Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
A weary time, a weary time, how glazed each weary eye.
We are gathered here on Trevor's verandah awaiting the demise of the year. Felix has a celebratory poem he wishes to recite to us. Rupert is fuming about Richard Dawkins new book The God Illusion. He says he has been preaching that message for twenty years and why is Dawkins getting all the credit? Amanda is deeply concerned about the execution of Sadam Hussein. On the one hand, she feels an evil man has been brought to justice. On the other, she cannot quite come to terms with the brutal finality of capital punishement. Trevor, of course, is enjoying everyone's misery.
For my part, I am distracted by the promise of my new philosophical theory. I would dearly like to pursue it but I am forced to admit that this is not the time. The last day of the year ought to be an occasion for reminiscence and reflection or else drunken revelrie and oblivion. I fear we are all caught between the two. There is sense of relief rather than a sense of occasion. One wants to say, in the words of the egregious D H Lawrence, 'Look! We have come through'.
Come through what, though? The answer is not entirely clear. But this, I fear, is precisely the problem for the inhabitants of Ventiak. The feelings of stress, the sense of batterment, the vague premonition of doom that has no obvious correlate in the real world - all these are the lot of the pelicans. We are wrapped in an aura of significance, while at the same time realising that our lives are mostly futile.
What we need is a religious perpective but the clarity of reason (see Dawkins) has denied us that. All we have left is our paper hats and our champagne toasts.
Happy New Year! (Trevor is grinning from ear to ear. It is on occasions like this that he seems most devilish.)
I feel a bout of speculation coming on. I have been thinking about empathy. According to sociobiological theory, this isn't something that we learn at our mother's knee. It's a genetically based trait that arose, through the course of evolution, out of our need, as social animals, to get on with one another.
Empathy, though, isn't just a matter of feeling or appreciating how another person feels. It is, more generally, the ability to adopt a point of view other than one's own. This ability to change point of view is one of the most interesting characteristics of our thinking, one which has ramifications for almost every form of intellectual endeavour.
Take cosmology, for example. Our sophisticated understanding of the structure and processes of the universe is based on a first essential step - the ability to step outside our everyday, sensory perspective and see the world that we inhabit as an object. A cosmological theory that says the world is flat disc on the back of four elephants that are standing on a giant turtle has already made this step. Without it, we are left simply gazing at the stars in helpless wonder. (Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps wonder itself involves the sense that there is another point of view - one that we cannot achieve.)
Progress in science depends on shifts in perspective, on being able to see things in new ways, but, by the same token, so does art. The great revolutions in painting have all come with changes in our ways of seeing. Similarly for literature. Every piece of literature has a narrator and a narrator is no more than the expression of a perspective.
I can feel a whole new theory coming on. Philosophy as literature. I must go and talk to Trevor about it.
Out friend Monty is a Libertarian. He believes in the absolute sanctity of individual freedom of choice. Taxes are theft in his view and any government beyond the provision of a police force and, possibly, a defence force to protect the nation's citizens is completely unjustified.
Recently, he's been arguing with our socialist friend, Amanda, about climate change and has managed to convince himself that a) global warming is not necessarily a result of human generated carbon emissions and b) even if it were, there is precious little we could do about it. This is a convenient conclusion from his point of view.
Global warming, if we are responsible for it, is a fine example of what political philosophers and economists call 'the tragedy of the commons' - because no one owns a public good, no one bothers to look after it. The usual right-wing answer to this problem (and the one to which, I imagine, Monty would have to subscribe) is private ownership. In other words, we need to sell the atmosphere to Bill Gates. Or perhaps we could persuade Roman Abramovich to stop trying to win the English Premier Football League and save the planet instead.
Alternatively, we could trust all the individual citizens of the world to exercise their individual freedom of choice in a rational way and voluntarily reduce their petrol consumption or plant sufficient trees to arrest the undesirable atmospheric trends.
The one solution that Monty can't allow himself is that governments should pass laws to restrict the activities of their citizens and thereby try to achieve an appropriate carbon balance. In Amanda's view this is the only possible solution. Some of us agree with her, although we don't necessary see signs of much political will to achieve the desired result.
Here on Ventiak, for example, we tend to be relaxed about such matters. We may talk of global warming on a summer evening over a gin and tonic or three. We may even shake our heads and tut-tut with sincere concern but we are not about to do anything. We are no different from Monty in this respect. Eventually, no doubt, we will all sink beneath the waves, still clutching our glasses and nodding sagely to each other. Monty will probably be all right. He is a good swimmer. I expect, though, that Amanda will be the only one with a boat.
'Bah! Humbug!' in Rupert's view. Not that he is particularly mean-spirited. On the contrary, he has a principled generosity of heart that often puts the rest of us to shame. However, he is an evangelical atheist and a devout anti-materialist and so the peculiar combination of religious sentimentality and rampant consumption that is the modern Christmas enrages him even more than post-modern poetry tends to do. His standard responses is to give no gifts, send no cards, to eat and drink nothing but dry bread and water and to spend the wearisome hours between dawn and dusk on laborious, unpleasant and mundane tasks like scrubbing toilets or doing his accounts.
Trevor says he does this to make us all feel guilty. He may be right but if so, Rupert fails dismally, at least in Trevor's case. Christmas brings out the worst in Trevor, or perhaps the best. Lavish presents for everyone he knows, endless hours of eating and drinking and, when he is not stuffing his face, Christmas carols, sung tunelessly at the top of his voice. Trevor has even been known to shed a bibulous tear or two for the baby Jesus - that poor little critter what got turned away from the inn.
Of course, Trevor is no more religious than Rupert. The difference between them is that Rupert is sincere, while Trevor is.... What? A mere negative doesn't seem to cut it. If 'anti-sincere' were a word, it would do. Trevor is aggressive in his pursuit of the meaningless. Everything he does, he does because it amuses him and most of his amusement comes from people misinterpreting his motives. I think he sees himself reflected in their criticism. This is one reason he is so fond of Rupert, who is critical to a fault. (I am tempted here by a pun on hypercritical and hypocritical but I can't work out how to do it and it would, in any case, be unfair to both of them).
Rupert, for his part, likes Trevor because he offers so much to criticise. Rupert's preferred state of being is a heightened sense of moral indignation. Trevor delivers many more opportunities for this than anyone else. In this respect, at least, he is King of the Pelicans.
The wonderful Jennifer tells me that the Nine to Noon radio show has decided to review Black Earth/White Bones. This was not a foregone conclusion. I don't know if they are doing fewer reviews of local books these days or whether there are just more books being published but I know of several very good novels that have not been reviewed on this slot.
We hope, of course, the review will be a good one. Even good reviews can sometimes be a problem, though.
I remember when I published my first book twenty-mumble years ago. It was a slim volume of short stories called Dreams of Pythagoras and my friend Bert Hingley, who was then writing a column for the Listener, said he would like to review it. Somewhat naively, I wrote to the Listener informing them of this fact. My letter, of course, had no effect but to ensure that Bert was the last person they were going to offer the review to. Instead, they gave it to another of their columnists, Malcolm Fraser.
Oddly enough, Malcolm was also a very closed friend of mine and was probably the only person other than Bert who I would have chosen to do the job. He gave me a very good review.
I was pleased, of course. I was less pleased when a seagull of our acquaintance commented on the review as if the positive remarks were a foregone conclusion, as if Malcolm could not have done otherwise. Knowledge of our friendship seemed to undermine the review's good effect. Was Malcolm not entirely honest? I found myself prey to McGonagallian doubt.
I was relieved, therefore, when a second review (there were no others) came out in the Christchurch Press. It was also very good and it was by someone I knew not at all called Owen Marshall, who I later came to realise knew a couple of things about short stories. Malcolm, I felt, was vindicated and the seagull put firmly in its place.