Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (16 page)

In domino dominus.

Auschwitz

The philosopher Theodor Adorno's famous assertion – that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' – was not his final thought on the subject. ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream,' he later wrote, ‘hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.'

So that's all right then. We can write our poems as we can scream our screams, it's just living to which, after Auschwitz, we have lost our entitlement.

Adorno's logic would seem to lock us in a terrible circularity: the very act of survival calling for ‘the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz'. In other words, if we are human we die, if we live we do so at the cost of our humanity. But it is by no means intended punitively. Far from precluding survivors from what remains of the human family, Adorno asks us to imagine how, by virtue of their survival, they might feel they have precluded themselves. So his argument is an expression, if this isn't too bourgeois and banal a word, of pity.

That survivors will be plagued, as Adorno further imagines, by dreams that they are not living at all, that their whole existence since has been imaginary, would seem to be borne out in many cases by their long silences, as though words have lost their sufficiency, and then later, as though the walls containing silence have suddenly collapsed, by the terrible urgency with which they deliver their testimonies at last. Like so many Ancient Mariners, they tell their tale wherever they can find a listener, and having told it they must find another listener to tell it to again. It is without doubt a crucial calling – to keep alive the memory of what happened; to memorialise the names and maybe even the faces of those it happened to; and yes, yes, to ensure there will be no repetition, though repetition peeps at us every day wherever one person is granted sovereignty over another. But the Ancient Mariner's compulsion is like a death in life, no matter how necessary his horror story is to us – the now sadder, wiser recipients of it.

Unless we are insensate, to be modern almost requires that we aspire to the condition of survivor ourselves. At its most innocuous the ambition resembles a sort of fellow feeling, an entering too vividly into other people's anguish. At its most offensive it is spiritual ghoulisness. In between, it reflects a proper conviction that Auschwitz represents, in Adorno's words again, a ‘caesura or irredeemable break in the history of civilisation'. And after such a caesura only a fool would suppose he can live a life no different to the one he might have lived before.

(Half the country's kids have never heard of Auschwitz – there being no band of that name – but they exist in the darkened knowledge of it, their nihilism a direct consequence, the oblivion they seek in artificial stupefactions a confirmation of Adorno's expectation of non-living.)

Laurence Rees's series about Auschwitz, currently being shown on BBC2, refuses to indulge any of the vicariousness which often mars Holocaust documentaries. It moves meticulously, at a sort of moral snail's pace, resisting melodrama or hyperbole, and resisting metaphysics too – so far, at least, not seeking to explain ‘evil' – allowing the evolution of the most ambitious act of diabolism ever to have been brewed in the mind of man to unfold matter-of-factly, as it must have done for many of those who little by little became its active agents. If it's understanding we want – and I sometimes wonder why we want it, or imagine it is somewhere other than under our noses – then this is the painstaking course it should take: one brick laid upon another.

‘The compelling objectivity of these photos,' Günter Grass wrote, ‘the shoes, the spectacles, the hair, the corpses – spurns any dealing in abstractions; it will never be possible to comprehend Auschwitz, even if it is surrounded with explanatory words.' This series allows the shoes and the spectacles to do the explaining.

None of which, of course, will stop the revisionists and deniers taking the edifice apart again. If evil is gradual literal-mindedness, the final triumph of the bureaucrat, then the mind of the revisionist historian is its consummation. He is in perfect harmony with the very event he denies, proving its slow accretion of malignities in the slow accretion of his own. Scales and tape measures are his tools, architects' plans and memoranda his elements, pedantry his mindset. You will see him on a roof, looking for the hole through which Zyklon B could have been deposited; you will find him in a gas chamber, calculating the number of people it could have held, then multiplying the answer by how many chambers in how many camps, by how many days in the week, by how many weeks in the year.

There is a philosophical desperation of nitpickery in revisionist historians which would make them fascinating to study if one could bear the proximity. For theirs is the greatest flight from existence imaginable – the ultimate proof of Adorno's contention that life after Auschwitz is untenable: measuring away the truth, seeking a mitigation now by an inch, now by a yard, imagining that they can weigh what was into something that it wasn't if they can lose a hundred here, a thousand there, chip chip chipping away at the millions until they can show that not a hair on a single head was harmed.

Where is the man who with his own eyes saw or with his own lungs breathed a gas chamber? they ask. To which the answer is, gassed.

‘No one will believe you,' the Nazis said.

That's the sole lesson of Auschwitz. Believe.

Gay in the Judy Garland Sense

I too went through an anti-gay phase once. I must have been in my late twenties – somewhat younger than the Anglican Church, but then we each age at our own speed. My problem was that all my friends had suddenly decided to come out, come clean, cross over, whatever you call it, and I was afraid of being left to stew in solitary heterosexuality. I saw my future stretching out before me: companionless in Straightsville. And loneliness can make you say terrible things.

Not that I went as far as the primates we've been hearing from in recent days. I never, for example, said, ‘Homosexuality is just filthy,' like the Most Reverend Remi Rabenirina (no doubt known to his fellow primates as Irene) of the Indian Ocean. I've always been more careful, for a start, about the way I use the word ‘just'. If homosexuality is ‘just' filthy then what's the fuss about? My accusation was more temperate. I just thought homosexuality – and I blush now to recall it – was unnatural.

A woman friend – because women friends were all I had left – took me to task. ‘So who are you to be a champion of nature and naturalness all of the sudden?' she asked. ‘You don't have a natural bone in your body. You have never wanted to propagate. You have never wanted a family life. When you were presented with a child by your first wife – and you marry the way other people get on and off a bus – you ran screaming from the house the minute you saw a nappy. You will not go on a date with anyone who has less than three inches of make-up on her face, you invite the women you love to whisper depravities in your ear, you dress them like street prostitutes, you beg them to perform lesbian acts in your presence, you suggest sexual variations that would make a strumpet blush, to my certain knowledge you have never been against buggery between the sexes, you refuse to go to Denmark or Sweden on the grounds that Danes and Swedes consider copulation a healthy activity – natural, you? Don't make me laugh! If you're so in favour of nature, tell me why you never leave the house. Tell me why you're so frightened of weather. Tell me why you fumigate the lavatory every time another person has been in it. Tell me why you fumigate the lavatory every time YOU have been in it. Name me a park you've ever visited, Mr Nature Man, name me a tree, name me a fucking flower!'

What can you do when a woman talks to you like that, short of asking her to perform a lesbian act in your presence? You think, that's what you do. You ponder. You consider. And then you accept the justice of her every word. Thereafter I did not allow a single reference to nature to pass my lips again.

I would humbly urge the Anglican Church – if urge is not too inflammatory a word in this context – to do likewise. Forget hetero or homo – any appeal to nature, using scripture as a guide, is hypocritical. Strip away the refinements of theology and what does religion exist to do but subdue the natural man? 2 Peter 2:12 (the only way to talk to Anglicans is in numbers) – ‘But these, as natural brute beasts . . . shall utterly perish in their own corruption.' Nature equals brute equals beast equals unregenerate. And the unregenerate cannot receive the Spirit of God. 1 Corinthians 2:14 – ‘But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' That from the mouth of Paul the Apostle himself, Paul the prime source of loathing of those who ‘abuse themselves with mankind'. Count the ways in which homosexuality is unnatural and Paul, were he consistent, ought to have seen each of them as a positive recommendation.

But at least Paul is even-handed in his abhorrences. No one is spared, not the adulterers, not the fornicators, not the incontinent of either sex, not even the marriers. Better to marry than to burn, but best not to marry at all, for it is ‘good for a man not to touch a woman'. In other words, Most Reverend Remi Rabenirina, it is all filth, man on woman, man on man, woman on woman, beast on beast, you name it.

This is my position: whoever has looked into the deep dark abyss which is heterosexuality cannot be bothered or surprised by what the homos do. Since it is all filth, it makes no sense to discriminate. And please don't shy from the filth word, remembering the beauty of love, the exaltation of the feelings you have sometimes experienced in your bed of lust. Of course you have. We are an extraordinarily idealistic species and find poetry everywhere. Good for us, until the poetry fails, whereupon there follows disappointment, infidelity, heartache, violence, separation and every other sort of calamity until we can restart the engines of idealism and find poetry in lust again. Whether sex is even natural in the unregenerate beast sense I am not sure. Observe dogs locked in passion and you will see that they look abashed, look away, have an air of creatures doing something else altogether, as though they neither understand why they are occupied as they are, nor ever wish to repeat it. Shame and confusion, even in the animal kingdom. Shame to be driven to such filth. And dogs don't have to reconcile their actions with God.

Filth without exception, bodies entering bodies through the unlikeliest corridors and porches, putting this here and that there, unless you happen to be numbered among the subtle who put this there and that here. Poor Dr Jeffrey John, or Jennifer as I believe he's called, having to assure us he's stopped all that and is now gay only in the caring, Judy Garland sense.

Pity: a little less care and campery and a little more unapologetic sodomy would do wonders for believers and doubters alike.

Wherefore Art Thou Charlie?

Three cheers for mature love, I say. If we are to have marriages then let them be between mature peoples only. Marriage, like love, is wasted on the young. If we were sensible we would make it illegal to marry, or indeed to fall in love, the baby side of fifty.

Seeing the famous newsreels again of Charles and Diana answering the question of whether they are in love – of course we are, says Diana; whatever in love means, says the Prince – it is hard not to shake one's head in sorrow over both of them. Since then, and with hindsight, we have come to see a terrible duplicity in Charles's prevarication; and it may well be that he was thinking of someone else even as Diana was flushing and starting by his side. But the truth is, they were so unevolved when they underwent the ordeal of declaring their love on television – mere embryos of people they look now, not a wrinkle of knowledge or understanding between them – that neither could have had an inkling of what love meant.

Whether Diana ever did get a better handle on the word or the thing it denotes is open to debate. She certainly enjoyed deploying the language of love for everyone to hear, and no less willingly unpacked her heart for everyone to see. That was a hot night for most men when she looked out of our televisions with fire in each cheek and said ‘Oh yes, I adored him' about somebody the world has since forgot. But it always looked like an emotion in search of an object, which is the way of it when you're young, before experience yields or, in some lucky cases, confirms a choice.

It's for this reason that I have never been able to read or watch
Romeo and Juliet
to the finish. I cannot attach sufficient value to their protestations of devotion to care how things turn out. Badly – how else were they ever going to turn out? Now act me a play about grown-ups.

This is not to say I doubt the young experience intensity. I loved like a tornado when I was a boy – if you can imagine a tornado that bites its pillows and sobs into handkerchiefs. For a girl whose hand I held for five minutes in a field in Chester, but who insisted on wearing a woolly mitten while I was holding it, I was prepared to sacrifice my education. For a girl with her leg in plaster who asked my name on Oswestry market, then laughed when I gave it to her, I would have cut my mother's heart out. I can see neither of their faces now, for all that I was not able at the time to imagine a life worth living without them. Write a tragic drama about that if you will, but do not call it a tragedy of love, however much like love it felt to the soppier of the parties.