The butcher’s apprentice

I’m at home, watching trailers for upcoming movies on Five. Guns, fisticuffs – combat as a fundamental dramatic component. It’s so all-pervasive, you don’t notice it any more.

And I’m sick of it. Sick of the reduction of the subtle emotional conflicts inherent in drama to meatheaded literal battles; sick of the constant presentation of violence as a positive response to problematic situations; sick of the idiot miscalled-morality that can only respond to opposition with absolute destruction.

Encoded in violence-as-entertainment is a whole broken world view, over-brought in to a narrative structure that demands a frangible antagonist for every protagonist, and makes every hero an innocent victim of evil, a by-definition justified responder to a situation that’s been forced onto him or her, thus absolving them of any real moral responsibility for their actions.

This sickened externalisation of such a limited view of evil, this self-indulgent definition of the other as both dispensable and perpetually unjustified, is at the root of so much of the damage we do in the world, complaining about our own hurt while butchering by the thousand to re-confirm our brutally narrow, boneheaded definitions of what heroism is.

You want to hold up a mirror to up to the worst parts of what we are? Turn on the television, and watch endless butchery presented as narrative positivity, casual massacres as a constant solution to opposition. We are our obsessions – and, in the modern world, our obsessions are so brutally, perpetually present and exposed.

Killing the lover

Watching children and their parents on the beach at the weekend, and I was struck by how much care goes into the making of a person. None of just happen; we’re all very carefully supported, built even, over a period of decades.

And more generally, there’s a deep sense of nurture in being us. Walking through London, all you can see comes from human care; attention to construction of buildings, vehicles, goods, relationships, organisations.

A case can be made that care at that level has become pathological. Our concern to construct is so short sighted, taking place at the expense of the environment, of people elsewhere on the globe.

We are constructive for ourselves, in the short term; but we build without reference to the impact of our works. As a society, we are blind creators, destroying so much more than we create as we re-shape the world to our immediate convenience.

Which set me thinking about World War II poet Keith Douglas, and the deep honesty of some of his finest work. ‘How To Kill’ is a devastatingly good example of this. Here, he’s brave enough to be very open to the consequences of his act.

For me, though, he’s perhaps most focussed in ‘Vergissmeinicht’, contemplating a potentially lethal opponent’s corpse (’he hit my tank with one / like the entry of a demon’), imagining the dead man’s girlfriend from a photo left near his body, then concluding -

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

Douglas’ meaning reaches out to us from the 40s. We’re at war with so much of the world; and as we reshape the parts of it we find threatening or inconvenient, so much is lost, in so many different ways.

Monk ponder work

The dissolution of the monasteries made monks of us all, taking the monastic organisation of time and labour in pursuit of transcendent ends and releasing it into Northern European society as a whole. ‘Laborare est orare’ (itself all verbs, all doing) is made the founding principle of modern society; now our expectation is that work itself can and should be a transcendent activity, a fulfilment in itself.

Zali to rock hard

Zali over at iotacism is playing a solo set at the Klinker in Stoke Newington tomorrow, details (and groovy music downloads) here. Go see him! He will rock unfeasibly hard. Would be there myself, but alas I shall be rowing. A useful skill given current rainfall levels.

Scott of the Rantarctic

Well, despite a bacon, mushroom and brown sauce sandwich, and a rather nice cappuccino, I’m still hungover, so I’m just going to rant a bit, releasing my inner literary Richard Littlejohn (for non-UK readers, a noted right wing ranting journalist / loon) on the world.

We’re going to hell in a handcart!

If there’s one thing that winds me up, it’s the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’ is taken to mean that there are no second chances in American lives. You see it quoted all over the place – such-and-such has returned triumphantly from failure, ‘disproving FSF’s famous dictum’, somebody else falls into obscurity, ‘proving FSF right’.

You couldn’t make it up!!

But – if you think about what the term ‘second act’ actually means in a narrative structure context – you realise that’s not what he meant at all! Classically, in the First Act you establish a goal for your protagonist, in the Second Act you create obstacles to the achievement of those goals, and in the Third Act you show what happens when those goals are finally achieved.

It’s Political Correctness GONE MAD!!!

So, when FSF said that there are no second acts in American lives, what I think he really meant was that there’s an expectation that there should be no barriers between the desire and the fulfilment of the desire. And that’s a very intriguing comment, perfectly describing the promises that much of modern consumer culture makes to us all. You want it? You got it. No effort needed, because there’s no longer a second act.

Now that’s much more interesting than no second chances.

And it’s OUR TAXES THAT PAY FOR IT ALL!!!!