A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (32 page)

We get scared by history; we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue

And then what? Everyone became wiser? People stopped building new ghettoes in which to practise the old persecutions? Stopped making the old mistakes, or new mistakes, or new versions of old mistakes? (And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.)

Dates don’t tell the truth. They bawl at us – left, right, left, right, pick ’em up there you miserable shower. They want to make us think we’re always progressing, always going forward. But what happened after 1492?

In fourteen hundred and ninety-three
He sailed right back across the sea

That’s the sort of date I like. Let’s celebrate 1493, not 1492; the return, not the discovery. What happened in 1493? The predictable glory, of course, the royal flattery, the heraldic promotions on the Columbus scutcheon. But there was also this. Before departure a prize of 10,000 maravedis had been promised to the first man to sight the New World. An ordinary sailor had won this bounty, yet when the expedition returned Columbus claimed it for himself (the dove still elbowing the raven from history). The sailor went off in disappointment to
Morocco, where, they say, he became a renegade. It was an interesting year, 1493.

History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, apian, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it’s connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it’s more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator’s roller rather than camel-hair brush.

The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don’t quite know why we’re here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty – are we a voluntary patient? – we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.

There’s one thing I’ll say for history. It’s very good at finding things. We try to cover them up, but history doesn’t let go. It’s got time on its side, time and science. However ferociously we ink over our first thoughts, history finds a way of reading them. We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer), but history discovers what we did to them. We lost the
Titanic
, forever it seemed, in the squid-ink depths, but
they turned it up. They found the wreck of the
Medusa
not long ago, off the coast of Mauretania. There wasn’t any hope of treasure, they knew that; and all they salvaged after a hundred and seventy-five years were a few copper nails from the frigate’s hull and a couple of cannon. But they went and found it just the same.

What else can love do? If we’re selling it, we’d better point out that it’s a starting-point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that’s not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers. By which I don’t mean great fuckers; we all know about power as an aphrodisiac (an auto-aphrodisiac too). Even our democratic hero Kennedy serviced women like an assembly-line worker spraying car bodies.

There is an intermittent debate, in these last dying millennia of puritanism, about the connection between sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can’t keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I’d rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make more sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I don’t say we should pardon them – on the contrary, we need to fan their guilt. But by harnessing this useful emotion we restrict their sinning to the erotic sphere, and produce a countervailing integrity in their governing. That’s my theory, anyway.

In Great Britain, where most of the politicians are men, there’s a tradition among the Conservative Party to interview the wives of potential candidates. This is, of course, a demeaning occasion, with the wife being vetted by the local members
for normality. (Is she sane? Is she steady? Is she the right colour? Does she have sound views? Is she a tart? Will she look good in photos? Can we let her out canvassing?) They ask these wives, who dutifully vie with one another in supportive dullness, many questions, and the wives solemnly swear their joint commitment to nuclear weapons and the sanctity of the family. But they don’t ask them the most important question: does your husband love you? The question shouldn’t be misunderstood as being merely practical (is your marriage free from scandal?) or sentimental; it’s an exact enquiry about the candidate’s fitness to represent other people. It’s a test of his imaginative sympathy.

We must be precise about love. Ah, you want descriptions, perhaps? What are her legs like, her breasts, her lips, what colour is that hair? (Well, sorry.) No, being precise about love means attending to the heart, its pulses, its certainties, its truth, its power – and its imperfections. After death the heart becomes a pyramid (it has always been one of the wonders of the world); but even in life the heart was never heart-shaped.

Put the heart beside the brain and see the difference. The brain is neat, segmented, divided into two halves as we imagine the heart should obviously be. You can deal with the brain, you think; it is a receptive organ, one that invites comprehension. The brain looks sensible. It’s complicated, to be sure, with all those wrinkles and frowns and gulleys and pockets; it resembles coral, making you wonder if it might be surreptitiously on the move all the time, quietly adding to itself without your noticing. The brain has its secrets, though when cryptanalysts, maze-builders and surgeons unite, it will surely be possible to solve those mysteries. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible. Whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.

Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge. Religion has become either wimpishly workaday, or terminally crazy, or merely businesslike – confusing spirituality with charitable donations. Art, picking up confidence from the decline of
religion, announces its transcendence of the world (and it lasts, it lasts! art beats death!), but this announcement isn’t accessible to all, or where accessible isn’t always inspiring or welcome. So religion and art must yield to love. It gives us our humanity, and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us.

The materialist argument attacks love, of course; it attacks everything. Love boils down to pheromones, it says. This bounding of the heart, this clarity of vision, this energizing, this moral certainty, this exaltation, this civic virtue, this murmured
I love you
, are all caused by a low-level smell emitted by one partner and subconsciously nosed by the other. We are just a grander version of that beetle bashing its head in a box at the sound of a tapped pencil. Do we believe this? Well, let’s believe it for the moment, because it makes love’s triumph the greater. What is a violin made of? Bits of wood and bits of sheep’s intestine. Does its construction demean and banalize the music? On the contrary, it exalts the music further.

And I’m not saying love will make you happy – above all, I’m not saying that. If anything, I tend to believe that it will make you unhappy: either immediately unhappy, as you are impaled by incompatibility, or unhappy later, when the woodworm has quietly been gnawing away for years and the bishop’s throne collapses. But you can believe this and still insist that love is our only hope.

It’s our only hope even if it fails us, although it fails us, because it fails us. Am I losing precision? What I’m searching for is the right comparison. Love and truth, yes, that’s the prime connection. We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‘really’ happened. This God-eyed version is a fake – a charming, impossible fake, like those medieval paintings which show all the stages of Christ’s Passion happening simultaneously in different parts of the picture. But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can’t believe this we must believe that
43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don’t we’re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity, we value one liar’s version as much as another liar’s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth. (Whose truth do we prefer, by the way, the victor’s or the victim’s? Are pride and compassion greater distorters than shame and fear?)

And so it is with love. We must believe in it, or we’re lost. We may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us unhappy; we must still believe in it. If we don’t, then we merely surrender to the history of the world and to someone else’s truth.

It will go wrong, this love; it probably will. That contorted organ, like the lump of ox meat, is devious and enclosed. Our current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up. But when love fails us, we must still go on believing in it. Is it encoded in every molecule that things fuck up, that love will fail? Perhaps it is. Still we must believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth. And when love fails, we should blame the history of the world. If only it had left us alone, we could have been happy, we could have gone on being happy. Our love has gone, and it is the fault of the history of the world.

But that’s still to come. Perhaps it will never come. In the night the world can be defied. Yes, that’s right, it can be done, we can face history down. Excited, I stir and kick. She shifts and gives a subterranean, a subaqueous sigh. Don’t wake her. It seems a grand truth now, though in the morning it may not seem worth disturbing her for. She gives a gentler, lesser sigh. I sense the map of her body beside me in the dark. I turn on my side, make a parallel zigzag, and wait for sleep.

9
PROJECT ARARAT

I
T IS A FINE
afternoon and you are driving the Outer Banks of North Carolina – the Atlantic Coast’s austere rehearsal for the Florida Keys. You cross Currituck Sound from Point Harbor to Anderson, then south on 158 and you soon reach Kitty Hawk. Across the dunes you’ll find the Wright Brothers National Memorial; but maybe you take a raincheck on that, and in any case this isn’t the thing you remember from Kitty Hawk. No, you remember this: on the right-hand side of the road, the west side, its high prow pointing towards the ocean, stands an ark. It’s large as a barn, with slatted wooden sides, and painted brown. As you turn an amused and passing head, you realize that it is a church. Where you might normally see the ship’s name and port of registration perhaps, you read instead the ark’s function: WORSHIP CENTER, it says. You have been warned to expect all manner of religious excrescence in the Carolinas, and so this strikes you as a piece of fundamentalist rococo, rather cute in a way, but no, you don’t stop.

Later that evening, you take the seven o’clock ferry from Hatteras to Ocracoke Island. It’s chill, early spring, and you feel a little cold and lost in the darkness, on the black water, with the Plough hanging upside down above you in a blazing sky rented from Universal Pictures. The ferry feels anxious too, its huge searchlight charging the water twenty yards ahead; noisily, but without conviction, it shrugs its course between the marker lights, red, green and white. Only now, as you step out on deck and your breath turns solid, do you think back to that replica ark. It is there, of course, for a purpose, and had you stopped to think instead of merely lifting your foot from the gas pedal in a merry way, you might have felt its meaning. You had
driven to the place where Man first took to the air; and you are reminded instead of an earlier, more vital occasion, when Man first took to the sea.

The ark was not yet there back in 1943 when Spike Tiggler, only a year or two out of short pants, was taken to Kitty Hawk by his father. You remember Spike Tiggler? Hell,
everybody
remembers Spike Tiggler. The guy who threw the football on the moon. The guy who threw the god-damned football on the moon? That’s right. Longest pass in the history of the NFL, four hundred fifty yards into the leaping hands of a volcanic crater. Touchdown! That’s what he shouted, and it came crackling back to us, down here on earth. Touchdown Tiggler, that’s what the crick-necked world knew him as, least for a summer or two. Touchdown Tiggler, the guy who snuck a football into the capsule (how’d he do that?). Remember when they asked him why he did it, and he just kept that poker face on him? ‘Always wanted to try out for the Redskins,’ he said. ‘Sure hope the fellas were watching.’ The fellas had been watching, just as they watched his press conference, and they wrote Touchdown asking if they could have the football, offering to pay what strikes us even now as a decent price. But Spike had left it far away in that ashen crater – in case some running-back from Mars or Venus happened by.