Joyce's welding puns make needlessly explicit what was already implicit and obvious. Rather than a delicate vibration of related meaning, Joyce presents a vulgar demonstration. – Perhaps this is the really obscene thing about his writing; a smutty giggle making pornographic the discrete and commonplace relations between words.
All the world's political and religious systems offer their believers the conviction that there is less human waste, irrelevance, and hostility under their rule than under that of other systems, as if to say that everybody matters, and is beneficial to each and everyone. However, in practice all such systems can do is more or less mask the manifest hazard of individual failure and the fact that the success of others is commonly achieved at the expense of some or every other individual. Since our spontaneous intuition of these facts is very strong, it has proved necessary for political and religious systems to anticipate our doubts by creating a category for the "lost", into which believers can project heretics, infidels, and the evil. Hence the various kinds of hell. This realistic touch makes the religio-political fictions of mankind all the more plausible, and is perhaps the source of all their power.
"It was a curious fact that, although every magician must have known himself to be a fraud and a trickster, he always believed in and greatly feared the supernatural abilities of other medicine men." (E Lucas Bridges, Uttermost Part of the Earth, 286).
Our immediate response to this could be, 'And so it is with writers, musicians, painters and with all experts, all professionals'. But in fairness to the medicine man we should perhaps grant that he might be impressed by his own sleight of hand and that of others in proportion to the admiration this excites. What he fears in other magicians is not the truth of the magic, which he knows is a ludicrous deception, but the fact that it succeeds in deceiving the audience. There is no power in a curse except, and it is a vast exception, that it persuades many that you are indeed cursed.
The arts, like religions, are doubly fraudulent; they not only promise what they cannot deliver, but that which in fact cannot be delivered by any agent at all.
One of the pleasures of travel is that the surfaces of cultures foreign to us throw back an unfamiliar image. For a moment, before our vanity catches its breath, we are objectified. As the earth's populations become more homogeneous this interval grows shorter and shorter.
Corruption is the reassertion of private economy in spite of the planned coercion of an arbitrary power, whether it is a socialist and corporate state or an autocratic monarch. And corruption wears a double aspect; it is thoroughly obnoxious, if you have not yet asserted your own rebellion, and thoroughly desirable if you wish to see the end of oppression and the liberalisation of society. But it is hardly admirable, for those likely to lead the vanguard of this rebellion are also the men (and mostly men) most likely to offend against the rule of law in a well-conducted society.
Objectively, we should admit that corruption in any society is simply the free will working its way round the laws, like a stream diverted and constricted within a culvert that takes advantage of the slightest weakness, and eventually triumphs since the expensive coercive force cannot be long maintained, and so pushes banks and pipes aside to find again the path it would otherwise have taken.
Similarly, in a legalised and officious society, like our own, charm becomes paramount. The officers of state and its corporate extensions, its tools, its extended phenotype, are after all but people, individuals. Charm is the secret signal given from individual to individual, asking to be cut what slack may be offered without arousing the police, who are themselves, nota bene, also susceptible to charm.
Autocrats know all this and strive to demoralise and brutalise their populations so that even this last act of freedom is inhibited; when a population loses its manners it has no more liberty to lose.
But in the long run, and it can be very long, the coercive force of the dreaming intellect, whether it is Kubla Khan or Lord Passfield, will be resisted, will be cut back to the earth by the innocuous but deeply subversive tact of two subjected individuals coming undramatically to agreement. Thus is autocracy destroyed by charm and courtesy.
Two weeks back I had to take to the local council collection point, the 'Recycling Centre', a few pieces of miscellaneous rubbish, a broken microwave, some kitchenware, a few metres of cracked plastic water piping, some leaking shed roofing material, a mound of cardboard boxes, and waste wood from a demolished shed. How much is actually recycled is an open question. The metal, I imagine, has some value (it is, after all, and even though it is now waste, much lower in entropy than the metallic ores from which it was originally derived).
But for all I know the plastics, the cardboard and the wood, are probably marginally economic as resources and may be best burned to generate heat and save primary energy consumption. Perhaps everything except the metal, and in spite of our careful streaming, goes into landfill. The Council would surely say otherwise, but one has doubts. However, the service is free for householders depositing their own domestic rubbish, so these doubts count for little and the place is very popular. Indeed, I had to queue with my groaning truck for some ten minutes to get in to the site.
However, apart from the sound of one car leaving and the next driving in, the shuffling footfall of other visitors on the openwork stairs on the sides of the vast skips, and the intermittent clatter of discarded materials falling into those cavernous containers, the place was completely silent.
Perhaps there were twenty people milling about at any one time and no one said a word. Those who had arrived together communicated by gestures; eye contact was carefully avoided, and even the staff, though heavy, hairy men clearly capable of demolishing a house with their bare hands while laughing cacophonously had the noiseless tact of first class butlers. Whispered queries were answered with discrete gestures. Is this unique to my area, or to Britain? I suspect it might be an extreme case, but of a very general phenomenon. Is it shame? Is that part of the explanation of fly-tipping? No one wants to be seen striding around a tip holding objects which by definition are your possessions, otherwise you would have to pay the fee: a broken electric lawnmower, a third rate chair, a truly hideous lamp? Would we rather drop these after dark in a layby than confess to ownership? Yes, and for the same reason that direct excretion from the body is a very private business. One learns a lot about someone from their spoor, and, now I come to think of it, I really ought not to have told you about the microwave and the kitchen trash. Thank goodness I didn't mention the brands.
At street level distances seem arduous to traverse, long and tedious, and this is true whether looking along a canyon in a Chinese, grid-based city like Kyoto or New York, or snookered in the aggregation of individualist decisions represented in the obstructed views and short vistas of London.
When elevated, however, the spires and the architectural decorations of buildings, that we know to be a fair walk off, are visible as if close by, and, though not quite within the reach of an extended arm, the details, cracks in the masonry excite our curiosity. (I am sitting at a high window, near enough Waterloo Place, looking east to the spire of St Martin in the Fields on North-East corner of Trafalgar Square.)
This is curiously like social and political life. Seen from the ground the mighty of those worlds seem either quite inaccessible or tiresome to reach. However, once in the company of the great, even a pedestrian, such as myself, believes that the others are now neighbours. The friction of the pavement no longer hinders, and the great heights are but a short flight off. This is an illusion. The heart of standing, even in such high places, and even for the mighty themselves is that you simply and absolutely cannot fly.
The film poster told me that "Everyone has something amazing within them." This is a major change: original sin has given way to a Pelmanistic sense of integral value. While that is intrinsically troublesome, and acts as a disincentive to education, the main problem is that it has been combined with a strong anti-rational tendency towards the frankly mystical view that that inner strength of will can render the world infinitely plastic.
The result is that we are coming to believe not only in the legitimacy of our desires, for if we are all wrapped around something amazing, we are all virtuous at heart, but also in our ability to realise these desires, and not just because we are capable, or inherit a scientific tradition of real power, but because there is a supernaturally close co-ordination between our will and the world. We have only to want something for it to be possible.
Such a view is perhaps the result of many decades of economic plenty, and a low awareness of the inevitable and temporarily concealed dangers of the world. Fossil fuels, compound growth, and intense co-operation have together produced such wealth that the consumer is encouraged to feel that any wish whatsoever can be realised.
But there is little point in delivering a reproving lecture on this matter. It would fall on deaf ears, and is in any case redundant, for the world will execute its own infallible remedy to misconceptions. Insofar as the individual believes themselves gifted when they are not, errors will reveal the truth through failure and pain.
However, the process is not instantaneous, and the fantastic individual, as he correctly thinks himself, is not the only sufferer of ill consequences. When a parent is mistaken, the children suffer; when our politicians are deluded in this fashion, the electorate is in deep trouble. Blair was internally convinced of his own power and capacity, and his freely exhibited desires were both nebulous and marketable. He meant to do good, and he believed that he had but to wish well for all manner of things to be well. He impressed himself, and many voters were similarly impressed. Brown was probably not troubled in this way. The authentic version of Original Sin was deeply active in his mind, though largely as a conviction of its presence in others. Like a true Puritan he was certain to be one of the elect. Fortunately, the world saved us from him, as it has saved humanity from many another idealistic narcissist who believes his selfish inclinations are a general panacea. But in the saving, as ever and ever will be, much harm was done, for this is the actual, gradually unwinding world, and no other.
A few weeks back one of the more prominent British political commentators wrote:
Last night, giving the annual William Wilberforce address to the Conservative Christian Fellowship, Stephen Crabb, the rising Tory star and Welsh secretary, noted that “here we are in 2015… [and] it is easier for a politician to admit to smoking weed or watching porn than it is to admit that they might take prayer seriously in their daily life."
Indeed, but that is a sign of health in our politics, and all the more welcome because such signs are hardly gathering in drifts on our windowsills. Would anyone, seriously, want our politicians to be the sort of people who think that the probability of desired outcomes can be increased by just willing them to be so, or yet more strangely by requesting the intervention of an unknown and unmanifested power? Would anyone, really, want our politicians to be the sort of people who, talking to an unconnected telephone, pretend to consult a third party for guidance on difficult matters? Isn't it obvious that such people have reasons for their actions that they would rather we did not see, or, worse still, that they are so confused that they genuinely do not know what to do.
Whatever may be said in favour of those who attend churches, and there is a good deal, the disadvantages of declared faith in politics are vastly greater. And in any case, a secular politics would have the ancillary benefit of being free of affirmations such as this, released today by our own Prime Minister, David Cameron, a declaration so nauseatingly weak and lacking in depth that one has to hope it is insincere.