Ssssh-schwitt! Phflonk – Dunk! And a cheer from the crowd as the head drops into the basket. The limp limbed torso, still spouting blood from its neck like a hose, is toppled off the slab and into a waiting cart already half full of slick red bodies. Another grey-faced victim is pushed forward up the steps and manhandled into position and the heavy blade is hauled to the top of the frame. Ssssh-schwitt! Phflonk – Dunk!
This is adult work. X-rated activity. Enforcing utopia is a business that children wouldn’t understand. Unless the grown-ups at this scene, sophisticated only as far as hope and revenge will take them, think that they are enacting a fairy tale; the one in which a beauty lies sleeping, spellbound, in amongst a thicket of thorns. An overgrowth so verdant and complex, so effloresced, that to rescue her you must draw your sword and cut it all away, head by bloody head. The sleeping beauty in this case, in revolutionary Paris, being liberty: who eventually wakes up and sees what was done for her sake, and kisses the world.
But liberty is a piece of human imagination. There is no freedom in the material world, where everything depends on its relations with everything else. No equality or brotherhood either, except in the human imagination. Our histories are full of sleeping beauty clearances, sometimes not so bloody, but sometimes bloodier still. And imagination attends most of them. Cleansings, purges, new starts, the sweeping away of the old, the in with the new. What for? To make the world a better place?
Meanwhile the actual world, by which I mean not the splintered world of the human artifice but the whole of the planet Earth and its cargo of forms, runs a different mode to the optimistic clearing and rebuilding, the hopeful erasing of tablets, that we engage in. The Earth itself is changing all the time, spinning through space, cooling and heating, flowering here, rupturing there, but it changes like a moving shadow changes, without purpose. Its mentor is the sun, whose own progress is a continuous mighty burn on the way to a massive explosion, a broadcasting of energy that promulgates diversity wherever it can lodge. And how well it has lodged here on Earth! Every so often we glimpse the huge, endwarfing totality of it all and fear engulfs us. That’s when we get the bulldozers out. Human imagination, however powerful a thing, is not strong enough to face up to the complex pointlessness of the sun’s broadcast. We would rather set about manufacturing a new hope; and to do that we are prepared to face down the horrors of our own making. The liberty of the torsos. The equality of bloodbuckets. The brotherhood of heads.
Let me tell you a story about the time Jackie was first in hospital. He was only a couple of years old, tiny as an animal. He lay there in bed with eyes like wet stones. He had suffered a series of seizures and Lola and I were waiting at his bedside for the doctor’s prognosis. We sat motionless like those gorillas in the cage in the zoo, uncomprehending, waiting to be released, for what seemed like – is, in the gorillas’ case – years; when suddenly the curtain was drawn aside and a stranger’s face appeared. He said he was the curate at the local church and that on Sunday the congregation would be saying a prayer for the boy. He wanted to know if there was anything else he could do? It was immense in the middle of our despair to suddenly feel this press of the community, one we hadn’t even known was there. Later, when the crisis had passed, my wife went to visit the vicar to thank him and returned with the news that she was taking the boy to be baptized, and also, that she was getting baptized herself! And to qualify for that, she had to attend bible classes! It was such a sudden escalation of spiritual warfare that I had to hang on to her to stop myself falling over.
Her bible studies consisted of going in detail through the gospel of St. Luke. One evening she returned from class shaking her bible, aghast at the radicalism of this man Jesus, this tough love merchant from the other side of history. “‘He who is not with me is against me,’” she shouted. She opened it at chapter nine, where he is sending forth his disciples without food, without staves – without sticks to protect themselves – and without money, sending them as lambs among wolves – and here’s her point, she yelled, as she flung the book across the room – without even letting them say goodbye to their families! He demands that they ditch everything to follow him. “One of them asks if he can bury his dead father before he goes.” No, says Jesus. “He says ‘no’!” She squealed. “He says ‘let the dead bury their own dead’!” ‘No man, having but his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of god.’ Cleansings, purges, new starts, the sweeping away of the old, the in with the new. Jesus was full of it. “What do you think?” she said. “He had a sign on his office desk, engraved ‘Do It Now!’?”
Two measures of fundamentalism there – one, the revolutionary, whose impulse is to clear away the history of privilege and make a new, uncompromised future. The other, the prophet, who wants to clear away corruption and decadence to regain paradise; to regain a lost past. But what about the present? The always with us, quite unclearable present? Are we doomed to always feel this discontent with where we are, to live in a perpetual winter of cleansing dreams and disappointed ideas? What other way is there?
It’s a peculiar place for an irreligious soul to look, but I found one in Ignatius Loyola’s chapel in Rome. Loyola was the founder of the Jesuits, a spiritual army ranked against the clearances being made by Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century. Who went sweeping out the attics of faith and knocking the heads off statues of saints in what is now known as the reformation. And Loyola’s army was the spearhead of the Catholic Church’s fight back, the Counter Reformation. You can visit the private chapel in his apartments next to the Jesuit church of Il Gesu, a plain barrel vault painted in an elaborate optical illusion that looks like a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Until you stand at the spot marked out in the middle of the floor and the whole thing springs into your perception as an ornate, rectangular room carved with cherubs and volutes. The counter form itself was the baroque. Not the uncluttered horizon of the protestant fundamentalists, but a twisting, curving, heavily freighted exuberance, not clear, not flat, hardly even explainable; and now, five hundred years later, a secular transformation of the baroque has become a figure for multiplicity promoters. Who see in its dissolutions, in its folds and complications, an analogue of the actual world that can complicate the illusionary abstraction of the clearances.
“That spot in the middle of the floor,” says the guide, a fresh-faced young novice Jesuit priest all the way from Korea, “is the God’s eye view, from which everything in the chaotic world can be seen for what it is.” Never mind god, I think to myself. What about us? And you see how this works? You don’t render the world explicable by clearing away obstacles and irrelevances but by carefully considering all that lies before you. Because everything is relevant. The tabula rasa of the fundamentalists is an erased tablet – but that is not what the world is. What it is is a tabula scripta – one with all the writing, the accumulated fund of all its forms, pulsing, present and intact. How do you make a better world? There is no better world.