Dead and alive, p.23
Dead and Alive, page 23
The proper mode for the Unspoken is confession. I will confess to you now that sometimes when I walk past one of the largest Muslim schools in Europe – which happens to be around the corner from my house – I feel surrounded by the Other. A passing feeling, with no animosity in it, but I feel it. I experience this mass of children, girls in headscarves, boys in neat uniform, all speaking Arabic, as a They, and I feel my I to be isolated among them. I feel the change in my neighbourhood these past thirty years. I feel nostalgic for the past, when schools were less likely to be segregated and my Muslim neighbours sat next to me in class. So goes my feeling. Then, because it is a part of my habit, as a writer, I try to consider my feelings. In a moment, what seems monolithic separates into parts; what appears simple reveals complexity. ‘The Muslims’ become, on second glance, many different Muslims: from many different countries, speaking not only Arabic but at least a dozen languages, some in headscarves, some without, some rich, some poor, some friends of each other, some enemies, some light, some dark, some pious, some not, and some mesmerizingly unexpected, like the white woman I passed recently, in a hijab, with a thick Dublin accent, laughing like a fishwife and talking about how she couldn’t bloody wait for breakfast. But noting the complexity does not resolve the problem. And I think it’s important to understand that immigration is a form of problem, because it arouses real feelings in people, emotions as strong as any they are able to feel: fear, anxiety, alienation, anger, displacement, envy, hatred. So, the question, in your country and mine, has become: What kind of a human problem is immigration and how is it ‘solved’? But because so many feelings around immigration have been unspeakable, suppressed for so long, now the Unspoken has re-entered the scene in the form of atavistic fantasy. People are to be sent back to where they come from – even if they are children travelling alone. Impenetrable walls are to be erected – to keep out all the fruit-pickers, dishwashers, cab drivers, home helps, hospital orderlies, nannies and other workers we rely on every day – and despite the fact so many of these people arrive by sea or air. Transnational political entities, like the EU, are to be exited while we simultaneously retain all the economic advantages of transnational political entities. These are our ‘solutions’. In this context, the very word ‘solution’ is a fantasy, referring as it does to an absolute, to a finality. In our social reality, lives can be made decent and fair, but they cannot be finally ‘solved’. Final solutions are meaningful only in an absolute state, a state run on myth and images. Immigration is our present problematic social arrangement, but historically minded Europeans will recall that all human social arrangements are inherently problematic. Not only Russia’s Communist revolutionary state and Germany’s racially pure one, but England’s sixteenth-century Elizabethan golden age – which murdered and pillaged in Ireland – or its eighteenth-century industrial miracle, accompanied as it was by global colonial crimes. Like all our problematic social arrangements, immigration will neither be solved nor perfected, but it is within our capacities to accommodate it and make it liveable for its participants. In the world of images there is no accommodation, it’s either We or Them, heaven or hell. On earth, we have many practical examples of how such accommodations can be made, even if, in our present absolutist state of mind, we pretend not to see them.
* * *
*
One of the apocalyptic futures being paraded before the public is the bogeyman of parallelism: that is, the existence of self-contained communities living within the borders of, and parallel to, democratic nation states. This is supposedly the worst that can be imagined. Yet large swathes of several cities are already the exclusive preserve of a single community, and have been for many years. A community who have their separate school system, language, businesses, religious laws, local by-laws, and whose women wear their hair entirely covered. When I first came to New York I stayed for a while next door to such a community and one day accidentally wandered into their preserve. Into the tall hats and the long beards, the brown wigs and the checked skirts, the Yiddish street signs, the Yiddish everything, and the young men who crossed the street when they saw me coming. What were my feelings? Amazement, confusion, intense curiosity, a little loneliness, and the usual writer’s delight in the strange and unfamiliar. But the one thing it was impossible to feel was that this self-contained community in Brooklyn was in any way an existential threat to the city of New York never mind to the United States of America, although, in many other countries, Hasidic communities like the one I am describing would be under the kind of threat the Rohingya are presently under in Burma. New York’s functional parallelism – in which dozens of internally homogenous, racially and culturally distinct neighbourhoods coexist – is a long-standing social arrangement, though it is not without its troubles and problems. But it is a real-world example of the unique flexibility of democracies, the way they can contain multitudes – albeit imperfectly. Parallelism is in no way my personal ideal – that would be integration – but in our overheated arguments about immigration, the gravitational pull of the local is consistently underrated. Show me the New Yorker who is more a New Yorker than the Williamsburg Hasid who speaks only Yiddish! And what could be more English than the young brown men on our football team, whose very existence is the unintended consequence of four hundred years of British colonial history, and who speak in a variety of regional English accents rooted in a thousand years of English local history. The ties that bind come in many forms, some strong, some weak.
* * *
*
In a recent article about Austria, I read that the binding society – in which people feel in some way obligated and connected to each other – is over. That it exists only in nostalgic images of Heimat on TV. That the promises made after the Second World War, which were intended to bind people together, can no longer be kept or recreated, for people will never again be provided with health care, education and decent work, and into this void now floods the previously unspoken: xenophobia, sentimental nationalism, Heimat itself. It was a left-leaning article, but it played the game of the Right by speaking of the post-war welfare state as if it were a brief fairy tale ended by a witch’s curse, rather than a social contract deliberately dismantled by means of a concerted, fifty-year-long process of financial deregulation and privatization that has created unprecedented global inequality and which it is well within our power to reverse. The unspoken and unspeakable, for the Right, is precisely this global inequity, which they themselves know the people ‘feel’ just as strongly as they ‘feel’ the shocks of immigration. In America, Bernie Sanders’s candidacy was an example of what happens when the Left also dares to speak the Unspoken. Universal basic income. Fair and progressive taxation. Legislating against transnational entities that hoard billions offshore, billions that could be used precisely to fund universal health care, public education, public housing and the decent and humane integration of recent arrivals into our social realities. These are also things people long for, beyond rationality, emotionally, in their very souls. To be safe and well cared for. To be bound to each other. This, too, is Heimat.
* * *
*
Once, in Europe, we envisioned a We that was bound to every I. More recently, we have relegated this idea to the image world, to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, or else we leave it safely in the Bible where nobody serious is likely to come across it. For there it is, in the ‘Parable of the Workers’, as Christ explains that he who has laboured only one hour, who is least deserving, shall be given exactly the same as he who has laboured ten. So the last shall be first, and the first last. We ask for nothing as radical, nothing as absolute as this. In Christ’s kingdom, it would be my obligation to come last, to give everything I have, to open my door to the weakest and the most lost and the longest travelled, to experience injustice to myself as justice to others, to expect nothing and offer everything, always and for ever. But we don’t live in Christ’s kingdom, we live in supposedly democratic nation states. Here the last shall not be first. Here the ideal is far smaller: that the last and the first should have some basic individual rights guaranteed and collectively funded; that our social reality should be not ideal but decent. That this rather paltry aim should have entered the realm of the Unspoken is an example of how far from reality we have drifted, by which I mean ultimate reality, the one described by Christ in which we have only the most radical obligations imaginable to each other.
My kind of writing describes the liveable. It does not traffic in absolutes or ideals. It is small, full of local anecdotes and banality: primary schools and football teams and Dublin-accented Muslims. It occupies the realm of the social, that impure and imperfect world. It hopes to take people out of a system of images and return them to the real, so they may no longer be spoken of statistically, or as symbols. Not ‘the Muslim Woman’ but Alsana in White Teeth. Not ‘the Black Youth’ but Felix in NW. Not ‘the Privileged White Man’ but Howard in On Beauty. When I write, I try to access unspoken emotions about the Other, and thus free myself from their clutches, for the internalization of the Unspoken is, in my view, the real existential threat. The most powerful weapon of fascism is its reliance on emotion, the way it claims, in essence: Everybody’s feeling it but only we dare say it. But what is dared is only a primal scream: blood, soil, Heimat. Emotions are real, they are our truest response to a perceived reality, but they are not a description of reality itself. The challenge of social reality is to commit ourselves to the tedious, effortful triangulation of the They, the We, and the I. To try always to balance ethos, pathos, logos. To weigh rights, duties, expectations. There is no final solution to their complex interrelation. But we should know by now that to deprive any one of them oxygen will only cause a fire elsewhere.
Agelessness
A ladies’ magazine wanted me to write on the subject of ‘agelessness’. I tried.
The subject at hand is ‘agelessness’, a concept I think I only half-understand. If it means, ‘Age is just a number,’ or ‘You’re only as old as you feel,’ or ‘You, too, can look young for ever,’ then I know I don’t understand it, or, at least, it’s an idea that doesn’t mean much to me. I believe age – and the awareness of age – is one of the few concrete ways we can measure our progress through this world, and that each stage of life has its season and something to teach us, and that either to look or think oneself twenty-seven for ever is to abandon the idea of really living altogether. But if, by ‘agelessness’, we are referring to those moments of grace when time swings and you escape the actual number on your passport, and find yourself transported backwards, then, yes, I know that feeling intimately, and it is one of the treasures of existence.
An example: a few days before writing this, I found in my iTunes a song I didn’t know I had, ‘Apparently Nothin’ ’, by Young Disciples, a tune I’m quite sure I haven’t danced to since 1991, but which, I now remembered, I’d once played day in and day out with as much delight as I have it in me to experience. So, I was curious: I pressed play, closed my eyes, started to dance. And for three and a half minutes, it really was 1991, both inside me – in my limbs, and in my mind – and for all I knew, outside me, too, for with my eyes closed, it felt entirely possible that all the rest was a dream, that I had no adult life, no partner or children, no job or responsibilities, and that the sixteen-year-old soul who had once loved this tune was still alive within me and could be awakened at any moment, could perhaps even take over the rest of the organism, and erase all the back pain and saddlebags and wrinkles and weary experiences that have constituted some of the intervening twenty-six years since this song first came out.
Then I opened my eyes: I was forty-two again.
But the lyrics lingered:
I ain’t trying to rule your mind
A conscious observer trying to find
A place on earth where they heed the signs…
It is commonly thought that time is the particular enemy of women. Because we supposedly have so much to lose: our ‘looks’, our fertility, our cultural capital. There have been feminist modifications to this story over the years, but it remains powerful: a tale long told by men and subsequently retold and internalized by women. But there are other ways of looking at it. That women have timepieces built into their bodies – primarily ‘biological clocks’ and the menopause – signs that must eventually be heeded, signs that are, finally, impossible to ignore, seems to me at least as much gift as curse. That our bodies should bring us such concrete signs of time passing – that they should have the miraculous ability to bring us news of what is actually the case – surely means that every woman is offered the opportunity to be, as Young Disciples have it, a ‘conscious observer’ of her own life. It strikes me that one consequence of this bodily awareness of time is that adulthood – with all its complex responsibilities and demands – often seems to come as less of a surprise to women than it does to many men (there’s a reason our folk tales are full of ‘wise old women’). Our hyper-awareness may well be a kind of opportunity, one that might allow even death itself to be well imagined and prepared for. And yet, this unique feminine opportunity to be wise – to know time as it is, rather than as we would wish it to be – is almost always diminished or ridiculed. When we were teens, for example, and still testing out ideas of what lay ahead for all of us, I can remember male friends gleefully bringing up the matter of Charlie Chaplin, who, during my youth, was a famous octogenarian father, and often cited as a case of male good fortune versus female bad luck: ‘You’ll all be finished at forty. But we carry on – we can have babies into our eighties!’ And we will stay attractive, the boys meant by this, and we will stay vital, and potent, while you and your lot will wither and fade. Even at sixteen, I could hear the fear and anxiety hidden deep within this supposed display of male pride. Was Charlie Chaplin admirable or ridiculous? You could see these boys weren’t exactly sure: the whole point of teasing us about him was to get our assurance one way or another on this point. And who can blame them for being unsure? Without that dreaded ‘biological clock’, without the menopause, and with few honest mirrors in the culture in which to reflect themselves, what or who will tell a man that he is old? That he is no longer twenty-seven? That the things that pertain to that beloved twenty-seven-year-old self may now need adaptation or change?
I grew up in a culture suspiciously eager to convince me that an eighty-year-old woman with a twenty-year-old man was at the best comically grotesque, at the worst, some form of perversity, while Chaplin and his youthful loves, by contrast, were an example of the ‘agelessness’ of men. But the truth is – as I think those teenage boys suspected – age exists for us all. It comes to you whether you believe in it or not. And I am now very grateful to be in a body that reminds me every day of this simple human truth. Which is not to say age does not bring me sadness, that I don’t sometimes mourn for my twenty-seven-year-old self, nor miss a certain version of my face, breasts, legs or teeth. I feel all of that natural, human sadness. And I do all the usual things – exercise, eat decently, dress optimistically – in the hope of slowing the inevitable process. But there are limits to that hope: limits like the menopause, limits like the end of my fertility. And thank God for them, because hope without limit is another word for delusion. And I think on the whole, I’d rather be sad than deluded.
There is a beautiful couplet in ‘Apparently Nothin’ ’:
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine.
It gets repeated over and over. When I think of the sort of light that is a woman – when I think of each woman’s particular contours and colour and way of burning – the idea of trying to make that light burn persistently at exactly the same wattage and intensity over decades seems to me a terrifying task to set oneself, not unlike lighting a candle and expecting no wax to ever melt. We melt, we melt, and finally we’re extinguished.
But what interesting shadows we throw on the wall, depending on the hour, and how various are the ways that wax can melt, how many different forms and shapes it can take! Some pretty, some not so pretty…oh, it’s not easy, ageing, but it is consistently interesting. At ten, you couldn’t imagine twenty, nor at twenty, thirty, nor at thirty, forty, and on and on it goes. (I’m guessing. I can’t imagine fifty.) I see groups of women in their sixties on holiday whooping with delight and I wonder, why are they so happy? I guess I’ll find out. And I see lone eighty-year-olds pushed by their carers down Broadway, mouths open, looking devastated, and if I’m lucky I’ll live long enough to find out about that, too.
It’s all life. It’s all unavoidable. It’s all better than the alternative. Enjoy it while you can.
The Fall
I’ve been thinking about teenagers. I have one myself now, and of course I was one once – in a different world at a different moment – and can remember the feeling. Everything was extremity. It still is. Four waves of feminism, digital connectivity, a global wellness movement, the injunction to ‘be kind’, the commonplace ‘it gets better’ – none of it seems to have put much of a dent in teenage misery, especially not of the kind that concerns me. Watching girls gather outside the multiplexes this past summer, choosing between Barbie and Oppenheimer, I thought, yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Brittle, impossible perfection on the one hand; apocalypse on the other. I’ve never forgotten the years I spent stretched between those two poles, and there was a time when I believed the intensity of my girlhood memories made me somewhat unusual – even that they were what had made me a writer. I was disabused of that notion a long time ago, during the early days of the social networks. Friends Reunited, Facebook. Turns out there’s a whole lot of people in this world who feel they never lived as intensely as they did that summer. ‘If teenage me could see me now, she’d be so disgusted!’ I said that to a shrink, a few years ago. To which the shrink replied: ‘Why assume your fifteen-year-old self to be the arbiter of all truth?’ Well, it’s a good point, but it hasn’t stopped me from carrying her around on my shoulder. I don’t suppose, at this point, I’ll ever be rid of her.
