify them in the first place, because. But once we entrust our belief to others it is no longer our own. It is dictated to us.

Any human organization, religious, cultural, sporting, political, government, whatever, will be controlled by those who love power, and it will demand that the primary faith, belief, loyalty, be to the structure and hierarchy of the organisation itself, not to the idea, ideal or purpose that it was originally created for, and certainly not to the people who created it to serve them. God, football, socialism, the taxpayer, whatever, is very much in second place.

Anyone who places the original purpose, God, say, in the case of a religious group, above the group itself will not be trusted, and will be sneered at by the leaders.

Idolatry of the abstract is what I, and doubtless many other people who are mystified that I should find any of this new, call the tendency to place the abstracted idea of a group of people above the individuals who make it up- who may have created the group specifically in order to benefit themselves- and even above the great majority taken together. The leaders will require, and often the members will not only accept but actively collaborate with the idea, that only the state, the game, the order, the party, the school, whatever it happens to be, matters, and the people who make it up can be dispensed with, disposed of, destroyed if necessary, all of them, in the name of the abstract that is supposed to belong to them.

Since there is one born every minute, and many people love simple abstract ideas that are easy to name, especially when they are designed to flatter them by being made fashionably good and easy to understand, many pseudo-religious, pseudo-political or pseudo-other organizations are created purely to take advantage of this factor. But many are created by the very people who later allow themselves to be controlled by them.

Sports associations are taken over by the people paid to run them, as soon as the game becomes economically or socially important enough. They talk about ‘bringing the game into disrepute’, ‘the game is bigger than all of us’, and are frequently in dispute with the people who supposedly employ them.

To a certain extent this exemplifies the principal/agent problem. In all such organizations, whether private or agencies of government, the people in charge of the money, of the rules, of deciding exactly what the whole point of the organization is, and however they acquired that power, will tend to run it in their own interests. Whether through corruption, ineptness, laziness or some combination of these and/or other reasons, this will happen. We know it will happen because it invariably does happen.

Tyrannical governments deliberately take advantage of organizations which already exist, and create abstracts such as ‘the state’, ‘the country’, the party’, the nation’, ‘the revolution’, the philosophy’, ‘the ideal’, ‘insert –ism here’, in order to justify everything up to and including the murder in the name of that ideal of the very people it is intended to serve, and indeed, in most cases, without whom it would not exist, and in all cases without whom it would have no meaning.

But you don’t have to go to Stalin to see this idolatry. The local golf club, choir or neighbourhood watch committee will happily sacrifice the people who created it to serve them, to some abstract ideal of itself, often with the willing acceptance of those sacrificed, who fail to see what has been done to them.

On World Peace

How would you work for world peace?

I shall fight the urge to comment on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU. I doubt there is much I can add that hasn’t been said (not that that usually stops me, but I shall resist the urge*). But I will ask, and completely fail to answer, a question ignored by the process, though not perhaps by Nobel himself, who essayed a form of answer: how do you contribute to world peace in any way that could mark you out for recognition or awards?

“…one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

I have long wondered what Nobel meant by ‘peace conferences’. It is probable that he lived in a world very different from our own, and it was possible to imagine that if leaders of nations, or their favoured officials, could be persuaded to sit down together, peace would result from it. Despite the incompetence and corruption of that perpetual peace congress that is the UN, despite the failure of NATO, the EU and similar organizations to keep absolute peace in the areas they try to control, despite the abject failure of many meetings convened for the specific purpose of ending or averting conflict, the fact is that at least they exist, to an extent perhaps unimaginable a century ago, and that a significant number of people cannot conceive of a war breaking out in the country they live in, suggests that things have improved in the presence of such congresses.

Economic growth and the material comfort it brings are undoubtedly important as well, as is a fair bit of luck, but I think our Alfred, casting an eye about him today, would be fairly happy that he had identified a way of bringing some improvement to the world in general.

The abolition of reduction of standing armies is a trickier matter. The negotiated death of the arms race, and the subsequent ending of the Cold War, certainly made the world in general a much more peaceful place, and I think Nobel would consider this within the scope of ‘reducing standing armies (not that those responsible for it were ever recognised by the Nobel Committee). So one up to Sir Alfred.

The dissolution of the Japanese and German armies after WWII led to unprecedented peace in Western Europe and the Far East, but it was an expression of the desire of those countries and their peoples (in the case of Germany at least) not to start further conflict on the scale they had previously been responsible for. The reduction in the standing army was a consequence of the fervent desire for peace, not the direct cause of peace. A scoreless draw there, I think.

And then there is the contribution of armies to peace, something which Nobel could probably not imagine. The idea that armies could prevent conflict rather than be the cause of it by their very existence is unlikely to have entered his head, as it was obviously indisputable at the time that war was caused by armies. I might be misjudging the times, not being remotely expert, but I assume the thought process was something like that. Now an Army, in the sense of a body of men trained and disciplined for certain rôles requiring controlled authority, can contribute to the peace of their own or more frequently other nations.

And then there is the Fraternity between Nations. Hard to define, harder to quantify, but how would you work to achieve fraternity among nations? Much as I hate to admit it, we have to let the governments help us out on this one, not because they are likely to be any good at it, but because they can very easily stop it happening. The global trade, comfortable lives (in some countries at least) and cheap travel that freedom and stability have brought about lead to an increase in understanding and knowledge about people who are not quite like us, and a (slightly) reduced desire to kill each other unthinkingly.

Governments, the press, others with a voice and some kind of control can very easily persuade us (for some value of us) to hate some given ‘them’, and frequently find it useful to do so. They have a harder time persuading us to like ‘them’, usually having to resort to abuse and the law. In fact, you would think from reading the papers that no one would like anyone at all if we weren’t forced by law to pretend that we do.

But the fact is the more we travel, the more we surf the internet, the more we expose ourselves to news, entertainment, food and other artefacts of culture from around the world, the fewer the obstacles to that fraternity which Nobel wanted. There is surely a case for awarding the prize to Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Freddy Laker, Michael Ryan, or some combination of little-known people who have made communication around the world so much easier. Or from a slightly broader perspective, to the world’s major banks, which have, over the last century, made investment easy, with the result that we have the prosperity that has allowed bars to fraternity to be broken down. A serious suggestion, though perhaps not a popular one.

It has often been observed that free, wealthy countries don’t go to war with each other. To bring about peace and fraternity we should try to bring about freedom and prosperity. We know now how to do that, although there are many who don’t want it to happen.

*In consequence of which the whole of paragraphs 2 and 3, much of paragraphs 4 and 6, and quite a lot of the introduction, have been struck out.

On Hydronyms

The river that flows through the village is called the Alarconcillo. The river we went to to look at the salt mines a few days ago is the Pinilla. They both play a role in feeding the lakes and their two lines join up near the start. A couple of weeks ago I went to a village further south, on the river Cañamares. There is a stream that flows into the lower lakes, called the Magdalena, one of many that appear on the maps in the innumerable little valleys that the crumpled scenery here creates. This one is particular well known because it gives it name to a stretch on hill on the road to somewhere else where a lot of motorcyclists have met an unhappy end. It tempts you to go faster than the curves will allow.

All of this makes for a verdant-sounding countryside filled with the chatter of babbling brooks and the mating calls of happy and abundant fish. But all these rivers are dry. None of them deserves the name of river at all, as they are little more than mud channels baked in the sun. On the occasions when they do have water in them, it is a kind of sludge so narrow you can jump across it.

The city I live in is on the Guadiana, which at least is a proper river you can get wet in. It flows north-east, through Mérida and Badajoz, then goes south, forming the border between Spain and Portugal for about 70 miles and flowing into the Atlantic at Ayamonte. The name is Arabic and it somehow manages to keep its identity for several hundred miles, despite joining with many other rivers and passing through complex multi-feed drainage systems.

You would expect most people to call the river that waters their town or village ‘The River’. Why would you need a name for it at all? ‘And even if you did, to distinguish it from some other river that passed nearby, perhaps, why would the people in the village a few miles downstream give it the same name? There comes a point where the distance is so great, and it needn’t be more than a dozen or so miles, that it is not even recognised as the same river.

People identify their local river with some divinity, or event, or specific feature that characterises it, because they like giving an identity to the important things in their lives. Geographers give themselves the task of tracing rivers, then they need to define criteria for choosing names and deciding which has precedence, so the idea that a river has an identity over hundreds of miles is an invention of modern academia.

A neat explanation, if I do say so myself, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Hydronyms, and to a certain extent toponyms more generally, are extraordinarily durable. They are handed down from tribe to tribe, from conquered to conquerors, from those who left to go West to those who moved in to replace them. Most of the place and river names of Greece are not Greek. They have survived not only three thousand years of Greek culture, the Turkish conquest/semi-replacement of the 17thC, but they even survived the original occupation of the land we know as Greece by those who came from the East and displaced those who gave them those names.

There are countless river names in Spain that are Arabic, Visigothic or Celtic in origin. Why do people who share no language or cultural identity with the namers, nor any real cultural continuity, continue to use names that mean nothing to them?

Names are sounds. The meaning of the sounds is less important than the symbolism of the thing we attach them to. I am certain there is a great deal of information about human history in the human mind contained in the way we preserve and re-interpret names that have become meaningless, but try as I might, I can't find it.

We are Extraordinary

We are extraordinary creatures. Formed from chemicals that can only be created by the unimaginable pressures and temperatures at the heart of dying stars, endowed with the power to detect our world in various ways that have been developing for hundreds of millions of years. The perceptive powers of our senses are limited compared with large numbers of animals, and we do not have at all some senses that other animals have, and yet these powers, though not the greatest among life forms, are extraordinary enough. That a bunch of chemicals can combine, reproduce, be aware of themselves and process information about the world around them is in fact so remarkable that we cannot even begin to understand it. Science accepts that some things just are.

Yet we can describe how the world works from what we can perceive. We can conceive means to make things easier to understand, we can imagine models that allows us to perceive things with the mind that are beyond the perception of our bodily senses, we can probe the invisibly small and interpret the unimaginably distant, and we can grasp how this affects us, and our place within it.

When I say we, I mean a small number in the most extreme cases, and a larger number who have a more general understanding. I once clung by my fingertips to the coattails of this last group, but it doesn't matter one way or the other. The fact that I share a species with such people is quite something.

We are extraordinary. Why do so many of us choose to be not even ordinary?

To Whom does the World Belong...

The world does not belong to the people who moan all the time, because it has no need of them. It doesn't belong to those who think they are important, because it doesn't share their opinion. It doesn't belong to the lazy and unwilling because they contribute nothing to it. It doesn't belong to the wilfully ignorant, because they will never understand is. It doesn't belong to the cowardly, because it will destroy them.

Does that mean the world belongs to me? I sometimes feel it does, or at least, that it could.

Thinking Out Loud

I do not object in principle to the death penalty for murder.
(Perhaps also for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or otherwise deserting people you have promised to protect. Raping children, that sort of thing).
I should like to believe that a free society should be able to deal in this way with its murderers, and I still believe that to forbid a society from doing so, as the EU has done, is an act of tyranny, but it is clear that the decision to eliminate those who represent too great a danger is never truly in the hands of 'society'. It will always be controlled by those who rule, and the rulers are never part of the societies they rule. They consider themselves above the rest, a breed apart. They care little for the ordinary people, and, in any case, they will certainly make mistakes, mistakes which can never be rectified.
In practice, therefore, theory doesn't matter here.

Those Olympics

I am a bad person. There are many people who wouldn’t question that assertion, and a few who would, at least for the sake of form. I can be friendly, sociable, generous, considerate, understanding, magnanimous, accommodating, encouraging, optimistic, entertaining, and a number of other desirable things, as long as there’s something in it for me and I have my instruction booklet handy. On the other hand, I have been thinking impure thought about the Olympic Games.

There, I’ve said it, a non sequitur slipped in at the end of a paragraph, almost hidden from sight, but I have said. I think bad things about the Games.

My impurity of thought has nothing to do with beach volleyball or Yelena Isinbayeva; it is a deeper, less human impurity. More or more I find myself hoping that they will be an abject, humiliating failure.

That they will be a crashing economic failure is taken as read, these things always are. That there will be utter chaos in London for weeks and a lifelong bill for the British taxpayer likewise. That the media will be full of self-important officials and inarticulate has-beens telling us (well, not me, I won’t be there) how to behave, and preening themselves over how much of our (your) money they’ve managed to spend and how they deserve get special traffic lanes and police protection and all the best seats that everyone else will have to pay through the nose for, because they matter and you don’t, is also a given. Such people are nothing to me, and don’t even notice when they are laughed at and ignored. Only humiliation is good enough for them.

The idea that they represent some kind of national pride or symbolic unity is utterly risible, of course, a marketing notion invented for the occasion, no more. It’s useful for getting people to put up with in and persuading thousands of children to work for nothing in the preparation, but it isn’t real.

But in most Olympic sports the Games are the highest prize there is, the culmination of years of work and dreams. That for decades the event has been organised purely for the glory of politicians and bureaucrats who care nothing for the people who create the show is not their fault, and I desire them no disappointment in the pursuit of those dreams or in the search for reward for their labours. I once had sporting dreams and I won’t crush those of others.

On balance, therefore, I see that the Games are of great importance to a lot of people, some of whom don’t deserve to be disappointed) and they won’t affect me one way or the other, beyond providing a bit of entertainment if I watch a bit of them, but, even so, a part of me, a part that will not be excised, would love to see the music files get lost at the opening ceremony, the terracing collapse on its foundations, the Zil lanes blocked by broken down buses, empty stadiums, bored journalists called home by their stations  because no one was interested, the right-on finding contradictory ways to denounce some aspect of the event, add your own if you wish.

I know it would give me pleasure, even though it shouldn’t, if it were a failure, and a lot of people deserve it to be.

Btw: when looking for the image that accompanies this post I googled ‘Lisa Simpson blowjob’ (for reasons which I hope are obvious). I can state without reservation that this is a bad idea.

Rousseau

I have recently been reading the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From the beginning it is clear that the world needs a lot more people like him. Not for the political philosophy which, as I recall, is a bit authoritarian and statist for my taste (I’ll take another look), but as a model of how to live life, and how to write about the life he lived. When our young wonder how they should live their lives so as to get the very most out of them, a good answer would be that they should read Rousseau and, I would not say act like him in every way, but they should think like him, become like him, and act in consequence.

He cared nothing for anyone else’s judgement of his actions, but he had his own morality by which he judged himself, often rather harshly. Not for Jean-Jacques the fear of what people might think, the cringing with shame as he goes against fashionable morality, the kowtowing to other people’s prejudice. He sets out to live, and he does so, on his own terms, in a very successful and wonderfully free and refreshing manner. At least, that’s the way he tells it.

The book is full of instructive anecdotes. While at Venice as secretary to an incompetent ambassador he considers the question of women. After a couple of prostitutes leave him with a horror of syphilis, and his deep regard for his friends leads him to stop sleeping with their mistresses, he decides he’ll just have to get one of his own. Lovers, however, being expensive and inconvenient, he finally arranges to share one with a close friend. Thus, they shop around a bit and finally invest in a 12-year-old girl whose mother was a bit short of cash just at that moment.

Lovely and charming was this child. She sang well and they provided her with a clavichord and a singing master, she entertained them and they were all happy. Theirs was a happy household while they waited for her to be of an age when they could seduce her (nothing suggests that seduction would have meant rape or any other form of coercion, they would have expected to win her by the usual means). They both came to love her, as one does a lovely, charming and talented child, in a way that quite excluded the purpose they had originally formed. They determined that their child would be found a good husband, and a portion settled on her, as good fathers, surrogate or otherwise, do so determine. Rousseau left Venice before she reached puberty, but he gives us to understand that his friend did what they had both considered to be right.

I wouldn’t recommend the purchase of a prepubescent mistress, it just doesn’t feel right, but if you do find yourself in that position, the actions of Jean-Jacques, as he describes them, anyway, are an excellent guide to what your subsequent behaviour should be.

I haven’t finished the book yet. I look forward to being further instructed.

Whose Hand on the Trigger?

A man in France decided to murder seven innocent people in cold blood. Three of them were soldiers and two were children. It is widely reported that he shot an eight-year-old girl in the head at close range. A thoroughly evil bastard.

He had reasons for making these choices. What they were we can only speculate, but unless his mind was not under his control there was a process of thoughts that led to doing what he did.

What he did, let us remember, was not to express anger, or to attack symbols, but to murder children. Once that is glossed over the importance of the event is lost, and the truth is forgotten. It is possible that he murdered those children and adults as a manifestation of a diffuse hatred that he refused to address within himself.

His reasons for choosing those specific people may not have been personal, it seems more likely that they represented to him something he had chosen to hate, rather than being, themselves, the object of that hate. It’s probably similar to the motivations of the components of mobs who, when finding an excuse to rampage together, identify members of certain outgroups as legitimate targets for violence

Many commentators are too grand to get close enough to the action to see what is really happening, and so they waffle about contexts they don’t understand and attribute motivation and final responsibility to whoever it is they always attack. This is good politics, but it isn’t truth.

His choices were, naturally, influenced by those around him, by his upbringing, by the company he frequented and the people whose moral authority he gave weight to. It is perfectly possible that he was taught to hate, and that his murderous violence was irresponsibly cultivated by others. All of which places an important part of the blame, not on events and circumstances a long way off and outside his direct experience, but on the people close to him who persuaded him that he could affect those events and circumstances by murdering children.

His actions may well have been another example of belief in the magic of symbolism. Aware of but not wanting to recognise his inability to change anything real by his own actions,  he convinced himself that murdering children was such a big thing that in some way it MUST bring about the change he wanted.

The murderer is beyond answering for his actions. Some of those around him might still have to do so.