Dear Diary
Something stuck in my mind a while
ago: that you reach a mental peak at the age of around thirty and that after
that your mental powers decline.
Since I thought that that was true
I've felt this urgency to make something idea before it becomes jaded or begins
to deteriorate.
I've had a lot of ideas, some of
which concern talents I already have, others which are simply the result of
"studying the market". That
I'm writing in such terms suggests the truth: none of these ideas have really
worked out.
If I was to look at me, an embryo,
I would say I used to be a romantic.
I'd write romantic stories, write romantic music, poems, that sort of
thing. My ideas were clouded by an
image of " social justice", almost of unselfish, altruistic humanism,
but in many ways mine was a consciousness finding its feet. The kind of state that everyone should be
in, but if they were, would make human life impossible.
I suppose I could have gone in a
direction/mixed with a particular group of people/become a certain kind of
person that would allow me to have continued in that vein. I could have become intensely religious,
boorishly political, emotionally insufferable or tediously musical. Instead, what I did do was to become neither
these nor the kind of person who pushes their way to the front line of their
original self.
What I mean is that I have become
somebody who can listen to other people, and has become attracted to the idea
of conformity. Not that I was ever a
radical, I was never the sort of person who confronted things which I truly
believed in. Vainly in pursuit of the
"soft" approach I let other people voice things in which I believed
without involving myself. I steered a
course which let me off the hook if the situation became too difficult for me
to handle. My stifled cries of
"Yes" could be heard from here to the computer screen.
Given that one thing I have always
believed - and continue to believe - is that there is no God, I have played my
cards as the agnostic, not as the atheist.
Atheists are more positive, agnostics "sit on the fence". I come from a family of atheists who
"sit on the fence".
What, then, is this fence?
I have begun to believe this
"fence" is what a middle class family describe as the boundaries to
their home. It has a simple meaning:
that which constitutes the fence is the boundaries of what is perceived. It has the advantage of not being
particularly profound therefore easily defended; of being socially acceptable
therefore gratefully received; of taking up the "middle ground"
therefore not overly contentious.
"Middle ground" is not
fought for, nor does it have to be openly defended, the "extremes"
either side define it, and are defined by it, and need it for their definition
(and therefore "defend" it).
Without the "bourgeois" mentality, the strength of attack on
"values" and "morality" become extremely weakened, because
an attack alone on "fundamentalism" can become as fundamentalist as
the fundamentalism it attacks. In this
way - as in so many others - the right has so much more in common with the left
than it does the middle; not only a sort of rule of political ideas, but a
framework in which political ideas can exist.
I don't exist in this middle
ground; I despise it as much as the remaining Marxists and the incumbent
Right. Marxist economics describe a
state of affairs I would have no argument with; the political and economic realities
of the increasingly small world we live in do not respond very well to either
the still, small voice inside nor the blustering antics of would-be New Empires. The "United Kingdom", for all it
has done to the world, deserves to be given a "clip round the ear",
but due to a quirk in world history, has got away with it, whereas emerging
empires in the past have. Ostensibly,
no country can get away with the things England, France, Holland, America,
Russia ... and perhaps all but Baffin Land - got away with "at their
peak" because world politics will no longer allow it. However much the Khomeni children or the
Thatcher children believe they've got it right, the world won't allow them to
get away with it. Unfortunately, in the
short term, they do. "Get away
with it".
In any event, the overriding
factor is the economic. Not, as has
sometimes has been the case, the ideological or the religious. It may - on the surface - appear as if a
particular nation has no other interest in the world other than to be
fundamentalist in religion or wealth of ideas, but it turns out that economics
has become "that which serves that population, by stealth, as the single
most powerful factor". Religion,
however formulated, will back down to the power invested by world
currency. "Long live the
Ayatollah, long live the dollar".
The dollar in question is
unquestionably the dollar that purveys to the bearer any quality it
wishes. It positively embraces the
contentious idea as long as it doesn't become dangerous; it allows any manner
of behaviour as long as it's legal; it will sustain any form of government as
long as it's "constitutional".
This is the point at which the reader becomes cynical by the dollar. "Whatever my point of view, we need the dollar". Warring people love the dollar.
3rd
August 1990