Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand

I know; I know! You guys have been coming up to me in droves, asking when my next thrilling appraisal of the Yukio Mishima tetralogy 'Sea of Fertility' is going to air. All I can do is ask for your continued patience, direct those of you who have not been lucky enough to read the first article here, and to confess that my novel-reading temporarily digressed, albeit edifyingly, into another area.

Nigh on 1200 pages of tight text by an author whose philosophy I believed tended away from my own seemed a tall order among a never-depleting pile of books that I simply must read, but I'd promised my Libertarian friend-on-Facebook Jim Peron (who is probably the finest Rand scholar I'm never likely to converse with again after this review) that I would give Atlas Shrugged (Rand, 1957) a go; the effort was rewarding; it's a real 'page-turner'.

Ayn Rand (an alias) (1905-82) developed an existentialist philosophy discrete from, for example, the Kirkegaardean mystical or Sartrean Left-leaning varieties, which she dubbed Objectivism, a comprehensive exhortation to the thinking person on how to take life by the horns and seek one's own happiness. Atlas Shrugged (AS) is her work of fiction that expounds her philosophy most emphatically. 

So what's the novel about? Well, I'm not going to give out spoilers because I would recommend that you might approach this engaging text with as little foreknowledge as did I. Suffice to say that the stage is set in a productive, industr[y]ous, progressive and Modern USA, in which the luxuries of the manufacturing age have become commonplace. Regrettably, in Rand's opinion, the creators of that wealth are stymied in their ambitions. At best defamed, they are at worst taxed and expropriated, "looted" by legislators. The captains of industry are a 'meal ticket' for most of the rest in a society living under a socialistic state that displays outwardly noble aspirations to egalitarianism, with a collectivist approach to employment and welfare schemes. In pursuit of such ends, the government maintains a level playing-field for its nation's industries upon which the mediocrities of manufacture might, through political "pull" and, for instance, the "Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog" legislation, enjoy the same chances of 'success' as those who excel, those men of ideas and innovation stultified in what would otherwise be their peerless pursuit of profit and property. 

Imagine now, if that excellent elite were to go on strike, if they were to say "enough is enough!" and step into the shadows of society, abdicating their 'responsibilities' toward the greater good. Herein lies the work's central metaphor: the catastrophe that might ensue were that great, unseen and un-thanked Titanic deity of the ancients, Atlas (who supported the world on his shoulders), to forsake his onerous task and, effectively, shrug. This is the premise upon which Rand builds her entertaining plot, creates her Boys' Own heroes and gives depth and energy to the rest of the dramatis personae, who are each cleverly positioned and flagged throughout the linear narrative such that we remember with ease the many players (without too much flicking back and forth through the pages of this chunky 'triple-decker'). With few enough sub-plots and intrigues, Rand consummately facilitates her readers' educative journey from out of the dark forest of Romance and into the open vistas of Reality.

One is tempted to look to Rand's personal life to see how her childhood years, lived before and during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, may have moulded her views, but for at least two reasons I shall refrain from doing so: first, there have been greater minds than mine that argue that there is little point in studying the author to aid in one's critical analysis of their oeuvre; also, I am currently reading a biography of Ayn Rand, my conclusions from which this blog will not await (Branden, 1986 (available here)). We are not dealing in a Rand novel with Dostoyevsky-style polyphony; there is no uncertainty in the narrative voice (Bakhtin, 1981). This is an epic novel but not in epic style because Rand heroes are simply heroic, singleminded, not open to corruption or even flawed with the sulks of an Achilles or the mischief-making of an Odysseus of the Homeric epics. Rand heroes' machinations are forthright and rational. Branden's biography will be the least of my research into a life of which I know little other than that, like Margaret Thatcher, Rand was the offspring of a petit-bourgeois chemist of means. Her father was self-made, circumspect, but lacking perhaps the sort of developed social conscience that might have helped him and his family to better cope with societal developments. 

History has, in the main, not looked kindly upon Rand; a guru of that kind of Libertarianism that tends to the Right (cf. Chomsky here to "set the cat amongst the pigeons"), she has been subject to critical attacks from the Left and from rivals who have, it seems to me (if not every balanced reader of her work), unfairly distorted her brand of selfish individualism. She may have been a sociopath (if you can trust the diagnoses of those authorised to diagnose mental pathologies); she was certainly no 'fascist; by any useful definition of the word (cf. Eatwell, 1995). It would not be the first time that philosophers have been yoked by their critics with movements that observe some of their views. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, due not least to his forthright pronouncements, will interminably be linked with Nazism because, in aiming to be precise he becomes opaque and authoritarian, while his racial partiality and generalisations risk confusing the careless interpreter. Rand shares some common ground with Nietzsche's existentialism but she is less obfuscating; her philosophy she makes crystal clear. Certainly, the Prussian philosopher's observation of Christianity as a "slave religion" (cf. Nietzsche, 1968, p.69) is echoed in Rand's perception of altruism on mystical grounds as evil and depraved*. Rand sees humanity blighted by an unhealthily passive relationship with priesthoods; the notions of sin and guilt and propitiation are corrosive to the natural human impulses.

The protagonists who stride across her fictitious Americas in AS do so as Modernist demi-gods, bearing a stoicism beyond my ken. For instance, Rand would have us believe that young and successful industrialist Francisco d'Anconia might reasonably belie the vigour and passion of his greatness by remaining celibate for 12 years, while fabricating a public persona of playboy extraordinaire in order to disguise the 'strikers'' hidden agenda. Incredible as this may seen, such strength of character serves to excuse one aspect of Rand's philosophy dealing with sexual promiscuity versus fidelity. I have some sympathy with, but am not convinced by, her narratorial implications that whoring (presumably, both its practice and its pursuit) is worthless. This importantly, contradicts Rand's assertion that a negotiated price paid for a thing offered is a solid footing for a healthy society. It is, after all, the Capitalist way: use-value against exchange-value of a given commodity (Marx, 1867). When I think about Rand's disapproval of prostitution, I suspect that she affords it no moral "value". Indeed, is it for the typical Objectivist that sexual intensity or fulfilment is somehow related to value and reward? Is it that similar minds when clearly united by commonly held values, will attain the satiety expected from the perfect coupling of confederates-in-virtue? This is some sort of pure love that I would not ridicule nor disagree with (and, in a way, makes Rand seem less the harridan than she is often portrayed) but are not the Powerful also the Passionate, the very types unlikely to let such sensibilities thwart them in their pursuit of the not insignificant value of a "zipless fuck" (Jong, 1973)? It seems appropriate at this juncture to quote without explication from Rand's dialogue these words from a system-weary protagonist in AS who is refreshed to realise "[t]hat I was dealing, for once, with someone who doesn't pretend to give favours (p.83)."

While we are discussing aspects of sexuality, it is worth mentioning that this novel nowhere mentions homosexuality but, then, why should an Objectivist see the need to endorse, or discriminate between, one type of fucking or another? The interests that occupy Rand, I think, are idiocentric and, so, just as she does not acknowledge homosexuality as a force in the world, she has no capacity to write upon her characters the particular sense of being bound by maternal, filial or wider familial forces, either. It is as if her intra-relational rivalries are stronger than any affections. Attachments are handicaps or at least distractions.

Today's post-modern, academic forte-subject Gender might find much to occupy its hypothesising in AS, but for Rand its issues are not raised above the implicit; key actor Dagny Taggart is constrained by her femininity neither intellectually nor dynamically, but some observers might see in this character a psychologically repressed female after the manner of its creator. 

Like the proverbial horse and carriage, we cannot mention Gender without touching on Race, which, to all intents and purposes, is invisible in AS. Our characters' physiognomies vary little beyond northern Europeans or Latins and there are no obvious Black or Asiatic characters, which strikes me as incongruent to the North American experience and an oversight in a condition-of-the-nation novel. Rand, more than once, uses the term 'savages' without any concession to the post-colonial niceties that most of us have adopted since the time when her work saw its first publication. Romantic primitivism is not to be expected in a paean to Modernity; there are no noble savages, not even those who 'sold' Manhatten to the Europeans. This essentially anachronistic novel depicts an early 20th-century dystopian global enterprise peopled in the main by those she terms, worryingly, "sub-humans" (an unfortunate choice of term which I am willing to allow refers to these unfortunates' attitudes and motives rather than some fin de siècle idea of degradation, a kind of implied devolving of the state of Homo sapien). These masses of humanity typically have the misfortune of living in a number of discrete "People's States" of, for instance, "India" or "England". This novel would surely have fed its contemporary readers' fears of the domino-effect of supposedly rampant Communism (Maoism; Stalinism). Neither of the world wars gets a mention and, as a result of the general absence of historiography or specific dates, I was held within the horizons of an alternate reality or parallel universe, a counterfactual account of America losing her grip on her founders' energy and purpose, as Uncle Sam ushers her towards the homogenized dystopian bleakness of the Old World order-become-disorder.

As for Libertarianism, there is little that I wish to offer in opposition to its ideals (as with most paradigms it is lofty and worthy) other than to point out that unless those ideals be rehearsed in an Arcadian space and time, it is cruel. Of course, there are many Libertarians living their lives as close to their ideals as they might manage, but classic Libertarianism and classic Capitalism, if they are to enjoy their renascence, are dependent on a post-Apocalyptic Arcady. Indeed, the heroes of AS effectively precipitate an "armageddon" and, in this reader's opinion, they are as guilty as any current-day fundamentalist pastor who prays for the destruction of the "evil-doer" or acts as an agent of the Almighty to precipitate the Rapture, or a fanatical mullah calling for jihad against the Infidel in the name of an Islamic world order. For someone to either desire the violent intervention of a higher being or to hasten cataclysm by means of their own, or instigated, actions amounts to the same in my logic, because both endgames bring down evil upon their perceived adversaries. Take, for instance, one episode where fearfulness, engendered by the incompetencies and sanctions of a warped society, sends a trainful of incorrigible and misguided lefties to its ineluctable doom: a judgemental fate derived from the victims' poor judgement, perhaps? It is this passage that has the one depiction of maternal affection in the novel and which is cynically used to engender some pathos. 


Ayn Rand's ideal system comprises a sphere of operations unrealisable without – and in common with other groups seeking justice and freedom for the κόσμος – a global cataclysm or economic breakdown in which the wrong-doer gets their comeuppance and the virtuous class of earthly Apollos awakens to a new daybreak, boundless in its potential. I'm left wondering if Rand's concept isn't as far from Praxia as that Marx/Bakunin utopian, world-wide association of workers envisioned by the First International. Certainly, the violence, desperation, rapacious nature of the aftermath of Imperial Russia's disastrous entry into the Great War, which Ayn Rand witnessed as a girl, were no worse than that which she depicts in the aftermath of the great strike in AS. Rand's formative years in soviet Russia certainly impacted on her hatred for collectivism and/or State capitalism, which occupied the opposite pole to Objectivism's belief in the individual's freedom of action and interaction by means of pristine capitalism and property rights. It is in the denouement of AS that we have the prospect of an utopia as could only be imagined by a an ex-member of the petite-bourgeoisie and: 

"As with any petty bourgeois utopia its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation (Harman, 2002, Concl.)." 

Rand's heroic characters are exclusively of the capitalist class, the magnates and the tycoons. Their imputed ideals (the ideals of a dispossessed Russian burgher girl) are a hard-pushed find among such types in the real world.

The novel genre is a sound literary form by which to convey ideas; Rand's is a sound novel of communication. Obviously, Rand's idiosyncratic prose and handle on novelistic form doesn't make for 'high literature' but, then, ask any Da Vinci Code fan whether Dan Brown writes a decent novel. I stumbled across this imperfect critique of her novelistic skills (from someone who to my knowledge has not actually written a novel). In opposition to Hitchens on this occasion, and in Rand's defence, I might point to the contrasting styles in the output of those two friends and renowned Victorian/Edwardian authors Henry James and H.G. Wells: their respective approaches to the novel form was a subject of correspondence and argument between them for years. If there is a salient, formal novelistic flaw in AS, it lies with the chapter "John Galt Speaks" in which we have to suspend our disbelief far too long to allow to take root in our minds Rand's trope of a radio broadcast to expound at length what might be every aphorism and thesis in the Objectivist manifesto. Rand is at liberty to utilise this expansive literary form howsoever she sees fit, but the Novel, as one writer once put it, "is not a theory, it is an exploration." Why assemble a novel that shows a rule when "the statement of the rule would suffice" (Robbe-Grillet, 1992)? I understand that Rand's philosophy is outlined in a discrete publication, yet that doctrine seems thoroughly delineated in AS. 

Jean-Paul Sartre made as effective, if subtler, an exposition of his existentialism in his trilogy 'Roads to Freedom', but then he is among my favourite novelists and even I am not without bias! That difficult choices must be taken; this is Rand's version of "authenticity" (Sartre, 1943). Indeed, the inauthentic act is a "despicable" act for Rand, the action of a "depraved" individual. Yes, even when that decision hurts a 'stiff-necked' kith and kin. Hank Rearden is the almost-authentic man, the puritanical, but not Puritan, pursuer of his goals, whose suffering in the corrupt world of AS is bound up with his immature sense of rectitude; he can only understand his mistaken approach by means of an epiphany that evokes the primitive-Christian Pentecost experience. Any convertee, filled with zeal, might well make sense of my putting these words into Rand's (Galt's) mouth: "I have come to divide a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matt. 10.35). Certainly, for all Rand's implicit disdain for the revelatory experience of religion, Objectivism (and Rand is Objectivism) needs its own Armageddon, its own dividing of the sheep from the goats, its time-to-get-off-the-fence decision-making process by the reasoning person. For Nietzsche, Pauline/Christian thought represented a negative response to the greatness that was Rome, a counter offensive of a conquered Jew (Saul of Tarsus/St. Paul) toward the genius of the victor (Rome). Rand, however, unwittingly requires of her adherents to accept that the Objectivist (as with the Pauline) conversion "is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart (cf. Heb. 4:12)." As it was for St. Paul, the messianic is never far away in AS: in the character John Galt we have at once an Angel of Death, a Prometheus, a Wizard of Oz and a Saviour, depending on your analysis of those figures' respective qualities within folkloric conventions (see Russian Formalism). 
Beyond folklore stylising, this is a gothic novel; it has central to its intrigue a 'casket in a castle', a mystery object housed within an edifice. Rand's gothic tropes include a marvellous motor ensconced in an Atlantean valley (of which I mustn't reveal too much) built by a modern-day Prometheus every bit as intense as Mary Shelley's eponymous overreacher (Shelley, 1818).

In common with Sartre's efforts, AS challenges, albeit half a generation later, the mores of sexual fidelity, but avoids promoting promiscuity. For such healthy, good-looking specimens, her protagonists are remarkably chaste but, then, theirs is a kind of stoicism that is able to patiently await the perfect sexual coupling, fired up by the mutually-held presupposition that they are each instrumental in co-ownership of the long-awaited climactic moment. There is an evocative passage in which Dagny, a paragon of libidinous control (considering that the object of her desire is now within her compass in the Holy of Holies at the heart of 'Atlantis'), might be fantasising herself participating in a "spit-roast", her hungry contortions, perhaps, caught between Rearden and d'Anconia, while 'Melchizadek' Galt looks on lasciviously, phallus in hand. That, however, is this reader's vivid imagination extrapolating unjustifiably from the well-drawn and attractive character of Dagny Taggart. It should be noted that my prurience does not remotely reflect any depiction by Rand in AS nor, I presume, in the recently released DVD of the film. I should maybe await the t-shirt.

The pinnacle of Philosophy for Rand is Aristotle, who wrote the earliest of the extant texts separating out rationality from the unobservable. There is some formula or other of his followed among the chapter headings in AS. I searched around a while for something apposite to Rand's Objectivism in Aristotle and came up with: 

"For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of the pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of the pain that we abstain from noble ones. Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education." (Aristotle, 2004, 2:iii). 

In her novel we see her protagonists 'delighting' in the pain, or at least the challenge, of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is telling that we find most sympathy for those who resist the siren call of Atlantis at the risk of being caught like Job's wife in a system doomed to destruction.

AS is a realistic rather than a naturalistic novel, in which, although science is at the forefront and rationality rules, the complexities are absent. A naturalistic approach, which might reflect better life's actualities and how individuals really behave, does not need to apply in AS because the protagonists are heroic and in Rand's logic the narrative arc plays out the inevitable (which is destiny, by some definitions); the terrain we travel might be Nature's but Rand is confident that the mind can conquer her obstacles. As we read, we absorb didactically the lessons of minor Everyman characters such as Cherryl Brooks and Wet Nurse Tony. We witness their political conversions as they come, ultimately, to understand the unwise, ill-advised routes they've hitherto travelled in their careers; sometimes, pitiably, they come to grief on the last legs of their respective Roads to Damascus.


Aside from these honourable victims of events, other actors, some of a Socialist bent, die pathetically in accidents, riots, through ignorance... but kind of deservedly! So, there, "but for the grace of God, might go we"; and well might we remember that the "sins of our fathers" are very often visited upon us, in the Bourdieuian sense, inasmuch as one's cultural capital, inherited from our parents and guardians, profoundly affects an individual's successes in adulthood (Bourdieu, 1973) - a sociological notion at which, I imagine, Rand might have scoffed. 


It would be at this point that I should compose a concluding paragraph, but, what the heck! This is a blog, not an essay.

*

As for poor old Yukio (I love that maddening bastard), I am on number three of the four novels. Of course you don't have to wait for little old me to read and recap. Read 'Sea of Fertility' and start to understand the Japanese 20th-century experience before it becomes part of the dim and dreary past. 

*

* Perhaps Christianity's detractors do not realise that its central tenet of loving others before oneself, demands a prerequisite, not entirely alien to Rand, which is to love ourselves before we are capable of loving others.

^ "The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving". No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one (Jong, 1973)."


References
Aristotle. (2004). Trans. W.D. Ross. Nicomachean Ethics. (350 BC). Available online here.

Bakhtin, M. (1981). Ed. & Trans. M. Holquist. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. (pdf available here.)

Bourdieu, P. (1973). (R. Brown (Ed.). ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction.’ in Knowledge, Education and Social Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education. London: Tavistock)

Branden, B. (1986). The Passion of Ayn Rand: a Biography. (1987). New York: Anchor Books (Random House).

Eatwell, R. (1995). Fascism. London: Vintage.
Harman, C. (1994). The Prophet and the Proletariat.  available: http://www.lpi.org.uk/
Jong, E. (1973). Fear of Flying. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital. Volume 1. Widely available and here.

Nietzsche, F. (1968). Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (1895). London: Penguin.

Rand, A. (2007). Atlas Shrugged. (1957). London: Penguin.
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1992). Trans. R. Howard. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. (1963). Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 

Sartre, J-P. (1943). Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Numerous editions available.

Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Harding, Mavor, Jones. 

Zola, E. (2004). Le naturalisme au théâtre: les théories et les exemples. Project Gutenberg EBook. (I've read extracts of this in a collection of drama essays, but cannot now find the English translation. You can find the French version here). 

Tuesday

*

A feature of living in the same house for 20 years is that time passed so quickly.

The moment of removal and moving in, my little family in toe,
is like a memory I picked up this morning;

The interval was one stout sentence
rather than a few shorter slurs separated by semi-colons.

As a sparrow hops between two stones;

Yesterday to today,

With the interval between so concentrated, so full, so rich,

That I can well understand how all the matter in the Universe
might be squashed down into the space currently occupied by the Millennium Stadium,
Take That with Robbie Williams in residency notwithstanding.

Throughout that time I tried to love the Cosmos,

Which love bore nothing
to the love I had for my family and a very few friends.

I was quite ready to extend the scope of that love,

Not by any skill of my own origination
but because love is a limitless resource and it’s no hardship
distributing that which is easily come by:

Had I a dozen kids rather than two,
I can’t imagine I’d love any of them less.

And, had I met better in the world,
then I might have given more of

The kind of love we were told God has for us.

*

No. 4 in the occasional series, The Working Class Reproducing Itself

Scroll down and left and right to see some fun photographs Summer 2011

Jake Helps in the Garden

Some recent pix of my grandson, who seemed to enjoy "helping" in the garden.

(Scroll down and left/right to see the images)

I particularly like his cool jazz jiving under the paintings of Ellington and Coltrane!

Mishima

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987),
French novelist and biographer,
whose idiosyncratic approach to
writing as a lesbian  left her largely
shunned by  the Feminist movement

Yukio Mishima
(1925-1970)

Joy.


Today my latest purchase from Amazon reseller came through the letterbox.


Nice, because yesterday, I completed a couple of texts that I've been reading in parallel: Marguerite Yourcenar's Mishima: A Vision of the Void, alongside Spring Snow, the first in Yukio Mishima's tetralogy 'The Sea of Fertility'. 


This reading project had been a useful little exercise for me as, although the latter novel informs the former biographical piece, the both inform me in my pursuit of understanding an enigma whose literary works I first stumbled upon a few years ago.

Berlin apartment c.1977. Bowie's
Head of Mishima in
German Expressionist style

I hadn't heard of the Japanese author until I saw a painting by David Bowie with Mishima as the subject (my sub-fanatical interest in that cultural magpie Bowie has certainly broadened my artistic horizons: in addition to reconciling my heterosexuality with queer culture (no mean feat upon a straight teenager in 1970s Britain), I have learned about, for instance, William Burroughs, Surrealism, Pop Art, cinema history, Berlin, jazz, Anthony Burgess, Little Richard, Expressionism, Aleister Crowley, none of which am I an aficionado, but, of whom previously I was ignorant). I'm sure that, in the same way, lads half a generation older than me were influenced by what Lennon or Dylan read and cited in their interviews (teenage girls' experiences are perhaps generally different... let me know, ladies).

Mishima poses as
St. Sebastian, a popular subject
of gay iconography

Mishima was, in 1960s Japan, a well-known author, film star, martial artist and paramilitary captain, who ritually committed suicide after a futile coup attempt at a Japanese military base in 1970. His final speech from a balcony to assembled, jeering soldiers outlined how aghast he was at what Japan had become as a nation. Any appraisal of him, however, as an ultra-nationalist or authoritarian needs to be preceded by a keener understanding of him as a family man, a producer of sensual prose and by gaining an appreciation of his attitude towards his own sexuality and the homoerotic.


As a Westerner, to read a short story by Mishima is to take a small step towards comprehending what motivates or perturbs individuals living in a culture alien from ours, with generally strange sensibilities and manners, allegiances and religious beliefs. Culture is that which adorns a life once the bare necessities are catered for, yet Freud saw it as something that controls us, hems us in, contains us in our pursuits of pleasure or satisfaction. Nietzsche was another who contrasted a Dionysian hedonism with an Apollonian rigidity in cultured mankind and was quick to blame Socrates for this detachment from baser drives. The Japanese frame of reference, however, must be analysed from a different historio-philosophical perspective, one that acknowledges an insular national existence that had lasted for centuries and which had been so thoroughly and rapidly transformed as the powers at Japan's helm strove to bring their nation into the industrialising world of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is that burgeoning globalisation at the end of the 19th Century that is central to the themes of Spring Snow and which furnishes the reader, by means of the novelistic form, with a more comprehensive understanding of Mishima's grand ethos.


In 1912, Japanese society, just as stratified and mannered as the British social hierarchy of the time, is coming to terms with a change in its social dynamic: the bourgeoisie has gained an hitherto unknown influence upon the aristocracy and the imperial family, with Western ideas and fashion upturning established notions of Japanese heritage and custom. Japan's relatively recent victory over Russia had been momentous in the forming of a new national confidence within the populace. The novel centres on the formative years and adolescence of the main protagonist, Kiyoaki Matsugae and his friend Honda. The translation by Michael Gallagher deftly represents Mishima's descriptive passages concerning horticulture, clothing, mien, and the subtleties of cultured Japanese society, especially in relation to the way manners and etiquette were considered of paramount importance. We are also given useful information about Buddhism and various eschatologies. Central to the story is the romance between Kiyoaki and Satoko and the intrigues of the respective families to hide a developing scandal. It's a fine, affecting work which has interest for a wide range of reading tastes, I guess.

Photograph of Mishima's
severed head.

There are three more in the series of 'Sea of Fertility' for me to read and I'm not sure that even those will enable me to get a compass on why someone who is probably not a depressive character would plan his seppuko in such a way as to organise members of his cult to aid and abet him in his suicide and even partake of it themselves.


So now my parcel has arrived I'm going to dive into the second in the tetralogy, Runaway Horses. I don't suggest you hold your collective breaths for my review of it, but look out for one once I'm back from Turkey.

Hot Monday

Hasn't this been a balmy Monday? If you live in my little quarter of England, you'll know what I mean.
By Muhammed! I DO love the heat! It gets to my core, warms my bones and my joints move freely; my skin reacts only positively to the Sun's agency (when I burn, I know I'm alive). I really ought to be living in Mallorca or Malaga, with all those ex-pat Brits with lapsed pension contributions and negative equity; or the Canaries; or decamp to one of those cruise-liners, such as The World, that follow our star around this planet (I realise this is scientific inaccuracy, but everything is relative!), satisfying their passengers' every need, with only a minimal risk of endemic disease.
Pending our lottery win, however, in a few weeks we're off to Turkey. Neither Dr Sam nor I have been there before, but we've heard only good reports, Midnight Express and some Kurdish disabuse notwithstanding.
I went to Washington DC one late summer and it was fucking hot in a humid kind of way. But I guess the best experience of heat and its beneficence was a couple of trips to the Red Sea on vacation during successive summers a few years ago: 40ºC? Bring it on! We came back, however, to a Heathrow Airport at over 100 Fahrenheit, the hottest day in Britain's history apparently since it fell away from Pangaea, which somehow deflated our buoyant sense of accomplishment.
One might select today one's summer holiday from a broad church of packages premised on sightseeing, hedonism, watersports, camping, etc., but every couple of years we decide on the necessity of a relaxing beach holiday, where we can offer our bodies to Helios and damn the consequences. The most a la mode scare stories since AIDS are to do with skin cancers (sorry if that's glibly offensive to some), yet I'm of an age group that can remember a specific kind of Ambre Solaire sun lotion, which was probably a simple admixture of olive oil and lemon juice, with no pretensions to 'protection'. We lay on the beach or swam there or frisbee'd there or beach-bouled there, without an inkling of the risks involved from overexposure to our planetary system's energy source. We lay there on our bunks at night, hot, sleepless, dehydrated and on the verge of heat exhaustion, but we LOVED it. Between us (κοσμος or maybe γαια), we have lost the ozone layer and with it our cocooned existence, yet we were always aware of the unforgiving nature of relentless sunshine.
I dream of the bleached, rocky shore of the Mediterranean, the turquoise, the aroma of the pinaceae, the fruit vendors on the beaches, the sense of bounty that, yes, is purchased and is material, yet is humble and which should be available to all. Indeed, who knows, were I doomed to roam this green and pleasant England two centuries hence, after climate change and sea-level rises have done their worst, might I be able to walk among olive groves and fruitful vineyards, where watermelons embiggen on a daily basis and figs ripen on their boughs, where every kind of malaria-vending creature might lurk?
But damn the risks... give me the heat!

Wormwood and rocket

Today in the garden I'm mostly contemplating rocket (Eruca sativa). Why? Because, sometimes we are impotent to do great works, solve others' or our own problems and, if we are blessed with any sagacity, resign ourselves to dealing with that with which we are able to deal i.e., the gardening. If there is another crisis about which to tell, it's not going to be related here, today, because my refuge from the problematic is the garden and a few tins of beer. 
Anyway, we sowed a packetful of rocket seeds in springtime and we've been harvesting and enjoying tasty salad leaves for a few weeks now. I'm allowing a few plants to go to seed and I've noticed that some bloom yellow while others produce white flowers, with the latter tending to offer relatively less spindly foliage. The subtleties of any difference in taste between white and yellow would require a more discerning palate than mine, but it is generally recognised that the maturer leaves are bitterer.
Consequently, in contemplative mood, I have been put in mind of the Passover meal of the Judaic tradition (which tends to coincide with the Christian Holy Week) and at which lamb and unleavened bread are consumed with bitter greens (wormwood (Artemisia absinthium)) and sometimes wine. Yummy, I imagine. 
Notwithstanding the festivities associated with Passover, its symbolic notions are founded in the story of the Israelites' leaving captivity in Egypt circa 1200BC and the last of the biblical plagues associated therewith: the passing over the houses of the Egyptians of the "angel of death", which visitation we are told impartially killed all their firstborn. In the Christian tradition, the sacrificial Lamb of God, is killed at Passover and is memorialised at Easter. 
You'll in all likelihood recall the Chernobyl incident of 1986, in which a nuclear event occurred in Soviet Ukraine, the full consequences of which are still unclear but which, one imagines, have been destructive at all conceivable levels. Chernobyl is Ukrainian for 'wormwood'  and I'm not the first to reveal that the oft-presumed prophetic Christian bible book of Revelation (8:10-11) reads, “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” 
Coincidences abound, of course, but this was one of the more intriguing prophecies to test the curiosity of the unbeliever. Indeed, interpretations of prophecies are legion, with apocalyptic dates proffered, arriving and passing without incident, there always being someone arrogant enough to explicate what is written and impress upon others the import of their own idiosyncratic interpretation.
For now though, there's a chicken roasting in the oven, some new potatoes to boil and a nice salad of bitter leaves to prepare. Wasn't it yesterday that I remarked that the best things in life are the simplest?

Gove and Marr (revision with 28/6 update link)

Sitting in the garden on what could be one of the best sunshine days of the English summer (should that be a capital S for summer?) watching the runner beans grow, one feels that the best things in life are the simplest. 

I'm pleased to be relaxed once more (in the background is playing Q Radio, which isn't plagued by too many advertisements, but on the down side is playing Snow Patrol. This is considerable progress, since my heart rate was dangerously raised by watching, earlier, Education Secretary Michael Gove on the Andrew Marr(ed) Show, spouting off in oh-so reasonable terms about the upcoming strike action by a small selection of public sector workers on Thursday next. As a foil to the argument, Marr did all that was required of the BBC (read, Tax Payers' Alliance) to thrust forward questions that Gove might parry with ease, whereas an interviewer with a different agenda might have pierced that pouting lip of the Tory (who in his misspent youth actually went on strike, he admitted!). Bully for him! But, what an enlightened turnaround by Gove in the face of reason and the greater good, one is led to believe!

Gove's Sunday-morning claim is that the British public won't look too kindly on the strikes, which will possibly require one of the parents of unschooled and unsupervised offspring to stay off work or do something parentlike to arrange cover for their kids who are damned to be deprived a day's schooling. Oh, what disruption... the British public barely knows the meaning of the word! 

The Marr & Gove Show this morning was the perfect example of how the BBC (counter to any claims made to the contrary that it is peopled by Grauniad-reading and Tribune-contributing lefties) fulfils its role as mediator between public opinion and the Government/Establishment. Gove went to bottom-lip quivering pains to suggest that Britons popularly want more anti-union legislation to stop such future disruption to their routinised existences (almost Stepford and, indeed, alienated), endured under the 'benevolent' canopy of capitalism. Militancy, apparently, is not what we're about in England (Gove used "the English way," as a phrase, quite unabashedly for someone from Edinburgh.).

It is disgraceful how this sort of performance is expedited. Where were the incisive questions, Andrew Marr? Is this the state of political interviewing today?; a friendly sofa'd chat, bound merely to stimulate the sense of injustice of aspiring families whom, for 30 years, Gove claims, have suffered from an education system inferior to the up-and-coming go-getting nations (a list of which he reeled off, as if we needed to know what a country actually is). Bizarrely, those darling Canadians were grouped in with the nasty Chinese as peoples that will be advantaged ahead of British youngsters in an increasingly global marketplace. There are, of course, many problems in the education system, much to do with under-investment, and perhaps Gove, in a world without briefed statements on party policy, might have some reasonable thoughts on the subject.

As for the imminent strike action, taken reluctantly by a few lap-dog unions (the TUC's Brendan Barber and the Government are in league here) it will, as always, be a flash in the pan. The opposing parties will come to agree terms after the one-day event (mark my words (although Long & Walker are more optimistic)), which will presumably stimulate the appetites among the general public for more legislation against those angry/militant/threatening (choose your own adjective, which might ignore the wonderful work that our union representatives quite often do in defence of individuals bullied and harrassed by aggressive managers and employers) unions.  The meda will be abroad in an effort to interview the least articulate of the protesters so as to undermine the cause. The red-top dailies and the increasingly Marvel Comics-like Telegraph and Times and, indeed that Silver Surfer of a newspaper The Daily Mail will rouse their  uncritical readership into accepting yet another assault upon the working classes, whom I would wager most of you readers should count yourselves amongst, even though you might aspire to something greater. Indeed you are the proletariat, the mass with the voice, should only you care to make it heard.
As for me, I shall continue to enjoy the rays and wish that you all enjoy your Sunday, too. I'm sure those runners have grown an inch in the time it's taken me to type this!

Archer on the Archbishop

The BBC is reporting at length on the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams's comments, published in New Statesman, criticising the coalition government's policies.  The 'bish has a brain the size of a planet and occasionally makes newsworthy comments on a number of issues, most of which are either incomprehensible or of no consequence to the indigenous masses in the UK, most of whom have only a tenuous hold on the Church of England label that periodically affiliates them to a religion of sorts (usually by accident of birth) and which buries them, marries them and occasionally baptises their kids.
Williams sits in the House of Lords, is ensconced in an organisation still utterly entwined in the British Establishment, is elitist of education and attitude and, with the best intentions in the world, is caught ridiculously, if metaphorically, with his cassock hoisted to his hips to facilitate his pissing in the wind, especially when he speaks meally-mouthed about the privations of the poor in modern Britain. His ministry is a nonsense, with dwindling congregations, wishy-washy adherence to the Articles of faith and a cowardly impotence when it comes to defending the Deity's scriptural purpose or, indeed, pursuing that which the Christian godhead demands of its Church, i.e., evangelising among non-believers and ministering to the congregation and those in need. The Church of England remains trapped in the paradox of its origins which were indefensibly, then as now, expeditious of regal aims and opportunistic in the disappropriation of others' money and property.
If you're sincere, Rowan, resign in protest. Are you not a little bit like the rich man who wanted to know how to attain the kingdom of the heavens and to whom Jesus said, "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of the heavens"?

Essence, Gould and Bach

A recommendation.

I wouldn't expect the opinions of a non-musician on things eminently musical  to carry much weight, yet after recently listening to pianist Glenn Gould's two versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations I feel moved to type for my chums a recommendation.

But first, are you someone who actually listens to music or someone who simply hears it? I have sometimes regretted that I find myself within the former group, concluding that I've invested far too much of my, let's face it, finite existence lolling my head back on the sofa in devotion to the sonic sensations of my stereo system, selfishly excluding any other activity. A luxury indulged, I'm sure you'll agree, but, all things considered, I reckon I'm enriched for making that occasional choice. Indeed, at my age I'm prone to recalculate the values that I've previously applied to my career, with the result that I quite often am appalled by my existential innumeracy.
Musically, 'variation' denotes a stylized and embellished recapitulation of a simple melodic theme (Bach describes his as an 'aria'). Bach's scores have come down to us with few instructions on the manner in which they should be performed, so musicians' interpretations are varied, as evidenced by the plethora of recordings available. This prescriptive lack is something of which Gould takes full interpretative advantage. He seems to cover the whole gamut of emotion such that, during the aural experience, I felt variously the need to stop the world so I might alight only to be capriciously changed of mind and impelled to rejoin our global carousel whole-souled: the tenebrific trough to the solace of spring sunshine.

Both of Gould's versions are wondrous achievements and yet there are vast differences in their execution. The first was recorded in 1955; Gould chose to revisit the project in the studio for release in 1981. The two are available together on CBS and freely available on Spotify. The album also contains a lengthy interview with Canadian Gould, whose lofty ideas and responses are less sublime than his playing. In this semi-rehearsed discussion, Gould's view of Mozart as an atrocious composer is one of the themes covered and seems, even to a dilettante like me, extreme, or at least, contrary.

For an in-depth discussion of Bach's Goldberg Variations look no further than Wikipedia.

Jobs for the boys and girls

I'm thoroughly proud of my daughter's resilience in the jobs market.
We all know that the days of post-war Britain and the technologically white-heated 1960s, that afforded for some the sense of a 'job for life', are long gone and, consequently, my daughter has not been surprised to have worked in lots of companies in a wide range of roles. Firms have grown craftier in their dealings with employees and devious in the ways that they excuse pushing down rates of pay and eroding working conditions. Some of these arseholes recruit only to sack for a variety of illegitimate, if legal, reasons at the end of the probation period or when the invariably short-term contracts end. At that point when workers expect to receive the promised increase in pay, they let them go. This has been my daughter's experience.
Apart from deserving a good kicking, I believe these predatory bosses also need the rule of law to keep them at bay. Of course, any such legislation is not even a speck on the political horizon under the current system; due to ruinous union bureaucracies and their fraternising with the various incarnations of the Labour party and because of officials' predilections to engage in political intrigues with government lackeys, the working rights that British workers have fought for and improved over 200 or more years are now practically meaningless. Employers are increasingly wolfish in their dealings with employees and particularly those they take on to fill jobs that are not specialised (the majority of positions, today). My daughter's experience has included being subject to a succession of middle managers who tend to play the good guys in guiding her job development plans and then change tack or side-step the issue as seniors provide them with excuses to make their fellow employees redundant. Managers are unabashed in their duplicity, playing with individuals' lives, ambitions and career hopes.
My daughter starts another job on Monday and is happy and optimistic, which pleases me no end.

Work for all

Well, it had to get to this: tomorrow is my first day of work for 2011. The vacation is over; the holidays are long gone; everything is before us. I threw my last disposable quid at a lottery ticket on Saturday with the certain feeling that it would leave me in clover. Not for the first time my instincts failed me.  
Anyway, what is a person without work? Can any of us really be alive without a purpose, without a role, an identity? While such rhetoric is for each to answer as best they might, I would ask, please, for a direct answer to why we're continually pressured to do more and more for relatively less. We turn up to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, yet Capital continues to make more demands upon us all. The excuses for its demands are rehearsed time and again through a media which persuades us that our sacrifices will help the national economy, while our political masters exact from us the same by legislation. 
Yes, the state separates our elected representatives from our interests and uses them to reconcile us all to capitalism. The irony is that capitalism cannot survive without our labour, although our labour would be just as useful to the nation without capitalism.
Have a prosperous and happy new year, y'all!

A new national socialism might be around the corner

Were we generations ago so naive to think that the global community might be where the future lay:-)?
It's becoming incredible to me, living as I do in a country where the immigrant is seen as suspect or as parasitical and as ultimately unwelcome, to believe that we might some day soon throw in our lot with foreigners. Questions of sovereignty, 'natural' bellicosity, fear of the ex-Soviets and Islam, would all suggest that we are as far away in 2011 from global union as we were in 1911. The increasingly shrill rhetoric behind individual autonomy, libertarianism and choice is discordant with the humanist project, with pejorative socialism, with efficacious charity. Self remains the foremost interest such that, under perceived fiscal pressure, the interests of community and society (global, national or parochial) fall by the wayside. Rather than enjoying the 21st century's promised widened horizons, the pressed family head now scrambles to attain a vista on best defending his or her dependants and, if this government has much to do with it, will soon be resorting to pack imperatives for survival. It is in this climate that national socialism forces its claims to relevancy.
Capitalism runs parallel with all these developments; flexing like a whore with the state, capital is generally unaffected by the convulsions that touch our little communities and with which it toys. Its own crises are resolved because we do not congregate in opposition, don't irritate its otherwise healthy organism. Indeed, our suffering is often part of the physick and its encouraging acquisitiveness and self-interest are effectively divisive to its potential enemies.
It is at this point that I play devil's advocate and ask: Is aggressive nationalism the way forward? If we are to discount communism, which is generally attacked as state capitalism (Stalinist) then how about a kind of national socialism, or Nazism as it was termed in Germany's racialist variation on Italian fascism? Let me hear the arguments because I would like to analyse their bases. The arguments might be based on how you feel about GM foods, immigration, end-of-life decisions, abortion, the Third World? The British as a whole seem full of their own self-importance and have an interesting view of their relative worth. We generally would strip our compatriots of what they've spent generations fighting for if we feel they have an advantage over ourselves. Let's face it, we refuse to believe we are working class and see no solution in a Trotskyist international workers' association that might precipitate revolution. The world is shrinking in relation to its population. Resources are depleting. We're stuck on the planet for the foreseeable future, so where do we go from here? Britain still has some clout in the world and American Tea-partyists and Zionists (in some bizarre blindness to the events of their modern history) would offer little opposition to an extreme right-wing regime here. Capital has fomented two world wars and perpetuated the conflicts of the Cold War. It loves the current aggression in Iran and AfPak. It would certainly fall behind the economy of a country that embraced the full monstrosity that is national socialism.