Leviathan

Linda laid these tiles on our apothiki

We seem unable to avoid bickering. I suspect I am being pointed somewhere – on villages? communities? getting old?
“When I was very young” I said to Lin “I thought the default condition was tidiness."
People I hardly noticed cleared up after me and I didn’t even notice – having my nappies changed - I suppose I must have had them - my washing done, my food prepared. Later it was housework. I knew how to muck out a stable and clean tack – from enthusiasm for a pony – long before compunction to make a bed or clean up a room. The first space I learned to keep tidy – immaculately so - was the inside of a sailing boat – from enthusiasm for not scraping a mélange of glass, broken eggs, cutlery and clothing from the cabin sole the first time we hit a sea. I didn’t know houses needed maintaining until I was thirty. And I didn’t think about whether a community was sustainable – let alone worry about whether a village or a street worked until late middle age – 50 or older? apart
Now I’m seventy I recognise the default condition is mess, collapse, corrosion – a relentless conspiracy of moth and rust to corrupt. Without work- constant energy - things fall. I’m acquainted with the dust to which I shall return. Lin sees entropy all about – paintwork fades and blackens with smoke, walls that mould and bleed efflorescence, roof tiles that loosen and crack, invasive weeds, woodworm and termites, dry rot, wet rot, leaking joints, speckles of oxide lifting paint, bleaching wood shrinking in the sun. Something Graham Hurley wrote he’d learned researching his brilliant procedurals ‘that so-called “vol crime” would never go away.  It was like the weather, or gravity.’
Lin thinks a house can be made good; gets morose when I behave and sound unconvinced, but the Naz knew “The poor you have with you always”. Graham puts it ‘Pompey scrotes would never give up.  Never.  You could depend on it.’
Lin still seeks to drive up our Performance Indicators, but as the Bible’s first atheist wrote – to get past a censor – ‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?’ Greeks invented philosophies that engaged with the despair that can attend housework, stoicism to confront the inevitability of unending maintenance, irony about its ultimate futility. Fatalism - μοιρολατρίαin - knowing dust will never give up.

Δύνασαι νὰ σύρης ἒξω τὸν Λευϊάθαν διὰ ἀγκίστρου; ἦ νά περιδέσης τὴν γλῶσσαν αὐτοῦ μὲ Φορβιὰν;

Villages? What makes them work. Why the question even? Because cities are imbalanced in their relation to their surroundings. They parasite on the land, forcing people off it into their slums and sprawling suburbs. The world’s trend is towards vaster cities. Towards citification. My stepfather would speak of the coming city of England, where on some busy weekends you'd have to book your visit to the countryside as otherwise it would be 'full'. In the advanced economies the countryside has become a metro recreation ground – commodified views, picturesque with footpaths that circuit back to carparks off big roads, a place for second homes and transit hubs for big box distribution and factory farms. In England now hardly 4% of those who live in the countryside make their living there. The urban bourgeois yearn to live there and buy second homes in villages. The poorer like a spin in the countryside. What’s left of villagers, especially youth, find nothing to do there and look to the city for a life, for education, training, for health and for the possibility of work.
Is this an approximate diagnosis of a problem? How could the picture be enriched, its crude brushstrokes made more precise while maintaining the general impression? If the countryside is so congenial to townspeople why do some people crave Dubai? Now there’s my idea of a netherworld – concrete Mordor-on-Sea. But lots of people love it. There’s no crime to see, the apartments are spotless and spiderless, the pools blue and the domestic help upon which this sanitized limbo depends pliable, almost invisible – unless like us, you take a bendy bus from the mighty airport before first light to see Satwa Bus Station...

...Give me a bicycle and a map and I’d end up liking the place – don’t I come from Birmingham? – pedaling round the underbelly, trunkless lots, amputated pipes of various gauges sticking up from nowhere, premature Ozymandias. Look upon Dubai and despair.
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What if the earth refused credit? "For your seeds I loan you nutrients and space." It’s not like that among men. The first question isn’t about the earth but about human property. Who lets you use this plot of land on which to grow your crops? Whose army protects it from invasion? Whose local government decides this land is for growing food rather than providing space for building, road, rail, runway or car park? What laws protect your rights to use this land, enjoy its usufruct? Who contests its ownership? What if the sun demanded a down payment, or the weather allowed you a slate? It’s not like that among us.
When does a child learn about ancient lights? About the law as it relates to casting shadow? What a row is in preparation about selling the sun, and rights over its harvest. Come come, of course the sun is free, as was coal, oil and wood. Where the law and money enter is in the knowledge that made – makes - them into easily available energy. The cost of solar energy will contain profit to recover the investment in education and technology that allows us to focus the sun, as through a magnifying glass we used it to make a flame or to signal with a heliograph. Without human inventiveness the sun’s heat, for all the divinity men ascribe its source for the myriad use of sunlight, is hardly more useful than water vapour from a boiling kettle. Fruit dropped on men’s head for millennia. Isaac Newton struck by an apple mid-muse thought gravity. Steam bubbled too, even powered the playful aeolipile, but James Watt ignored the vapour streaming from the kettle spout, mused on the unharnessed power in the invisible gas heaving at its lid. For the sun to power a train or a hand-drill, to fry an egg in winter or deliver a hot shower in Reykjavik, someone’s going to want to be paid. It's for the intensification we’ll be taxed. I’m not sure William Blake decrying the sequestration by men of what should be God’s gift understood this.
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So what can be done?

The Leaders of SYRIZA, PASOK and ND have separately and successively tried and failed to form a government; some rainbow coalition that would support continued austerity. Lock in, or rather lock-out. We watch and pray and paddle and I feel an almost constant nagging worry in the pit of my stomach.  

An English-language summary of the transcripts of the meetings held on 13/05/2012 between the President of the Republic, Karolos Papoulias, and the leaders of all the political parties that were elected to parliament following the 06/05/2012 elections, in an attempt to form a coalition government.         

Emma and Richard in Corfu

Keronvel, Brittany

Sun in the early hours was the last we saw on Saturday. Laurence, the Moals’ son, knocked on the door and asked if all was OK. Speaking fluent English he confirmed some of my conjecture about the farming economy, using the word ‘balance’ severally, mentioning the need to match supply and demand of vegetables by timing of crops and investment in distribution – transport and storage. I surmised he held an agricultural degree to which he’d added a Masters from Abersytwyth; lived in Brest working as an agricultural advisor. He spoke of the problem of keeping people on the land; the need to balance local and international, tourism and agriculture, town and country, then he must dash off to play the Breton pipes. In the late afternoon, I took a cycle ride along the coast towards St Pol discovering small places – an oyster farm, a château with high walls, a chapel by the shore, back roads, lanes and alleys. Out of the car the landscape was, as always, rewarding – closer and slower. The grey wet didn’t matter. NEWS FROM HOME Richard phoned. “The weather’s fine here”. Our electricity faltered and went off altogether in the evening. After an hour without power we found the main switch tripped. Watched ‘Mississippi Burning’ dubbed in French after a supper of roast chicken and one of the three cauliflowers M’sieur Moal brought us yesterday. The rain increased. Mum phoned. Ill news. She heard last week the people planning to buy her house have been let down in their chain. Mum’s going to wait and hope and not put the house back on the market at once. “X says she’s going to raise the money one way or another. The children are down for the local school.” VACCINATION AGAINST CRUELTY? Watched Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogart in 'The Night Porter' until late – in a film from 1973. The plot follows an affair in peacetime Vienna between a concentration camp victim and her Nazi torturer. To be snide, it looks over 30 years later, like a film that moves between two camps. In 1973 submission and dominance was underground, now via Punk, Madonna, Gay Lib, and myriad other routes S&M is High Street, referenced in M&S. The psychology is known. Human’s have ingeniously eroticised real cruelty into a consensual game. By 1992 Iris Murdoch (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: Chatto & Windus) was saying this sort of thing was sentimental. It could also mean that many people more sensitised to the vile cruelty around them have sought a substitute for denial. Of course, there’s the quiet struggle of Tutu’s conciliation commissions in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Ruanda; the work of forensic teams on the body pits of Bosnia and elsewhere, collecting evidence for the International Court at the Hague (may Phil Shiner and his colleagues bring our righteous man from No 10 there), but a local council chief executive used the adjective ‘vanilla’ the other day to decry unimaginative policy, and he would have understood what I’m saying, alert in ways I respect most deeply to a lurking folkish layer in the prosperous leafy suburb where he works. (03/01/10 See The White Ribbon on the rural roots of fascism) Is there now some collective intention to know about the closeness of evil? Is the pervasiveness of S&M imagery a way to keep our nature before us yet bearable? I conjecture, most cautiously, that large tracts of the population are less likely than the holy righteous to project impulses to do evil outwards, seeking enemies deserving punishment and elimination among decadent strangers. Are we vaccinated against cruelty by perversity? Not if you read the news. Cruelty has gone indoors and into cyberspace. This April a tourist magazine I read, while at our estate agent in Corfu town, described a moment in the Easter celebrations when believers chorus “A curse on those who killed Christ”. In Durrell’s book on Corfu he writes of the crockery smashing we’d both enjoyed last Easter Saturday as ‘a ceremony for the casting out of Judas.’(p.84). He says it happens ‘at eleven o’clock on Good Friday’. Is he wrong or has there been a politic shifting of the event to less doleful Saturday, when more visitors from the modern secular grind can assemble at the weekend just to enjoy the spectacle - another less circuitous transformation? Saturday 16 June 2007 Steady rain driven before a steady westerly dripped off canopies at the Saturday market in Morlaix. I bought some roast potatoes to eat as we strolled and tasty crumbly pâté to take home. By the time we were back at Keronvel the sky was lighter. We headed to a small peninsular between two rivers – Guillet and Horn – just west of the hamlet Kerbrat where a walk runs through shore meadows with views, under the overcast, of rocks lining a ruffled grey sea criss-crossed by tiny figures skimming the shallows inside îsle de Siec attached to colourful kites. I like these habits of pleasure that draw on the quiet power of the elements – sand yachting, wind surfing, sailing and gliding – and detest the noisy pleasures of those who get disruptive fun from the pervasive noise, smell and waste of internal combustion. A beach can provide a setting for all sorts of fun – swimming, sailing, handball, sunbathing, rowing, canoeing, diving, fishing, surfing, picnicking, strolling, sandcastle building, birdwatching, rockpooling, jogging – and then along comes a prat with an outboard motor and everyone else’s pleasure is interrupted – an insult to that idea within democracy which says ‘do what you like so long as it doesn’t stop others doing what they like.’ On Friday we drove twenty miles west towards a growing patch of blue and came to Brignogan and the coast leading north from Grève de Goulven. Boulder lined coves provide shelter from east or west with pleasant paths amid flowers and grasses close to car parks - coastal parkland made the more pleasant by the stewardship of local authorities and the care of visitors. Litter is rare, benches not vandalised. Agriculture and tourism co-exist. When we arrived the sea was distant. By late afternoon it was lapping close under an almost unclouded sky. We examined a menhir with a small crucifix on its summit. I imagined a local bishop claiming this ancient landmark for the church. It wouldn’t stop some of his flock touching it for luck, fertility and potency, but they’d be doing it beneath a cross.