On the train back from Exeter. It’s a three-hour ride so, like the train, this post will cover a lot of territory. I start back to school tomorrow, and a lot has been simmering for a while.
Yesterday I took a bus to Okehampton, then made the long uphill hike onto the moor, past the military station from which they sometimes do maneuvers and fire shells up on the moor. Yesterday (not a shelling day) the camp was marked by young men shouting—from a distance it looked like they were engaged in what was for them surely an epic match of tug-o-war—and sheep grazing in the fields. Nice little contrast. The day was blue and blustery. After getting battered by the wind up on one of the tors (the bald, round, rocky peaks) I decided I preferred the wooded hike of the day before. But all in all a lovely day.
Three days out of the city, and not a word about Jade Goody. All that is about to come to an end. Sigh. London tabloids are obsessed with this woman. She made her fame on “Big Brother” or some such reality TV show, on which she was told (on camera) that she has cervical cancer and that it would probably kill her. Now at age 27, she’s on her deathbed. Every day brings reports of how Jade is doing. Her wedding day a couple of weeks ago was a media event. (She wore a dress fitted with a morphine pump.) Then came her husband’s trial for assault or something (not against her, blessedly). Then the baptism of Jade and her two young sons. Then her checking back into the hospital, where one day Jade awoke to find an odd woman with a hammer in her bag standing over her bedside. Then the discharge from the hospital so she can die at home. The tabs have no end of material. If Jade is still alive, I’m sure she’ll be front-page material on the Tube again tomorrow morning.
This is a really odd time we live in, where so little is private anymore. (Yes, blogs are part of that.) There’s another row going on these days over a book published by an apparently well-known writer (Julie Myerson’s “The Lost Child: A True Story”) in which she details her 20-year-old son’s drug abuse, whether with or without his permission is a matter of some debate. What’s private? What’s appropriately public? What’s fair game for a mother to publish about her children?
The Guardian carried an essay last week about such matters, in which it quoted an American writer from 50 years ago (Philip Roth, I think it was; he must have been young then), commenting on how reality was surpassing fiction for inventiveness. The same day carried a review of TC Boyle’s novel about the real-life story of the women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life—the nonfiction story is gripping enough; why Boyle had to novelize it I’m not sure—and a piece about how somebody other than Maya Angelou has been writing Maya Angelou’s Twitter page. Who can even tell what’s true anymore? Then again, Pontius Pilate had the jump on that question 2000 years ago.
The essay in the Guardian (largely about Myerson’s book) said: “Philip Roth called the memoir ‘probably the most manipulative of all literary forms’: it could never be as frank as it presented itself to be—true frankness was to be found in fiction. ‘With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented,” said the US writer. Partly what he meant by that was that the things a writer excluded in a memoir were as interesting as those included, and also that, this being the real and not fictional world, others would have different versions of the same experience. Counter-texts often remain invisible…”
A blog is like a running memoir, I suppose—or rather, a memoir without the tempering process that happens as memories sit over time, like wine aging in a bottle. (Which probably makes it unlike a memoir at all, but humor me.) What to include, what to process privately, what’s worth neither, I suppose anyone who blogs ponders these things. I hope so anyway.
And this brings me back to that play I was part of last December, as promised. This being March, you can see my ambivalence over whether to write about it at all. But this one has gone through the moderate deliberations of a short aging process, so here goes. (And not to be coy here, but as always, what I leave out, you simply don't know. Or why. It’s all part of the conundrum of getting what we trust is information from what we read.) ("Ooooh," he added with some self-mockery. "How post-modern is that?")
First of all, my qualifications for being part of this endeavor came not through acing an audition or my having any particular talent. A classmate invited me simply because I have an American accent. Not that Brits can’t speak with an American accent, but that's how I got cast. There’s a series on London called Showflat in which artists present exhibits or installations or theatrical works in their own homes. My classmate shared a house with a guy who organizes the events. And thus I was invited to take part in a provocative piece on waterboarding. (Waterboarding, as you may recall, is a practice that the US used recently in interrogations of suspected terrorists. It’s often described as “simulated drowning.” There’s been a lot of debate over whether it’s torture.)
An American expat artist in London decided to do a piece on waterboarding. He invited friends and the public to his Showflat event, but didn’t really explain what it was about. For the first part of the evening people milled about downstairs, drinking wine, noshing and schmoozing, and looking form time to time at video monitors showing a chess match. After an hour or two they were invited one by one to come up into the attic, where they found the artist, hooded, strapped to a board with his head lower than his feet, two masked people standing by him and another sitting in the corner making drawings of the event. The chess board was off to the side. Loud music was playing, some of it quite insipid and ironic, like the theme song for Barney the purple dinosaur, which is a saccharine song about friendship. (Apparently some of these songs have been played loudly and incessantly during waterboardings abroad.) As the person from the party below climbed the ladder into the attic, she or he was given a piece of paper that said the artist is on the board and he wants you to pour water on his face. It identified this practice as waterboarding. (I was one of the masked figures, but since the music was so loud and I was standing on the other side of the board to which the artist was strapped, there was nothing for me to say. So much for the reason I was cast.) Then the person had to confront the decision of whether to participate or not. As masked figures, we were simply to point out the water, hold a towel tight over the artist’s face, and leave the person to decide. We were not to try to persuade them one way or the other.
Jon (the artist) had worked out a signal with us whereby he would indicate when he wanted the person to stop. When we got the signal, we stopped the person and checked to make sure Jon was OK. Then the person would go back downstairs again, sworn to secrecy until the end of the evening as to what was going on upstairs. I’m told several troubled-looking people descended the attic stairs, but there were very few who decided not to pour the water when given the choice. Some seemed very uncomfortable but did it anyway. A few did it with smiles on their faces. One or two were uncomfortable and smiling, both.
I was invited into this about a week in advance, and I was really torn as to whether to take part. Jon and I exchanged extensive emails over several days. You can read Jon’s description of the project, along with some excerpts he took from my emails here and here. (The second one gets more to the meat of the matter.) I’m still troubled by the whole thing. I can see what Jon was trying to provoke in his audience (I think the chess match was to add a horrid sense of rational detachment), but I wonder, by domesticating waterboarding—literally domesticating it—did he actually make it less horrific? As I continue to reflect on this, I think he (we) did. Still, was it worthwhile? Maybe. Of course, there’s a lot more that could be said.
Not to distract from the event itself, but one of the spookiest aspects of the whole evening for me was leaving his flat and knowing what had gone on behind closed doors there. Each house on the street looks the same from the outside. Each gives no sign of what goes on inside. With the news stories of Josef Fritzl still relatively fresh (Fritzl is the Austrian who kept his daughter in his basement as a sexual prisoner for 24 years), I found myself wondering what was going on behind other closed doors on that or any other block.
The ironic coda to all this was that when I left Jon’s house that night, the last thing I said to the man I had recently stood by while he was strapped to a waterboard was “Merry Christmas.”
A few excerpts from the papers recently:
¶ From a review of the book “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better": “We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year longer or so, and we’d trust each other more.” The book tracks all sorts of scales of social wellness and ill health (e.g., mental illness, obesity, child mortality), and sets them against scales of economic equality, country by country. In almost all categories, the most equal societies like Japan and Sweden fare best in social wellness and the least equal (the UK, Portugal, and the US) fare worst.
[Eric’s editorial comment: Is anybody in the US taking note?]
¶ The British Medical Association is calling for elimination of charges for all prescription drugs in England—as is already the practice in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As it is now, those who do not qualify for free medicines pay only £7.10 per prescription (about $10), and given the extensive list of conditions that exempt people from having to pay for their drugs, only 11% of prescriptions require payment. “The BMA chairman, Dr Hamish Meldrum, said: ‘Free prescriptions for people with long-term conditions is a laudable aim, but it does not go far enough. The system we have at the moment isn't working, and is unfair on many patients. Making the list of exemptions longer will not make it fairer. Ultimately, we could end up with a situation where only a tiny proportion of prescriptions attract a charge, which would be nonsensical. Abolishing prescription charges altogether is the fairest and the simplest option.’"
[Eric’s editorial comment: See above.]
Back in London
... and I have my window open for the first time in months. Time to air this musty old house out a bit. Birds are singing. I have my sheets on the line for that fresh spring smell. Robin arrives for a visit on Wednesday.
I feel like I've caught my breath. Tomorrow we start up again.
Note to self: Remember to breathe...
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