Back in Amsterdam again, Lola and I have a rare day together on our own in the house. So we clean it, top to bottom. It feels as intimate as cleaning each other. And while we clean, surrounded by the scent of polish and the soft buff of dusters, we talk. It’s lovely, peaceful and domestic. I tell Lola all about old man Bob the artist and what he said about the oxygen of the atmosphere being created, and his three-point plan for global warming. I tell her about the kid on the plane and how he reminded me of the original slogan for this quest of How To Like Everything – live in the present, believe in nothing, know what you know. I tell her about the simple but incomprehensible idea that underpins the whole enterprise, which is that there is no past and no future, only the present.
“Oh yes,” she says, “your ontology bollocks.”
And then she starts telling me about meeting a man on the street the other day who told her about being a Sufi. “You’d like Sufi. They are people of peace. They live in the present – which is to them the present moment in which God’s creation continuously unfolds – and because they are located in the present they live without hope but also without fear.” It’s Islam, Sufi, but it’s an Islamism so special, a surrender so deep, it seems not like religion at all. Seems like something else altogether. Lola’s right, I do like her description – where Buddhism is about nothing, Sufism is about everything. Buddhism strives for nothing to eliminate suffering, Sufism suffers everything. So I ask her who this Sufi is she’s met on the street.
“He’s called Bamba. You must have seen him. Drives that big black Audi. Parks it right out there on the bridge sometimes.”
“The pimpmobile?” I ask, in horror. “He’s a pimp, that guy. How can he be a Sufi? How can you have a Sufi pimp?”
“He’s not a pimp. He runs a charity looking after retired women.”
“But I saw him taking money! Right there, outside the house. Big wads of cash.”
“That’s right,” she says, “he runs a charity. He’s not a pimp. He helps women. I like him.”
Lola sees the best in everyone, but this is ridiculous. So Bamba raises fallen women, I say – to be told that fallen is an Old Testament idea. I mean he saves whores from whoredom – no, saved is a New Testament idea. Whoreing is like any other job, she says. Some people are enslaved by it, some find themselves doing it, some choose to do it, some enjoy it. But they’ve all got to retire sometime, and Bamba helps them when they do. Is this what they call humanism, or is it something else?
Humanists are structuralists. They believe in structure because they are attempting to reconcile the different ways of being human that have arisen in the world – structure to them is a word for the common features of what it is to be human. So they study language, the prime quality of being human. They catalogue the basic sounds the human pharynx can produce. They invented the universal language of Esperanto in an attempt to bring us all together. They are after unity.
But Lola is not a humanist, she’s a vitalist. She believes in structure like humanists do, but she does it on behalf of all life, not just human life. In fact we first met at a seminar in London devoted to a linguistic proposition that was not about unifying humanity with a common language but attempting to make it easier for things like us humans to interface: it was not about Esperanto but about pidgin English. Let me explain.
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN in idiomatic English. It is not the same language as World English, as that Dutchman pointed out back there in public space. In twelve years time people will understand him and not me. Because idiomatic English is dense and rhetorical, full of homely sayings and colonialist assumptions and question marks. Maybe it is untranslatable in the full sense.
English has become the Lingua Franca – an old name for a universal spoken tongue that dates back to the Holy Roman Empire, meaning the language of the Franks – for three reasons. First, Hollywood speaks it. Second, it has ditched most of the details that other languages find necessary – gender and case declension – so it is not so much to learn. Third, it is accidental. At first this seems full of difficult irregularity, but in the end it is an advantage because it makes it resilient – it hardly matters how it is spoken. You can be as clumsy with English as you want. Try speaking Dutch to the Dutch and they will laugh at you because it is rare for them to hear it spoken by a foreigner and they are not used to the distortions in language foreign speakers produce. With English, grammar hardly ever gets in the way of sense. Precision, maybe, but not blunt sense.
The seminar on pidgin English looked at the six questions – who, what, where, when, why and how – to see if the language could be further compressed. The discussion, bizarre as it is, belongs in a book called How To Like Everything, because these are the everything questions. They are the questions taught at journalism school, because if you answer them all you know you will have covered your subject. They are called “five w’s and an h”, which itself is an example of accidental English: why are they not six w’s? And what follows is what the seminar concluded.
Who and what are about material presence in the world. The difference between them is a species one – who is for humans, what is for everything else. If humans were created beings, that would be a significant difference; but if we are emergent beings, and have evolved through the same processes as everything else, we only need one word. We could combine who and what like this: Whot? That is the epistemological question. Know what you know.
Why and how are about ends and means. If they could be combined the edifice of moral anxiety that arises out of reasons for action and the methods employed might evaporate. Torture and bombs might not exist! So we could combine why and how like this: whow. Whow? Is the ethical question. Believe in nothing.
Lastly, where and when. One explanation of the present moment, in which the actual world can be glimpsed, is Einstein’s theory of relativity. His word ‘spacetime’ was made to frame the nature of existence. Space is where and time is when, but the two are inseparable; hence ‘spacetime’. The two questions where? And when? Could likewise be written together, as ‘wherewhen?’ So now all questions begin with a w and there are only three of them: Whot, Whow and Wherewhen. Wherewhen is the metaphysical question. It is the question to which the answer is ‘herenow’. Live in the present.
And here’s a complication, pointed out to me after the seminar by Lola on a hilariously romantic bus ride home. If space and time were time and space instead, ‘timespace’, and the question was not where and when but when and where, ‘whenwhere’, the answer here and now, ‘herenow’, would be now and here, which comes together as ‘nowhere’. Nowhere! And so, back to utopia. The only possible world.