In the Metro yesterday from the airport a man climbed onboard wearing immaculately pressed charcoal-coloured windbreaker and pleated pants, the uniform (according to his bright yellow logo) of a security firm: securidad. Later in the afternoon we saw two of his colleagues guarding a castle. He sat down and pulled out a beautiful copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and began to read. The cover was black with a big red slightly bleeding or tearful eye drawn on it.
Picked up the most marvellous book, it’s by Jared Diamond & it’s about traditional societies (which, he points out, survive in partial form in even the most harried industrialized landscape and were universal to us until 11,000 years ago: a blip). He says how some things ‘modernity’ does better and some things, tradition. Like a bolt of cloth falling from a high shelf it struck me when he pointed out that all of psychology is based on a very narrow sample: mostly, undergraduate American psychology students, who were the ones most available to undergo tests and to fill out questionnaires. He cites the acronym WEIRD: Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.
The name of this book is The World Until Yesterday. How people picked up their babies and carried them upright with lots of body contact. Babies learned the world at eye level. How your chances of being killed by falling out of a tree or by having a tree fall on you were rather high. When I was a child in Jakarta we heard about a tribal man to the north, coming home from the village meeting through the familiar jungle who was eaten, whole, by a large snake. His body was cut out of its belly entire after the animal was captured.
What is that book you’re always carrying? my friend wanted to know. So I opened it and read to him:
“But the first of the thunder and lightning was always high, wild, savage and frightening. Every year people in our part of the land were killed by lightning. Yet long before I learned at school that lightning was electricity, and all else physics had to say about it, I caught the symbolic ‘other’ from Klara, for whom it was a pure phenomenon of the spirit. While the women of our community on their different farms would fold up the silver and metal in the house in sheets and blankets in the belief that otherwise they would attract the lightning, hanging towels over all the mirrors and drawing the curtains in their haste, Klara would sit with me on our great verandah and make me look at the lightning because she said that every human being had the same light as the lightning in his eye, and the fiercer the lightning outside, the brighter the light with which the eyes must look directly, steadily and without swerving, back at the lightning. She believed that if the light in one’s own eyes did not respond and flare all the brighter because of the example of the lightning, there was a form of lightning that would go black and invisible, and that that form of lightning was the lightning that killed.
“This was for me one of the earliest and most convincing illustrations of how symbolic the Bushman spirit was, how rich in the primordial wisdom stored up in that two-million-year old being of which Jung spoke to me later, describing at as ‘a living treasure of the all the experience and knowledge gained since the beginning of time’, and warning that if one lost touch with this innermost source and its symbols, life, rootless and adrift on the tides of fate, would fail and die. Fairly early in my life, thinking of the Bushman symbolism as I had done from the beginning, I thought of the lightning and the light in the Bushman eye staring back at the lightning as images of consciousness and awareness, and I ended up where I still stand today by thinking of lightning as the call to the battle for increase of awareness which is the imperative in creation.”
~Laurens van der Post, The Voice of the Thunder
The place I’ve sublet has a shelf of Joanna Trollope novels and I’ve just reread two of them. It’s so interesting learning all the signs she uses to indicate class. In the gentry, rudeness indicates an unwillingness to pander to form, it is authenticity. In factory workers, rudeness betrays a lack of breeding. Horsey women have good-quality possessions which they do not value and treat casually. They do things carelessly, having nothing to prove, dropping tea bags on the floor, “sloshing” milk into mugs and speaking in clipped half-sentences: “Shut up! Bloody dogs. Sit over there, it’s the only comfortable chair. Chuck the cat off.”
The landed class recognize one another by signs: tea is always “China”, never “India”, perhaps because China eluded colonization by these characters’ forbears and thus like a spirited horse showed independence. To have middling-quality possessions and to take care of them is unmistakeably a sign one is trapped in the worst of all worlds: bourgeois, unimaginative, burgerlich middle class. At least the poor have their realness and dignity. At least the gentry have their self-assurance and intricate codes: ‘”Daddy says,” one ten year old said cheerfully to our main character Liza, surveying a French pronoun exercise almost obliterated in red ink, “that there’s really no hope for me because I’m as utterly thick as him.”‘ Very often Trollope’s plots seem to unravel the marital miseries of a couple ill-suited as to class: in the case of A Passionate Man, a lordly doctor and his timid wife whose appearance is dismissed as “pretty.” She’s not of good enough stock to be either ugly or beautiful.
In fact the approval of both aristocratic and poorly educated character types in these novels seems to revolve on their ‘realness’ – excusable bluntness in the gentry, forgiveable gaucheness in the “frightful woman” who runs the post office. The middle class, by aping their “superiors” but without access to the insider knowledge that would let them buy the right kind of tea, show themselves to be false.
The other novel I read yesterday, The Best of Friends, was reviewed (on the cover) by The Observer as “above all a novel filled with good advice.” Like a recipe book.
