Father and Son

There have been many novels and short stories based upon the sins of the father being vested in the behaviour of the son. The murderous instinct. The weakness for alcohol. The failings with women. More so than mothers and daughters, I’d venture. Perhaps men have a greater propensity for weakness, full stop.

In the last Blog, I mused on the notion that every serious condition has its weaker form in so-called ‘normal’ behaviour. In this case, as we age and time begins to speed up, we start to morph into our parents. Not wholly, for there is some fought-for traits and beliefs that we maintain to salvage the respectability of our individuality. Nevertheless, we find ourselves uttering phrases, coughing, adopting a body position or a splenetic view of some social behaviour and cringe inwardly as we realise the awful nature of our metamorphosis. Our parents, often from beyond the grave, occupy us like those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

A dear friend gave me a wonderful, three volume, early 19^th century translation of A Thousand and One Nights, for Christmas. I am reading it at exactly the same age my father read it to keep alive his Urdu. For at least a thousand and one nights he had waded through the Sanskrit, and practised orally on a Pakistani family in Lanark to prepare for his last trip to India. As he processed round Delhi, crowds gathered when he spoke, for his accent was unchanged since he left in 1947.

“Your father is great man,” they’d say, “He speaks Urdu classically. It is such a pleasure for us.”

Meanwhile, I completed a novel, as Christmas approached. You can find the first two chapters elsewhere on this web site: Kamil the Historian and His Tales of the Magus. The structure is similar to A Thousand and One Nights and I had that book’s form firmly in my mind, as I wrote it.

No matter what I do. No matter how much I loved and hated him, he is still there, like some burrowing fish, stirring up the ocean-bed of my mind.

Labels: Sins of the father...

¶ 3:13 PM 2 comments

Stockholm Syndrome

It's a strange thing, Stockholm Syndrome. I first came across it when Patty Hearst raided a bank with her captors. Recently, the kidnapped Austrian girl, Natascha Kampusch, now a young woman, revealed her fondness for the man who had kept her in a cellar for all those years. So far she has refused to reveal what he did to her. Prisoners of war have displayed similar feelings towards their guards. Whilst these extreme cases make exotic and disturbing reading, I began to wonder about more humdrum examples. Psychologists are becoming interested in mild versions of the various psychoses and neuroses that, in their full-blown forms, might lead straight to the padded cell, drugs or electric shocks. Quite a proportion of the population wander quite happily (or miserably) through life, without causing harm to anyone and without any need for a diagnosis of their slight abnormalities. As bell curves go, there must be within the range of what we think of as 'normal', a fair proportion on either side of the apex, who display symptoms just short of dysfunctionality. We may even think of them as 'characters'.

So what would be the faintest imprint of Stockholm Syndrome in every day existence? Supporting a football team that never wins anything, yet loving it beyond measure (previous Blog)? Staying in a marriage which shackles us in the misery of another's narrow horizons and calling it love? Unable to put down a loathsome pet? In fact, any continuing circumstance or ritual which both subjugates us and at the same time makes us feel we do not want to change it, no matter how banal and every day.

We are all, to some degree captive to behaviours we know are demeaning, belittling or simply irrational. We should stop and ask ourselves what we want to be. Imprisoned or free.

It only takes an act of will. Only....

Labels: Stockholm Syndrome

¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments

To Disrespect

The verb seems to be used everywhere. Once the word was known primarily for its noun status. You showed disrespect to the elderly, the flag, the humanity of another, a creed. Now, seemingly, it has become overused in its transitive verbal form. People disrespect each other at all levels. Street gang members are maimed or worse for disrespecting those of another. Boyfriends fight like enraged bullocks if they imagine disrespect towards their females. Spokespersons bleat endlessly in the media about disrespect towards their so-called communities (see previous blog!). Football managers grunt that their competitors disrespect them by putting out weaker teams against them. The workplace is riddled with complaints of disrespect whenever performance is challenged (see another previous blog!).

Some of these scenarios may have more than a kernel of validity to them but it’s the use of the word I find disrupting my sense of fairness.

Where it impacts most perfidiously is when someone or some group objects to criticism. Rather than accept that criticism is part of life’s healthy debate and should be rebutted by the use of evidence, now we hear people complaining that they are being disrespected, as though they are unfailingly virtuous. The verb ‘to disrespect’ has crept in on the clunkingly cruder end of political correctness. It is used to forestall debate by implying that its victim inhabits a natural moral high ground which protects him or her from any challenge.

It is too often an active agent of censure, a straightjacket on the freedom of speech.

It is in that sense I disrespect it.

Labels: Respecting language

¶ 8:30 PM 0 comments

In today's Guardian, Germaine Greer attacks a nerdish Plain English group for awarding her The Golden Bull, a kind of pseuds' corner prize for purveyors of opaque English. Germaine's defence is that she was quoting Immanuel Kant - as she was certain most Guardian readers would have realised (!). Her diatribe was splendidly over the top, a literary swatting of lesser humanity. I couldn't resist my Muse, if a little crude in her influence:

Hell hath no fury like Prof Greer
(Big Brother flunkette and TV seer)
Piqued by the Golden Bull, her rant
Showed she can be an awesome Kant -
disciple

Labels: Germaine Greer

¶ 5:54 PM 0 comments

(Musing on the way objects, people and environments quickly become caricatures of themselves as the media fixes them in the aspic of populism, led to this poem.)



Venice


Venice is a recumbent dead octopus engorged in the sun of a hot May day
Its tentacles rising and falling, bridging canals and submerging in a lagoon
Pinkly soft, offering itself, benign and bloated, without threat
To its Bank Holiday feeder fish, picking morsels off its exposed parts

It has the Borges quality of absurd paradox, a tenacious refusal to adapt
Despite the domino effects of time, a self-fulfilling prophecy of flotation
It only exists for the solipsism of its visitors, in coffee table books
In films and in lines of water-soaked verse. Central is
St Mark's Square, a great bowling alley with one enormous skittle
Like a misplaced Diane Arbus close to one end of a runnel
Edged by exclusive terraced grandeur, windowed deathly open eyes
Blind to the liquid flow of human desire to embrace and know

Venice is not for depth, it is a metaphor for surface
A circulatory theme park, the antithesis of bone and blood
Whose cold carcass is caught in the voracious kiss of nature's maw

Starting again with a clean bay, who would draw this profile now?

Labels: Venice

¶ 3:24 PM 0 comments