Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. [...]
— Sorrow from me seemed to depart.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear : sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard.
Bloom (presumably) attempts to rationalise what he's hearing [2]:
Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. [...] you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like : Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.
___________________
[1]Ulysses, James Joyce (1922), p. 262 [OUP Oxford's World's Classics edition] [2] ibid. p. 267
The Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, has this to say on the word "broken":
One breaks things like guitar strings, bicycle chains, and glasses. That which is broken no longer functions as it was intended to. A broken X is not a suboptimally functioning X but a nonfunctioning X.
That seems fair. Vallicella points to Obama's (mis)use of the word to describe the U.S.' healthcare system.
But the most prominent use of the word here in the UK in recent times has been in the phrase "Broken Britain". It was used by David Cameron in the Conservative's General Election campaign earlier this year. What does it mean? Those without the patience for such questions may say that we shouldn't "quibble", that "we know what it means". But unless there's a clear definition we really actually don't.
An image from prepriministerial days:
Cameron, visiting an estate in Manchester
The point of such a phrase is to conjure up associations and images, to play on the emotions. In fact, the phrase is powerful and successful in the way that photographs can be — without any context, we are left baffled and end up bringing our own values (or, if you like, narratives) to bear on the image.
A phrase like this can become a rallying point, for people who believe they share the same values and that the phrase somehow articulates those values. But the point is that phrases like this don't articulate anything.
Cameron's call for a "Big Society" as a fix for "Broken Britain" may be more helpful but suffers from a similar weakness of definition. It sounds aspirational but it's a euphemism, the very vagueness of which seems to protect the government's aims from accountability and leave us busy, hotly debating its meaning.
Like Obama's "hope" and "change" of 2008, or more recently "squeezed middle" from UK Labour Leader Ed Milband, such phrases aren't supposed to articulate anything. They're designed to be pithy and catchy. The best one can say about them is that they generate debate, but unfortunately I tend to think the worst: that they're distractions which lead to pedantic posts like this one. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, there are issues that are both deserving of more precise language and in need of being debated and discussed.
This past few days I've been ill. Apart from making me a bit miserable, being off work and stuck in bed also got me thinking about all the things I haven't done this year. Like keeping a blog.
Cheerfully, I said to myself: "that site's like a graveyard now". Having spoken, I then proceeded to cough for half an hour.
As you can see, I took a very long break from blogging. I put too much pressure on myself to make posts as good as possible. I've had many drafts lined up for a long time, always almost ready for people to see.
The same could be said for my writing in general. It must be time for a change in approach or attitude or something.
Comparing a blog to a graveyard's not a very apt metaphor though. After all, it's on the active blogs that posts get buried. An abandoned blog is more like an unsown field.
Or perhaps in my case more like a rundown dockyard, from which small boats no longer cast off. Time to make some little rafts to get things going again. I have to remember that even the ricketiest things will float, even if they won't actually sail.
Following my post on modern policing in the UK, I found this post at My Tiny Spot in which Mike fearlessly explains why police in London had no choice but to remove McIntyre from his wheelchair. He also picks up on the BBC's interview it seems:
Identified by his I.D. card - surely forged - as "Jody McIntyre, Violent Anarchist Revolutionary,” Mr. McIntyre plans to sue the Metropolitan Police Service for God knows what. Perhaps for saving his life?
As you'll see, it was all for the man's own good.
And in more good humor, following my post on pre-modern policing in the UK, here's a look at what they were predicting police of the future would look like back in 1886. Well, sort of.
Courtesy of this post from one of my new favourite blogs, The Cat's Meat Shop:
Then I found this in the introduction to the book:
England's treatment of political radicals was another example of this general equality. On the day the Queen opened Parliament, James had witnessed a demonstration in Trafalgar Square 'which might easily have given on the nerves of a sensitive police department'. But the English police were unperturbed; they allowed the demonstrators to 'sun themselves' freely. James was struck by the 'frank good sense and the frank good humour and even the frank good taste of it', as well as by
the fact that the might mob could march along and do its errand while the excellent quiet policemen — eternal, imperturbable, positive, lovable reminders of the national temperament — stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.
It was political revolutionaries like this 'mighty mob' — as well as those he had witnessed in France — that James was remembering when he wrote The Princess Casamassima. [2]
Almost enough to make one slightly nostalgic, no?
Coming soon: a consideration of The Princess Casamassima. ___________________
My friend just sent me a couple of links to items he said made him feel "angry and upset". So be warned.
One link is to an article from The Guardian about protestor Jody McIntyre being tipped out of his wheelchair and dragged across the street, here.
The other to a (slightly glitchy) YouTube video of a BBC interview with McIntyre, in which he is asked at least twice whether he was "rolling towards" the police in question:
The BBC interviewer (Ben Brown) asks some other frankly absurd questions. For example, would McIntyre label himself as a "revolutionary"? But since when did a person's beliefs become reasonable grounds for inflicting violence when that person poses no threat?
Perhaps one could argue that beliefs, statements, even statements of fact constitute some sort of threat. But the point here is that McIntyre posed no physical threat to the police, even if one were to argue that in his beliefs he posed some sort of threat to society.
Surely in the policing of protest, the police are ideally looking to prevent or stop violence and destruction. That is, they should deal with physical threats or actions and not with why the protesters are actually there. Whether that is what the police have actually been doing in practice is another question, perhaps one the BBC should have asked instead of looking into McIntyre's beliefs.
McIntyre is fortunately very articulate and patient on several points: though it might be reasonable for an interviewer to ask if he has complained to the police, it seems less so to ask the same question three times when the interviewee has already given a perfectly reasonable response. Which McIntyre did — it seems eminently sensible that he first consider his legal options.
And he's right to point out that these are not isolated incidents in recent policing by the Met. Remember Ian Tomlinson, or Delroy Smellie, or very recently Alfie Meadows (here, here, and here).
The footage will stir certain emotions and doubtless cause many to feel anger. And the debate around the cuts and fees means that some will already have taken sides. But whether or not McIntyre and other students are right is besides the point. Just as whether or not McIntyre was, according to The Observer, a "cyber-radical" is surely irrelevant to his treatment at a protest. The arguments for or against the coalition's decision to cut funding for higher education and raise tuition fees seem to me to be very separate from the issues of policing or the media's coverage of protest.
I grew up¹ in the UK, and have yet to escape for more than a month at a time. This blog is my attempt to put out some of my reflections on literature, politics, philosophy, and anything else that catches my eye.
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