Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Madness

I suppose it's kind of comforting that idea that madmen think that they're sane and never question their own sanity. I mean, the reverse of that is comforting, and is meant to comfort you, when people tell it to you again and again: "If you're wondering whether you're mad, then that's a sign of sanity." I wonder if it's true, though.

I remember a friend of mine saying something like this (I'll now do a bad impression of him):

"If, when I get old, right, if I go gaga, I want to go completely fucking doolally-flip barking mad. If I just think I'm Napoleon arrived on Earth from the Moon, I don't want to be Napoleon on Wednesday, and then on Thursday be thinking, 'Oh fuck, fuck, fuck! What the hell am I doing thinking I'm Napoleon? I'm a complete fucking loon!"

The Excrement of Man's Best Friend

I suppose all these things are a matter of taste, but I don't actually like dogshit.

I've just come back from a walk on the beach in the seaside town where I spent many of my formative years. I used to walk my dog on that beach, and it was through walking my dog, I think, that I got into the habit of walking generally, even though I no longer have a dog, and have no plans ever to have a dog again.

I was hoping, on this walk, to take some photographs of this very picturesque (in an Arthur Machen, fungoid kind of way) and relatively little-known area of the world, when, walking along the sands, I knew, through sense of smell alone, that I had disturbed a carefully concealed landmine of dogshit.

At first I thought I could walk it off in the sand, or rinse it in the rockpools, but I should have known that this was not enough. I would have to climb some of the rocks surrounding the beach, to the areas of vegetation, in search of a stick. The sticks I found got rid of the bulk of the substance, but it was clear that a layer of muck still adhered to my shoe. I flattered myself that I was drawing on my country upbringing or some race memory, or even common sense, and tore up clumps of stringy beach-grass (I don't know the proper name for it) with which to wipe off the rest. In drawing my shoe up, had I got some on my coat? This was getting impossible. My walk had turned into a major operation against the insurgence of dogshit.

After a while, I told myself that my efforts would have to suffice, and hoped the rest of my walk would help ameliorate the situation. I also made a mental note to take my shoes off before stepping back inside the front door.

Is there any shit on Earth, I wonder, that is fouler than dogshit? This is how foul dogshit is: Depending on the human, it's even worse than human shit.

When I had a dog, it still had not really become law or social custom to take a plastic bag and scoop your dog's poo up after you. I generally tried to urge my dog into places that would not inconvenience people too much, what I think used to be called "kerbing (curbing?) your dog". On the occasions I trod in what someone else's dog had done, I took it philosophically as part of life's rich and very pungent tapestry. Now, I understand the reasons for the social custom of cleaning up after your dog, and they form, for me personally, a very good argument against having a dog, since I'm not overly keen to handle dogshit, even through the protective barrier of a plastic bag.

(At this point I begin to think to myself that there are people waiting to hear from me, and I will claim to have been busy. Writing. About dogshit?)

Anyway, I love dogs, but I am reminded of something William Burroughs said about dogs being the only self-righteous animal, which is what, he explained, makes a dog's snarl so ugly. Similarly, I wonder if the foulness of dogshit is not something to do with the indignity of the fact that dogs are the most closely domesticated of all animals. I would be mildly surprised to hear of a wild animal with fouler shit. If anyone knows of any fouler shit, I would be interested to hear of it.

Not the Queen's Speech

I remember watching the Queen's Speech one year - no, not that Queen's Speech, the other Queen's Speech - and thinking that one day I must address the nation in a similar way at Christmas. But it doesn't look like it will happen today. There's too much going on and too little access to the Internet at the moment, and besides, you're probably not even there right now. So, just in case you are there, my apologies as usual for any tardiness in communication of which I am guilty. And, in my stead, my old friend Kate has been good enough to address the nation from her own front room, in her own pyjamas (or possibly someone else's pyjamas). All rise please, for Ms. Kate Bush:

Labels: Kate Bush, Quentin Crisp, The Queen

Christmas Message

Paul Potts doesn't think he's anybody

I'm not an opera fan, nor am I a fan of talent shows, but I was very interested when I was told recently about the story of Paul Potts, a man from South Wales who sang opera on the talent show Britain's Got Talent.

The story that was told me involved a hard luck tale which ended in the tossing of a coin to decide whether to enter the competition or not.

I was very interested, but haven't yet found the coin-tossing detail online.

Anyway, before I re-tell the tale, here's the clip I later found showing it in full technicolour (well, telecolour):



Okay. Actually, that pretty much tells the story, as it was told to me, of a Welshman in a cheap suit, with a tooth missing, coming to a talent show near the end of its tour of the country, when the judges are tired and pissed-off with all the shit that they've sat through, and who are now looking at the same Welshman with weary disdain until he opens his mouth and sings.

Apparently there was some kind of documentary about him on last week.

Faces tell us a lot, I think. For instance, Paul Potts's face before and after he sings, and also when he's gathering strength in his singing. Also, look at Simon Cowell's face after a few notes of Potts's singing. I actually don't like Simon Cowell at all (I know, it's predictable), but I remember Quentin Tarantino talking about Cowell to Jonathan Ross. Tarantino said something like, "But you know, the thing is, Cowell's always right. If you actually take notice, he's always right." Well, I don't know about that, but credit where it's due, he put aside his pantomime-villain smarminess on this occasion.

Okay, I've watched enough of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe - and despite initial reservations I now love Brooker as only someone who's never met him can - to realise that television is illusion, but I don't think there was an entire audience of paid actors there.

Having looked up information on Paul Potts online, I see that he has had a real decent amount of voice training and apparently amateur experience. It seems that some people have called hoax at this. Hmmm. Well, who knows what is a hoax, but one thing I can say to idiots who think think that genius is not hard fucking work - you're wrong. Paul Potts probably did not just start singing Nessun Dorma in the shower one day, out of the blue.

I haven't seen the documentary, but as it was told to me (not verbatim):

"They brought this expert on the programme - this opera critic - and he was saying, 'Who does Paul Potts think he is? Who does he think he is? If he'd went for an interview in the opera world in the proper way, he'd have been laughed out of the room.' And this guy can't understand what it is about Paul Potts that just tears people up. Paul Potts doesn't think he's anybody."

As far as I can gather, no one knew who Paul Potts was as he was standing before them on that day. Within a few moments, there was an auditorium of people crying and cheering as if they had recognised something they knew deep down. This was not manufactured hysteria over Madonna in a pointy bra (that dates me). You can't fake that kind of reaction.

So, I don't care, first of all, if Paul Potts has had extensive opera experience, I don't care if the story is very sentimental, and I don't care if it all happened on a tacky talent show. I also don't care if he is now famous and about to become less of a gap-toothed, cheap-suit kind of guy. If I might be allowed to say it, good luck to you, mate.

Also, just to burn my bridges and address the critic who I have never met and didn't even see on the documentary, and who only exists to me as a kind of grey, generic 'critic':

"Paul Potts doesn't think he's anybody. You're the one who thinks you're someone, you elitist wanker!"

I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent

Boys and girls, this is my story...

Those who, very patiently, put up with me

I think that one of the most fundamental emotions defining my experience of existence has been a kind of alloy of embarrassment and guilt.

This evening, I spent a very pleasant few hours in the company of Mr. Wu. Mr. Wu is the pseudonym (after all, I wouldn't want to compromise him by using his real name on this disreputable blog) of a friend of mine from university days. We're both Bowie-philes and studied Japanese together. When I stayed at Mr. Wu's digs for the first time in Kumamoto, we discovered we had a lot in common. T. Rex, for instance. I remember saying to Mr. Wu, when our friendship was yet young, "Do you think I dress like Austin Powers?" And he laughed and said, "Yes. I do." At that time I was not vegetarian. We went to a restaurant together to have basashi (raw horse meat), which I was eating just to be able to say I had eaten raw horse. As we sat in the restuarant, for some reason I felt prompted to say, "The waistcoats on these lobsters should be cerulean blue, but you've put them in Prussian blue. And where are the chocolate-covered ants?" (There were no lobsters on the table, as far as I remember.) And much to my surprise and delight, Mr. Wu recognised the obscure Alan Moore reference I was making (D.R. and Quinch, you get me?). I think our friendship must have been cemented at that point.

Anyway, Mr. Wu took me this evening to a Japanese restaurant not far from Piccadilly Circus. It was his treat. We started with Sapporo beer. I ordered tanuki soba. Mr. Wu had sushi. We were served by a very lovely waitress who picked up very quickly on the fact that we could speak Japanese, and very graciously and intelligently spoke to us in Japanese without the slightest shade of being patronising.

Afterwards we went to a pub, which was fairly packed with people enjoying themselves. Mr. Wu asked me to scout out for somewhere to sit while he got the drinks in. There were no empty tables, so I asked some people sitting at a half-empty table if it was okay to sit there. They said it was. Soon Mr. Wu arrived with our bevvies. And in a few minutes, the group who had been sitting at the same table, got up to leave. A young man amongst them turned to us and said, "It's all yours!" in an affable way.

After a while, my bladder felt full, and I went to have a piss. As I was washing my hands, the door opened and banged against my arm. The man coming in apologised fumblingly.

I was very tired, so Mr. Wu and I decided to go home early. On the escalator of Waterloo Station, a bloke passed me singing along to some music that was playing: "... how beautiful life is 'cause you're in the world..." I smiled inwardly. I did not even hate him for singing Elton John.

I feel like my misanthropy is melting away.

There are lots of things I could say here. For now I'll say a little about science. Regular readers of my blog will know that I have been very critical about science. But I'm beginning to feel that there's something self-contradictory in the position of being afraid of science. To be afraid of science is at once to disagree with it, and to suspect that it is 'right'. And that really has been my position, I think. This is not to say that I don't think I've ever made a valid point on the subject of science, because I think I have. For instance, I like reading New Scientist, but I also notice 'cultural assumptions' in the writing that I find strange. One small example - a headline that goes something like, "What a strange mind you have!" I can't remember if I read much of the actual article, but I think I've read articles like it, about how our minds play tricks on us, falsify memories, create much of our sensual experience out of nothing, or scraps of information, and so on. The thing I noticed, though, was the use of the word "you": "What a strange mind you have!", in other words, you, the lay-person, the reader. Your subjective experience is not to be trusted, but our scientific objectivity is. That's the kind of thing that tends to annoy me. However, if I think I've made a valid point about science at some time, it probably boils down to the very commonplace observation that science isn't everything. But life will demonstrate that, sure enough, without my help. Anyway, life is an experiment, and science is an essential part of that experiment. This doesn't mean that I won't vehemently oppose (verbally and perhaps even otherwise, who knows) certain things I find to be morally dubious, for instance in the area of genetic engineering.

When we were walking from the pub back to the Tube station, Mr. Wu told me that he had "rediscovered" my blog. "Do I come across like a complete arse?" I asked.

"No," he said (well he is my friend, after all) "you come across as very well-read and very balanced, which is strange, because I know how unbalanced you are."

At which point I almost fell off the pavement.

(By the way, I'm not really that well-read.)

I'm afraid that in my life I have been very, very selfish in many ways. I am sometimes afraid that I am actually insane. Embarrassment and guilt. I don't mean in any, "Hey, I'm a really wild and crazy guy!" kind of way, either, just in a sad kind of way. I think that it's actually true. Eckhart Tolle, whom I've mentioned recently, suggests that identity is a kind of madness. Sometimes it scares me how much madness there is in my life and the world, and I want the ground to swallow me.

Anyway, despite my madness, I'm really beginning to feel the support that many people have been giving me, and, if I may be allowed the self-indulgence of some sentimentality, I almost wish to weep knowing how little I deserve it.

So, well, tonight at least - who knows the future? - I feel like, actually, I like people. Tonight I feel like pessimism is over, that we don't need it any more. Who knows?

Anoint my head, anointy-nointy

Aidan Smith, famous Irish poet and singer-songwriter has just compiled a great list of things that make life great.

I compiled a similar list a while back.

In immortal lines of Tom Baker's Doctor Who, in the best Doctor Who story ever made, ever (The Ark in Space), "That's good! You're beginning to think. Your mind's beginning to work. It's entirely due to my influence, of course! You can't be allowed to take any of the credit."

It occurred to, actually, soon after I had done my one hundred list, that among many, many glaring ommissions, perhaps the most glaring of all was that of Peter Harris, director of Wolf and Water Arts Company. If he doesn't mind me speaking in such terms (and he might take violent exception), he is a rare genius, as anyone who knows him will attest.

In case you missed it when I posted it on my blog earlier, here's the Wolf and Water version of Perfect Day:



Please enjoy.

I'd also like to mention that I Won't Share You by The Smiths, is a hugely underrated track.

Special flavour.

Bugger Bognor

There's a bit in Hamlet - but I can't remember the exact bit - where someone repeats something the Dane has said back to him, and he retorts, obviously lying, that, "Those words are not mine", or "I never said that", or something like that. When I say "obviously lying", the thing is, it's so obvious that you know he has another intention. He is not lying at all. He is, philosophically, turning himself into a Heraclitean river.

Sometimes I feel like deleting my entire blog. And yet, so far, I have simply gone on writing it. Either impulse, to delete or to write (that is the question), is really quite irrational.

Similarly, sometimes I think that I suffer from a kind of social Tourette's (I don't mean that in any medically accurate sense, but in a very silly 'popular misapprehension' sense) and should care more about what other people think, and sometimes I think I'm far too nice, and shouldn't care at all about what other people think.

Perhaps the strangeness of it all comes in thinking that any of the ripples (of word and deed) in this Heraclitean stream are actually me.

These days, I believe, it's not uncommon for someone to die having left websites, blogs, MySpace profiles and so on behind them in a strange kind of posterity. Depending on how many people knew and were interested in the departed, the moths of consciousness will gather about the glow of the computer screen to see their life preserved there. But these words are not their life. Embarrassing or beautiful or boring, it's...

Someone who knows my interests very recently informed me, hilariously, of the construction of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, now nearing completion, and of the fact that there's a possibility that it may destroy the universe.

Perhaps it's another example of the silliness that so embarrasses me, which I should really feel utterly detached from, but I feel vaguely as if I might be changing.

In another of my books that I don't have to hand at the moment, because I have none of them to hand right now, there's a Japanese death poem (jisei), that goes something like this:

Oh, I don't care
Where autumn winds
Are blowing to

I'm reminded of a very similar jisei from a dying royal:

Bugger Bognor.

Crisis in Bali

I quote from the lastest Avaaz newsletter e-mail:

We're here at the climate summit in Bali -- but it's reached crisis point. Working late, negotiators were nearing consensus that developed countries should pledge post-Kyoto emissions cuts by 2020--a step which the scientists say is needed to avert the worst ravages of global warming, and which will help to bring China and the developing world onboard. But then the news broke: the US, Canada and Japan rejected any mention of such cuts. Every few hours the draft changes.

If you disagree with the gross irresponsibility of the USA, Canada and Japan, please sign the petition here.

All other countries are run by little girls

Last night I watched the Borat film. I know I'm a little late.

I found it to be brilliant, but excrutiating.

The 'controversy' surrounding the film has already been analysed to death, I think, and I don't really have anything to add to what has been said by others.



Here's a negative review of the film from Mark Kermode (it starts about thirteen minutes into the download/podcast). At one point Kermode says, "If you take away the political incisiveness [of the film] (which I don't think it has), you're left with a simple question: is it funny? For me the answer to that question is no."

I suppose, quite simply, the answer to that question for me was yes.

Apart from being funny, I also found much of the film to be quite jaw-dropping. Perhaps one of the things that most sticks in my mind is where Borat first arrives in New York and greets strangers on the train and in the street, "My name is Borat. I'm new in town. What's your name?" and so on, and is greeted with aggressive hostility. One person addressed responded, "My name's mind your own fucking business." Others threatened violence. Apparently there were over 400 hours of footage shot for the film (which was edited down to 80 minutes), so I imagine that other reactions from strangers, perhaps friendlier and less interesting reactions, were discarded. In a way the hostility of those people shown was understandable; they must have thought they were being approached by a weirdo intent on messing with them in some way, and, of course, they were right, though not in the way they probably imagined. However, I must admit to finding the level of aggression and paranoia quite shocking, even pathological. It might say something about environment, but there's a chicken and egg question here as to what determines environment.

I'm reminded of a story told to me by a Japanese friend some years ago, which I now recall only fuzzily. It concerned an incident that made the news in Japan for a while. A Japanese student was living in America, and had been shot and killed. I don't remember now the beginning of the story, but I believe that the student had entered the garden of someone's house in order to ask directions. The owner of the house took the student to be a trespasser up to no good, and came out with a gun. The homeowner instructed the student to put his hands on his head, which he did. He then, apparently, told the student to "duck". Seems like an odd kind of command, but that is how the story was told. Unfortunately, the student did not know that 'duck' meant anything except a kind of bird, and he was killed. This, my friend informed me, was a topic of conversation for a number of reasons. First of all, there was the problem of English language education in Japan, since very few Japanese would have understood the instruction to duck. Then there was the question of a kind of Japanese naivete with regard to other cultures. Such an incident would never have happened in Japan. For the student, it was probably something unimaginable - something belonging to the realms of fiction. There seems to be an interesting and very sad lesson there in the clash of realities.



Kermode comments that the Borat film is full of "rampant anti-Americanism". Some time back, on the Momus blog, I made some comments about the hostility that many people feel towards America that one American reader felt the need to pick up on as "anti-American". At this point I kind of sigh... I'll just say that I have no problems with people criticising British culture at all. I don't feel like I have to take it personally. Anyway, at a later point in the comments thread someone mentioned Borat, and the fellow who had taken me to task, obviously still a bit agitated, left the following rather memorable comment:

"Borat is such an Ugly American. No, wait, he's a British actor playing a Kazakhstani."

Labels: Borat

Strange Tales Volume II

I keep meaning to let readers know what stories I have forthcoming, and I've left it so late that one of them has already come. My story 'The Fairy Killer' is now available in the anthology Strange Tales, Volume II, from Tartarus Press.

I also believe (to be confirmed, as they say) that I shall have something new coming out from Rainfall Books before too long.

In the distant future, a novella of mine written many, many years ago will also be published by Pendragon Press, in the Triquorum series.

A short story of mine is to feature in Postscripts 13.

And a story of mine is also confirmed for the anthology Holy Horrors.

I think that's the main stuff on the forthcoming list, apart, of course, from the big(ish) one, which is my novella, Shrike, due out from PS Publishing next year.

Hopefully there is also lots of other stuff in the pipeline.

We shall see.

Negotiating with Terrorists

Continuing from my recent post about Morrissey, immigration and racism, I think I should make a distinction clear here (the problem with my blog is that I write almost all posts in one sitting, and there's always something left unaddressed). I started off by talking about James Watson and saying that I felt uncomfortable calling him racist. I then went on pretty much to say that saying negative things about immigration did not make Morrissey racist, and it could have been inferred (incorrectly) that I thought Watson's and Morrissey's remarks in some way equivalent. Of course, they're not. If racism is an unfounded belief in the inferiority of a particular race, then saying that one's country is losing its identity because of the number of immigrants is clearly not a racist statement. Suggesting that Africans inherently (as a matter of genetic inheritance) have lower intelligence than caucasians, with no evidence, would seem, almost by definition, racist. In the case of Watson, in the quotes of which I am aware, he referred vaguely to tests that showed Africans to have lower intelligence, and stated his belief that in a few years we would discover that there is a genetically determined lower intelligence among Africans. There are a number of things to be said about this. It would appear to be part of the whole scientific racism phenomenon, of which one famous example is the 1994 best-selling study The Bell Curve. Scientific racism is, in itself, a huge subject, so I'll have to really limit my remarks here. First of all, I'm not aware that anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory definition of intelligence that would make it possible to reliably test for it, anyway, so that all tests so far must be assumed to be in one way or another biased. Secondly, Watson seemed intent on anticipating a future discovery of genetically lower intelligence. There are all kinds of questions here, as to why he would even wish to anticipate that, and so on, but, once again, I will limit myself. How will something as nebulous and indefinable as intelligence be correlated with DNA? That's my question. In the same way that it's correlated with answers to culturally-biased examination papers today? I mean, first of all, you have to decide whether or not someone is intelligent in order to correlate it with genes, surely? Without spending paragraphs and paragraphs on the subject of racist science, I'm going to stick my neck out and say, quite simply, that I think Watson is wrong. At the moment, I don't really feel the need to say more than that.



Perhaps, given the fact that Watson's comments so well fit the bill for the definition of racism above, you might wonder why I feel uncomfortable calling him racist. I think there are a number of reasons for this, and one of them is that I feel that people have become trigger-happy with the word in recent years. I do think that people have recognised that they can shift attention away from themselves and their own shortcomings by pointing at someone else and saying, "Racist!" I also think this is a deeply cowardly and unhelpful tactic. Since I don't particularly like Watson, I felt there was an element of that in my own accusation, and I didn't really like that. To be honest, whether or not Watson is racist was, for me, almost a side issue. What I found myself taking exception to were his values as expressed in the kind of society he would apparently like to engineer (genetically) - a society in which "all girls are pretty". If he's being serious here, and I assume he is, then I can only say that I think his aims are vile. I don't think that his vision could ever be acheived, anyway, but it's a 'master-race' vision. His comments about Africans were therefore interesting to me because, of course, racism is a huge factor in any 'master-race' vision. I was keen to speculate about whether there might be something inherently racist and 'master-race' within the ethos of the whole field of genetics, and it was pretty convenient for me to rope Watson in to support my speculation. In the end, I don't have daily (or any personal) dealings with Watson, and there's no actual need for me to comment on whether or not he is racist. But since his comments are in the public domain, I can still comment on them. Beyond that, I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt, as I would hope that people would give it to me.

There's another factor in why I would rather not sling about accusations of racism. That is, I think that racism is one part of a wider problem, and the basic problem of being human, which is simply how to live with other people's differences. If I were to give a single word to the wider problem of which racism is part, I would call it 'dehumanisation'. In other words, by characterising a particular race as inferior, you are dehumanising them. But it's as easy - perhaps easier - to dehumanise someone by calling them racist, as it is to dehumanise them through the use of derogatory racial stereotype. I don't believe that people are born with a tattoo behind the ear saying "racist" or "not racist". As I've said before, I think anyone is capable of racism. Racism is as nebulous as identity. If someone expresses a racist view, surely it's far more helpful to talk about it than to turn them into an outcast. (Yes, I know some people are more difficult to reach than others, and do present a very real problem.)

This brings me back to Morrissey, who has now issued a statement in response to the NME article. It's a fairly interesting read, though I note that Morrissey is not really as good a prose writer as he is a lyricist. I noted in particular his full support of the Love Music, Hate Racism campaign. I found this interesting because I'm not sure I would support that organisation myself (incidentally, despite being a vegetarian and oppoosed to vivisection, I don't particularly support PETA, either; I don't like Pete Singer's utilitarian philosophy). Why am I unsure? Because they oppose the invitation made to the BNP to speak in an Oxford debate about free speech. As a writer, if I am passionate about anything, then it has to be free speech. My impression is that the people of Love Music, Hate Racism, like many, many people who would probably say they support free speech, don't actually understand what free speech is. It's very tedious to have to say this for the thousandth time, but free speech doesn't mean letting people say anything as long as you agree with them. It means letting people say anything even if you don't agree with them. It's always better to talk than to fight, surely? I suppose that the invitation to the BNP could be seen as a deliberate move to stir things up a bit, but really, what's the point of even having a debate on free speech if you're only going to invite people who agree with each other?



I'm reminded here of the stance inevitably taken by governments with regard to terrorism. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," they always say, as if to prove how strong and morally upright they are. This is really another permutation of the pointing a finger at someone else to distract people from one's own shortcomings. Now, though, instead of "racist" we have the word "terrorist". They're terrorists, we're not. They're racists, we're not. No negotiation. No talking about things. If we talk to racists, that makes us racist. If we talk to terrorists, that makes us terrorists. And we wouldn't want that, because we're good people, aren't we? And the fight goes on.

I'm going to wander off into left-field a bit, here, I'm afraid, and say that my final musings in my blog post about the whole Morrissey debacle - the musings about whether or not nations should exist - have a lot to do with the idea of enlightenment. As in, yes, Zen and all that. I mentioned that I almost always write my posts in one sitting, and I'd like to do that this time, too, and now I've only just got onto another VAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSTTT subject. I'm beginning to flag, but I shall try to rally. Let me just get some water.

So, where was I?

It occurred to me that one possible problem with my thinking on questions of race and immigration was the tendency to look at some abstract big picture and take things to their 'logical conclusion' (always a bad idea). I did mention what has often been my antidote to logical conclusions and 'big picture' thinking - individualism, or my own version of it, which is simply taking each person as I find them and each moment as it comes. I don't want to dismiss the immigration debate entirely, but as I'm sitting here writing this, immigration is certainly not a problem for me, and perhaps, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, nothing is really a problem in the here and now. This is linked with an old idea of mine, and one which I'm almost certain is not originally my idea, that the answer to all our social and international frictions is not political, but spiritual - that we will continue having violence on an individual and a mass level until everyone is enlightened.

By the way, I hope that no one reading this is imagining that I'm going to come to some great conclusion at the end of all this? No? Good.

Enlightenment is something that interests me deeply. I'm not even sure if it exists, but it seems to me that it might constitute the only possible redemption for the individual and the race.

What is enlightenment? Er... don't ask me, Guv. Apparently it's pretty fucking ineffable. For those not overly familiar with the 'concept' I'll try and give some (undoubtedly unhelpful) pointers in a minute.

I am not aware that I've ever actually met anyone who is enlightened, though I am informed by someone I trust that he has. Still, I'd rather rely on my own experience in being able to say definitively that enlightenment is 'natural and real'. There are, however, many, many accounts of enlightenment available, in books, on the Internet, and all over the place.

Some time back, the writer Thomas Ligotti published, for a limited time, his long essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race on the Internet. The essay was a discussion of horror fiction heavily slanted towards an exploration of pessimistic philosophy, with the overall effect of being an argument for the voluntary extinction of the human race in order to put an end to human suffering. One by one, Ligotti examined and dismissed possible answers to suffering. Naturally, one of these possible answers was enlightenment. This was dismissed, too, as something that only ever happens accidentally, and that very rarely, and which, if it happened wholesale, would reduce us to beings interested in nothing more than our next meal, if that. I found this exploration of the subject of enlightenment (and by extension, the essay as a whole) to be weakened considerably by the fact that it seemed to rely on the figure U.G Krishnamurti as the ultimate authority (or anti-authority) on all things enlightened. U. G. seems to present us with a particularly curmudgeonly version of enlightenment, and blasts all other enlightened beings (apparently including the original Buddha, by which I suppose is meant the prince Gautama Sakyamuni) as charlatans. However, there are other accounts of the subject to be taken into consideration, such as that, for instance, of Suzanne Segal.

For myself, I find that I have become, over the last few years, strangely interested in the reputedly enlightened figure of Eckhart Tolle, author of a number of books on the subject (more-or-less) of enlightenment, most notably, The Power of Now. I mention him here in particular, because of certain remarks he has made on the subject of group identity:

The self does not want to be free of that; that's not where the longing for freedom comes from. The longing for freedom does not come from self. The self speaks of freedom, but then sabotages it continuously. It says, 'I'm looking for peace', and then creates conflict. And then you can see how it operates collectively, the same mindset operates collectively. 'Let's have another peace conference.' And in the meantime they produce massive amounts of weapons. So... 'Let's talk about peace.' The peace process. They're still talking about the peace process, and they're continually throwing grenades and machine-gunning... The peace process. Peace - they don't want peace. Because the mindset depends on non-peace for its survival. And so whether your sense of self is predominantly a personalised sense of sense or whether it's predominantly a collective egoic sense of self - a religion, or a nation, or a racial thing - then it can be even stronger than the personalised; it's actually exactly the same principle at work, exactly the same mechanism at work, but can be even more mad than the personalised sense of self, which is mad enough. But you can see how mad humanity can become when they identify with a collective 'me'. That's the height of madness.

As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, it is identity itself (the self itself), that appears to be the source of all conflict. This is something that Tolle says, and something that I'm inclined to agree with. The thing is, I personally don't know what to do about such a situation. I appear to have a self, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing anytime soon. Also, in the same way that there's some lingering doubt in me that we should simply do away with national identity, I can't help feeling there's something of value in the self, too. For instance, I'm not sure how love is possible without a self. (Who would be loving whom?) But I'm aware of counter-arguments - that it's precisely the self that obstructs love. In any case, if enlightenment exists, it doesn't appear to be something that can be understood or arrived at by reasoned argument. It seems to be in the nature of a quantum leap of consciousness that happens without being willed, and does not happen when it is willed.

All of this is an ongoing internal debate for me, that I engage in, and then let go, engage in and let go...

On the question of whether Eckhart Tolle is himself enlightened. Well, first of all, I'm not sure such a question is even important, but I'd be disingenuous if I said it wasn't a question that interested me. I'm inclined to think that, of all the examples of reputed enlightenment I have encountered, he is the most convincing candidate so far. I cannot fault anything he says. I find no pettiness there, nothing pernicious or manipulative or wilfully obscure. I am, however, not without reservations on the question, which, just for the record, I will list below, though they probably serve as a list of my own shortcomings more than anything else:

1) I have reservations simply because I am a doubting kind of person in many ways. I think doubt is an important part of keeping an open mind.

2) I hate the title 'The Power of Now', which reminds me of the song The Power, by Snap!. It's a curious question as to whether being enlightened should enhance one's taste. Why should I anticipate that it should? (And why should I put such faith in my own taste?) Nonetheless, this kind of thing bothers me. I remember seeing the website of someone who claimed a near death experience, and gagging at how tacky it was. "If you've died and gone to the shining edge of the cosmos and back," I thought to myself, "how come your poetry is so utterly shite?"

3) Tolle changed his first name from 'Ulrich' to 'Eckhart', apparently post-enlightenment, as an allusion to the mystic Meister Eckhart. If the basis of enlightenment is having no identity, why change your name, which shows a concern with identity?

4) Does being enlightened oblige you to write the same kind of insipid self-help books as everyone else? This is a bit of a worry for me, as I'd rather keep writing a rather dark vein of... stuff. Also, there's a samey-ness here that's not entirely attractive.

5) After having read pretty much everything Tolle's written and watched his DVDs and so on, I still don't feel especially enlightened, which is bound to be my fault. However, even assuming that Tolle is enlightened, and this is my fault, what's the use of going on reading the books and watching the DVDs?

6) It's not only me. I haven't actually heard of a case of anyone becoming enlightened after reading any of his books or watching his DVDs.

7) Tolle's apparently quite wealthy now, and continues to make money from his teachings. This does bother me a bit. But then, maybe this is a problem with perceptions of enlightenment. Why shouldn't someone enlightened have money, as long as they're not attached to it, and as long as that's not what motivates them? I suppose one answer to that question would be that they might want to avoid more than average material wealth simply in order not to hoard.

8) He's 'too nice'. This sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining, but I think I do trust people a bit more if they show their dark side. I like the tai chi symbol that shows darkness and light intertwined. Is it possible to deny the darkness? That's not a rhetorical question. I think it's worth considering. I mean, I'm not sure I want violence to continue forever just for aesthetic reasons. I'll give an example of Tolle being 'too nice': He's blandly dismissive of drug use. Okay, so he doesn't take an authoritarian tone, and what he says is fair enough (if you have highs, you'll have lows), but he seems unwilling to look at the fact that it's possible even to have 'noble' drug use, as in certain tribal rites of passage. This strikes me as a slightly 'radio-friendly' approach.

9) Not showing one's dark side, somehow, also seems to have implications about sexuality. I haven't entirely fathomed why this is. I suppose that I tend to subscribe to the Woody Allen view that "Sex can be dirty, but only if it's done right." I find it hard to imagine healthy, wholesome sex without wanting to puke. Eckhart does talk a little about sex, describing it as "the most deeply satisfying experience you can have on a physical level", and does apparently have a partner (no prurience here, please), but I honestly find sexual desire and the kind of enlightenment he presents to be somehow incongruous. Interestingly, Buddhism, too, has a tradition marked with asexuality. There is the celibacy of the monks, of course, and there's even the fact that there's no Buddhist wedding ceremony. As someone who has at least a nodding acquaintance with sexuality, I suppose I'd like a better idea of how that fits in the enlightenment picture without having to resort to castration or something.

Actually, I think that's pretty much it - my list of petty excuses for not being enlightened, but, like everyone else, contributing to all the horrible conflict of human society. I suppose that makes me a terrorist, too. But I think, as we're all terrorists together, we should try and negotiate with each other.

Labels: Eckhart Tolle, Enlightenment, Immigration, James Watson, Morrissey, Racism

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