Machine | Fiction | The Implausibility of Goodness

I quite enjoy being lax about my sense of the word 'fiction' in these articles (as you, er, may have noticed). Because fiction is not, of course, restricted to prose novels and short stories. Fiction is the unreal; the unreal that - as I like to think, in the case of literature - informs and casts light on the real, but that can also be used to manipulate it and, in some cases, to engulf the real entirely.



One of my odd little obsessions, whenever something is happening in the wider world that excites or distresses me, is to go over in my head, again and again, a speech I'd quite like a public figure to make. It could be any public figure, really. Someone with a voice; someone who will be heard. In this case, as you can probably guess, I wanted someone to talk about Egypt. Not a journalist, or a blogger, or any one of us people who don't really matter - but I wanted them at least to admit the great gulf between ideals and practicalities; admit that our countries have been complicit in several cases in doing the unethical thing for the purposes of realpolitik, admit that the West is paralysed by a patronising fear that instability will instantly lead to dangerous fundamentalism and that this is considered a valid reason not to stand up for democracy - and admit that it is no longer ethical or practical to do anything other than demand that Mubarak be removed from office. I wanted the fiction of diplomatic language, with all of its fucking ambiguities and hedge-bets and pathetic insinuations, the use of ambivalence to obfuscate, to disappear just for once, because it's not helping at all. Why are the only people giving direct answers the ones who are lying directly, like Khamenei, hatefully and very deliberately, misappraising the situation as an Islamic revolution in Egypt? (And, of course, there's no point getting started on Berlusconi, who has to be trolling. He just has to be.)


I got what I wanted, sort-of, when Nick Clegg came onto Daybreak and said that he found the Egyptian protests "incredibly exciting" - which reminded me firstly of the trouble he got into when he referred to the illegal war in Iraq as an illegal war in Iraq in Parliament, and secondly of the belief that I do still hold; that he isn't a bad man so much as he is a weak man. Naive, perhaps, but I'm not sure I believe that anyone who's been touched by Beckett can be bad. Complicated, definitely, but not bad. (That does sound naive - even elitist and stupid - but I think I'm going to leave it in). But it troubles me that he was able to show instinctive sympathy and joy for a protest that he was dealing with in a detached, almost abstract sense - but that the same sympathy failed to break through in his spiels about tuition fees. When faced with the pressures of local reality, where was that sympathy for another sort of protest of the economically disillusioned youth against the government?


The saddening thought is the flipside of the Romantic dream; it's all too easy to be good when you're alone - when your actions are detached from personal costs that society will always bring. And goodness within society can never be truly good, because it's too complex; it's measured by one's possibly unconscious motives. It's easy to be good instinctively, like stamping out fires spread by a molotov cocktail as more missiles rain down upon you, or by blurting out how you really feel about a situation you're supposed to be toeing the company line upon. It's near-impossible to be good in a considered way. A hermit who steps away from the world is good in the meannest of ways, because he removes all opportunities to be bad.


A position I've always tried to take is to be good, while wearing life lightly - which I'm aware I'm falling away from with all of this hand-wringing about morality. Irritating earnestness is really uncomfortably close to attempts at sincerity. But, as they're saying Mubarak may go today - as they have, admittedly, said before - I find myself considering that uncomfortable fact that I don't want to be in a country where David Cameron's in charge. But I don't care for Ed Miliband either. All of the smaller parties are, in their own, often horrible way, hopelessly naive. And, more than any of these people, I'm concerned - ethically speaking - with the political system in place and - practically speaking - with any of the alternative possibilities. So, kids...where do we go from here?


Glenn Beck, who's nothing if not direct in his explanations of a given political situation, seeks to connect the economic protests in Greece and the tuition fee protests in London with the situations in Tunisia and Egypt by simply not bothering to give any details, shouting instead that "the fires are spreading". In one sense, he's an imbecile. In another, perhaps he has a point. The Internet is showing signs of a...universality beyond the machinery of politics. The possibility - if I may again be naive - of the goodness of individuals.


P.S. Fans of either actual fiction or sincerity gone wrong should check out Michael Rosen's caustic and slightly pointless comments on the Guardian live feed. He begins very well, with a sarcastic assertion that the women in hijabs protesting clearly can't stand up for themselves, and then goes downhill fast until he ends up making Hitler comparisons for comic effect.

Wider Reading | Speak2Tweet: Google Supports Free Speech In Egypt, In A Cheeky Carefree Rapscallionish Sort Of Way

Geoffrey Rush, as promised. AKA the coolest thing in Elizabeth.

A few press statements concerning machines. The first is from Vodaphone, when the Egyptian government shut down mobile phone communications. It's a sort of on-the-fence shrug; the final clause indicating, very, very delicately that maybe Vodaphone would prefer this sort of thing not to happen, but that it's not really their business to interfere, and that, practically speaking, there's nothing that can be done. Not that I'm comparing it to the US reaction or our reaction here in the UK or anything. Less still the Foreign Office's 'wait-and-see' policy in Yes, Prime Minister to say that they can't do anything until it's too late to do anything, then admit that something could have been done but that it can't now, in fact, be done. Anyway, the quote.



"Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it."


Their second statement, made when service was resumed, is almost masterful in its wording; the implication being that Vodaphone were right to close down their mobile networks in Egypt, because had they resisted, the government would have closed them down manually and prevented them from bringing back the power of communication to the people for quite some time. So, if you think about it, they were the good guys, applying softer pressure from within the system rather than standing against it. Oh, Vodaphone, you brave little Schindlers!


"We would like to make it clear that the authorities in Egypt have the technical capability to close our network, and if they had done so it would have taken much longer to restore services to our customers."


The third statement came on Monday night from Google, announcing a new method of communication. In essence, it's that bit in A Knight's Tale where Heath Ledger's having veg pelted at him in the stocks. Then James Purefoy turns up as the Black Prince and announces dramatically that Heath Ledger's actually a knight and must be set free and given a chance to joust the baddie a second time and a happy ending and everything, after which he gives Heath Ledger a cheeky grin and a wink and starts very obviously rooting for him in the joust. You have absolutely no idea why this immensely powerful figure turns up and comes through for the underdog hero. It could be an ethical thing; or it could be just that he doesn't give a shit about offending anyone and he's too much of a softie not to root for the little guy, regardless of the knock-on effects of introducing social mobility very suddenly into the feudal system.


Observe the cheeky grin and the wink that accompanies this statement of obvious neutrality and business-like detachment. God, it might as well be whistling nonchalantly.


"Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

 

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there."

 

What the...Google, you've absolutely no right to go around idealistically sticking up for freedom of speech with a cheery disregard for the practical consequences. Less still to mimic the carefree jargon of a group-buying site ("Glued to the news", indeed!) while pretending your action has no political implications whatsoever. You're meant to be the oppressive internet baddie who swallows competitors whole, advertises sexy adult webcam pop-ups and spends your weekends torturing Bing with electrodes in a basement. And Twitter, Google, and SayNow working together? Like the Justice League?

Actually, scratch that previous thought about James Purefoy. This absurd situation is more like the bit in a movie or TV series where the old baddie has been supplanted by a new, more ruthless, more powerful baddie. And there's 40 minutes until the end and the goodies are arguing about how their situation's hopeless. And they hear from off-screen something like, "Hopeless, eh? Perhaps I can help." And they turn around and there's the old baddie, grinning at them in the doorway. So, after some token scenes where they shout at each other about how they can't trust him, they all team up and save the day together. Huzzah!

 

Yes, you heard me right. Google is Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Butterflies | Fiction | Two Riders Were Approaching...

“I have given bread to the hungry man, and water to the thirsty man, and apparel to the naked man, and a boat to the shipwrecked mariner.”
The deceased gives good account of himself to the divine court, The Coffin Texts, 2150-1750 BC

“Charity’s a Christian virtue, y’know.”
Bill O’Reilly



I am in love. The moment I read the Ancient Egyptian funereal writings ‘The Coffin Texts’, I fell instantly in love with them.

Honestly – what a religion. My vague memories of being scared by the jackal-headed, monstrous figures in my Horrible Histories books have vanished entirely. The afterlife is presented as the kind of transcendental journey of the self that ought to fascinate anyone even vaguely interested in Hermeticism or in certain of Jung's theories.  And there’s an overwhelming sense of decency to the entire set-up. Evil men are not tormented for all eternity; they’re simply eaten, one time only, by a monster, and are annihilated as a result. Their punishment is not to have an afterlife (all right, so this part's debatable, but I'm taking the optimistic view). The deceased actually gets to defend his own nature before the gods, instead of being told what sort of a man he is; and, if he ascends into the Elysian Fields, rather than making him sing them hosannas to them for all of eternity, the gods will charitably dine with him, and converse with him as an equal. There is much mention of “cakes and ale.”

I’ll say it again – what a religion.

But for our purposes, there’s something that fascinates me still more. It seems the world was not created, in much of Egyptian mythology, by the Christ-like Osiris, or Ra, the sun-god (who does become annoyingly close to all-powerful in the later, and more famous Book of the Dead). It was Thoth, the ibis-headed writer-god, who scribbled down the spell that formed reality. And, furthermore, the Coffin Texts and its forebear, the Pyramid Texts, strongly imply that it is Thoth who causes every event in the gods’ lives to occur, by writing them down; it praises, him, for instance, for bringing about Osiris’ resurrection, rather than praising Osiris himself.

Thoth.  Ultimate Badass?

Now, I like Thoth. He’s also revered as the inventor of all arts and sciences, which suggests he probably wouldn’t get pissed at mankind for discovering fire or a system of morality. He’s my new favourite author, in fact. But this same preoccupation with the immense power of the word – and the fact that this power is in human hands - runs deep through all of the texts. All of the books themselves, most obviously, are spells of a sort; actings-out of the deceased’s journey through the afterlife. At one point, to enter the divine mansions, he must first recall the names of the very hinges of the entrance door – and the planks of wood over the floor refuse to let him pass until he’s given them the names of his feet, which are going to be passing over them.

This same concept of being able to defeat something, or gain its support, by knowing its True Name, has passed through a great deal of our literature since then, most notably becoming extremely popular in modern fantasy. But it has made me ponder something that’s probably a truism; did the Ancient Egyptians revere the power of words more, since their words were pictographic in their written form, and therefore already endowed with symbolic meaning, from the very beginning?
And this brings me on, of course, to the Rorschach butterfly.

We all know it. You could even argue it’s one of the most popular symbols of our time that isn’t associated with a brand; i.e., a symbol that’s endowed with its own meaning, and not meant to imprint a particular product or person in our minds. And, to grossly over-simplify, the idea of it is that the psychiatrist holds up the above picture (the first in a sequence of ten, that grows more complex), asks the subject what they see, and explain their interpretation. And so both the answer and the method of getting there may give clues about the subject’s state of mind.

Now, these images are very much in the public domain. And it’s been argued (quite reasonably) that only testers should have ever been allowed to see them, since subjects are now “primed”; we see a butterfly, or a bat, or a moth, because we’ve seen that symbol before, and we know that’s what it’s supposed to mean, and we want very much to get the ‘right’ answer. Perhaps students of the psyche should have taken a lesson from the Hermeticists or the authors of the Book of the Dead, who argued, “This book is indeed a very great mystery; and thou shalt never allow ignorant folk, or any person whatsoever to see it.” Elitist, perhaps, and that makes our post-modern blood boil, but if everyone knows the meaning of the magic word, it ceases to have value.

It’s the curse of the symbol, more potent than any Egyptian magic; how do we distil cultural baggage from the word, strip it of its existing symbolic meaning so that we can add our own? I’m fond of a technique that’s half-nicked from sources like the ancient tradition (very popular in Egypt, incidentally), of dismembering the corpse so that it can be put back together in the afterlife, of removing the earthly organs so that divine organs can be administered, and half-stolen from Sideshow Bob’s classic ‘rake’ joke. Repeat the word until it loses all meaning. Then repeat it some more, on your own terms, until it’s endowed with a new meaning, that belongs only to you. “I am Yesterday, and Today; and I have the power to be born a second time.”
Try it. It’s quite a spell.