A marmalade Autumn morning arrived at Mimbly.
Delicious cool breezes, beautifully phrased, suggested hot foods and
comfortable places. Autumn liked to get things freshened up a bit, too, so she
carefully woke up the gardens. Apart from a few disgruntled roses that wanted
to sleep in, the plants bustled about being Biologically Correct and looking
like Monets. Autumn, giggling at a dandelion’s pithy views on excess dew,
noticed an immortal being in the depths of breakfast with a lot on its mind.
Reggie, mid Earl Grey, wondered how he’d come to be
living in a place he loved so much. The morning light polished the dining room
and the garden outside as if it was expecting a buyer. Pausing to get lost in a
piece of toast, which seemed to be infinite, he realized what was happening.
His mind was returning.
Since
his mother’s casual, mid-global-crisis, mention that he was immortal, his mind
had decided to charge gung-ho off at the idea. Experience had since left him
informed of something, but not necessarily to the point of understanding what
it was. His mind was now bringing back its ideas and had a few things to tell
him. That was why he felt so peculiar.
The Mimbly children had reacted quite differently to
the idea of immortality. His sister Vixen had started to develop incredible
skills, empathy and levitation most obviously, and her life had begun to
reflect her heights of inspired introversion. Reggie had taken a quite
different course. His parents were now of the opinion that their son was doing
a passable imitation of a new continent rising from the ocean floor. Slow, but
interesting.
Never forward, Reggie was an unusually retiring
person, even by English standards, which tend to be backward, regardless of
which side you’re on, or whatever direction you might be prepared to admit to
be facing. Warily turning inward upon himself, he had tried to take up as
little external space as possible, and just live his life. Given the sort of
social orientation contained in this description, it’s not all that surprising
his mind wasn’t sure it knew where he was. It sighed, and burrowed in after
him.
It found him more or less where it had left him, but
a little to the left of somewhere. His mind’s information arrived at the
subliminal level and doggedly set out to put Reggie into some sort of context
for himself. It had decided to start from known territory. Reggie had recently
plunged into refining his course on Being English. He now had rather more
students for that esoteric subject than he quite knew what to do with, and had
begun research in earnest. He wanted to instill the sort of character which had
made the series of improbabilities known as England possible. His problem was
how to define it. His mind thought it had a talking point.
His current problem was that England-as-history
seemed to have nothing in common with England-as-cultural-identity. His mind
seized the chance to have a heated argument with him:
What am I trying to achieve?
I’m trying to teach people to Be English.
Why, in the name of Shakespeare’s comma-soaked biro?
Because I love the culture. I admire the identity.
Define culture, and then prove it exists.
A culture, in this sense, is a growth medium, a
social ecosystem, which provides the environment and the nutrients like a
garden soil. Arts, science, and other meaningful human products are the plants.
Great ideas don’t grow in barren, famished, mentalities. Weeds are also not
uncommon. Cultures, like gardens, tend to become impoverished, if recyclable
nutrients like the arts and science aren’t added. It couldn’t exist if it
didn’t, because it wouldn’t.
Try not to be so unequivocal. Wormed your way out of
that pretty well, if vaguely. What’s a cultural identity?
An identification of a distinct culture. You
can look at a thing and identify it a related to its culture, like “Chinese”,
or “Indian”.
So what’s so great about English culture?
Well, there’s Mimbly………
That was a low shot. I mean what’s Great, as in
magnificent, about the culture, not the byproducts.
Hard not to just produce a few bits as examples.
It’s the state of mind the culture achieves…
Hang on; you’ve hit something there.
…plaster ducks, for one……….
Shut up, you idiot, we had a good idea there…
Which one?
Which one! Nice to have these conversations with
part of myself that isn’t even listening to itself. You said before you started
driveling that it was the state of mind the culture achieves; isn’t that
the real product of the culture, the defining identity? The nutrient for
subsequent cultures, you geranium-bothering, gardenia-breeding, sod?
Oh, yes…
That’ll be it. Wake me up when you find it.
Nice of you to drop in.
I’m a secret charity. Your own personal Oxfam. This
is what we’ve been trying to find.
In the world of the Scientocracy, technology is
pocket sized, does everything, and plugs into everything. Unlike the precursor
technologies, everything is so small it’s almost unnoticeable.
Mimbly could easily be mistaken for a 19th
century house, in its lack of visible machinery. The personal computer is now
called an interface, and that’s what it does. You merely plug it in or tune it
to a power/light source, and it acts as a computer, library, multimedia
telecommunications network, research lab, and game controller. The power/light
source is modulated and the interface simply uses the power grid as a network,
whether fixed or wireless, or amplified light, using (obviously) different
modulations from the electricity and light. It’s also handy for spreading
gossip on a global scale.
Reggie, knowing his mind was likely to invade him
more often now to see how things were going, set to work on images and cultural
elements related to the state of mind of the English throughout history. More
toast joined him on his quest, which was nice of it.
“English”. A mass of useless stereotypes, all wrong,
had to be disposed of, before much was likely to be achieved. Early exclusion
of superficial things, such as the pernicious premeditated wearing of bowler
hats, and the ability to massacre vowels while attempting to speak English, was
required. Not relevant to the English character. A stereotype is by definition
inaccurate.
Naturally it wasn’t that simple. The things Reggie
admired didn’t, and apparently wouldn’t, coalesce into some convenient package.
It served him right, he thought, for first dismissing such things and then
expecting such a definition to just appear. It can be said that England is/was
by definition not a homogenous, simple, commodity. There was character.
There was elegance. There was genuine courage, genuine strength, and
real genius. Yes, and each example was so different no
category was ever going to work as a definition. Reggie grudgingly
admitted that he wouldn’t admire anything so straightforward anyway. He loathed
agreeing with himself.
Autumn watched with interest this brave attempt to
interpret life. She was always intrigued that people with functional brains
would even try to understand the workings of those without working mentalities
of any sort. Of course she’d had seen it all before in one form or another, and
was there to see humanity’s more absurd departures from itself. She rattled
about making things look nice as she pondered the possibilities of an immortal
trying to interpret anything. A cloud had to be moved slightly. One tries for a
certain effect…
Reggie dredged patiently. Great accomplishments
abounded. They also coexisted with a history which reads like a disease. The
domestic culture of England, which could generally be described as a secondary
infection, like pneumonia, with occasional comas, was born of a series of
circumstances which are a farce of misadventures. The results didn’t match the
history at all.
The sheer perversity of English history is a study
of itself. Consider the following situation: Have poverty, plague and wars, a
nation in collapse, produce Elizabethan England. Have Armada on doorstep, with
infighting idiots at home, achieve basis for biggest maritime empire in
history. Administer empire with very dubious collection of alcoholics, become
even more profitable. Win two world wars, go broke, lose empire. Have massive
scientific breakthroughs; spend years fighting against them with fang and claw,
and other budgetary and spiritual mechanisms. Invent reforms, don’t implement
them.
This extravagant human vagary was called England.
Autumn knew that. She liked the place, because she could scatter things about
and make them grow all over it. The human side of England, however, seemed to
try and hibernate whenever it got the chance. Some even managed to fossilize
themselves alive, which was difficult. They called it a society, or something.
Autumn thought that a young species should have got
out more. They didn’t seem to have had much fun in those “building” things of
theirs. They went from one to another and came back looking rather irritated.
They also used to drive about in those little buildings with wheels. That
seemed to make them even more annoyed. Then somebody had stolen the humans,
from all over the world, and taken them to another world. Well, at least they
weren’t digging up the plants any more. The new animals, which lived in
different buildings on wheels, seemed to avoid the natural world…possibly just
as well. The other new creatures, which did live in the natural environment,
were pretty weird, although they seemed happy.
Reggie, deciding that he should try to sort out the
history of the place, tried to make an abstracted time line. A setting is
required in which to produce a nation. First take a damp place, preferably an
island; full of plantain-eating ingénues whose main crime was making unprovoked
beakers. Invade with someone peaceful and tolerant, like the Celts, over time.
Add a civilization and a religion, in this case
Roman ethics and Christianity. Invade the place again on principle, with
something nice, like Angles, Danes and Saxons. Fight truly hideous but
educational wars for a few centuries, achieve something, however indistinct,
and raid frequently with variegated Vikings for flavor, and eventually install
some Normans. Don’t do it the other way round. While cheerfully being medieval,
add a plague or two, and a few rosy wars with everyone in the vicinity. Stir
briskly with several Tudors. Annoy the Spanish, which is a good idea, and chase
the Armada around the islands until it becomes Irish. Have a rash called the
Stuarts. Cunningly do not assimilate France.
Reggie noticed that abstraction wasn’t as easy as it
looked. History did tend to trip over definite individuals and events. Autumn
had thought it odd at the time that people seemed to need to travel such
distances to kill each other, and supposed that it was more exciting than
simply killing those where one lived. Certainly tidier, in the domestic sense.
She scrubbed a very dusty oak. What had Summer been doing? Her younger
brother was a pest, sometimes.
Despite De Ruyter, have war with Dutch, who couldn’t
invade you even if they wanted to, which they didn’t. Found maritime empire,
preferably by bumping into profitable bits of planet, or pinching bits from
others. Fight more wars with the French, being closer and by now less likely to
take it personally. Lose American colonies in process, to avoid appearing
materialistic. After ages of war with the Bourbons, spend a decade or so
fighting to restore them to French throne in preference to Napoleon. Evolve
insular gin-drinking class to operate colonies, being utterly useless for
anything else. Have industrial revolution to find use for Yorkshire, and excuse
for Manchester. Whisper the word “Liverpool”. Then rather stupidly enter
twentieth century, despite good advice to the contrary.
Reggie had also discovered that England had spent
most of its history systematically finding what was good about itself and
abolishing it. Merrie England had ultimately given way to Not-So-Frightfully-Merrie
Cromwell, one of the great wearers of belt buckles around the head that was to
make English society so inscrutably boring for so long. This impression was
heavily reinforced by dramatizations of the past by the hacks of the Visual Era.
Nothing, evidently, was too trivial to create a TV series around, and he found
a wealth of sanitized horrors as references in the vast crypts of the media.
Self-abolition seemed to be a sort of hobby of the
English. The greenwood was supplanted with the terrace, that final
unconditional surrender of any claims to talent in the architectural
profession. Sentient use of the English language was eventually obliterated by
brilliant scripts for exciting interactions between consenting illiterates.
Unique among nations, the English had a genius for destroying their culture.
The Americans had supposedly tried to destroy theirs, but their hearts
obviously weren’t in it. Anyway, it was bigger than they were.
The Europeans, in contrast, had managed to avoid
this situation by fossilizing everything good about their culture almost from
birth. Revered to death, and thus transported to the realm of the inaccessible,
culture was never a danger in daily life. There was always someone to prevent
interest in it by enforcing the strictest admiration for the least enlivening
operas, or schools of visual art, or even schools of thought. In the mainstream
there was an endless supply of mercantile peasants to help the public avoid any
contact with higher ideas. Culture, defined as groceries, can’t cause much
social upheaval, except in France.
Reggie
pondered, because pondering was about all that was available. The human public
has had little involvement with its culture, historically. Vienna, say, was
inhabited by large numbers of people who really weren’t Mozart,
presumably accidentally. The Renaissance, miraculously, contained a bulk of
population who were simultaneously neither Leonardo Da Vinci nor
Michelangelo. Literally billions of people were able to live full, boring, futile,
lives, entirely unaware of anything called “culture”.
Culture
and character tend to get in each other’s ways quite a lot. If not visible,
“culture” was less likely to impact upon the delightfully unhygienic
inhabitants of humanity’s past. That admittedly had a few good points. To
paint, for example, was to intrude art among the mob, and thus be mutually
afflicted by each other. Thus the Old Dutch Masters, God help them, were
required to paint the Old Dutch. The great French painters were seemingly forever
blessed with the uncompromising cultural brick wall of the bucolically
poisonous provinces. Poor old Cézanne, with a difficult vision and impossible
neighbors. Gauguin, with his unspeakable associates.
Culture is a strangely vicarious beast at times.
Great Art, that wonderful bouquet of third party wisdom and posthumous zeal,
has always been sincerely loathed and obstructed by its parent societies, and
Great Artists more hated still. Having reached the bottom of the dunghill, the
Implacable European Peasant’s instinct is to reduce everything and everyone
else to that level. Any that do not duly shrink to the same size are resented.
The sheer gall of a Frenchman not to be buried in some worthless
petit-eunuchry![1] A
German………yes, well, ask a German artist. The English version incorporated a
level of ignorance easily on a par with these.
Conversely,
few things are more honestly loathed by artists than the ineffectual human
moths that flutter about the moment of a symphony or a painting for centuries,
relentlessly “understanding”, or worse, “appreciating” them. The insufferable,
mindless, self-proclaimed elites. Surely even the most hopeless
artistically-inclined hypocrite can have the balls to not understand
something. To add flavor, there are also the entrepreneurs, promoters of art by
check book, and the Fashionable Nothings that infest each event. The tapeworms
of a civilization. The English fop was a notable species.
It will be seen from this delightful excursion among
the ephemera that “character” is the grimly true nature of the inhabitants of a
world or a society. Culture and character aren’t mutually exclusive, just
mutually intolerant. A good argument could be made for trying to make them keep
a respectable distance between each other. Like an Apprehended Violence Order.
“The subject of this order shall remain five hundred metres from the Matisse…”
You could try to do it the other way round, preventing things like ballets from
attacking people, but that doesn’t even sound likely. A compliant, pacifist, ballet?
Pshaw, I say.
Bizarrely, some arts grow on the character of a
society. Like molds, they sprout and spore on various media. The ancient soap
operas were a good example, the fungus of a world, recycling the nutrients of a
ridiculous social order. They promote regeneration of the society. Why else
would people roam around in front of cameras being meaningless?
Into this frail, gruesome, and more importantly, closed,
antique shop, there inexplicably arrive more artists, convinced that the world
loves them for themselves and their art. Some delusions are necessary
anesthetics, some are just stupid. That makes some sense. It can be argued that
the greatest encumbrance to any art form is the people that practice it. Absurd
idea, really. The arts are just making the best of a bad situation. It’s not
the fault of gouache that there were such things as Expressionists.
That said, if to produce an art form you require
deluded idiots, it really opens up the creative potentials of a lot of possible
producers. Humanity has always had the advantage of being able to delude itself
about anything. Drought? No, it’s a statement. Famine? No, it’s a montage.
Spin? Well, I thought I should interpret, rather than refer to facts.
Reggie had gleaned by now that character was lucky
if it had the chance to be cultured, and culture had only itself to blame if it
took on too much character. In England, through the centuries, the worst
vulgarities of peasant ignorance were as healthy as anywhere. Then the Tudors fanned
an indecisive flame of identity which ultimately produced a modern, uniquely English
culture, despite the character of the times.
This culture was unavoidably an alloy of the earlier
Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures. A healthy hybrid, regardless of all
reasonable expectations. Exposure to the European politics of the Tudor times
must also have been a powerful incentive to avoid the tyrannical ugliness of
the continent.
This, it should be noted, also makes the point that
Great Culture doesn’t necessarily need a period of enlightenment. The
Renaissance may well have produced some of the greatest art of all time, but
nobody could call it a period of profound progressive social reform, or any
other kind.
England wasn’t exactly the epitome of a hothouse of
liberal ideals itself. Post-medieval would be about the kindest thing you could
say about it. Yet it was a new thing, as a society. Cut off from Europe
politically, it had to be different. Plague had routinely killed off the
population, and eventually there weren’t really enough people left to maintain
the serfdom of the past. Land ownership, formerly for nobles and definitely
nobody else, was now a reasonable aspiration for the English. (Trevelyan is
well worth reading on this subject). Thus was created Merrie England, which is
probably the most mythologized part of English history. It was an improbably
benign result of a combination of quite horrific circumstances. Something
resembling a tolerable existence was to be had, for once.
Autumn, watching Reggie’s diligent researches,
remembered that period well. There were a lot fewer humans about after that
Plague thing, and for once they all seemed to be eating enough to live well.
This was so out of character that it quite stuck in the mind. Even the chamber
pots were hurled with more vivacity. A true cultural awakening.
As Reggie read of events, Great Persons, battles,
and other forms of normal human denigration, he was suddenly bludgeoned by a
hideous vision. A coarse and brutal streetscape sneered its way into his
unwilling thoughts. Stunted ugly people in a wardrobe of stenches. Crowds of
filthy children. The bland faces of the prosperously vicious. Cow-like ancients
of nearly forty winters and crones of ten. A careless décor of thrifty neglect.
The confused and terminally wounded poor. A horse, in better repair than any of
the people.
Reggie’s mind wandered by.
That was the truth, I think.
Why?
Fits the behavior. A cultural identity doesn’t have
to be a nice thing, just one which survives. Arguably, most human cultures
couldn’t live on “nice”, anyway.
You’re a joy to have around, you know.
Reggie tunneled on. One theory he discovered was
that England retained a sense of itself from its beginnings as a true identity.
The appallingly simplistic idea of “national character” didn’t wash with the
proponents of this theory. It was
reasoned that a motley collection of peoples had been grouped together on an
island and had synthesized a shared identity which contained the elements of
all, but like any compound, was different from its components. On that basis,
there wasn’t one “character”, but dozens of them, within the whole of the
nation, acting as facets of the identity, but still distinct.
This
appealed to Reggie, who’d found most recorded definitions of “English
character” either so patronizing or so useless as to be personally offensive.
Literature had
recklessly produced a collection of “English Eccentrics” who were so tedious
and tame as to be starkly ridiculous compared to the real variety. It had also
reproduced a stolid and uninspiring collection of lower and middle-class vermin
apparently so devoted to mundane mediocrity as to be unrecognizable as
belonging to the human race at all. The upper class appeared to have always
been insane.
A lot of the “characters” were simple thefts. There
was no point in blaming Dickens for the improbable collection of “Cockneys”
perpetrated by fiction, who were somehow so immune to squalor and poverty as to
be interminably cheerful. It would be more apt historically to describe a
Cockney as a “sparrow” because of the historical comparison in diets between
human and bird, than for any similarity of temperament. The bird would win.
Cockneys don’t seem to find many worms.
The workhouses and coal mines had evidently also
contained a race of Noble Poor who had nothing better to do with their lives
than be effectively dead but interesting. Later speculative narratives managed
to incorporate loveable criminals, exciting politicians, honest businessmen, and
other fantastic beings into a somewhere which was also, inexplicably, called
England.
Well, he asked for it. A grotesquerie of articles
and spewings, not unlike an economic policy seminar, kept springing out at
Reggie as he tried to research his subject. Wherever he looked, on any subject,
some unstated beast roared. Some samples:
“…The work exudes mighty outcomes as its resources
are synergized in a rich flux of implied grandeur.” (Undertaker’s Gazette,
Review Of Ritual Budgeting, by A. D. Cline, 2000).
“What is insanity, really, and does it come in other
colors?” (Accountancy Weekly,
anon. 2134).
“What do you need money for, anyway?” (Layman, 2001,
informal address to several hundred Royal Society members cornered in abandoned
coal mine).[2]
“Some doubt is now being expressed whether the
aircraft carrier really should have been in the domestic appliances area at
all.” (Thames Times Tomes, HRH Mopsy, 2207).
“Politicians are useful, like economists.” Vivisectionists’
Holiday Guide, 2147.
“A hush, now, as the pageantry of the Changing Of
The Accountant begins. Bert, resplendent in his Rag Of Honor, squirming
handkerchief regal atop the pervasive shining of his elegantly buffed and
stylishly low cranium…………” BBC Uncensored, 2004, prior to Great Purge of
2004.
“And Lo, that this frightful abyss is known as
Bognor, wherein one’s dearest printed perversions are set at naught and one is
confined to arduous readings of the classifieds, in the hope of self
gratification. To think that mighty clerks a-straining of their sinews did
cluster about such treasures of the written word and cause them not to be shewn
unadorned and promiscuous in the local rag.” British Rail Dean of
Literature (escaped), verbal, verbatim, in course of murderous rampage at
co-op, 2206.
“Well, you know, of course, really, in a way,
without wanting to be too specific, actually, and….” (Coroner’s Report,
Assassination of HRH Mopsy, 2207).
“Oooooooooh.” Hansard, Spring Flutterings
Sitting, 2201.
“It has come to this, you foul brute.” Quotes
From Great Phone Bills, British Museum, Thule, Greenland, discovered in
time capsule, 2189).
“We ran out of gerbils.” Treasurer’s Statement to
Budget Committee regarding appointment of EU Commissioner, 2009.
“There is no law preventing members of this House
from being quadrupeds. In many ways, it’s quite gratifying.” Rules and
Baccarat Debate, Speaker’s Address, 2164, at Mauve Lion Inn, where
Parliament sat during the replacing of the tarpaulin over the garage.
“Dear Yodel-arse, we’ve given that duck your address
and a chainsaw. Love, Mother.” Personals, Hobbyists’ Newsletter,
2017.
Where on Earth was my England, demanded Reggie, crashing
unexpectedly into one of his cherished ideals in his reaction to this
assortment. The emotional content was surprising. For a while he began to think
he’d imagined it. Was he co-dependent on a culture that didn’t exist?
There were theories. There usually are. One was,
that if people don’t have a personality, the culture[3]
provides one for them. Citizens can then hide in some safe social context,
because identities are frail things, and become acceptable to each other. How
sweet. (There was, of course, a section of the population that said that by
definition the public could not possibly have an identity, and even if it
could, it shouldn’t, because it wouldn’t know what to do with one. However,
sociologists are very strange people, and nobody cared what they thought).
Consciousness,
left unchecked, tends to cause a sensation dangerously close to being alive,
even among those dedicated to the drabbest things in human experience. Life, if
not prevented, may cause actual people. People, if not encased in transient and
preferably murderous cultures, might have their own personalities.
People with personalities might not want to wallow in the drain-like
tedium of any society, drowning in the sour continuums among which things and
people merely pass on their predictable ways to oblivion.
Consider, O becomingly dappled and commendably
cheese-smitten reader, the glue with which humanity has traditionally stuck
together its little lives. Since the Stone Age, humans have lived in mutually
dependent groups trying to deal with things like eating, breathing and not
being killed. To do these better, societies “sprang”, (actually, lurched), into
existence. Agriculture created a reliable food supply. The trade in goods
created consumer societies… ha, snicker, ha, chortle, gargle.... Societies…these
pitiful piles of overrated ancient excrement…. you’re kidding…when?……… What a
load of…oh, sorry, Mother. Put down the
axe.
The result was a series of unwieldy and inefficient
horrors known as civilizations, which duly produced a supply of disasters for
humanity to play with. Poverty, for example, wasn’t an invention of tribal
groups, which took the more practical (and still not illegal) line that
everybody was able to contribute something, whether they were willing to admit
to it or not. To be truly impoverished, the average human apparently requires
enormous effort to be put into creating hopeless but orderly methods of
distribution, interminable demands on the resources of everyone and everything,
and a nearly mystical system of asset-valuation.
Endless and useless issues are required to fill and
create the gap between human needs and human aspirations. Time passes, slowly,
in the pursuit of solutions to problems that ought never to have existed. The
same original need, being alive, has inconsiderately remained constant.
Humanity has suffered much from its demand for material
comfort. The eternal importance of things which come and go, the vital
expression of things that ultimately don’t matter, but get airtime regardless.
The big issues of any time are the absurdities of their future, however
hideous, because by then someone has had the time to invent even bigger
disasters. There’s an element of slapstick in human history, and the pratfalls
are real. Time may or may not heal, but it obviously doesn’t hang about looking
for the band-aids.
Autumn, who had been busily tidying up the northern
hemisphere for a few centuries, wryly agreed that just waiting for things to
repair themselves hadn’t been such a great idea for the human world. Time is
the movement of circumstances. So is jumping off a cliff. The theory that this
process solves problems, or heals anything, is debatable.
Not too unexpectedly, most people react to their
times, rather than wait for them to go away. Usually these people are those
unreliable, rickety souls unable to convince themselves of the value of living
like an inefficient cockroach that can’t feed or house itself, and which has to
have an entire civilization working for it to be able to live at all.
These also tend to be irresponsible people not
desperate to butcher themselves along with the interminable herds of bovine
non-characters at the abattoirs of social neglect. Those to whom the subtle
glories of a lifetime of irrelevance-fondling bureaucracy are as nothing.
Sinister individuals whose lives are not spent gaping in awe at the collection
of insane and ugly plodders which infest economics, and babble conscientiously
among the political lobbies.
England did manage to produce a quite tolerable
supply of such people until about 1914. A profound, soul-generated, dislike of
petty and meaningless fools was evident in the actual literature of the
time. It all seemed rather English to Reggie, who was by now desperate to find
anything resembling his ideals. The Enlightenment, a period in which Gilbert
and Sullivan provided the accompaniment for an array of people prepared to
question, for once, the anachronisms of the previous two thousand years.
It seemed, however, at odds with the social result,
a truly pedestrian society unmistakably based on being as dull as possible. The
ideal of domestic death-by-routine, coupled with conscientious ignorance, duly
industrialized. Reggie found himself far too well aware of the limitations of
the ponderous society which ground on its stodgy way through the end of the
Victorian era.
Reggie read on, as though rowing a bathtub across
the Atlantic. A passage scuttled out of a tome called Boorish Bleak[4],
by Grim Ace, a member of the Extreme Historians Guild, a group which was
dedicated to making people learn from history by physically beating people up
with their books. The book was described as “a worthwhile rant, and very
effective weapon, what with the poison tipped spikes sticking out of the cover
and all”, by the literary critics. From the section on England there emerged:
There was also introduced a social idiom masquerading
for some reason as egalitarianism, which also managed to become a
one-size-fits-nobody method of “social equity”, of all things. Not all rocks
are diamonds. Try making a bedpan out of diamonds and see what reactions you
get, particularly from jewelers, doctors, nurses, and patients.
People, for better or worse, are themselves.
Societies create role-positions for people based on some generally unworkable
average and then wonder why so many resent the roles they have. One look at the
almost Paleolithic social groupings that industrial civilization produced
should convince the most rabid socio-idealist that peer-groups are forms of
oppression, and therefore their parent societies are much worse.
A
person belongs to some circumstantial collection of individuals like a school
class. One kid has a tendency to damage those that disagree with him, and the
others miraculously become better at not disagreeing. Another kid usually gets
better test results, and is disliked accordingly. Some forty-plus different and
largely mutually expedient human interactions unreliably occur, and this mess
is sagely called a peer group. (You also have the option to pay to be told
this, having realized that your child is a sociopath after talking to a
psychologist).
Extrapolate
this mess to fit a nation and you wind up with an accidental hierarchy of
compromises. England, probably in self-defence, managed to achieve a quiet
degree of expedient self-avoidability which made it bearable. You would be
“Woooon Ov Ver Laaardz” “at poooob”, but privately you were able to be
yourself, or, indeed, another person entirely, without too much pressure.
Sometimes with active help from your friends.
This confused Reggie. Public and private personae.
Designer non-persons. Self-evasive personalities, to “fit in” with those you
didn’t seem to be able to avoid. Identity obliteration, for personal reasons.
Similar to suicide, but cheaper. OK, but there was, historically, no lack of
people prepared to say in print that they wanted no part of such
death-by-association. Those that objected to the habit of turning into an
anonymous drone when clustering in groups.
This dichotomy was, inevitably, at odds with
Reggie’s honest belief that the English had personal character as
individuals. There were those happy to disagree with anyone and everyone that
didn’t like being disagreed with, and do so in print and in public. (This odd
behavior was known subsequently as Literary Vertebrate Syndrome, and was used
by doctors to counteract Schmaltz Disease, prevalent in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries).[5]
Mystified, Reggie had real trouble with the
seemingly endless conflict of historical facts and his ideals. This was
aggravated by excerpts from a few diaries which had somehow managed to stray
into the histories. It seemed that society was not comprised of some dour
collection of homogenous vegetables after all.
“Went out with human jellybean. We talked about
cars and clothes and houses and work. Ooh it was exciting, like two mating
bricks on a fine summer day. She was very excited that her doctor had told her
that soon her estrogen count would be a whole number. We delicately discussed
sex among other people and agreed that what was most important were the legal
ramifications.”[6]
“How, and for that matter why, do economists
breed? I seem to be saturated with the bastards. Yet you could never meet a
more passionless group. Each crevice of our society is festering with the
minutiae of the age, the slow sucking morass of temporary insanity called
material status. In every moment is the dreary droning dribbling drabness of
some ancient mercantile fool with its hideous self and its overpriced and
tasteless stage set of a life, some talking ulcer of perceived success and
propriety.”[7]
The other side of this “debate” was ably represented
by Carping Nag himself, in his address to the Scientocracy Sycophants and
Vermin Glee Club.
“Are we not happy in our little world? Do we not
seek and find fulfillment in the safe luxuries of the familiar? Have not we
brought our simple lives to this great pass? Could we improve on such domestic
idylls? Could we be more than we are?
I say that in fact we have attained enlightenment.
We have reached a height where all human roles are defined. No longer need we
wonder who we are and what we might do. All things are now secure in their
place. No change is needed in our selfless society.”
Typical of Nag, and many others. It is typical of
history to try to portray Homogenous Humanity, with the same values and goals.
If any such thing ever occurred, it’s remained well hidden. England certainly
spent as much time fighting with itself as it did with anyone else. Perhaps it
was the food. Autumn had wondered why humans clustered about in groups doing
nothing but annoy each other. It seemed a bit…dumb.
An alien reading human history could be forgiven for
thinking that a species of unusually stolid idiots was making excuses for
itself, while vigorously denying doing anything that might have needed
excusing. What is it in human history that is so hard to admit? Humanity?
Reggie, like many historians, continually found that sidetracks were more
common than actual lines of research. Historically, as a survival strategy,
divergence from whatever the species is doing at any moment is probably a safer
survival strategy for humans, but it’s tough on the researcher.
Grim Ace was consulted again. He tunneled on through
the book, arriving at Applied Non Conformity:
If everybody does something, there must inevitably
be something wrong with it, whatever it is. Most people are not particularly
successful at anything. The majority of any group are the lesser-achievers, not
considered to be winners in any sense. Therefore conformity to majority
behavior is a recipe for failure. Nobody ever succeeded by being like
everyone else. It’s also hard to imagine anything much more guaranteed to
induce lack of identity than being unrelentingly and pitilessly exactly like
everyone else. The anonymous are those nobody wants or needs to notice. To be anonymous,
conform. The worst that will happen is that you’ll be praised for your social
skills.
Inevitably some fool tries to uphold the
status quo. If that were a successful option, we’d all be living in the trees
to this day. Societies and cultures stagnate, and have to be stirred to
maintain any interest in doing anything. To do anything better, it must be done
differently. Those that don’t do things better lose to more efficient
competition. The status quo, therefore, is for real, fanatical, dedicated,
losers. These are the people that fought for the idea of the flat Earth,
opposed the study of medicine, and managed to slow Western science to a
superstitious drivel for some two thousand plus years after the Greeks.
More succinctly, a collection of useless fools.
Endlessly “busy” in lives of important impotence, shamelessly cowering at every
convention, ever groveling like Machiavelli with his presumably illiterate and
idiot prince.[8] Virtuous
parasites, nestled like ringworm in some body politic.
That made some sort of sense to Reggie. He left it
there while Grim Ace went on to describe his battles with his local grocer, for
some reason.
England in its various heydays has contained some of
the greats of nonconformity in their professions. The Tudors, Turner,
Shaftesbury, Shakespeare, Drake, Cochrane, Cook, Carroll, Byron, the Huxleys[9],
More, Darwin, Constable, Wells, the Durrells, a phone book’s worth of
thoughtful people. The list is pretty daunting. Most were constantly
confronted by the heroic pig-ignorance of their times. Somewhere in there, felt
Reggie, was his England, in knightly combat with itself. Perhaps.
Reggie’s problem was really that as a sane person
from a sane time, he was attempting to understand why such people were so
utterly outside the mainstream of social thought. Reggie belonged in a time
where thought wasn’t actually a criminal offense. Grim Ace dragged him back,
muttering about human thinking, which is a rather odd way to describe a moral
dilemma at a grocery:
New thought has the constant challenge of
penetrating contemporary delusions. It is rare that any information or idea simply gets
taken up simply on its merits. Most have to battle through the lazy
omnisciences of their day, those invaluable relics who have done so much over
the centuries to obstruct the most basic advances in every field.
It is amusing in retrospect to note that nobody ever
opposed the idea of electricity, largely because it was too easy to prove, and
the greatest and most authoritative dullards of the time couldn’t argue with
it. Astronomy, in contrast, was the prerogative of everyone that had ever
looked upward.
Everybody “knew” that the sun orbited the Earth. You may not understand a
thing about electrons, resistances, polarities or conductivity, so you can
accept a light globe. However, you “know” about the sun, therefore you
are able to refuse to believe any information provided about it, however
convincing or important.
From
this the fundamental human law is derived; you can accept anything in
ignorance; it’s when you think you understand that you inevitably get things
wrong. This grocer…
Reggie, idealist to the core, found the constant
conflicts a severe strain on his love-on-principle of all things English. He
found the great English idiom he revered totally at odds with the blundering,
too-tolerantly muddling, history. People did things for a given purpose, and
then apparently did everything else contrary to the supposed reason for doing
it. Why did the insufficiently-ever-reviled “placemen” of the Napoleonic Wars
sell bits of driftwood to the Royal Navy, claiming them to be ships? Why did so
many die trying to chew their way through barbed wire in the First World War?
He discovered in the bibliography of Boorish
Bleak that his grandfather, Thunder Mimbly, had written a manual in
1960-something called Basic Rites of The English, a “suspiciously
concise work”, according to Grim Ace, detailing modes of conduct. It seemed
improbably useful.
Reggie’s ethos demanded to see great élan and incisive
contributions by champions of the culture. He hoped his grandfather would fill
the void created by his readings to date. Being immortal is useful for an
advocate of anything English. In his case, “There’ll Always Be an England” had
potential practical applications. If England dies out, you can either build a
new one or simply wait for it to come around again on the indecisive wheel of
existence.
Reggie tracked down his ancestor’s book in an
obscure Scientocracy library collection called, infuriatingly enough, European
Aberrations. His grandfather had evidently felt the need to supply detail.
The section on Neighbors was illustrative.
“Despite many requests, some people are both foreign
and
neighbors. Some are even relatives. Foreigners come in various brands:
descriptions in parentheses are generic qualifiers.
French. (Occupational hazards)
Extremely sensitive, sometimes with a reason. The innocent building of the Arc
De Triomphe and/or a life size replica of the Bastille in your topiary may be
considered more than a coincidence by a French neighbor. The accidental wearing
of berets may attract adverse comment. The Englishman should maintain an air
of benevolent ignorance, to the extent of being unable to speak French as and
when required.
Australians. (Relatives, mercifully
distant) Far too loveable to tolerate. Cause arson in cricket stumps. Avoid.
One may find oneself tying down marsupials before one quite realizes what one
is doing. On no account raise any subject whatsoever.
Germans. (Inevitable) Traditionally
classified into two types, those with Panzers in the backyard and those
without. The former is perhaps subtly reassuring; the latter probably owns your
employer. Make polite noises, but don’t attempt to pronounce anything, and
avoid the grammar.
Irish. (Unavoidable) When Irish
eyes are smiling, they’ve probably undercut you on something. May cause
literacy, even in adults. Have a cold instead.
Cockneys. (Sigh) Once believed to be
English, now known to be very lost tribe of Scotland. Those wearing fashionable
clothes are considered avoidable. Those wearing American street fashions, alas,
are not. Feign interest.
Scots. (Acquaintances) Useful for
disemboweling other neighbors and tending to ward off people that say “Tha’s no
hoow ye maaaaaake prrrrridge,” by boiling them in broths in accordance with
ancient customs. Be charmed, and helpful.
Americans. (Relatives, omnipresent)
The soft quack of the American is an ornament to any conversation, and may
occasionally mean something. Judicious use of the word “paradigm” may prevent
onslaught of over-erudition. Educated Americans recognize people and vehicles.
Some even make a distinction between them. Be awestruck.
Indians. (Egad!) Do not under
any circumstances whatsoever refer to the Great Vengeful Curry which caused
India to be triangular. It may be listening.
Welsh. (Shriek) Avoid casual
remarks about eisteddfodder. Lloyd George may be referred to guardedly. Try
(preferably unsuccessfully) not to drag yourself away from the subject of
leeks.
Italians. (Um) Overloaded to the
point of martyrdom with shockingly attractive women, these people are to be
helped to reduce their burden. Leer helpfully.
Greeks. (Oh, of course) Heavily armed with Mousaka, they have no need of
nuclear weapons. However, they may unwittingly feed the unsuspecting Englishman
to death, not realizing that the English gave up all forms of useful eating
during World War 1. Tact demands that the Englishman express a heart-rending
desire for kippers on toast, which should confuse the most hospitable foreigner
sufficiently to allow an escape.
New Zealanders. (Relatives) A nation
possessed of only one vowel, with which they are so adept as to be able to hold
conversations and have a democracy at the same time. Over–fond of sporting
crockery and inclined to paint any situation as All Black. Smile
understandingly.
Others. The above are the more
familiar nationalities. Those others from all over the world contain a
diversity and richness of culture which experience has shown is far better
ignored for the peace of mind of all concerned. There are few things more
dangerous than mutual understanding. The Englishman, wading through the
unplumbed depths of English culture, being helpfully bludgeoned by the pith of
the past and the pestilence of the present, thus has a mass of excuses for
enlightened ignorance. Use them.
General remarks.
Neighbors may be avoided in enormous numbers. Actual
mass slaughter is considered somewhat crude, and difficult to clean. The
English themselves go to great lengths to avoid any contact with each other,
apart from ritual gatherings at the pub to watch the communal destruction of
livers, and enjoy shared decay. This prevents contamination of the soul,
reduces the spread of disease and political activity, and inspires retailers
and advertisers. More importantly, it prevents the development of interest in
things and people that aren’t and never were interesting, thus maintaining an
intellectual stability of which most nations can only dream.
In
deference to the carefully maintained mass disinterest, a series of banal
non-interactions was mercifully instituted in late Victorian times, which are
now standard procedures worldwide. Thanks to this laborsaving social process,
relationships lasting decades may be reduced to birth, gossip, sporting events,
photo albums, weddings, funerals, looking sympathetic at work, and the odd
brittle party. Death subsequent to any or all of these events is considered
compulsory, the participants having enjoyed themselves far too much.
Occasionally a war or some other nuisance interrupts
this island of determined hermits as it floats serenely and determinedly to the
quiet elsewhere it would rather become.”
Reggie noticed that a lot was unsaid. Inspired
Disinterest was probably the main reason the human race managed to avoid
exterminating itself. It’s hard to kill people if you don’t know, or care, that
they exist. The English, disinterested to a degree which could at times be
described as a medical problem, achieved in the late 1800s a level of urbane
detachment that defied all prior norms of human interaction, even while making
pests of themselves on a global scale.
A synopsis of further history came from Boorish Bleak:
…This
noble dissociation from the world received a quite unforgettable rebuff from
the Germans, of all people, in France, of all places, during the “battles” of
World War One. The normally reliable, even log-like, German insularity seemed
to have evaporated completely. They seemed unnaturally extroverted. Anyway, a
lot of people went and got themselves thoughtfully killed and maimed, and some
(other) people wondered why.
The Somme, that elaborate and disgusting proof of
human idiocy which history will never erase, somewhat diminished the urbane English
faith in the idea that a moustache can run an army all by itself. There was a
decidedly un-urbane hint of doubt.
In fairness, it is difficult to be urbane with a
5.9-inch shell in your head. One becomes pensive, perhaps even opinionated.
Criticism, the vile beast of language, slithered into the English psyche. Some
results were informative. It was belatedly realized that having a moustache
wasn’t quite all a general officer commanding an army needed. A brain was
subsequently considered a useful addition, although implementation of this
novel idea took some time.
Distressingly few kudos were bestowed on the shyly
anonymous butchers of the trenches. Formerly, mowing down a few natives armed
with sticks had entitled one to nobility. No gratitude was shown after the
Great War, however, for the vacant spaces in theatres or on trains. The reduced
load on marriage celebrants was hardly even mentioned. Those wonderful
conversation pieces regarding the whereabouts of missing bits of anatomy were
ignored by a brutish public who seemed unaware of all the Generals had done for
them.
One would think that a fitting memorial to the Great
War would have been created, with immaculately attired senior officers forever
to be remembered wearing ceremonial pinafores, frolicking in a Flanders field.
Such a useful edifice would give rise to poetry of the highest order: “Happily
the Little General-Cherubs gambol among the graves, little knowing or asking
whose lives were saved,”[10].
…Something like that.
Or
at the very least there could have been commemoration in the form of a dirty
mutton soup called Tommy Atkins. For authenticity.
It didn’t happen. No such glorious icons. Just
hundreds of square miles of graves, and some horrified histories written by
those who even though personally involved, still didn’t quite believe it.
Ironically the process of war also proved the doctrine that the less you get
involved with the world, the better.
It later became a common theory that perhaps
slaughtering an entire generation wasn’t such a good idea after all.[11]
This strange notion was responsible for an outbreak of mental activity called
quaintly enough the 1920s. Intelligence, long suspected among the English but
never proven, brazenly stalked the land.
This
departure from a colonial stupor was quite appalling. The war, surely, had been
bad enough. Now there were people, even women, being intelligent, in public,
without licenses. Formerly there had been an unwritten law that one was
expected to decline from about age 35 into an increasingly pompous and
soul-numbingly dull part of the landscape.
In extreme cases people had hyphenated each other
and gone to community gatherings specifically to avoid appearing either
interesting or intelligent. In these environs the most exciting thing likely to
happen was the rector retelling the tale of how he sodomized his way across
Asia Minor, and little else.
But
now one was expected to remain awake during famines, civil wars, oppressions,
Depressions, Prohibitions, and other fashionable foreign things. For people
whose main function was meeting their ends making ends meet, this was really a
bit much.
Far worse at the national level was the niggling
belief that if the past slaughter wasn’t well-managed, perhaps other things
were less than perfectly done. Could it be, reasoned the sultry, bran flavored,
temptresses of Westminster, that even something as axiomatic as systematic
squalor was not quite the Elysian vision it was supposed to be? No, surely not.
How could you have a society with nobody on the bottom of it? Such were the
challenges of the new era, which were all duly and efficiently not met to any
degree by anyone. That tradition remained intact.
Despite this fecund wisdom, Poverty, the great
mainstay of European and British life since the Middle Ages, ceased for some
reason to be the rightful aspiration of 90% of the population. Prosperity made
people even less compulsorily dull, which was quite oppressive.
The
1920s rather unkindly became the 1930s, and this made things even more difficult.
The Germans were back with a strangely irritating logo, and the process of
being involuntarily conscious expanded itself. Dreadful.
Disinterest
became rather marginalized in the 1940s during the conflict of interest between
Sir Christopher Wren and the Luftwaffe’s erratic interior decorations. Being
the recipient of various calibers of attention wasn’t much more enlivening than
before, either. Frenziedly fitting brains to their institutionalized military
moustaches, the English once again sallied forth to face a perverse world. The
odd sense that there was something wrong with losing battles came into
suspicious proximity with the naïve irresponsible elements that thought winning
them was the idea.
“Filling
the breaches with our English dead” wasn’t as popular as in the previous war,
although again some of the generals tried hard. It also seemed that those
earmarked to do the filling had some views on the subject. These views were
naturally ignored on the basis that it was unsporting not to carpet the world
with an informative array of corpses, preferably under-equipped, if possible.
The war did eventually end, which again confronted
the public with the dangerous possibility of living. This callous result seemed
a bit inadequate. Dining luxuriously on the rumors which one was able to obtain
with one’s ration book and a spade, the English attempted to digest modern
times.
A
not over-enthusiastically brave, or sufficiently new, world, unexpectedly
blundered into the 1950s. This was a mistake. The most avidly disinterested
were now obliged to admit that eating with a microscope was tedious after the
first decade or so. The English were now able to say with certainty that they
should have stayed in bed.
Reggie was now quite confused, as apparently England
had been. Was this Being English? He rather suspected it was. One of the
greatest difficulties of dealing with history is tolerating the sheer
imbecility of it.
Sincerity is a terrible burden for a reader of
history. Reggie had attempted to imagine himself in the place of historical
figures, and generally found that he would rather not. Anybody can be a famous
jerk, and history seems determined to prove it. He didn’t want to be
convinced that the great men of history were in fact the incumbent collection
of fools that happened to be there at the time. Heroism, however theoretical or
imaginary, is preferable to genuine and incontrovertibly documented
stupidity.
This logic managed to belatedly throw Reggie the odd
thematic lifeline that he knew practically nothing about his own
ancestors. Thunder Mimbly, for one. They were there when all that happened.
Pausing to consider that if he were immortal, it seemed strange that family
history was so sparse, he wandered in search of his parents.
Autumn wondered if the immortal was going to realize something about himself. His search was thorough, but in the wrong area. There is one place where
[1] If there’s ever a competition to insult French intelligence, don’t bother entering; they do it so well themselves. Striped garbage in berets and offensively mediocre pseudo-arty stereotypes; appalling refuse passed off as representing something French, which it never has been and never will.
[2] That was all I managed to
say before they dug their way out with their teaspoon. Curses.
[3] The culture itself gives a perspective. Not the Kulturati, or other learned offal, heaven forbid. Cultural dictatorship starts with being told what you have to like. Being told how to be “cultured” is like being told how to have malaria.
[4] Illiterate Syntax Bereft Press 2021. Believed to be the only publication to have ever shot down a plane without human assistance, or even encouragement.
[5] Schmaltz Disease involved excursions into the sickly sleaze-addicted side of literature. It was superseded by Obvious Horrendously Grim Obfuscatory Dire Niggling Oblivions (OHGODNO), when it became necessary to abandon any pretense at writing about anything meaningful later in the 20th century.
[6] Social Guide for 21st Century Etiquette, Illiterate Syntax Bereft Press 2004, quote from Max Loathing, society correspondent of the Despise Everything Association.
[7] How Bloody Interesting; A Study Of My Times, by someone who couldn’t be bothered telling anyone who he/she was, Illiterate Syntax Bereft Press 2010.
[8] Surely even the stupidest Italian prince could have found a copy of Tacitus somewhere.
[9] Just about all of them. I’m sure they must have gone on family outings trying to find something boring to do for a change.
[10] Verse of this sort should be
spoken by someone able to destroy dairy produce in the process.
[11] Of course, we know better now. We simply entertain them to death.