Gadget du jour

Light Touch™ instantly turns any flat surface into a touch screen. Light Touch™ is an interactive projector that instantly transforms any flat surface into a touch screen. It frees multimedia content from the confines of the small screen, allowing users to interact with that content just as they do on their hand held devices – using multi-touch technology.

Light Touch™ has Holographic Laser Projection (HLP™) technology inside which creates bright, high-quality video images in WVGA resolution. Integrated infrared sensors detect motion and turn the projected image into a 10.1″ virtual touch screen, so the user can control the projector and interact with applications simply by touching the image.

Просмотрено: Бабуся (2004)

Фильм - жестокий и реалистичный, трогательный, но не сентиментальный. Браво!





"Бабуся" в отсутствие национальной идеи

Текст: Екатерина Барабаш
"Независимая газета"

Фильм Лидии Бобровой как пример честного "народного" кино.

Делать кино про народ, беря за основу сюжеты из народной жизни, любят многие. Особенно в России, где слово "народ" принято произносить с трепетом и придыханием, памятуя об исконности, посконности и знаменитой триаде. Пройдя через болезнь чернухофилии, многие наши режиссеры, что называется, пошли в народ. Нечасто, но стали появляться фильмы из жизни глубоко народной, что проистекает на просторах земли русской, за пределами Садового кольца, а то и Московской кольцевой автодороги. Только вот беда — если в фильмах про любовь нас подстерегает пошлятина и неумеренная романтика в стиле дамских любовных романов, а картины про мужественных мужчин грешат преобильными реками крови, в которых плавают отстрелянные конечности, то к фильмам из народной жизни хочется пририсовать лапти и по ходу дела фальшиво-заунывно затянуть что-нибудь вроде "Степь да степь кругом".

Российское кино о российской глубинке и ее проблемах оказались в большинстве своем (правда, тут говорить о большинстве вообще трудно, так как "народная" тема в кино все же не самая популярная среди творцов) раскрашенными в терпкие, но безжизненные цвета, не имеющими ничего общего с теми сочными красками жизни, которыми режиссер надеялся привлечь зрителя. Герои "народных" фильмов, как правило, или запредельно много пьют, но совершают при этом добрые дела, либо не пьют вовсе, совершают бесконечные подлости, но в трудный момент из них, как из прохудившегося сосуда, начинает хлестать неуемная добродетель. Почему фильм Павла Лунгина "Свадьба", забавный по сценарию, с неплохими актерскими работами, остроумными сценами, по-режиссерски цельный, оказался под градом критических стрел (хотя справедливости ради надо сказать, что было достаточно и положительной критики, да и зрители фильм приняли)? Все просто: понадеявшись на то, что зритель узнает в персонажах себя и своих соседей, а проблемы, которые решают герои, близки зрителям и в жизни, — хроническая невыплата зарплаты, пьянство мужа, беспредел милиции и пр., Лунгин снял фильм-сказку, не удосужившись пояснить, что все это понарошку. В результате получился эрзац — похоже на правду, но от правды неизмеримо далеко. Как заменитель сахара — сладкий, да не настоящий.

Примерно то же самое произошло со всем циклом Евгения Матвеева "Любить по-русски". Благородная задача — показать хороших русских людей, противостоящих подонкам и сохранивших глубину и чистоту чувств, тоже обернулось полнейшим заблуждением и жизненной неправдой. Хорошие герои на фоне березок выкрашены в добрые пастельные тона, мрачные злодеи все как один злобны и неизлечимо порочны. Главная беда таких картин в том, что они пытаются провести некую национальную идею, зациклившись на эфемерной "русскости", которая, стоя по другую сторону баррикад от "нерусскости", якобы на деле доказывает свое благородное предназначение. В результате все сводится к очередным размышлениям на тему загадочной русской души, что тоже само по себе не совсем честно по отношению к зрителю, который против воли своей переполняется гордостью за собственную загадочную душу. А на загадочность можно спихнуть очень многое...

Удивительным образом всего этого избежала Лидия Боброва со своей картиной "Бабуся". Впрочем, вряд ли это можно назвать удивительным. Боброва с самого начала сделала то, чего так всегда боялись создатели "народного" кино. Она не стала играть со зрителем в поддавки. История про бабу Тосю, "бабусю", как звали ее внуки, сколь жизненна, столь и кинематографична. На старости лет бабуся оказалась никому не нужна. Дом свой в деревне она продала, деньги раздала многочисленным внукам. Вскоре умерла дочь, зять решил начать новую личную жизнь, в которой бабусе, разумеется, места не нашлось. Старушку стали передавать от родственников к родственникам. По разным причинам никто из внуков взять ее не захотел. Или не смог. И ушла бабуся зимней ночью в лес, умирать. Вот и вся история, простая, как миллион историй до нее.

Боброва не боится ставить самые "затасканные" проблемы — очерствение людских душ, неблагодарность, отсутствие сострадания, то же пьянство. Русская деревня, снятая зимой, не вызывает ассоциаций с Пушкиным и его Ариной Родионовной — только с тоской необъятной, когда заняться нечем и напиться тянет. Есть спокойная и грустная констатация факта: пьют до потери человеческого облика. Кто не пьет, тому вообще ничего не надо, кроме спокойной жизни, которую бабуся одним своим появлением в доме, само собой, нарушит. У кого повернется язык осуждать внука-беженца, вернувшегося из Чечни и живущего в чьей-то избенке на птичьих правах, да еще с больной дочкой? Или внучку, которая знает, что, приведи она бабусю, муж ее непременно выгонит? Осуждать за негероическое поведение? Оно нормально. Авторы фильма смотрят на всех глазами самой бабуси, а у той глаза любящие, она по-прежнему за внучат, уже давно выросших, переживает.

То, что режиссер взяла на главную роль не профессиональную актрису, а натуральную бабусю из деревни, делает фильм как-то по-детски настоящим. Нина Шубина — актриса, прямо скажем, неважная. Что неожиданным образом идет картине в плюс. Вроде как неказистая, зато своя. Причем "актриса" почти ничего не делает в фильме, играют профессиональные актеры, а бабуся только переходит, как знамя, из рук в руки. И молча подолгу наблюдает из машины, как ее племяннице не удается договориться с очередным родственником. Непрофессионализм бабуси словно подчеркивает: здесь все по-честному, здесь вас не обманут.

Это, конечно, не значит, что для успеха фильма непременно надо на главную роль брать непрофессионалов. Это значит только, что умение не играть со зрителем в поддавки в кино, да еще "народном", равносильно творческому прорыву. И никакой национальной идеи не надо.

Poem du jour

Опустись, занавеска линялая,
На больные герани мои.
Сгинь, цыганская жизнь небывалая,
Погаси, сомкни очи твои!

Ты ли, жизнь, мою горницу скудную
Убирала степным ковылём!
Ты ли, жизнь, мою сонь непробудную
Зеленым отравляла вином!

Как цыганка, платками узорными
Расстилалася ты предо мной,
Ой ли косами иссиня-чёрными,
Ой ли бурей страстей огневой!

Что рыдалось мне в шёпоте, в забытьи,
Неземные ль какие слова?
Сам не свой только был я, без памяти,
И ходила кругом голова…

Спалена моя степь, трава свалена,
Ни огня, ни звезды, ни пути…
И кого целовал — не моя вина,
Ты, кому обещался, — прости…

30 декабря 1908

Просмотрено: Кошечка (Бешеная балерина)

Михаил Ефремов великолепно живет в образе Бешеной Балерины, написанным талантливейшим Григорием Констанинопольским. Браво!

Driving in Croatia

Driving in Croatia... Now should I?...

TLS: Will Self on Sebald

Will Self on Sebald

Sebald, the good German?

Will Self on W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust

"I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I did finally find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything as I had already made a down payment on some furniture. Once, towards the end of the war I did contemplate loosening the Führer’s neck napkin and allowing a few tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me."
Following Freud – himself driven into exile by the Nazis – there are some things too serious not to joke about, and this applies to Hitler, to the regime he initiated, and even to the murders – through war, mass shootings, extermination camps and forced marches – that that regime carried out: mass murders the true extent of which will never now be established with complete accuracy. Twenty million, thirty? What can such figures tell us about the reality of a single individual crushed beneath the Nazi juggernaut?
I should qualify the above: some things are too serious for some people not to joke about them. I cannot decide whether or not W. G. Sebald would permit himself even the wryest of smiles in response to Woody Allen’s parody of Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, which I quote from above. After all, it isn’t the Holocaust that “The Schmeed Memoirs” seeks to extract humour from; rather, Allen is savagely mocking Speer’s claim that at the time it was taking place, he personally knew nothing of the murder of millions of Jews. By transforming Hitler’s erstwhile architect – who subsequently became his Minister for War Production – into a self-deluding barber, Allen performs the essential task of the satirist: to expose the lie of power for what it was, is, and always will be, and to strip away the protective clothing – of idealism, of denial, of retrospective justification – from the perpetrators of genocide.
read more
Ours is an era intoxicated by its capacity to reproduce history technologically, in an instantaneous digitization of all that has happened. But far from tempering our ability to politicize history, this seems to spur both individuals and regimes on to still greater tendentiousness. Among modern philosophers Baudrillard understood this development the best, and foresaw the deployment of symbolic events alongside the more conventional weaponry of international conflict. Sebald understood it as well: in The Rings of Saturn his fictive alter ego observes the Waterloo Panorama, a 360-degree representation of the battle warped round “an immense domed rotunda”, and muses: “This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was”. To counter this synoptic view – which, again and again throughout his work, Sebald links to dangerous idealisms and utopian fantasies – the writer offered us subjective experience. This was not, however, reportage that relies for its authority on witness; Sebald, as he wrote with reference to the Allied bombing of Hamburg in his essay “Air War and Literature”, mistrusted seeming clarity in the retelling of events that had violently deranged the senses. Rather, his was a forensic phenomenology that took into account the very lacunae, the repressions and the partial amnesias that are the reality of lived life.
Sebald, perhaps better than anyone, would understand the threshold we now stand upon. Last year Harry Patch, the final remaining British survivor of the trenches in the First World War, died, and with his death another stratum of history was sealed shut. In the next two or three decades the same will happen in respect of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Last November John Demjanjuk was wheeled into a Munich courtroom to stand trial on charges of being an accessory to 27,900 murders in the Sobibor extermination camp, and despite the statement by the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland that “All NS criminals still living should know that there won’t be mercy for them, regardless of their age”, it is generally understood that this will be the last Holocaust crimes trial of any significance. The previous month Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier, in his guise as the leader of the BNP, appeared on BBC1’s Question Time, where he was subjected to carefully orchestrated liberal barracking. And on January 27 – the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz – we will have Holocaust Memorial Day, a national commemoration of the victims of German National Socialism inaugurated by Tony Blair in 2001.
W. G. Sebald died in December of that year, but had he lived I doubt he would have made any public comment about this. Nevertheless, the message I take from Sebald’s works and his scrupulous posture in relation to the remembrance of the Holocaust’s victims, is that such events, far from ensuring a “Legacy of Hope” (the theme of this year’s Day), shore up a conception of history, of humanity, and of civilization that depends on a view of the Holocaust as an exceptional and unprecedented mass murder. It is not just in terms of the Zionist eschatology that the Holocaust is deployed as a symbolic event; we also require it as a confirmation of our own righteousness in the democratic and industrialized West.
Albert Speer was, of course, the very personification of an industrialization run amok. The Nazis, for all the twisted atavism of their ideology, were nothing if not modernizers. So, Speer could be significant for Sebald for many reasons – the grotesque giganticism of his designs for the new capital of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich would seem the epitome of that distortion of Burke’s “objects great and terrible” which was the Nazis’ vision of art as the servant of social control. In Sebald’s Austerlitz, the eponymous protagonist, an architectural historian, circles the truth of his origins as he circles the terra incognita of Germany itself. Through his study of such buildings as factories, docks and fortifications hypertrophied by nineteenth-century industrialization, Austerlitz is unconsciously homing in on the most monstrous disjunction of human scale: the exterminatory assembly lines of the Holocaust.
Encrypted in Antwerp’s Central Station Austerlitz finds a programme of social control, and remarks to the novel’s narrator: “The clock is placed some twenty metres above the only baroque element in the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Eendracht maakt macht”. In English “Union is strength”, but in Flemish that motto echoes “Arbeit macht frei”.
Then, there is Speer’s awkward status as not only the pre-eminent German denier of Holocaust knowledge, but also its foremost passive resister, who, charged with Hitler’s scorched earth policy, saved as much industrial infrastructure as he could. Just as Speer refused the evidence of his own senses when he visited the slave labourers at the notorious Mittelbau-Dora missile factory, so we can imagine that Sebald’s own father refused – at least in retrospect – to acknowledge the reality of what he witnessed as a career soldier in the Wehrmacht. Sebald said of his own parents that they were typical of German petit-bourgeois who “went into the war not just blindly, but with a degree of enthusiasm . . . they all felt they were going to be lords of the world”. Sebald’s father was in the Polish campaign, and in the family photo album there were pictures that initially had a “boy scout atmosphere”, but: “Then the order came and they moved in. And now the photographs are of Polish villages instead, razed to the ground and with only the chimneys left standing. These photos seemed quite normal to me as a child . . . . I look at them now, and I think, ‘Good Lord, what is all this?’”. It’s easy to see this as Sebald’s paradigmatic experience of the power of photography both to document and to dissemble historical reality – power he himself would make great use of. In Vertigo Sebald’s alter ego says of an album that his father bought his mother in 1939 as a present for the first Kriegsweihnacht – or Nazi-sanctioned “War Christmas”:
"Some of these photographs show gypsies who had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out smiling from behind the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of Slovakia where my father and his vehicle repairs unit had been stationed for several weeks before the outbreak of war."
And there, below the text, is the photograph in question, which was, Sebald said in an interview: “an indication that these things were accepted as part of the operation right from the beginning”.
Named “Winfried” from a Nazi list of approved names, and “Georg” after his father, Sebald preferred to be known as Max. He was born in the Bavarian Alps in May 1944 as the Reich was collapsing beneath the Allied onslaught, and his own literary achievement stands in almost diametric opposition to that of Speer. While Speer occupied himself exclusively with variations on the theme of what the psychoanalytic thinker Alexander Mitscherlich termed his Lebenslüge, or “Great Lie”, Sebald devoted his energies to exposing all the smaller lies of his parents’ generation. He remained steadfast in his excoriation, when asked in the course of an interview with the Jewish Quarterly after the publication of The Emigrants, whether he could talk to his parents about the so-called Hitler time, Sebald replied:
"Not really. Though my father is still alive, at eighty-five . . . . It’s the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That’s what they all are now in their own minds. I always try to explain to my parents that there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration – it’s the same thing. But they cannot understand this."
There is, as yet, no direct access to Georg Sebald’s war record, but sifting through the clues in Sebald’s texts and cross-referencing these with his statements in interviews, it seems likely to me that his father ended up serving with the 1st Gerbirgsjäger – or “mountain huntsmen” – who were indeed stationed in Slovakia before the invasion of Poland, and whose record includes a sorry tapestry of war crimes, including the rounding up and shooting of Jews in Lvov. Sebald, inevitably, was not close to his father, who had been taken prisoner by the Americans in 1945 and only returned home when the writer was three. But while it’s almost a cliché to say of a male writer’s books that they are acts of parricide, Sebald’s great achievement lay in not succumbing to Oedipal rage so as to forestall tragic sadness.
In his writings and interviews Sebald never pretended that his artistic development was entirely sui generis; it’s more that the lamentable insularity of the English-speaking world has made us generally impervious to foreign cultural influences. (This cannot have been far from Sebald’s own mind, not only when he rigorously collaborated on the translations of his own prose works from German into English, but also in his work as a pedagogue and as the founder, in 1989, of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia.) The influence of Alexander Kluge – to name but one exemplar of the documentary literature of post-war Germany – on Sebald’s methodology and concerns is difficult to assess for a non- German speaker, since none of Kluge’s key texts is available in translation. We can identify, to some extent, Sebald’s affinities with Jean Améry, or with Alfred Döblin, the subject of his own doctoral thesis, but the point needs to be stressed that these are Jewish German writers, the former a Holocaust survivor, the latter a modernist whose sensibility was shaped during Weimar. What we cannot do is place Sebald within the German literary context where he might be said to belong. Rather, let us resurrect him as a disciple of Améry, of whom Sebald wrote, “\[His\] existentialist philosophical position . . . makes no concessions to history but exemplifies the necessity of continuing to protest, a dimension so strikingly lacking from German postwar literature”.
Sebald is rightly seen as the non-Jewish German writer who through his works did most to mourn the murder of the Jews. He said that he felt no guilt himself – and indeed why should he? He was not responsible – but that there was an irremediable “sense of shame”. Subjected at school, as all Germans of his generation were, to a film of the concentration camps without explanation or context, Sebald was jolted out of what had been an isolated bucolic childhood; it impinged on him from then on that, “While I was sitting in my pushchair and being wheeled through the flowering meadows by my mother, the Jews of Corfu were being deported on a four-week trek to Poland. It is the simultaneity of a blissful childhood and those horrific events that now strikes me as incomprehensible. I know now that these things cast a very long shadow over my life”. The shadow lengthened through his university career where, in Freiburg, Sebald found himself being taught German literature by academics he later described as “dissembling old fascists”. Only the returned exile Theodor Adorno offered any insight, and no doubt his remarks on the possibility of a post- Holocaust literature must have been something the young Sebald took to heart: “To write poetry after Auschwitz”, Adorno wrote, “is barbaric”. A statement he later amplified thus: “The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it”.
Such “action writing” and any possible voyeurism were modes that subsequently Sebald carefully avoided. For a counterexample to his own meticulousness you need look no further than Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, a novel widely feted for its moving portrayal of the impact of the Holocaust – but on whom, exactly? Schlink’s novel may present a schema of evolving Holocaust consciousness in the successor generation of Germans, but its effects depend on exactly the kind of “action writing” Sebald rejected. (In Schlink’s case this consists in the portrayal of the protagonist’s underage sex with a beautiful concentration camp guard.) Just as Sebald himself never visited a concentration camp. This was a pilgrimage that he believed was “not the answer”, especially since such sites had become only way- stations on the profane tourist trail.
But he did assiduously follow newspaper reports of the Auschwitz-Birkenau trials of 1963–5, and said of the trials, “it was the first public acknowledgement that there was such a thing as an unresolved German past”. Further, “I realized there were things of much greater urgency than the writings of the German Romantics”. Sebald was struck both by the utter familiarity of the defendants – “the kind of people I’d known as neighbours” – but still more by how the Jewish witnesses, initially strange and foreign, were in the course of the proceedings revealed to have been residents of Nuremberg and Stuttgart. For Sebald, awakening to the realization that he had been living among tacit accomplices to the elimination of these people’s relatives made him feel himself to be a tacit accomplice as well, and so he “had to know what had happened in detail, and try to understand why it should have been so”.
In 1966, Sebald came to England, to Manchester University, as a teaching assistant. In 1966 – as today – Manchester had a thriving Jewish community. In post-war Germany it was, of course, only too possible never to encounter a Jew, but now Sebald had a German-Jewish landlord whose own parents had been deported to Riga where they were murdered. This man subsequently became one of the models for Max Ferber, the painter in Sebald’s The Emigrants, and the encounter hammered out the template for his subsequent modus operandi. “To my mind”, Sebald later said, “there is an acute difference between historiography and history as experienced history.” The experience of real, live Jews was definitely important – and possibly equally significant was that these were English Jews; after all, if, as the old Jewish saying has it, the Jews are like everyone else but more so, then it can be inferred that English Jews are like the English – but more so. The uncanny portrayal of Dr Henry Selwyn in The Emigrants is a function of his almost perfect assimilation to English diffidence, and since Sebald based him on a real-life model who the writer did not even realize was of Polish-Jewish extraction until told so, he stands as a sign pointing towards that earlier age when German Jews, with names such as Hamburger and Berlin – evidence, Sebald once remarked, of just how tragically close their identification with the Fatherland was – were quite as well camouflaged.
Cosmologists talk of the “anthropic principle”, which extrapolates from the coincidence of the physical laws of the universe and our ability to observe those laws, to the proposition that this is no coincidence but a necessity: the universe has evolved precisely to produce beings of our kind, QED, God. I suspect in our view of Sebald as the pre-eminent – or at least most widely and obviously revered – Germanlanguage writer in the English-speaking world, we are falling victim to a strong anthropic argument, when a weaker one will suffice. Undoubtedly, it was precisely Sebald’s own exile from Germany and his exposure to living Jewish communities that made it possible for him to transform the inchoate mistrust of his “passive collaborator” background into an active literature of atonement.
I suspect there is a degree of wishful thinking in the critiques of post-war German literature published in English, and the title of the most comprehensive of these – Ernestine Schlant’s worthy if over-determined The Language of Silence – says it all. The literature of Holocaust survivors can tell us how it was, but it can do little to explain why it was. For that we have impotently required a fully self-actualized literature of the perpetrators; in other words: an impossibility. Hannah Arendt’s much quoted subtitle to her study of the Eichmann trial, “the banality of evil”, has become a shibboleth to be lisped in the nightmarish face of the Holocaust. In fact, Arendt avoided the term in the text, while stressing, in her private letters from Jerusalem during the trial, that after ploughing through the 3,000-page transcript of Eichmann’s interrogation by the Israeli police, what impressed her most was his “brainlessness”.
We cannot interrogate the brainless for their or our own self-actualization, we cannot look to those who have capitulated to a regime which made evil a civil norm for a moral re-evaluation. Instead, we have their sons and daughters, and we have Sebald; whose elegant, elegiac and haunting prose narratives reinstate the prelapsarian German-speaking world. His careful use of documentary sources places before the contemporary reader the actualité of a culture in which Jews were an integral part, while his style is at once discursive – looping in historic anecdote and literary reference – and incisive: cutting away at the surface of reality to expose the mysterious interconnections of things-in-themselves. To read Sebald is to be confronted with European history not as an ideologically determined diachronic phenomenon – as proposed by Hegelians and Spenglerians alike – nor as a synchronic one to be subjected to Baudrillard’s postmodern analysis. Rather, for Sebald, history is a palimpsest, the meaning of which can only be divined by rubbing away a little bit here, adding on some over there, and then – most importantly – stepping back to allow for a synoptic view that remains inherently suspect.
I think it’s this beguiling overview – which Sebald calls our attention to again and again in his writings by describing the works of Dutch landscape painters and English watercolourists – that explains in part our willingness to ascribe to him some specifically moral ascendancy, and by implication a historiography he explicitly denies. For the English-speaking world – and the English in particular – Sebald is the longed-for “Good German”; he is everything Speer wanted to become but never could.
Sebald has recognized the taint and moved to erase it by a systematic bearing of witness. But if he had remained behind in Germany, might he not have succumbed to the same pressures as many of his generation, and been carried along on the tide of Marxist posturing to an equivalence between the Federal Republic and the Third Reich? It is hard to imagine Sebald subsuming the emotional reality of the Holocaust to an intellectual abstraction, just as it is difficult to see him falling for the victimology of many German writers of the successor generation, who, in their tortuous investigations of Oedipal hatred, revealed only that it was all about them. But then, recall that Sebald was no great believer in free will. “This notion”, he said, “of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn’t really subscribe to.” Nor, presumably, could he have subscribed to any view of his literary work as originating from a desire to do the right thing – that was then done. Indeed, he never did: he disavowed any particular philo-Semitism, explaining his resurrection of German Jewry as a form of social history as much as anything else – which does indeed make Sebald sound more English than the English. But the urge to project pious motives onto writers in a godless age is quite as strong as our desire to damn them to a hell no one believes in either.
In England, Sebald’s one-time presence among us – even if we would never be so crass as to think this, let alone articulate it – is registered as further confirmation that we won, and won because of our righteousness, our liberality, our inclusiveness and our tolerance. Where else could the Good German have sprouted so readily? If he had remained at home might he not have become – at the very least – a German version of Thomas Bernhard, a refusenik, an internal exile, his solipsism not modulated by melancholy but intensified until it became a cachinnating cynicism? Instead, Sebald’s writing is anecdotal in feel, and furnished with plenty of English quotidiana – Teasmades and coal fires, battered cod and dotty prep schoolmasters, branch line rail journeys and model-making enthusiasts; enough, at any rate, to submerge any disquieting philosophizing.
I might be doing the mittel-English readership of Sebald – if indeed such people exist at all – a disservice, were it not that I’m prepared to take the rap myself: I find Sebald’s path into the charnel house of the twentieth century quite reassuring, especially when it takes the form of a hearty English walk. To read exclusively German post-war German literature is to find oneself in the position of the unnamed narrator of Walter Abish’s How German Is It?, who, on returning to his home town after the war, becomes transfixed by the way Germanness inheres in everything he sets his eyes on – even the rivets that secure the map of the town to the station wall. In too-German Germany Sebald is, of course, not quite German enough. In the eight years since his death, his stature in England – already high – has grown considerably, while in Germany there has been some upgrading of his reputation, but Sebald would have needed to be alive in order to have benefited from the revelation of Günter Grass’s membership of the SS. As for Martin Walser, paradoxically it is his insistence that Germans have done enough atoning which – or so German friends of mine assure me – people find “boring”.
Sebald did enter the lists of the great controversies surrounding the history of the Hitler-time when in 1997 he delivered a series of lectures, posthumously published in English in an edited form, under the title On the Natural History of Destruction. When these writings appeared in Germany, Sebald’s contention that the Allied bombing of German cities, which resulted in 600,000 civilian deaths and 5 million homeless, was singularly under-represented in post-war German literature, became a stick in the hands of both Right and Left, intent on beating each other. Sebald’s reputation predictably suffered collateral damage. I suspect Sebald was not so much ingenuous as out of touch with contemporary opinion: to him the continuing and plangent shame Germans should feel for the murder of the Jews remained a given; it did not need to be restated in a thesis concerning a different mass killing. Besides, he did state explicitly in the text that it ill behoved Germans to castigate the Allies for prosecuting the war in this fashion.
You do not have to be an exile to be perceived as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) in the German-speaking world – but it helps; while it is exactly those Bakelite touches English critics find reassuring – even as they shade in the utter blackness – that German ones are dismissive of. Reviewing Austerlitz for Die Zeit, Iris Radisch described its lapidary style as “Holocaust and staghorn buttons” while averring that “Something’s wrong here . . . . Is it really possible to use the same model of archives to describe the search for your deported parents as the search for shells . . . in a school friend’s house? . . . Is it persuasive to plaster the journey back to the places of expulsion, death and destruction with antique curiosities?”. Then again, given that if you hail a cab outside Frankfurt’s railway station its driver is very likely to be writing a doctoral thesis on the Frankfurt School, Sebald’s metaphysical bent – so worrying to English empiricists – is viewed straightforwardly by this compatriot:
"Sebald is the same as those philosophers, of whom Kierkegaard said, all that they write about reality is just as confusing as reading a sign at a flea market stall that says “Washing done here”. You come back with your things, hoping to have them washed, but instead you stand there like an idiot because the sign is merely there to be sold."
None of which is to suggest that you cannot also find plenty of praise for Sebald’s works among German critics, it’s just that what’s missing is the peculiar reverence which attaches to writings that – so long as they are not read too closely – seem to confirm us English in some of our most comforting prejudices.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald cryptically alludes to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius”, which plays with the idea of an idealist world created by eighteenth-century encyclopedists to bedevil their empiricist heirs. The passage Sebald had in mind was this: “Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre”. In the preamble to this same strange tale Borges’s narrator recalls a dinner with a friend at which “we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality”. This is of course Sebald’s own fictional methodology, and I believe only a very few readers have grasped the atrocious and banal reality that he wishes us to perceive, despite the myriad clues that are scattered throughout his texts.
Consider this, from Austerlitz, where the eponymous survivor of the Kindertransport remarks,
"It does not seem to me . . . that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead."
Again and again Sebald makes statements of a transcendental idealism, again and again he points to coincidence and déjà vu as evidence of the unheimlich quality of subjectivity. This is Sebald’s alter ego in The Rings of Saturn: “my rational mind is . . . unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrase and gestures”. If instead of conventional linear narratives Sebald’s prose fictions are word-filigrees spun out of such atemporal coincidences, then they are also haunted by the congruence of the things-in-themselves that constitute the material world. In The Emigrants, Max Ferber returns to smoky industrial Manchester, understanding intuitively that while he may have escaped the Holocaust, it remains his destiny to “serve under the chimney”.
The echo of the Buna at Auschwitz is certainly intentional, and just as willed by Sebald are the references throughout his books to Theresienstadt, the “model” concentration camp established by Reinhard Heydrich in the Bohemian hinterland. I speak not just of the extended passages concerning the camp in Austerlitz, but of tens and scores of other references to it – far more than to any of the other, more notorious nodes of the Holocaust. I believe that in Theresienstadt, where tens of thousands of “privileged” Jews were crammed into an eighteenth-century fortified town of one square kilometre, Sebald saw the very synecdoche of the Holocaust.
With its theatre company and orchestra, its workshops and its newspaper, Theresienstadt was given a grotesque makeover by the Germans so that it could serve as a Potemkin village for a Red Cross inspection in 1944 designed to allay international suspicions. At the same time a film was made depicting the idyllic existence of those who shortly after the filming stopped were transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, or else forced east on the death marches that claimed 1.5 million more Jewish lives. Theresienstadt is for Sebald only an extreme and specialized form of a Holocaust he sees being perpetrated everywhere and at all times as civilization marches on. If there is any exceptional character to the German Holocaust it is only that it is German, just as Belgian genocides are Belgian, Rwandan ones Rwandan, Serbian ones Serbian and Croatian ones – albeit under German tutelage – Croatian. Describing Joseph Conrad’s arrival in Brussels to take up the commission that would gain him the material for Heart of Darkness, Sebald wrote: “\[Conrad\] now saw the capital of the Kingdom of Belgium, with its ever more bombastic buildings, as a sepulchral monument erected over a hecatomb of black bodies, and all the passers-by in the streets seemed to him to bear that dark Congolese secret within them”.
While historians such as Daniel Goldhagen might wish to arrogate a unique exterminatory impulse to the Germans, Sebald resists this facile view at every juncture. In his doctoral thesis on Alfred Döblin, he was inclined to see aspects of Berlin Alexanderplatz as a shadow cast forwards, a kind of reverse memory. Commenting on Döblin’s description of an abattoir, Sebald avers that “Far more horrifying than the chaotic destruction of the Apocalypse is the well-ordered destruction contrived by man himself”. Implicit in Sebald’s work is the idea that human mass murder is only an internecine form of the holocaust we are perpetrating on the natural world. It is there in The Rings of Saturn where the description of the destruction of the European fisheries is juxtaposed with a double-page photograph of the naked bodies of the Nazis’ victims lying among trees. It is there in The Emigrants where Manchester is described as a “necropolis or mausoleum”; in Vertigo also, when the vehicles crawling along the gleaming black roads out of Innsbruck are imagined as “the last of an amphibian species close to extinction”. Encrypted in almost every line of After Nature we find the same message: “Cities phosphorescent / on the riverbank, industry’s / glowing piles waiting / beneath the smoke trails / like ocean giants for the siren’s / blare, the twitching lights / of rail- and motorways, the murmur / of the millionfold proliferating molluscs, / woodlice and leeches, the cold putrefaction”.
In conclusion then, Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day – and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response – if not an atonement – for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even – casting the shadow forward – an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one. “More and more”, the narrator of The Emigrants tells us concerning Dr Selwyn, “he sensed that Nature itself was collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it.” And as Gerhard Richter’s fusion of slow oils and photographic quicksilver so perfectly expresses, on that denuded foreground, Onkel Rudi is always posing for the camera, smiling, in front of the slave labourers’ hecatomb.

This is an edited text of the 2010 Sebald Lecture, which was delivered in London earlier this month.

Will Self’s most recent non-fiction books include Psychogeography, 2007, and Psycho Too, 2009. Liver: A fictional organ with a surface anatomy of four lobes, The Butt and The Undivided Self: Selected short stories, appeared in 2008.

Listening to Pink Martini

Listening to Ricky Gervais

Listening to Peter Gabriel

The latest album from Peter Gabriel, no guitars, no drums, just other people's songs and the orchestra.

Laws of Human Nature

You're so predictable.

Offended? We're used to the idea that nature is governed by laws that spell out how things work. But the idea that human nature is governed by such laws raises hackles. Perhaps because of this, they have often been proposed with tongue in cheek – which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn out to be backed up by evidence.
One such law is the Peter principle, which states that in any organisation "people reach the level of their own incompetence". As we report this week, physics-based simulations suggest that this is more than just a cynical snipe at our bosses' competence. And that means we might have to rethink our ideas about who to promote to what jobs.
So what other laws of human nature might we have to reluctantly accept? Here are five that may – or may not – govern our lives.

Parkinson's law

Why is there always so much work to do? Anyone searching for an explanation might find one in Parkinson's law. Civil servant, historian and theorist Cyril Northcote Parkinson suggested in a 1955 article that work expands to fill the time available for its completion – backed up with statistical evidence drawn from his historical research. More recent mathematical analyses have lent support to the idea.
Parkinson also came up with the "law of triviality", which states that the amount of time an organisation spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its importance. He argued that nobody dares to expound on important issues in case they're wrong – but everyone is happy to opine at length about the trivial.
This in turn may be a result of Sayre's law, which states that in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.
Parkinson also proposed a coefficient of inefficiency, which attempts to define the maximum size a committee can reach before it becomes unable to make decisions. His suggestion that it lay "somewhere 19.9 and 22.4" has stood the test of time: more recent research suggests that committees cannot include many more than 20 members before becoming utterly hapless.

Student syndrome

"If it weren't for the last minute, I wouldn't get anything done." So said an anonymous wit, and none but the most ferociously well-organised can disagree.
In fact, procrastination is a major problem for some people, especially those who are easily distracted or are uncertain of their ability to complete a task.
One of the most well-known examples of vigorous procrastination is student syndrome. As anyone who has ever been (or known) a student will know, it is standard practice to apply yourself to a task only at the last possible moment before the deadline.
Student syndrome is so common that some experts in project management recommend not assigning long periods of time to particular tasks, because the people who are supposed to do them will simply wait until just before the deadline to start work, and the project will overrun anyway (International Journal of Project Management, vol 18, p 173).
Some of the blame for student syndrome may be laid at the feet of the planning fallacy: the tendency for people to underestimate how long it will take to do something.
If you often get caught out by how long things take, we recommend considering Hofstadter's law, coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law."

Pareto principle

The rich have a lot more money than you. That might sound like a statement of the obvious, but you may be surprised by just how much richer than you they are. In fact, in most countries 80 per cent of the wealth is owned by just 20 per cent of the population.
This was first spotted by the economist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 20th century, and it seems to be a universal rule in societies – although the precise nature of the distribution has been revised over the years.
But the Pareto principle is not just about money. For most systems, 80 per cent of events are triggered by just 20 per cent of the causes. For instance, 20 per cent of the users of a popular science website are responsible for 80 per cent of the page clicks.
Businesses often use the Pareto principle as a rule of thumb, for instance deciding to do the most important 20 per cent of a job in order to get 80 per cent of the reward.

Salem hypothesis

First proposed by Bruce Salem on the discussion site Usenet, the Salem hypothesis claims that "an education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to [creationist] viewpoints". This was rephrased somewhat by P. Z. Myers as "creationists with advanced degrees are often engineers".
Is there any evidence to back this up, or is it just a gratuitous slander against engineers? A 1982 article in the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science suggested that many leading creationists trained as engineers, notably Henry Morris, one of the authors of the key creationist book The Genesis Flood. But the article did not present any figures.
More recently, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog have noted a preponderance of engineers among Islamic extremist groups. They suggested that engineers may be at greater risk of being recruited by such groups than other graduates.
Obviously creationism is not the same thing as violent activism, but Gambetta and Hertog's analysis may be useful nevertheless because they discuss the engineering mindset in some detail. They show, for instance, that engineers are more likely to be religious than other graduates (PDF).
None of this is anywhere near enough to prove the Salem hypothesis, but it does provide some intriguing circumstantial evidence.

Maes-Garreau law

Everyone loves predicting the future, and some make a career out of it. These futurists often present detailed, authoritative claims about what is going to happen, though their success rate isn't always exemplary.
A common theme in futurist predictions is that revolutionary technology of one sort or another is just around the corner, and that this technology will allow people to live forever. This can mean physical immortality or some more abstracted technique like downloading one's personality into a computer. The "singularity", which Ray Kurzweil says will arrive "by 2045 or thereabouts", is a prime example.
And thus we come to the Maes-Garreau law, which states that any such prediction about a favourable future technology will fall just within the expected lifespan of the person making it.
Pattie Maes, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in the late 1980s that many of her male colleagues were interested in these ideas, and tabulated when they expected the miracle technology to arrive. Sure enough, she found that the dates they predicted for the singularity were always on or around their 70th birthdays.
She mentioned her findings in a talk, but did not write them up. Subsequently, the journalist Joel Garreau made similar observations in his book Radical Evolution, which looked at the implications of such "transhumanist" ideas.
The Maes-Garreau law was finally coined, and given its name, by Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Kelly informally repeated Maes's analysis, confirming her findings. He then defined the "Maes-Garreau point" as the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it.

Just Seen: Up in the Air

Reading TLS

on Animal Suffering

Should animals suffer?
Roger Scruton asks if the Director of the Centre for Animal Ethics has his ethics right. Andrew Linzey is a theologian and an Anglican priest, who campaigns widely for laws which will, in his view, offer increased protection to both wild and domesticated animals. He directs a “Centre for Animal Ethics” which he has established in Oxford, and has been a staunch opponent of fur-farming, seal-hunting and hunting with hounds – all three of which activities are considered at length in this book, in which he argues for moral and legal reforms that will answer to long-neglected human duties.
Linzey does not really tell us why animal suffering matters; nor does he need to – it matters because it is suffering. Linzey’s argument is really directed to the question how animal suffering matters to us, and how a concern for animal suffering should be built into the moral fabric of human society. He argues persuasively that animals should not be treated as mere instruments for our purposes, and that it is not permissible to impose heavy burdens on animals for some small human gain. He repeatedly emphasizes that the defenceless position of animals in the face of human power and ingenuity is a reason for offering them moral and legal protection, just as we do to children. And the fact that animals are non-rational, without moral feelings or the capacity for self-conscious reflection, is no reason for excluding them from our moral concern but, on the contrary, a reason for including them, since we alone are able to provide for their welfare in an increasingly hostile world.
All that is both humane and reasonable, and few people today would disagree with it. Linzey is able to summon theological and scriptural resources – including a hadith of Muhammad, no more obviously bogus than the rest of them – in order to reinforce his view that God has placed animals under our care and protection, and commands us to include them within the life of respect and compassion that it is our duty to establish. But he intends his argument to carry weight for atheists and agnostics as well as for believers, and this is where a little philosophy is needed, if he is to convince those not already persuaded, or those (a minority, perhaps, but not necessarily an unthinking minority) who consider the fashionable emphasis on the sufferings of animals as an elaborate moral evasion. The problem is that Linzey offers us only a little philosophy, and certainly not enough to justify the far-reaching condemnations which emerge as the goal of his argument.
read more
Unlike Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation (1975) initiated the “animalist” agenda, Linzey is not a utilitarian. He does not think that moral questions can be settled by cost-benefit calculation. Nor does he think that it is open to us to engage in those thought experiments for which Singer is notorious and which have been held to justify murder in all its more well-meaning and public-spirited forms, such as abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, eugenic cleansing, and the liquidation of inconvenient minorities. For Linzey there are moral absolutes which cannot be qualified by calculation, and it is not only humans that are the beneficiaries: animals, too, are protected by principles which have an absolute force, and which cannot be set aside by the benefits of flouting them.
But whence comes this absolute force? Linzey does not tell us. Like Singer, he has no clear metaphysical position concerning the nature of human beings and the distinction between moral agents and others. For Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and the other great philosophers of ethics, this distinction is not only absolute but foundational to our understanding of the moral life. If you say nothing about it, and give no indication what it means to us humans, that we alone in the world are beset by moral burdens, that we alone are free, responsible and accountable, that we alone are sovereign over our lives and bound by obligations, then you are not likely to say anything plausible about the grounds of moral judgement, or about the absolute principles that govern us. Still less are you likely to cast any light on our relation to the animals, who cannot reciprocate our moral concern, who have no conception of the injustice of their sufferings and who make no claims of their own.
Many, if not all, of the absolutes that order the moral life of ordinary people stem from their recognition that human beings are special. There are things you cannot do to people without committing a crime that must be atoned for. You cannot punish someone for an act that he did not commit, whatever beneficial effects might result from doing so. You cannot steal, rape, or murder; you cannot trap someone into fulfilling your designs or fraudulently use him to your own advantage. You cannot keep someone captive, train him by stick and carrot to do your will, or put him out of his misery when his sufferings have become a problem. There is, around each person, a wall that cannot be transgressed, and the foundation of that wall is the real topic of moral philosophy. Is there such a wall around each individual animal, including the mouse in my kitchen and the rat in the barn? Linzey assumes as much; but he gives no argument to prove it, since he ignores most if not all that philosophers have said concerning the concept of the person.
Nevertheless, Linzey is prepared to enunciate two absolute principles which should govern our dealings with animals. The first is that it is wrong to inflict suffering on an animal unless for its own good. Linzey is clear that such a principle involves extending to animals the respect for the individual that we owe to our fellow humans. Hence he is dismissive of those conservationists who believe that it is right to kill individual animals for the sake of the habitat that is needed by the species, or to control one species (the grey squirrel, for instance) for the sake of another (the red squirrel). The principle has other and yet more challenging consequences. Killing animals for food is ruled out, unless the killing can be effected entirely without pain, fear and distress. For Linzey it is not just halal butchery that is forbidden, but butchery of just about every kind. It becomes obligatory to be a vegetarian. At a certain point Linzey seems to accept this conclusion; but he is careful not to announce it when putting his principle forward.
Equally counter-intuitive, it seems to me, is the consequence that it is morally wrong to control pests if our doing so causes them to suffer. I live on a farm which is plagued by rats, mice and feral cats. But I am obliged, according to Linzey’s principle, to adopt an attitude of laissez-faire, since there is no way of killing any of these creatures that will guarantee a painless death. Exactly how I am to respect our rats as individuals is another question. I value their presence in the fields, since they provide food for other and more beautiful species – foxes, badgers, buzzards and hawks. But their presence in our out-buildings means stolen eggs, polluted horse feed, and a general risk of disease which I am surely under an obligation to eliminate.
More plausible is Linzey’s second principle, which holds that “it is intrinsically wrong to cause suffering for the purposes of amusement, recreation or in the name of sport”, a principle which, he believes, is the real ground for condemning hunting. This principle is more plausible precisely because it does not focus on the animal, and what supposedly cannot be done to it, but on the human being, and the state of mind from which he acts. In other words, it does not involve extending to animals the privileges and protections that are the gift of moral agency. The principle is rooted in a conception of human vice – the vice of enjoying suffering for its own sake.
But the phrase “for the purposes of” is not clearly defined. We all of us make a distinction between an activity that someone enjoys (horse racing, for example) which has animal suffering as an unwanted side effect, and an activity in which it is precisely the suffering – or the spectacle of suffering – that is enjoyed. Linzey’s language elides these two things, and so gives him an easy route to accusation. Anglers enjoy catching fish; but they don’t enjoy the suffering that they cause, and a good fisherman strives to minimize that suffering and to extract the hook kindly when the fish is landed. Surely there is all the difference in the world between such a fisherman and the hooligan who takes fish from the water in order to pierce them with barbs and to shriek with delight at their misery. The first is enjoying the sport, the second is enjoying the pain.
There are other relevant distinctions too. You may be engaged in an activity that directly causes suffering to an animal – as when you beat a recalcitrant horse or shoot a dangerous bear. Or you may be engaged in an activity that does not directly cause suffering, but which nevertheless has suffering as a foreseeable by-product – as when you keep a domestic cat, which is very likely to kill mice and birds in the lingering way that cats on the whole prefer. You might say that, in both cases, a human is responsible for animal suffering. But it is another question whether this responsibility imputes any measure of moral guilt.
Whether fox-hunters are to be condemned for sins that cat-keepers somehow avoid is a matter that is in no way settled by Linzey’s arguments, which remain at such a shallow level that one can only bridle at the self-righteous judgements he heaps on those, like myself, whose way of life he abhors. For Linzey, followers of foxhounds are “animal abusers”, comparable to those who torture cats and dogs for their amusement and who – according to research that he cites without question – are predisposed to become violent criminals when they turn their attention to their fellow humans. I conclude from this that Linzey may be a humane observer of animals, but he is no charitable observer of people. Maybe he cannot bring himself to attend a meet of foxhounds; but he could at least have consulted the literature, from Plato and Xenophon to Turgenev, Sassoon, Masefield and Ortega y Gasset, devoted to the place of hunting in a virtuous life.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of Linzey’s position is his endorsement of the British government’s argument for the ban on fur-farming. This ban was justified on the grounds that the rearing of captive animals for a “luxury” product is an offence against “public morality”. It is true that the law must, at some level, respond to genuine moral concerns, and cannot be simply out of line with the ordinary conscience. But what exactly is public morality, and who is to define it? What happened to Mill’s famous argument in On Liberty that the coercion of the criminal law can be justified only in order to prevent us from harming others, and never in order to force our compliance to a moral code? What happened to the Wolfenden Report, disapproving the judgment, in DPP v. Shaw, which held that it is a crime to offend “public morals”? What happened to the argument for the decriminalization of homosexuality, despite widespread moral disapproval? What happened to the sovereignty of the individual, which British law has, over the centuries, striven to define and protect, and which Linzey is covertly relying on in urging us to treat animals as individuals, entitled to a life and and fulfilment of their own? And why is it so sinful to breed animals for their outer layers, and not for the stuff inside? The MP who introduced the Bill to ban fur-farming often wears woollen cardigans and leather shoes. But this, it seems, is an offence only against the private morality of those who stick to animal-friendly but environmentally destructive materials such as nylon and plastic. The sad thing is that Linzey either doesn’t see, or doesn’t care, where the use of this kind of argument is leading. He is right to want to protect animals from people. But people also need to be protected from people, not least from the prigs and puritans who dislike their way of life. The liberal thinking that was until recently enshrined in our law was the most successful means ever devised to achieve this.

Andrew Linzey
WHY ANIMAL SUFFERING MATTERS
416pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $29.95).
978 0 19 537977 8

Roger Scruton’s most recent books include a third edition of A Dictionary of Political Thought, 2007. I Drink Therefore I Am: A philosopher’s guide to wine and Beauty both appeared last year. He is Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, where he teaches Philosophy at their graduate school in both Washington and Oxford.

Reading TLS

on Human Unhappiness

India's sacred extremes

How the poor and the pious of modern India find salvation in ' a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad'
by Wendy Doniger

Manisha Ma Bhairava worships the Goddess and engages in Tantric ceremonies in the cremation grounds at Tarapith, in Bengal. Lal Peri is a devotee of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Tashi Passang lives as a Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, in India. Hari Das is possessed nightly by a god during a cycle of theyyam ritual performances every December to February in Kerala. Rani Bai is a sacred prostitute (a devadasi) in a town in northern Karnataka. Kanai is a blind minstrel who sings with the Bauls (“crazies”), an antinomian sect, at Kenduli, in West Bengal. Mataji wanders as a member of a sect of Digambara (“sky-clad”, that is, naked) Jains at Sravanabelgola. Mohan was a low-caste singer of the epics of the cavalier hero and deity Pabuji in Rajasthan. Srikanda Stpathy is a Brahmin idol-maker in the temple town of Swamimalai in South India.
What do these nine people, the subjects of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, have in common? All are in some ways purveyors of the sacred, but beyond that the patterns blur. They are Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim. Four women, five men. Only one (the idol-maker Srikanda, who serves as a kind of baseline point of contrast for all the others) is a Brahmin. Six of them inherited their jobs, while three of the four women, and one man, chose to renounce conventional life for various extreme forms of religion. What binds them together is the unusual suffering that they have undergone – all but Srikanda, whose chief sorrow is that his son wants to become a computer engineer instead of carrying on the family tradition. (“I do feel there is something special in the blood”, he says: “At some level this is not a skill which can be taught.”) Dalrymple notes that many of his subjects had been brutally affected “by invasions, by massacres, and by the rise of often violent, political fundamentalist movements: a great many of the lives of the searchers and renouncers I talked to were marked by suffering, exile and frequently, great pain: a large number turned out to be escaping personal, familial or political tragedies”. As one of the devadasis remarked, “If I were to sit under a tree and tell you the sadness we have to suffer, the leaves of that tree would fall like tears”.


read more

Dalrymple reveals these tragedies to us, leaf by leaf: Hari Das, a Dalit (or Untouchable), works as a well-digger (filthy, dangerous, physically gruelling work) and as a prison warder (where the inmates brutalize and occasionally kill the warders); he also suffers, like most Dalits, daily indignities, such as not being allowed to drink water from the wells he digs for other people. Tashi Passang, who fought against the Chinese after they invaded Tibet and killed his mother, hated the invaders so much that for years he couldn’t bear to eat in Chinese restaurants. Finally, “I determined that I would try to eat a Chinese meal in a Chinese restaurant to try to cure myself of this rage”. Eventually he found a restaurant run by a Chinese woman whose mother, like his own, had been tortured to death by Mao’s soldiers. “After that we both burst into tears and hugged each other. Since then I have been free from my hatred of all things and people Chinese.”
When he was six months old, Kanai caught smallpox and went blind; when he was ten his brother was killed in an accident, and when he was eleven, his father died. With such bad luck in the family, no one wanted to marry Kanai’s sister, who hanged herself because, as Kanai recalled, “she must have thought she was too much of a burden on me, and that we could not afford the wedding” (a scene eerily reminiscent of Jude the Obscure, and the hungry children who hang themselves because “we are too menny”). Kanai left the village then and joined the Bauls.
Mohan died of advanced leukaemia in Rajasthan, when, because of his poverty, no hospital would treat him or even give him a painkiller. Rani Bai, the devadasi, services eight or ten customers a day. Her parents sold her when she was six; she was deflowered (by the highest bidder) right after her first period; her aunt said, “You should not cry. This is your dharma, your duty, your work. It is inauspicious to cry”. Her daughter died of AIDS, and she herself is now HIV-positive. Her fatherless son accused her: “He said I should not have brought him into the world like this”.
Lal Peri was driven first out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu–Muslim riots in the late 1960s and then, when Hindu–Muslim tensions and Bihari–Bengali tensions increased there at the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, out of East Pakistan into Sindh. When her father died, her uncle grabbed the land, and her family was penniless. Her best friend, a Hindu, took poison and killed herself because her family would not let her marry the Muslim boy she loved. There were devastating floods. “Things were so bad that we stopped eating fish from the river because there were so many bodies rotting in the water.” Her traumatic life left her emotionally raw. She finally took refuge in the shrines of Sindh and struggled to live the life of a Sufi woman in the male-dominated and increasingly Talibanized society of Pakistan. Manisha Ma Bhairavi, dirt poor (her father drank away their money), was beaten by her husband, rejected by her mother-in-law, and lost her home and her three daughters. She left her husband and children to join the Tantrics at Tarapith.
Dalrymple vividly evokes the lives of these men and women, with the sharp eye and good writing that we have come to expect of his extraordinary travel books about India, such as City of Djinns and The Age of Kali, and his histories (White Mughals, The Last Mughal). But Nine Lives is different from his other works; it is not so much about places as about the religious lives of people who live in those places, and is a glorious mixture of journalism, anthropology, history, and history of religions, written in prose worthy of a good novel. Each chapter places the biographies in the context of the religious activities and history of the place. For Rani Bai’s role of temple prostitute, for instance, Dalrymple explains that British reformers in the nineteenth century, and the Hindu reformers who aped them, “have not succeeded in ending the institution, only demeaning and criminalizing it”. Signs are posted: “Dedicating your daughter is uncivilized behaviour”.
In the descriptive passages, the book is rather old-fashioned, driven by a taste for the exotic and the picturesque, somewhat reminiscent of the memoirs of Raj adventurers such as William Crooke or Sir Richard Carnac Temple; not since Kipling has anyone evoked village India so movingly. Dalrymple can conjure up a lush or parched landscape with a single sentence: “Kingfishers watch silently from the telegraph wires”. “Flotillas of ducks quack and stretch their wings.” “Goats picked wearily through dusty stubble.” He also has a gift for evoking India through comparison with England: “At times the road seemed to pass through a long dark wooden tunnel, with the roots rising above and to either side of the road, like flying buttresses flanking the long nave of a gothic cathedral”. “Round his waist was a wide grass busk, as if an Elizabethan couturier had somehow been marooned on some forgotten jungle island and been forced to reproduce the fashions of the Virgin Queen’s court from local materials.” And he has an ear for vivid phrases from the people he interviews: “At least my mind no longer goes off like a yak that has escaped its herder”. Dalrymple delights in the oft-satirized flowery metaphors that Tantrics use, such as “the full moon at the new moon” (sex with menstruating women), “drinking nectar from the moon” (ingesting a drink compounded of semen, blood and bodily fluids), “close the mouth of the snake and boil the milk of bliss” (make love without ejaculating), and “make the frog dance before the serpent” (I’ll leave you to figure that one out for yourselves); they speak of using Tantric sex as a “booster rocket” to drive the mind out of the gravitational pull of everyday life.
The contrast between the colourful religious festivals and rituals and the bitterness of individual lives is stark indeed. Has religion been a balm to their wounds, or is it one of the wounds? This is not a question that Dalrymple cares to ask. He is determined to “keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore”. Very occasionally, he lets us catch a glimpse of him, as when Rani Bai remarks of a client, “He was very hefty, very fat. Much fatter even than you”. I wish that the author had stepped out of the shadows a bit more. It is in any case disingenuous of him to think of himself as invisible, as no anthropologist since Malinowski would be so naive as to do; though he never explicitly editorializes, his biases are evident not only in the stories that he chooses to tell, but in the quotations that he chooses to include. If the book leaves the reader with an overwhelming sense of sadness, it is because Dalrymple chose to tell sad stories. As he himself admits in the introduction, he made the decision to root many of the stories “in the darker and less romantic sides of modern Indian life”. To some extent, his selections reify the old Orientalist cliché of South Asian renunciation as pessimism, as a flight from life only because the particular life in question is unliveable, rather than because (as the renunciatory religions themselves argue) life itself is inherently tragic.
But the people in this book often depict religion as balm rather than wound. The women who left their families and found love and community in these bands of religious ecstatics tell why they renounced their homes. Mataji, who came from a well-to-do and loving Jain family, just happened to meet a holy man one day: “I was very impressed and started thinking. It didn’t take long before I decided I wanted to be like him . . . . I was only sad that I had already wasted so much of my life”. Lal Peri “was an illiterate, simple and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere”; after her years of oppression and flight, she started to associate with wandering Sufis and began to think that she might become one herself. As for Kanai, the death of his father, brother and sister drove him “mad with grief”. Unable to remain in the village, he remembered a Baul guru whom he had met. There was, moreover, another consideration: “I was always very religious, but it wasn’t just that: it seemed a practical decision too. A blind man cannot be a farmer, but he can be a singer”. Manisha did not want to sleep with her husband; her mother-in-law disliked her and kept saying: “What are you crying for?”. When she was forced to move into her husband’s bedroom, she was possessed by the Goddess, and had a fit for the first time. For years she kept going into trances; her husband beat her; “It seemed that the more angry and violent my husband became, the more often I went into a state of trance”. She ran away from him and slept in the temple, and from that day, her trances became less frequent. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to connect the dots here.
The positive effects of certain religious traditions are also in evidence. Very poor, and very pious, women see the devadasi system as “providing a way out of poverty while gaining access to the blessings of the gods, the two things that the poor most desperately crave”. Unlike other women, a devadasi can inherit her father’s property. Tashi remarked: “In the monastery I was happier than I had ever been. In my life as a herdsman, I had to worry about the wolves, and my yaks, and to look after my grandparents – life was full of anxieties. But as a monk you only have to practise your prayers and meditation, and to hope and work for Enlightenment”. It was in the monastery, too, that Tashi learnt to read the Tibetan alphabet. As for caste, Hari Das claimed that, during the season when the god possessed him in nightly performances, “Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet”. The stories enacted in the theyyam, too, often tell of a member of the lower castes who “transgresses accepted caste restrictions and is unjustly punished with rape (in the case of women) or death (in the case of men, and sometimes women too), and then is deified by the gods aghast at the injustices perpetrated by the Brahmins and other ruling castes”. The Brahmins attending the performance are said to be discomforted “and seek to reform their behaviour”. Hari Das admits that after the performance season, for the rest of the year, “no one here would even greet me or invite me to share a cup of tea with them . . . . They may pay respect to a theyyam artist like me during the theyyam itself, but outside it they are still as casteist as ever”. Yet he sees the theyyam as a weapon of resistance against an unjust social system, instilling self-confidence in the younger generation of Dalits and inspiring them to seek an education.
One of the unexpected benefits of Tantric religion is its comfortable domesticity. As Dalrymple remarks, “For all the talk of what might elsewhere be considered black magic, in the daylight at least, the cremation ground that surrounded Ma’s little hut made an oddly domestic scene . . . an oddly villagey and almost cosy feel”. The Goddess receives, in addition to the more usual offerings of coconuts, white silk Benares saris, incense sticks, bananas and bottles of whisky. Sitting around the fire as the corpses burn, people sip tea, play cards and listen to cricket matches on the radio, “as casual, eager, relaxed and at ease as their British equivalents would be on Guy Fawkes night”. Some of them work at oiling the skulls that they use in their rituals and painting them red, to keep them from going mouldy in the monsoon. A Bollywood director, who is the local Bihar Communist MP, comes here with a sacrificial goat when he wants to find out what the election results will be. By the end of the chapter, the reader begins to feel that there is nothing weird at all about drinking warm blood or decorating your home with skulls.
Manisha Ma’s children became quite used to her trances; “they thought all mothers were like this”. Even after she abandoned them (“I missed my children, of course – the youngest was only four, and none of them were old enough to understand. Often I would weep”), her devotees filled the place in her heart that her children had occupied. Other Tantrics have other problems with their children; one of them refused to cooperate with Dalrymple because his two sons were now opthalmologists in New Jersey. “They had firmly forbidden him from giving any more interviews about what he did in case rumours of the family dabbling in Black Magic damaged their profitable East Coast practice.”
The embourgeoisement of some Tantric orders was in part a survival response to two challenges to Tantra which arose in the nineteenth century: Hindu reformers, many of whom began to appear in Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, attacked not only the devadasis, but also the Tantrics. At the same time, the rise of devotional (bhakti) sects worshipping Krishna and Rama threatened to eclipse Goddess cults and blood sacrifices. The solution, simple but brilliant, was to incorporate bhakti into Tantra. As Manisha Ma put it, “I am beginning to think that Tantra only really works properly when it is coupled with intense devotion, with bhakti . . . . What you need is to find a balance between bhakti and tantra. With the two of them together, with both love and sacrifice, I believe you are on the right path”.
Dalrymple steps out of the shadows to praise this world. He speaks of “living in a mystical anarchy in a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad” and describes the asylum:
"There is a palpable sense of community among the vulnerable outcasts, lunatics and misfits who have come to live there, and those who might be locked up, chained, sedated, hidden, mocked or shunned elsewhere are here venerated and respected as enlightened lunatics full of crazy wisdom. In return they look after one another and appear to tolerate one another’s eccentricities. It is a place where even the most damaged and marginal can find intimacy and community."
And he ends the book with an upbeat passage which could have come straight out of A. A. Milne: “‘We have a song about this. You would like to hear it?’ ‘Very much,’ I said”. After they have finished their song, Kanai says, “It makes us so happy that we don’t remember what sadness is”. This is religion with a happy face.
But the uglier face of religion, religion as wound rather than balm, is visible too. Other Hindus persecute both the Tantrics and “poor, widowed, and socially marginalized women, who are accused of practicing witchcraft and ‘eating the livers’ of villagers, particularly when some calamity befalls a community; indeed they are still occasionally put to death, like the witches of Reformation Europe and North America”. Mataji underwent two ceremonies in which the hairs on her head were pulled out one by one, a process that she chose instead of having her head shaved. “The whole ritual took nearly four hours, and was very painful. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help crying.” Her only friend died of TB and malaria, in great pain. Though the sect are not allowed to use Western medicine, they finally took her to a hospital for an MRI scan, but “One doctor said that if we had come earlier they could have helped, but we had left it much too late”. Lal Peri eventually ran into the Wahhabis, Muslim reformists who opposed the Sufi movement; they blew up the shrines, silenced the music, and persecuted the women, blaming Sufi liberalism on friendly contact with Hindus, which they viewed as pollution.
This last factor is the source of the greatest suffering caused by religion: inter-religious hatred. Dalrymple raises, but does not answer, a very good question: “Why does one individual embrace armed resistance as a sacred calling, while another devoutly practices ahimsa, or non-violence?”. Tashi is the only one of the Dalrymple Nine who engaged in armed resistance himself, when he fought in the Indian army against the Chinese. He tries hard, but in vain, to justify his actions: “They would make us drink rum and whisky so that we would do these things without hesitation and not worry about the moral consequences of our actions. Every day I saw corpses . . . . War is far worse than you ever imagine it to be. It is the last thing a Buddhist should be involved in”.
Communist and Buddhist ideas about liberation are rather different; when the Red Colonel told the Tibetans that he had come to liberate them, “the abbot replied that he could not liberate us, as the Lord Buddha had showed us that it was up to each man to liberate himself”. Yet Tashi bends over backwards to justify his violence in religious terms. He notes a number of precedents, great figures, both divine and human, in the Tibetan tradition, who performed “acts of great violence in order to protect Buddhism and defeat its enemies, both human and demonic”.
A more interesting argument is Tashi’s evocation of Buddhist scriptures which say “that in certain circumstances it can be right to kill a person, if your intention is to stop that person from committing a serious sin. You can choose to take upon yourself the bad karma of a violent act in order to save that person from a much worse sin”. Buddhists believe that one person can give another his good karma (or his accumulated merit) or take another’s bad karma upon himself. (Some Hindu ascetics in the medieval period worked the system selfishly, in reverse: they went so far as to trick people into treating them unfairly, in order to steal their good karma.) Therefore, by killing people before they can kill you, you are actually doing them a favour: you get the bad marks that will give you a bad rebirth and they go to a better rebirth than they would have had if you had let them kill you. In addition, Tashi says, “I have prayed for the souls of the men I have killed, and asked that they have good rebirth. But still I worry”. And with good reason. “If anything I prayed more in the army than I did as a monk”, he insists. “But within my heart, I knew I was going against ahimsa.”
For Tashi, at least, religion was not the solution to the problem of violence. But for many of the others, it was. The relationship between Hinduism and Islam in India has long ricocheted between love and extraordinary syncretism on the one hand, and hatred and terrible violence on the other. Lal Peri, who later suffered from the violence, grew up in a time of peace, when “it seemed as if the Hindus and Muslims were like brothers and sisters . . . . There was a mosque and a temple not far from each other, and if people wanted something, they would usually go to both”. This situation still obtains in parts of India today, despite widespread communal tensions and frequent outbursts of hostility. In particular, peace is preserved in many fringe religious groups, including the Tantric gatherings and Lal Peri’s shrine, “where for once you saw religion acting to bring people together, not to divide them . . . a balm on South Asia’s festering religious wounds. The shrine provided its often damaged and vulnerable devotees shelter and a refuge from the divisions and horrors of the world outside”.
This aspect of the book gives an answer to Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and those who would condemn all religions for the sake of the fanatical fringe, who assume that anyone who believes in anything theologically heavier than Santa Claus is a jihadist. If you believe that anyone is mad to believe in anything at all, the people in this book are surely among the maddest. But they have found a world of peace and love to live in, and they don’t kill anyone. Some are full of joy, though many of them also mention, in passing, their enduring unhappiness, and end up saying, well, life is like that; there is always sadness. Why did these people choose peaceful, if often painful and/or anti-social, ways of life instead of striking back at the society that made them miserable? The writer in the shadows does not ask, but he skilfully points us where he wants us to go. Here is religion at its most extreme, and often ugliest, but also religion responding to human life at its most extreme, and ugliest, and responding in a way that the walking wounded of the material world find healing.

William Dalrymple
NINE LIVES
In search of the sacred in modern India
288pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 1 4088 0061 4

Wendy Doniger is Professor in the School of Divinity, and the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book, The Hindus: An alternative history, was published last year. Her translation from the Sanskrit of books 15–18 of the Mahabharata is forthcoming.