Bitter searching of the heart

TEN. December 29TH 2019

As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes think that activism may be only a covert technique for the avoidance of reality: we look as if we are doing something, but perhaps all we are doing is denying the facts – which, on the face of it, are very bleak indeed – and the improbability of doing anything useful about them. I refer here not just to the climate and ecological crisis which has become, almost exclusively, the domain into which I have been pouring my own energies, but to the political crisis which is providing an insane and absurd backdrop – like the madness of King Lear being played out on the cliffs of Dover while the apocalyptic storm rages – bringing to unfettered power the likes of Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and now Johnson.

When I say ‘pouring’ this may give a false impression, since my energies have become so depleted that in order to draw on remaining reserves it is really necessary to pick up the metaphorical bottle and give it a shake and a couple of good slaps; even then the results are meagre and sludgy and in recognition of this I’ve been trying to give it all a rest for a couple of weeks in the  hope that a winter pause and perhaps an embrace of the gloom, will eventually herald a new spring.

Before making this retreat, I spent a peculiarly peaceful and soothing couple of hours sitting in the hallway of a local community centre being chatted to by an amiable and apparently good-hearted woman somewhat older than me who, in between attempts to get me to flatter her by saying that she didn’t look over seventy (which I eventually did , even though she did) told me all about the challenges of caring for her sick husband, her excitement at having begun a course of study in hypnotherapy and the pleasure she had gained through years of public service as a local councillor. Even though she is not the kind of person with whom I am ever likely to become firm friends, I was struck by her warmth and goodwill and genuinely meant it when I said, as we parted, that it had been nice to meet her.

The thing hard to square with this impression was that this woman was, at the time, actively trying to assist the election of the most regressive and probably oppressive right-wing government in modern UK history. Nevertheless this was my impression. We were spending the two hours together because I, feeling guilty about having been unable to muster the enthusiasm and energy necessary to do any active campaigning for the Lib Dem candidate whom I desperately hoped might displace the embodiment of entitlement who is our awful Tory incumbent, and whom I genuinely regard as a talented  and decent man who would actually make a good MP, was doing a  session as an election day polling-station ‘teller’ for him whilst she was doing the same for the Tory.

How could it be that this evidently harmless and friendly person was prepared to set aside the scruples she must have about the awful and immoral Johnson and his shameless acolytes in order to support ‘her’ party, notwithstanding that it has clearly provided a political home and  social network for her during much of her life? Could she really be such a hypocrite? (The other explanation, that she somehow hasn’t noticed or realised what they are really like, I dismiss as unfeasible). How can these things be reconciled?

My conclusion, so far, is that they can’t. It was actually a bit like being in a parallel universe; the world as it might have been had this or that or that not happened, or perhaps as it once actually was; a world in which people had honest differences of opinion about the best way to manage things and debated respectfully and sensibly with each about them; a world in which mistakes were made and rectified, in which yes, people did bad and selfish things but for which those same people were usually ultimately punished and dishonoured rather than rewarded. It was in fact, like I always supposed politics was supposed to be, or at least could be, with people disagreeing relatively politely and maintaining a mutual regard for some shared objective reality and the capacity for enduring friendships across political divides..

That went, I think, in the very long run-up to the 12th, with what I experienced in that hallway on the day itself just some sort of ghostly echo. I still don’t understand how that woman could have not only voted for this Conservative party – the one that is now led by a lying, corrupt, abusive narcissist and doesn’t have room for Dominic Grieve –  but actually given up some of her free time to assist them. The only explanations I can think of are mental illness or a degree of self-interest that is so fierce that it amounts to evil. And that is really very difficult to square with her cheerful chatter, her readiness to share her ‘data’ with me, her friendliness to the voters wandering in off the street, and theirs to her, the humanness and civility displayed by all of us, which seemed of a different time and place.

The cognitive dissonance evoked is strong enough to make one feel a bit mad. Indeed, I do increasingly feel a bit mad, or at least that it might be easier to believe that I am mad – that this is the explanation for why things don’t make sense – than to believe that things are like they are. More and more the political struggle seems like one between good and evil – its narrative and the character of those which dominate it more redolent of the genre of the comic book than that of the one or two intelligent ‘broadsheet’ newspapers keeping their heads above water.

This ‘fantastic’ narrative style makes it seem, precisely, like a fantasy. It is hard to believe that all this is happening at all – that order in the world is approaching irrevocable breakdown and that the vast majority of people are unconcerned enough about it to allow it to happen without engaging in meaningful protest – let alone to believe that it is happening in my lifetime. To believe that this could happen ’to me’ or ’to us’, even if we take ‘us’ to mean the several generations over which, according to my guess, global society is likely to degenerate into something approaching the world of Mad Max, seems actually so self-centred and grandiose as to justify an assessment that I am indeed a bit mad. Conversation with activist colleagues tends to focus a lot on the practicalities of activism, leaving not much space for discussion of this sort of thing, but I know that at least a few of my colleagues share this feeling. 

According to the Wikipedia entries about the number of generations in human history. the chance of this happening ‘to us’ are about 1 in 12,000, which you’ll agree is quite long odds. As an alternative to indulging the idea of us being ’special’ in this way, I‘ve found myself using a bit of the spare time afforded by my retreat and the need for some distraction from the painful present, to dip into some random bits of history. My conclusion so far is that while many very terrible things have happened, far more uncomfortable to endure in terms of anything which anyone my age now is likely to experience, none of them can actually compete with the current reality – a likelihood of the actual end of human civilisation and a mostly uninhabitable earth – in terms of long-term seriousness

Not only is it hard to believe, I also don’t want to believe it. Most people who know me would, I am pretty sure, agree that I am arrogant and opinionated enough to enjoy an argument and to carry on engaging in it sometimes past the point where it would be appropriate to concede defeat, simply for the satisfaction of ‘winning’ . Having discovered quite early the pleasure of being praised for coming up with the right answers, I like being right and am quite attached to it as a concept. On this matter, however, I would dearly love to be wrong. Even though I have been prophesying in private conversation and theoretically ‘in public’ through the book I’ve been trying to write for god knows how long, that the very serious psycho-social disorder from which we are suffering is going to lead us all to hell in handcart. I would really like to find out that I have been mistaken. This is particularly so now that it seems clear to me that Armageddon is quite a lot closer and less available to mitigation than I initially realised.

The trouble is that I do trust what I think; and of course it doesn’t help that I have been thinking and writing about this stuff for years and that sinister things which I have darkly but half-jokingly predicted like the apparently insuperable rise of the ridiculous but terrifying Johnson have come to pass. Believe it or not I quite recently discovered in my loft a note book in which I had written, over 40 years ago, that in the future, during my lifetime, the president of the USA would be an ex-TV -game-show host. Of course, that was meant to be ironic too.

This would all be more bearable – less maddening – if I thought that other people didn’t believe that things are like they are. Although annoying and upsetting , having others unable or unwilling to see the truth of what you are pointing out is a psychologically more comfortable experience than having them acknowledge it but shrug their shoulders and get on with daily life as it nothing extraordinary had been revealed. It has occurred to me recently that the experience of this is analogous to the psychological disturbance experienced by victims of abuse after they have disclosed the abuse and found it inadequately or incompletely addressed, or simply accommodated within a new reality, 

Normalisation, Business as usual. The rotten state of Denmark in which  the evil murderous king reigns while the hero-Prince flounders around like a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, desperately trying to get someone to listen to him. Eventually the tragedy is played out, more or less everyone dies and the stage is reduced to a bleak empty finality where everyone gets a chance to have a think about what went wrong.

This is what’s meant to be happening now, of course, following the disastrous 12th and the suggestion, from one of the people who bears a particularly large share of personal responsibility for having got us into this mess, that those of the progressive left now enter a period of deep reflection. It might be his first act of leadership.

But of course reflection is very difficult when you’re traumatised. It’s hard to switch off from the sense of urgency which was driving you before and, if you manage it, uncomfortable enough to make you likely to switch straight back on again for some relief from the pain. This, alongside the fear of being left behind or out-manoeuvred by political rivals, may explain why a few Labour hopefuls so quickly began a leadership campaign – a context in which honest and accurate thought is almost inherently impossible.

For myself I find it hard to imagine that anything  anyone in the Labour party – the one that just went along with a march over the edge of a cliff because it was too potentially embarrassing or awkward or politically costly to do otherwise – could do in the short term will alleviate the harm or the pain, and I think it would be better to suspend the idea of trying to think a way out of the crisis and just hit the rock beneath and get on with discovering quite how hard that feels. Leonard Cohen (borrowing the words of a Canadian poet writing about 85 years ago within a political context which appears to have been somewhat similar, which I suppose is some comfort) called it “Bitter searching of the heart”. It implies absolute acceptance, grieving, and a rigorous self-questioning. Sometimes I think I’m getting there with the first two, and then the bleakness and horror kick in and fire up the monkey-mind to start again with its  silly schemes and plans which surely the evidence of the last six months should be enough to prove unfeasible. The third one, anyway, I find most difficult, and in some ways energetically contrary to the first two. The questions are too hard. What should I do, or not do? What is the point of continuing to follow a course of action which is increasingly challenging and exhausting, will likely have diminishing returns, and which, while it is has often been amusing and attractive to others, is likely to start annoying them more as time goes on, and will probably fail anyway. On the other hand, how can I live at peace by opting for the ‘quiet life’, seeking pleasure or to make myself or others simply ‘happy’, now that my eyes are open? Beyond all this, and perhaps easier to answer but harder still to contemplate, what’s the plan for when the shit really hits the fan? 

I’ don’t think I’m equipped either mentally or practically for that bit. It’s a cruel irony that over the past twelve months I have been on a rapid learning-curve, discovering or re-discovering ways of working, tools and techniques which I had never imagined, at the time of my retirement, that I would need to know about or apply. In many ways discovering all this has been invigorating and interesting and if I was a younger person I imagine this would feel like a silver-lining, a kind of saving-up of skills and experiences for the CV of the future (assuming I expected to have one). But these are nearly all ’soft’ organisational / communicational skills and the ‘harder’ technological ones are anyway dependent upon materials and resources which, from my point of view, look to be pretty unreliable as time goes on. Our activist organisation is intrinsically hopeful to the extent that most of would claim that all these soft and community-building skills are going to be key for survival in the future that’s coming. But the pessimistic part fo me is inclined to feel that it might actually be more useful to concentrate on developing some more practical knowledge like how to find a mushroom that won’t poison you and how to shoot a gun.

It’s hard enough to think about these things, let alone talk to one’s friends and loved-ones about it. Even if I felt I had some practical survival skills or resources to offer – “Here’s the keycode for the bunker with its lifetime supply of tinned food” – they may reasonably enough not want to consider them. Paradoxically, at a time in my life when I probably most need to talk about troubling things I feel least able to do it and I suspect that many of those I might normally choose to talk to might be disinclined to hear about them. Of course, I’ve met literally hundreds of new people in the last 12 months and many of them are quite ready to talk about it; but it’s not so easy nor always so safe to be vulnerable around those with whom bonds are much newer or feel less secure.

In short my ‘bonds’ do feel less secure, relationships overall more fragile, and perhaps this is inevitable and natural given that the overarching context, according to my assessment, is breakdown – environmental, political, social. Notwithstanding the great goodwill and warmth which I sense from many people, I feel more alienated, more alone. Probably the nearest thing to actual reflecting I’ve managed  is writing this (which I guess is mostly why I’m doing it) and spending the odd half an hour with the poems of Clive James who, annoyingly as I’d just decided that perhpas he was going to somehow outlive the worst horrors of the contemporary world , died a short while ago. Whatever he did in his personal life – which by all accounts, including his own, was not great – his capacity for insightful observation and accurate self-examination and his willingness and ability to convey that beautifully in his writing represents to me a sort of civility  entirely in contrast with the shameful, fearful, repugnant ugliness of most of what dominates public and cultural life right now. I suppose his apparent peacefulness at the end seems like something to emulate. At any rate, reading the poems seems to have provided for some sort of vicarious experience of reflection and perhaps brought me a bit closer to the bitter heart of things; from which, according to Leonard Cohen, we may “rise to play a greater part”.

All the theories I trust and the experience I have tells me that getting as deep as you can into the darkness is indeed the key to emerging as healthily as possible on the other side (provided you can bear the journey). Despair is where we discover our deepest caring self. The darkest hour is just before the dawn. All that. But in this case the darkness is really pretty dark, and scary, so that it’s difficult to believe in the light really coming back. Maybe it won’t. I’m pretty sure, however, that my own spark of activism will soon flare up again and that then, at least for a while, I will feel better. This might be only whistling or dancing in the dark, but hopefully it will at least be an authentic kind of joy in action – the simple pleasure of doing something which feels truthful and, however momentarily, powerful – rather than a manic flight away from depression. It being Christmas and the house full of cards, I’ve found myself pondering what might be the difference between a Merry Christmas and a ‘Happy’ one and realising, a bit late in the day, that in fact the former is probably the desirable state: you don’t have to be happy to be merry, and merriment may in fact represent a state not of denial but of defiance and of honourable, life-affirming rebellion.