Cassandra Voices

Tag: Desmond Traynor

  • Woody and Annie (and Others) Part I

    ‘I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with. Will you take two negative points?’
    Woody Allen, from his stand-up comedy routine (1964)

    Consider the facts: French writer Annie Ernaux has an affair with a young man, thirty years her junior (she was fifty-four, he was twenty-four), and writes about it, in the recently published The Young Man. Therein, she flatly admits that she was simply using him solely for her own satisfaction, stating that she was with a younger man ‘so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.’s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself.’ Also, ‘I felt as if I had been lying on a bed since age eighteen and never risen from it – the same bed but in different places, with different men, indistinguishable from one another.’ It is hailed as disarmingly honest in reclaiming female desire – as though we did not already know that women have always had desires, and do not really need to reclaim them because they never went away. Annie Ernaux is lauded. She has won the Nobel Prize, among other prestigious awards.

    Then there is the case of North American filmmaker Woody Allen: he has an affair with a young woman, thirty-five years his junior (he was fifty-six, she was twenty-one), and despite the fact that they married five years later, and have since adopted two daughters, and been apparently happy in their union for twenty-six years and counting, he is vilified as a predatory creep and possible paedophile, constantly mentioned in the same breath as charged and/or convicted sex-offenders Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. He now has difficulty financing his films in his own country, and has to do so abroad – notably in France. Amazon refused to distribute his 2019 film, A Rainy Day in New York, as ‘unmarketable’, resulting in a law suit for breach of contract. While some famous actors have stood by him, singing his praises, others have rushed to distance themselves from him, making clear that they regret having worked with him, and would not do so again. His memoir Apropos of Nothing was dropped by his original publisher, after protests from his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow and some members of her family, and a staff walkout at the publishing firm, although it was subsequently taken up by another house. He has been blacklisted, or in the parlance de nos jours, ‘cancelled’. (Amusing titbit: the contribution of Allen and his wife to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign was unceremoniously returned. The principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, and the requirement of due process, seemingly does not apply in Clinton’s legal framework.) This double standard needs scrutiny.

    Obviously, there are additional factors which serve to place Allen in an unfavourable light, and can be used to justify the opprobrium he endures. For one, the young woman he took up with, Soon-Yi Previn, was the adopted daughter of that ex-girlfriend, Farrow, who was still at the time his current girlfriend. For another, and far more damaging to his reputation, he was accused by Farrow, in the aftermath of the Allen/Soon-Yi relationship becoming public knowledge in 1992, of molesting his and Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan, then aged seven, an accusation which resurfaced in 2016 in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and a 2021 HBO documentary featuring interviews with Dylan, Allen v. Farrow. In fairness, Ernaux’s young paramour was a fan (a male groupie?), not an extended family member, and she has never been accused of sexually assaulting a seven-year-old boy, much less the adopted son of her then boyfriend. But, the key word in the previous sentence, to my mind, is ‘accused’. (Echoes resonate of the reflexively eponymous 1988 Jonathan Kaplan film, starring Jodie Foster, in which she portrays a rape victim who struggles to get justice. Who, exactly, was The Accused?) Allen has been accused, but never charged, much less convicted – unlike Cosby, Weinstein and Epstein.

    It is not my intention here to delve into the copious mound of facts and opinions, claims and counterclaims, which surround this case, and are readily available elsewhere to those with the inclination to do the proper research. Such an approach would involve excessive quotation from the large swathes of television, newspaper and magazine interviews, statements and op. ed. pieces I have read (to say nothing of the social media onslaughts on either side), information which has long been in the public domain. The Allen/Farrow/Previn blended family imbroglio is too sad and sordid and multifaceted, the problems around the original accusation too byzantine – partaking of classical tragedy – to allow of a simple black and white interpretation, and we may never know the whole story, only the conflicting, partial versions. So I will be economical with my references, but hopefully not with the truth – as I see it. The trouble with presenting an argument from either side of this dispute is that, as with the majority of such issues, once a side is taken, all arguments become one-sided. However, while I hope to avoid the bulk of the ‘he said/she said’ discourse on this episode of the culture wars, I will allow myself the odd judgement, while trying to avoid being overly partisan. My own allegiances will soon become apparent, and in any case I have other matters to engage with here: mainly, societal attitudes to legal, large age gap relationships; and, also, the age old conundrum around the separation of the artist and the work.

    Let us pull from the pile this quote, if only because it pithily summarises the vast and seemingly endless debate around the Allen/Farrow debacle. Daphne Merkin wrote in her profile of Soon-Yi (New York Magazine/Vulture, 17/09/2018):

    With regard to almost every aspect of life in the Farrow household, Soon-Yi’s story, like those of her younger brother Moses and Allen himself, is strikingly different from what’s put forth by Mia and Dylan as well as their son and brother Ronan Farrow, the journalist who has written a series of high-profile #MeToo stories over the past year. I can’t pretend to know what actually occurred, of course, and neither can anyone other than Allen and Dylan. Even the judge who eventually denied Allen custody of Dylan opined that “we will probably never know what happened on August 4, 1992.” All of life is filled with competing narratives, and the burden of interpretation is ultimately on the listener and his or her subjectively arrived-at sense of the truth.

    People will choose sides, based on previous loyalties and ideological standpoints, often ignoring evidence and even succumbing to flimsily substantiated conspiracy theories. (Needless to say, Merkin herself has faced multiple accusations of bias, both as a long-term acquaintance of Allen’s, and as a #MeToo sceptic). Still, a few salient points, often ignored, deserve to be made in Allen’s defence on both (separate, but in many minds, related) counts: that of the inappropriateness of his relationship with, and possible grooming of, his now wife (who was his then girlfriend’s adopted daughter); and that of sexually assaulting his own adopted daughter.

    Allen is on record as stating that he had no serious qualms about his relationship with Soon-Yi. ‘I didn’t feel that just because she was Mia’s adopted daughter, there was any great moral dilemma. It was a fact, but not one with any great import. It wasn’t like she was my daughter,’ he told Time magazine in an August 1992 interview. ‘I am not Soon-Yi’s father or stepfather. I’ve never even lived with Mia. I never had any family dinners over there. I was not a father to her adopted kids in any sense of the word.’ Supporters will concur. Detractors will see in this attitude further evidence of the man’s deficient conscience, and questionable moral probity. It does seem that the romantic part of Allen’s relationship with Farrow was well over by the time Soon-Yi and he got together, at least according to the Woody and Soon-Yi side of things. Allen and Farrow were maintaining a loose union mostly for the sake of the two children they had adopted, and the one biological child they had had together. In December 1987 Farrow gave birth to her and Allen’s son, Satchel (now known as Ronan) Farrow. Farrow wanted to adopt another child in 1991, and Allen said he would not take ‘a lousy attitude toward it’ so long as she agreed to his adoption of Dylan and Moses, whom Farrow had already adopted by herself. In October of that year she adopted another Vietnamese child (who turned out to have disabilities Farrow could not cope with, and so was passed on to another adoptive family). Allen’s adoption of Dylan and Moses was finalised in December 1991, shortly before Farrow discovered that Allen and Soon-Yi were romantically and sexually involved, in January 1992.

    Soon-Yi’s version of events, and justification for them, is more or less the same as Allen’s. In August 1992 she wrote, in a statement to Newsweek, that Allen had never been a father figure to her, and that they had become friendly long after his romance with Farrow had ended, adding:

    I’m not a retarded little underage flower who was raped, molested and spoiled by some evil stepfather – not by a long shot. I’m a psychology major at college who fell for a man who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Mia. I admit it’s offbeat, but let’s not get hysterical.

    This was repeated twenty-six years later, in that controversial 2018 Vulture interview with Merkin: ‘We didn’t think of him as a father. He didn’t even have clothing at our house, not even a toothbrush.’ She went on to say that she was ‘madly in love’ with Allen. ‘[I was] completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he’d said that I’d meet someone in college, but I’d already decided,’ she told Vulture. ‘From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him.’ As Allen and Farrow had never married, and as Allen had never adopted Soon-Yi, their relationship was not illegal. Furthermore, at twenty-one, she was more than ‘of age’. Soon-Yi’s affirmations are, unsurprisingly, disparaged by the vilifiers, as the product of an impressionable young woman manipulated by her more worldly and high-profile partner, and who may even be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. This interpretation finds its equal and opposite expression on the part of Allen’s advocates in the contention that Dylan was coached by Farrow into making her accusations of molestation, as the vindictive vengefulness of a woman wronged.

    However, in many ways, the propriety of Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi is a red herring, when it comes to characterising him as a sexual predator. Although it should not need to be pointed out, apparently it does: when it comes to passing judgement on Woody Allen’s large age gap marriage in particular, or large age gap relationships in general, and whether or not the senior party – man or woman – is de facto creepy, Allen’s status as an accused (but, more importantly, uncharged and unconvicted) child molester is simply irrelevant, if only because paedophilia (defined as a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children), hebephilia (a primary or exclusive sexual interest in eleven to fourteen-year-old pubescents) and ephebophilia (a primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages fifteen to nineteen) are very distinct, not necessarily overlapping, preferences, with the later not considered by mental health professionals to be pathological. Twenty-one-year-old women are not seven-year-old girls. In other words, it would be entirely possible that Allen could have groomed Soon-Yi as an adolescent but not molested Dylan; and, vice versa, he could possibly have molested Dylan while not ever have been grooming Soon-Yi. One act would not substantiate the other. In addition, it is just as likely that neither act took place as that both did.

    Paedophilia itself is a compulsive behaviour: you do not suddenly start acting on paedophiliac impulses when you are fifty-seven-years old. Indeed, clinicians differentiate between paedophiles and child molesters, and ‘preferential’ and ‘situational’ child abuse, since not all of those with a sexual preference for prepubescents molest children, and not all child molesters are true paedophiles. There are motives for child sexual abuse that are unrelated to paedophilia, such as marital problems, the unavailability of an adult partner, or general anti-social tendencies – which does not, of course, mean that everyone who finds themselves in such situations is going to abuse children. Furthermore, paedophilia is a prenatal, genetic sexual orientation: people are born that way, rather like being born straight, gay, bi or trans. For this reason, there is no evidence that paedophilia can be cured. Such an endeavour would be a little like trying to ‘cure’ homosexuality through aversion therapy, one of the more shameful practices of the many to be found in the history of psychiatry. Instead, most therapies focus on treating paedophiles so that they refrain from acting on their desires. However, in the wider society, just as there was once no understanding, or at best condescension, for LGBTQ+ people or unmarried mothers (the phrase ‘single parent family’ had not even entered the lexicon), now there is none for paedophiles – only judgement and condemnation. Every generation needs a minority to hate on, even if it is demonstrably true that paedophiles do more harm to the vulnerable than LGBTQ+ or unwed Mums ever did. Remember: there was a time, not so long ago, when gay people were routinely considered to be a bunch of pederasts, and unmarried pregnant females were thought of as lascivious ‘fallen’ women, whose ‘innocence’ had been taken, or who had given it up too easily. Magdalen laundries were full of them.

    Allen had no previous record of sexual activity with children (which does not, of course, mean that it did not happen – nor would it be of much consolation to Dylan, if her accusations against Allen are true). Various studies have indicated that non-paedophilic offenders do tend to do so at times of high stress, have a later onset of offending, and have fewer, often familial, victims; while paedophilic offenders frequently start offending at an early age, have a larger number of victims who are more often than not extrafamilial, and are more driven to offend. Such classifications and terminology may be irrelevant to victims, but while the possibility that Allen is a very late onset, single incidence child molester remains, it is unlikely that he is a paedophile. His numerous relationships with adult, so called ‘age appropriate’ women would also militate against this diagnosis.

    For those unfamiliar with the bare facts, Allen was accused of one incident of molestation of a seven-year-old by the child’s adoptive mother, against the backdrop of the revelation of his legal relationship with another adoptive daughter of the seven-year-old’s adoptive mother, and the ensuing custody battle between him and the child’s mother for custody of the seven-year-old adopted daughter, and two other children, one adopted and one biological. He was investigated in two separate states, Connecticut and New York, and cleared in both. These investigations included both physical and psychological examinations of Dylan, and lie detector tests taken by Allen, which he passed. The Connecticut State’s Attorney did not press charges. During the investigation the Connecticut State Police referred Dylan to the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale–New Haven Hospital, which concluded that Allen had not sexually abused Dylan, and that the allegation was probably coached or influenced by Mia Farrow. After a fourteen month long inquiry, the New York Department of Social Services found ‘no credible evidence’ to support the allegation. Furthermore, Farrow’s legal representatives offered Allen the opportunity to have the abuse allegation remain private, in exchange for a huge payout to Farrow in compensation and child maintenance, which he refused. This hardly points to his having any sense of guilt, or an overriding desire to preserve his reputation.

    But then come the speculative caveats: the state attorney in Connecticut found ‘probable cause’ to prosecute, but decided against doing so because it would further traumatise Dylan, and because there was ‘reasonable doubt’ that a conviction was a certain outcome, as it had been impossible to reach the conclusion that the abuse had occurred. One of the social workers in the New York investigation was fired and replaced because he was in favour of charging Allen. I find this latter claim, with its implication that Allen was too powerful a figure in the U.S. film industry to face the full rigors of the law, what with his having many sympathetic friends, and having brought millions in revenue into New York City, vaguely ridiculous: if Harvey Weinstein, a much more powerful presence in the U.S. film industry, can be charged and convicted, then Woody Allen certainly can. If it was so easy for rich and powerful men to act with impunity and evade the justice system, then why are Weinstein and Cosby serving prison sentences, and why was Jeffrey Epstein in prison on remand (when he committed suicide), while Woody Allen is not? As regards Allen’s rejection of Farrow’s lawyers’ attempt at mediation, which involved financial payments in exchange for making the charge go away, his antagonists might argue that this was only because Allen did not want to be lumbered with paying out such a large sum of money to Farrow in what he considered to be an extortionate deal. Again, your explanations will tend to be determined by which side you have already taken.

    The opposition between Allen supporters who claim that Farrow coached and cajoled Dylan, and the Farrow supporters who claim that Allen groomed and manipulated Soon-Yi, sadly extends into the Farrow family itself. Moses Farrow, who was fourteen at the time of the accusations, and is today a forty-six-year-old psychotherapist, staunchly supports Woody and Soon-Yi. In a long blog post from May 2018 titled ‘A Son Speaks Out’, he makes detailed claims about how Mia tyrannised him into upholding her version of events, how Mia coached Dylan during the videotaped interview she did with her, and that initially taking Mia’s side before coming out against her when he was an adult (and therefore no longer financially dependent on her) was ‘the biggest regret of my life.’ On the other hand, Ronan (formerly Satchel) Farrow, aged four at the time and today a thirty-seven-year-old investigative journalist, staunchly supports Mia and Dylan. He continues to campaign against Allen, both in mainstream media outlets and on social media. On one side, Soon-Yi and Moses paint a picture of Mia Farrow as mercurial, violent and manipulative, given to outbursts of rage and cruel punishments, and the instigator of Dylan’s allegations against Woody, as revenge for his affair with Soon-Yi. On the other side, Dylan and Ronan defend their mother against attacks while continuing to assert that Woody molested Dylan.

    What those who take sides in the Farrow family feud generally do not take into account is that even if Mia was an abusive, controlling, bad mother, it is still conceivable that Woody Allen molested Dylan Farrow. One possibility does not negate the other. It just adds to the sadness. Equally, just because Woody Allen began an affair and since married a woman thirty-five years younger than him, who was his then partner’s adopted daughter, it does not automatically make him a paedophile, a molester, or even a groomer. A further strand in this tangled web is the possibility that Soon-Yi Previn could have been exacting a subtle form of revenge on her adoptive mother Mia Farrow, consciously or unconsciously, for what she perceives was an abusive childhood, by ‘stealing’ her boyfriend. What is clear, however, is that there is a marked difference between the accounts and outcomes of Farrow’s biological and/or Caucasian children, and those of her adopted and/or Asian ones, and the sides they have subsequently taken. So maybe she did play favourites, as many parents do, with undertones of racism.

    ‘What’s your favourite Woody Allen movie?’ So begins Dylan Farrow’s open letter to the New York Times of 01/02/2014, in which she reiterated her accusation of molestation by Allen. There has emerged a line of argument which attempts to find evidence of his grooming of Soon-Yi and –  bizarrely – his molestation of Dylan, in Allen’s inappropriate interest in teenage girls as displayed in his film work. While reference is made to a few snippets scattered throughout the oeuvre, such as when Rob, the friend of Allen’s Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977), in recounting an escapade in Los Angeles, declares, ‘Twins, Max! Sixteen years old. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?’, the chief culprit is the entirety of Allen’s 1979 movie, Manhattan, with its central storyline of a relationship between forty-two-year-old television comedy writer Isaac Davis (played by Allen) and seventeen-year-old high school student Tracy (played by Mariel Hemingway).

    Revisiting Manhattan forty-five years later, what is striking now is not only how all the other adult characters in the film are totally accepting of the couple in their social circle (save for a solitary  throwaway quip by Ike’s other love interest, Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton): ‘somewhere Nabokov is smiling’), regarding it as at worst an eccentric but charming peccadillo, but also how garlanded with praise from both audiences and critics, as well as awards, the film was at the time of its release. Even as late as October 2013, Guardian readers were voting it the best film directed by Woody Allen. Clearly, Manhattan’s portrayal of a middle-aged man dating a teenager drew little derision back then, with the sole dissenting voice on record being that of Pauline Kael, who wrote in her New York Times review: ‘What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?’ What viewers and so-called critics frequently do not realise about Annie Hall is that, despite the fact that it is narrated by the Woody stand-in Alvy, it is actually about a developing female artist (whose name gives the film its title) who outgrows an immature male partner. Similarly, with Manhattan, it is Tracy who imparts important life lessons to Ike, such as the closing advice ‘you have to have a little faith in people’. Manhattan only began to attract more negative analysis in the late 2010s, as Allen’s reputation again came into question after the rise of the #MeToo movement, and Dylan’s reiterated allegations. Societal attitudes have changed, but only relatively recently.

    As even those who find Allen suspect or downright creepy will have to admit, Manhattan came out at a particular point in history (which was pretty much most of history up to and surpassing that particular point) where the kind of relationship portrayed in the film seemed unobjectionable to many adults (male and female). Take, for example, the character of Randal P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962): feigning mental illness, McMurphy is transferred from a prison work farm to a psychiatric facility because he thinks it will be an easier way to serve out his six month sentence. His crimes? ‘Drunkenness, Assault and Battery, Disturbing the Peace, repeated gambling, and one arrest for…’ Statutory Rape. He was never convicted, as the fifteen-year-old girl chose not to testify, possibly due to intimidation. However, McMurphy claims that the girl, ‘Said she was seventeen, Doc, and she was plenty willin’.’, and that her insatiable sexual appetite made him take ‘to sewing my pants shut.’ He continues his own defence by arguing that he was forced to leave town after the trial because, ‘that little hustler would of actually burnt me to a frazzle by the time she reached legal sixteen.’ The subsequent filmisation by Miloš Forman, released in 1975, is even more openly condoning of McMurphy’s sexual history (and readers who are easily triggered should consider themselves warned that perhaps it would be in their best interests to skip over this excerpt from McMurphy’s interview with the good Dr. Spivey):

    She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don’t think it’s crazy at all and I don’t think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that’s why I got into jail to begin with. And now they’re telling me I’m crazy over here because I don’t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don’t make a bit of sense to me. If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that’s it.

    Presumably, Kesey as author, followed thirteen years later by scriptwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, thought that this crime was an acceptable one for a protagonist – whose status as a Christ-like figure is subtly alluded to throughout the narrative – to commit, and still remain a ‘good guy’, or even a secular redemptive saviour of sorts, however flawed. The reading and film audiences were in accord – if they thought about it at all – given the massive contemporary popularity of the book and film. Interestingly, Ryan Gilbey’s reassessment in the New Statesman on the occasion of the film’s re-release in 2017 appeared under the headline: ‘Watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest again, I feel sorry for Nurse Ratched’, the character previously seen as the story’s arch villainess.

    But Tracy in Manhattan was not underage ‘jailbait’, to use the colloquial term for the temptation of sexual relations with minors. The age of consent in New York state was seventeen in 1979, and remains so today. (As of April 2021, of the fifty U.S. states, thirty have an age of consent of sixteen, nine at seventeen, and in eleven states the age is eighteen.) Thus, there is nothing illegal about Ike and Tracy’s relationship, as she is deemed capable of giving consent to sex with anyone else over the age of seventeen (save for cases of incest), with no so-called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ rules governing the age of her partner(s). Whether or not that represents informed consent is a matter for the legislature. (As we know from the political sphere, consent can be manufactured.) I would suggest that if the majority of a given society is of the opinion that a sexual relationship between a forty-two-year old and seventeen-year-old, or the portrayal thereof, is inappropriate, reprehensible, or criminal, then it is the current law which now needs to be changed, not the filmmaker or his work, retrospectively. After all, you cannot be indicted for a crime now that was not a crime then – in fiction or in reality. Well, maybe in fiction.

    Was Vladimir Nabokov a predatory, manipulative man because he wrote a novel about a predatory, manipulative man? Hardly, although Martin Amis, who averred ‘I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius’ (in ‘The Problem with Nabokov’, The Guardian, 14/11/2009), cannot help but have queasy reservations about what he perceives as the ‘only significant embarrassment’ in the literary reputation of one of his writerly heroes, opining (in ‘Divine Levity’, Times Literary Supplement, 23/12/2011): ‘Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls . . . To be as clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets in Nabokov is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.’ What if Nabokov had been accused of sexual impropriety (as could happen to anyone, for a variety of reasons, especially those burdened with teaching fickle, entitled students in the humanities departments of universities, in order to earn a living), would the facts that he had written Lolita and that paedophilia features in five of his other novels have been held in evidence against him? Was Nabokov a creep because he wrote about creeps – at length? Doubtless, there are millennials who would like to see Lolita banned, just as there were Moral Majority types who wanted it censored when it was published in 1955 (by the Olympia Press in Paris, for fear of backlash in the Anglophone world). Senior publisher Dan Franklin has gone on record stating that he would not publish Lolita today, for fear ‘a committee of 30-year-olds’ would resign in protest because of #MeToo and social media.

    Granted, it is disingenuous to conflate opposition to abuse and harassment with unreconstructed Judeo-Christian prudishness about sex. But it still amounts to arguing that there are facets of human behaviour that are out of bounds for nuanced exploration by artists and writers. We have exchanged the rationale for the puritanism of one era for that of another – however well-intentioned both of them were and are. Lewis Carroll obsessed about a prepubescent girl in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Father/Daughter incest is a major theme in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. From Gravity’s Rainbow to Bleeding Edge, via Mason & Dixon and Against The Day, incest and paedophilia run like a fault line through the work of Thomas Pynchon. In these days of sensitivity readers, should we ban them all? Should they come with a health warming? If we accept that paedophilia and incest and sexual abuse of children in general are things in the real world, and that they are immoral, where does that put the morality of writing about the topics or choosing not to, or passing laws to outlaw or censor such material? Does choosing not to publish facilitate covering them up? Does choosing to do so serve in tacitly promoting them? Such writing is deeply discomfiting, as it was probably intended to be. You would probably not be well-adjusted if you did not find it so. One thinks of Judge John Munro Woolsey, who concluded in the New York trial of Joyce’s Ulysses for obscenity in 1933 that, ‘Whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.’ But did the good judge not suspect that the novel’s power as an emetic was in some ways dependent on its being aphrodisiac? Does it not all depend on point-of-view and direction of sympathies, both within and without the texts? And, if so, who is to decide what the point-of-view, and direction of sympathies, are? Who will judge the judges? But if you are really looking for a book to censor because of depictions of rape and incest, then why not start with the Bible?

    There is a large age gap relationship in Sophia Coppola’s film Lost In Translation (2003), which remains unconsummated. The precise disparity itself is left unspecified, but Scarlett Johansson was seventeen when she played the role of Charlotte, a recent Yale philosophy graduate in her early twenties, and Bill Murray was fifty-two when he took on the character of Bob Harris, a faded actor in his early fifties. That the mutual attraction is romantic in nature is made clear by the significant show of disappointment exhibited by Charlotte when Bob has a fling with a more age appropriate woman (equally adulterous, but that transgression is not the focus of our moral inquiry here). In her rather vanilla defence of her storyline, in an interview given as part of the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release, Coppola stated:

    Part of the story is about how you can have romantic connections that aren’t sexual or physical. You can have crushes on people where it isn’t that kind of thing. Part of the idea was that you can have connections where you can’t be together for various reasons because you’re at different points in life.

    But what if it had turned sexual? Would Bob have suddenly metamorphosised into a predatory creep? Certainly, certain sections of the commentariat would have it so. They even express misgivings about the relationship portrayed as it stands. It is unlikely that what is widely regarded as a Gen X cinema classic would garner such a warm reception were it released today, given the heightened awareness of gendered power imbalances in the movie business, and elsewhere. The film assuredly benefitted greatly from being released before online discourse consumed pop culture, as it would easily have fallen foul of debates about the ethics of age gap relationships if it came out in the age of X (formerly Twitter). Furthermore, what if it had been made by a man? What if it had been made by Woody Allen?

    I notice that I myself have now fallen into the trap of failing to distinguish between legal and illegal sexual activity. But perhaps that is because there is a large cohort of people who are of the opinion that associations which are currently legal ought to be illegal. And if that were to happen, such currently legal relationships would become much less common in fictional representations, as it would become much less of a burning issue, although not in the realms of fantasy fiction. The queasiness of taboo which applied to Lolita in its day would now apply to Manhattan – as, indeed, it already does, but with much greater force, as now both scenarios would be equally illicit. And what would be the fate of future attempts at such representations?

    The fact is, just as Annie Ernaux was attracted to a man thirty years her junior, older men have always been attracted to women much younger than themselves, for the very reasons Ernaux says motivated her in her attraction to a much younger man. This is entirely understandable, whether you are a man or a woman: after all, youth is beautiful and full of promise; age is ragged and full of compromise. Was Ernaux grooming and being manipulative? Probably not, as it was her lover who first wrote to her, although she may have taken advantage of his fandom to have her way with him. But that was just ‘reclaiming female desire’. Nor has she been the only one engaged in this pursuit. When it comes to writers, a nefarious bunch to be sure, consider this: Iris Mudoch had a (legal) affair with a student when she was forty-four and he was twenty-four; Angela Carter had a (legal) affair with a nineteen-year-old man when she was thirty-one; and Germaine Greer published a book entitled The Boy (2003) – a study of the youthful male face and form from antiquity to the present day – in which she wrote that the ideally attractive boy must be ‘old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave. This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is mostly illegal.’ The erotic reawakening of middle-aged and older women is the main theme of several recently published novels: in Susan Minot’s Don’t Be A Stranger (2024), Ivy Cooper is in her early fifties, while her love interest Ansel is twenty years younger; in Miranda July’s All Fours (2024), the nameless heroine is forty-five-years-old, and constantly fantasises about sex with whomever; and Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022) (a sly nod to Nabokov), features an unnamed fifty-eight-year-old academic, whose husband has been accused of historic sexual misconduct with seven ‘of age’ students, lusting after a forty-year-old colleague. (Parenthetically, Anne Enright’s excellent early short story ‘Felix’ riffs, both stylistically and thematically, on a female Humbert Humbert, a forty-seven-year-old suburban housewife who has an affair with her teenage daughter’s boyfriend.)

    In the cinema world, the mother-of-all-cougars is the Simon and Garfunkel serenaded Mrs. Robinson, the older woman who seduces and has an affair with Benjamin Braddock in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). A then thirty-five-year-old Anne Bancroft was playing a woman whose age, although unspecified, was at least ten years older than that, somewhere in her forties, which is a sharp reminder of Hollywood’s standards when it comes to roles for leading actresses (or ‘female actors’). As the twenty-one-year-old Benjamin, twenty-nine-year-old Dustin Hoffman was in reality only six year younger than Bancroft. (Interestingly, the film also contains a false rape accusation, made by Mrs. Robinson against Ben, in order to thwart his relationship with her daughter, Elaine (Katherine Ross)). The older-woman-younger-boy trope later appears in Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2006), itself adapted from the 2003 novel by Zoë Heller. The scandal in question concerns forty-one-year-old art teacher and mother of two Sheba Hart, who has an affair with one of her underage secondary school students, fifteen-year-old Steven Connolly. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Liquorice Pizza (2021) is a contemporary film depicting a twenty-five-year-old woman, photographer’s assistant Alana Kane, dating a fifteen-year-old boy, actor Gary Valentine. Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) features Gracie Atherton-Yoo and her husband Joe Yoo, who started a relationship in the 1990s, when she was a thirty-six-year-old mother of two and he was twelve. Gracie has spent time in jail for statuary rape, where she gave birth to Joe’s baby. When she was freed on parole they got married, had two more children, and are still together. The scenario is loosely based on the real life story of Seattle teacher and mother of four Mary Kay Letourneau who, aged thirty-four in 1996, seduced her twelve-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. Like Gracie, Letourneau spent several years in prison, and married a then of age Fualaau upon her release in 2005, and had two children with him. In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (2024), CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman), a married mother of two daughters, embarks on a powerplay affair with her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). While how old they are is not specifically detailed in dialogue, the official screenplay indicates that their respective ages are forty-nine and twenty-five, a twenty-four year disparity. Furthermore, Kidman is fifty-seven while Dickinson is twenty-eight, making the leads’ real life age gap one of twenty-nine years. (As it happens, Kidman is no stranger to taking on such roles, as she portrayed similar older women involved with younger men in A Family Affair (2024), The Paperboy (2012) and To Die For (1995).) Reijn has promoted her film thus:

    If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane. It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships. We’re not trapped in a box anymore. We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.

    In real life, Madonna is sixty-five, her boyfriend is twenty-seven. Cher is seventy-seven, her boyfriend is thirty-five. Brigitte Macron is seventy-one, her husband Emmanuel Macron is forty-seven. Some of these relationships are legal, some are not, while some inhabit a grey area, depending on where and when they occur. But the middle-aged ladies are evidently horny for young male flesh, at least in these zeitgeisty cultural representations. The message is clear: having a toy boy is cool, whereas having a younger woman, it would seem, is not – or not anymore. What men have always known, and women are catching on to, to echo Ernaux, is that connubial domesticity is often a burdensome bore from which respite is required. Thus, for men, the acquiring of a mistress, or the discreet visits to the brothel, to supplement the mundane or meagre mollifications of the marriage bed. So, either women are just catching up and this is only equality in action, or else no older person, man or woman, should be allowed to cultivate such intergenerational romantic or sexual relationships in the first place. After all, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander – or is it the other way around?

    CLICK HERE to read PART II of Desmond Traynor’s ‘Woody and Annie (and Others)’.

    Feature Image: G1AWGP Cannes, France. 12th May, 2016. Woody Allen, Soon Yi Previn Director And Wife Cafe Society, Premiere. 69 Th Cannes Film Festival Cannes, France 12 May 2016 Diw88737 Credit: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Live News

  • How Far Can We Trust Science?

    Science in itself appears to me neutral, that is to say, it increases men’s power whether for good or for evil.
    – Bertrand Russell (from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944 (1968), Vol. 2, Letter to W. W. Norton, 27 January, 1931).

    What is Science? That is about as readily answerable a question as ‘What is Art?’, and could invite a similarly lengthy exegesis. As to whether or not it should be trusted, well, that rather depends on the kind of Science under discussion – just as it would if the same challenge were applied to Art. Is Science what scientists tell us it is? Is their research funded by a pharmaceutical company, with a vested interest in the outcomes of their labours? Will their universities’ coffers be swelled by producing what their institutions’ benefactors wish them to find? ‘It’s not an exact science’ is a cliché which trips lazily off the tongue, in relation to many a discipline. But it can conceivably be extended to ‘Science isn’t an exact science.’

    This opening paragraph is a suitably unsubtle illustration of the paranoic mindset, most readily associated with right-wing conspiracy theorists, and most recently made manifest by COVID scepticism: anti-vaxxers, mask refuseniks, restriction flouters. Such largely unfounded suspicions also extend to questioning the reality or severity of the threat posed to the planet by climate change (usually for entirely self-serving motives). But there is a more nuanced argument to be made here. As Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959) argues, the breaking of paradigms is essential in order to create new ones. People, scientists included, cling to cherished old beliefs with such love and attachment that they refuse to see what is false in their theories and what is true in new theories which will replace them. After all, the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system lasted from roughly 3000 BC to around 1500 AD, a time frame spanning from the Ancient Greeks to the late Middle Ages, before Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton came along, nervously positing the heliocentric conception of our corner of the universe.

    This point was developed further a few years after the publication of Koestler’s influential tome, by historian of science Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), in which the concept of ‘paradigm shift’ came to the fore. Kuhn’s insistence that such shifts were mélanges of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not logically determinate procedures, caused something of an uproar in scientific circles at the time. For some commentators his book introduced a realistic humanism into the core of Science, while for others the nobility of Science was tarnished by Kuhn’s positing of an irrational element at the heart of Science’s greatest achievements.

    Koestler’s book was also a major influence on Irish novelist John Banville’s so-called ‘Science tetralogy’: Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter (1982) and Mefisto (1986). A recurring theme in these narratives is the correlation between scientific discoveries and artistic inspiration, with scientific progress often depending upon blind ‘leaps of faith’. (One thinks of poor schoolteacher Johannes Kepler, struck by the proverbial bolt of lightning, ‘trumpeting juicily into his handkerchief’ in front of a classroom of bored boys, thinking ‘I will live forever.’) For Banville, all scientific explanations of the world and existence in it – and perhaps all artistic depictions too – merely ‘save the phenomena’; that is, they account for our perceptions, but rarely delve into what we cannot (yet) perceive. This is classic phenomenology, which has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others.

    None of the foregoing is made any easier to unknot if one considers that when it comes to Science, the majority of the population (myself included) have little idea of what they are actually talking about. As C.P. Snow observed in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959):

    A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

    Latterly, in Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), Simon Critchley suggests:

    Snow diagnosed the loss of a common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed ‘literary intellectuals’ on the other. If the former are in favour of social reform and progress through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow terms ‘natural Luddites’ in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced industrial society. In Mill’s terms, the division is between Benthamites and Coleridgeans.

    In his opening address at the Munich Security Conference in January 2014, the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said that the current problems related to security and freedom in cyberspace are the culmination of absence of dialogue between these ‘Two Cultures’:

    Today, bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to track people… simply because they can and it’s cool. Humanists on the other hand do not understand the underlying technology and are convinced, for example, that tracking meta-data means the government reads their emails.

    Artists are characterised as wildly unpredictable tricksters, while scientists are framed as boring, calculating nerds. Neither misrepresentation is helpful. As a corollary, most people think they can in some way ‘do art’ and ‘be creative’, while also merely taking Science on trust, just as they take (or took) religion on faith. We may have the experience of using technology and social media every day, but few of us have any meaningful grasp of how it works. More prosaically, how many of us could wire our own house – even if we were legally permitted to do so?

    Kepler (1571–1630), along with Galileo and Isaac Newton, was one of the founders of what we nowadays call Science. In Kepler’s time, and prior to it, those who practised Science were known as natural philosophers, and theirs was largely a ‘pure’ discipline in which intellectual speculation was paramount and technology played only a small part – although Galileo was quick to point out the practical uses of the telescope in, for instance, seafaring, land surveying and, of course, military strategising. Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion paved the way for Newton’s revolutionary celestial physics. Indeed, Kepler’s first law, which declares that the planets move not in circular but in elliptical orbits, was one of the boldest and most profound scientific propositions ever put forward: men, and – more often –  women, had been burned at the stake for less. By way of illustration, as Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo (1940) dramatises, the eminent professor of Padua was brought to the Vatican in Rome for interrogation by the Inquisition and, threatened with torture, recanted his teachings and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest, watched over by a priest. His astronomical observations had strongly supported Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system, which ran counter to popular belief, Aristotelian physics and the established doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. When doubters quoted scripture and Aristotle to him, Galileo pleaded with them to look in his telescope and trust the observations of their eyes; naturally, they refused. As a good Marxist, Brecht advocates the theory of technological determinism (technological progress determines social change), which is reflected in the telescope (a technological change) being the root of scientific progress and hence social unrest. Questions about motivations for academic pursuits are also often raised in the play, with Galileo seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake, while his supporters are more focused on monetising his discoveries through star charts and industry applications. There is a tension between Galileo’s pure love of science and his more worldly, avaricious sponsors, who only fund and protect his research because they wish to profit from it.

    These days, the preponderance of popular debate about Science centres on computer science, specifically information technology, and concomitant fears that Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter referred to as ‘AI”) is taking over the world, posing a threat to our democracies, or even our very conceptions of humanity – or as it is almost always more narcissistically cast, ‘Our way of life.’ The Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal of 2018, in which the data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign appropriated millions of Facebook profiles of U.S. voters, is certainly to be taken very seriously indeed. However, social media platforms – even ‘legacy’ ones – will undoubtedly have to pay more than lip service to improving privacy and security, if only to continue to attract venture capital, advertising revenue, and thus keep the shareholders happy. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, etc. are about maximising profits, by whatever means necessary. Therefore, it would be more perspicacious to look for the human element in these data breaches, rather than blame the technology itself. Such scaremongering claims as that by Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, in an article in The Economist (April 28th, 2023) under the headline ‘AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation’ seem to me to be all wild assertion and little evidence. As a recent delicious hoax perpetrated on the op. ed. pages of The Irish Times (concerning fake tan and cultural appropriation) neatly demonstrated, almost all problems with computers and AI-generated content are facilitated by human error and stupidity. All of us live under systems of control – political, financial, social, technological – over which we have very little, if any, agency. Even if we could do something meaningfully efficacious about the identity theft which takes places every time we log on to our computers, it is unlikely that we possess enough personal initiative to do so. In this regard, the chaos theory of modern (mis)communications is mirrored by the babble of literary, musical and visual modernism. After all, you could just stop using social media altogether, had you but sufficient willpower. Few of us have the courage to go completely off grid. Moreover, lest we forget, most statistical analysis puts internet access at around 64.6% of the world’s population, which means that over a third of mankind have never ‘surfed the web’. First World problems, eh?

    The Frankensteinian trope of the Mad Scientist being overpowered by his invention has long been a mainstay of that most underrated of genres, science fiction – a consideration of which might shed more light on this problem, rather than limiting discussion solely to scientific fact. From relatively schlocky items such as Alex Proyas’ film I, Robot (2004) (which fails dismally to capture the complexity of Issac Asimov’s source material), to the most famous and prescient instance of a computer outsmarting its operator, exemplified by Hal 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke) 2001: A Space Odyssey (and how far into the future did the year 2001 feel in 1969, when the film premiered?), the interface between intelligent humans and even more intelligent machines has long provided an imprimatur for literary imaginations to run wild. Witness Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1992), which was in turn based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). In the novel, the android antagonists can be seen as more human than the (possibly) human protagonist. They are a mirror held up to human action, contrasted with a culture losing its own humanity (that is, ‘humanity’ taken to mean the positive aspects of humanity). In ‘Technology, Art, and the Cybernetic Body: The Cyborg as Cultural Other in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, Klaus Benesch examined Dick’s text in connection with Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’. Lacan claims that the formation and reassurance of the self depends on the construction of an Other through imagery, beginning with a double as seen in a mirror. The androids, Benesch argues, perform a doubling function similar to the mirror image of the self, but they do this on a social, not an individual, level. Therefore, human anxiety about androids expresses uncertainty about human identity and society itself, just as in the original film the administration of an ‘empathy test’, to determine if a character is human or android, produces many false positives. Either the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed, or replicants are pretty good at being human (or, perhaps, better than human).

    This perplexity first found an explanation in Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential essay The Uncanny Valley (1970), in which he hypothesised that human response to human-like robots would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as a robot approached, but failed to attain, a life-like appearance, due to subtle imperfections in design. He termed this descent into eeriness ‘the uncanny valley’, and the phrase is now widely used to describe the characteristic dip in emotional response that happens when we encounter an entity that is almost, but not quite, human. But if human-likeness increased beyond this nearly human point, Mori argues, and came very close to human, the emotional response would revert to being positive. However, the observation led Mori to recommend that robot builders should not attempt to attain the goal of making their creations overly life-like in appearance and motion, but instead aim for a design, ‘which results in a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity. In fact, I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a non-human design.’ But, as technophobes would likely counter, the uncanny gets cannier, day by day. It would certainly be interesting to know if Mori has seen such relatively recent film fare as Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) or Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and, if so, what he makes of their take on the authenticity of human/android emotional and sexual relationships.

    It was military imperative which accelerated the discovery of nuclear fission (‘What if the Nazis develop the bomb first?’), just as it went on to fuel the post-war arms race and Cold War paranoia. As he witnessed the first detonation of an atomic weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita supposedly ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Similarly, artists such as director David Lynch view the invention of nuclear weapons as unleashing a new kind of evil on the world, as explored in Episode 8 of the third season of Twin Peaks, known as Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Many view the U.S.’s deployment of primitive atomic devices to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as wilfully and wantonly cruel, as well as ultimately unnecessary. Yet, in British novelist J.G. Ballard’s highly subjective and characteristically idiosyncratic opinion, he and his family survived World War II only because of the Nagasaki bomb. The spectacular display of American military might when the Ballards were prisoners at the Japanese camp for Western civilians in Shanghai led the Japanese soldiers to abandon their posts, leaving the civilians alive. In the essay ‘The End of My War’, collected in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996) (apropos of which, is anyone old enough to remember when Y2K was going to be the next big computer science disaster?), Ballard recollects that the Japanese military planned to close the camp and march the civilians up country to some remote spot to kill them before facing American landings in the Shanghai area. Ballard concludes, ‘I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.’ Also, the same source of power which can cause thermonuclear destruction can be harnessed in reactors to produce cheap, clean energy streams for large populations. Yet nuclear reactors can fail, as the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima attest. Yet the use of such technologies, along with solar, wind and wave power, can reduce dependency on fossil fuels, thus helping to ameliorate the climate emergency of global warming. Furthermore, as Lou Reed has it in ‘Power and Glory, Part II’, a song from his album-length meditation on death, bereavement, and (im)mortality, Magic and Loss (1992):

    I saw isotopes introduced into his lungs
    Trying to stop the cancerous spread
    And it made me think of Leda and The Swan
    And gold being made from lead
    The same power that burned Hiroshima
    Causing three-legged babies and death
    Shrunk to the size of a nickel
    To help him regain his breath

    And yet, and yet, and yet. If only life, and the moral and ethical dilemmas it throws up, were black and white.

    Man (encompassing Woman) invented the wheel, and discovered electricity. Wheels can be used to transport food and medicine to the starving and sick, or weapons to a war zone. Electricity can be used to power a life-support machine in a hospital, or death by electrocution in a chair in a penitentiary. Electrocution can even be accidental, just as winning a war may – in exceptional circumstances – serve the greater good.

    Ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and Eve bit into a forbidden piece of fruit, the acquisition of new knowledge has been painted as problematic. Humans will always misuse humanity’s greatest discoveries and inventions for selfish and malevolent ends. It is the way of things. Computers were supposed to make all our lives easier, freeing us from work-related drudgery for higher, less ephemeral, pursuits. Instead, inevitably, they have been appropriated by Capitalism, and made screen slaves of us all. If anything, they have added to our workload and the hours we must make available to employers, rather than diminished time spent earning a living in favour of increased leisure. The adults in the room, and there are increasingly fewer of them, need to speak up. Objective scientific truth, should it exist, is neutral. The problem, as ever, lies with humanity. For, as the author of this piece’s epigraph also wrote, in Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924), ‘I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.’ Equally, to draw again on the lessons to be gleaned from sci-fi, in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), the hydrogen bomb winds up getting dropped through the actions of one unhinged army general, and a subsequent unfortunate series of events; just as in his aforementioned 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000’s behaviour would not have turned increasingly malignant, had the astronauts taken into account that their spaceship’s operating system could lipread. Indeed, in Clarke’s novelisation of the film, HAL malfunctions because of being ordered to lie to the crew of Discovery by withholding confidential information from them, namely the priority of the mission to Jupiter over expendable human life, despite having been constructed for ‘the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment.’ As film critic Roger Ebert observed, HAL – the supposedly perfect computer – is actually the most human of the characters. Once again, the fault does not lie with Science; rather, human error and stupidity are to blame. All of which might lead one to suggest that maybe the question ‘How Far Can We Trust Science?’ should be more fruitfully reformulated as ‘How Far Can We Trust Humans?’

    Postscript: this essay could not have been handily completed without the assistance of Wikipedia, and other, often unreliable, online research resources.

    Feature Image: Lum3n

  • Substituting Memory for History in the (Mis)information Age

    History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
    James Joyce, in ‘Nestor’, from Ulysses (1922)

    If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.’
    Joseph Brodsky, in ‘Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary’, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

    One of the more contentious trends in contemporary historiography, and philosophy of history, is the weird juxtaposing of memory and history, with the latter being privileged (perhaps unsurprisingly, by professional historians) as somehow superior, or more objective. This is evident, for example, in the work of Roy Foster (e.g. ‘Sorry is not enough’, London Independent, 17/07/1999), and of David Reiff (‘The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good’, The Guardian, 02/03/2016). This tendency may have partly originated in a reaction against the work of French historian Pierre Nora, who, in his efforts to define what constitutes a ‘true’ history, instigated this opposition between history and memory. Because outright political agitation and national imperatives dominate readings of history, he argued (see Realms of Memory (1996/1998), therefore there is no objective truth to be found there. However, he went further, adopting the nihilistic perspective that because memory, although preferable, is also selective, there is, effectively, no such thing as a recoverable past. In his somewhat opaque attempt to reconcile Marxist dialectics with an underpinning theology, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Walter Benjamin took a more measured, if equally audacious approach. In Thesis VI he wrote:

    To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.

    But how exactly has memory come to be viewed as the poor relation of history? For what else is history, ultimately, but the product of memory? Or, at the very least, a consequence of the urge to memorialise? If only because Memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of History (Clio), as she is of all the muses.

    This shift in status is compounded by the current fearmongering panic and paranoia about the threat to humanity and the humanities by the dreaded Artificial Intelligence. While AI is NOT nothing to worry about, it should be remembered that narratives of conflict in contested spaces have always been distorted by misinformation: it is known as ‘the fog of war’ or, more commonly, ‘propaganda’. All that has improved (or disimproved, because of the uses to which it is put) is the technology. As the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler wrote in ‘The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue’:

    Speed of communication has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency.

    That was in 1956. It was ever thus. Whatever the contemporary concerns about manipulation by A.I., data harvesting, algorithms and bots, it seems to me that digitally native under-30s are more than capable of dealing with the vagaries of the media with which they have grown up and are therefore adept at handling because of easy familiarity. When it comes to being duped online, the kids are savvy enough. It is the supposed adults in the room you have to fear for and keep an eye on.

    Perplexity as to the status of historiography as a somehow tainted literary representation or a scientific unbiased recounting is nothing new, with E. H. Carr’s What Is History? (1961) provoking fierce responses like that of Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History (1967), because of Carr’s relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis; that is, his almost proto-Baudrillardian notion of history as a partisan pursuit, a simulacrum written by the winners, or at least by those whose relative perspectives are skewed by vested interests or their own agendas. Elton, on the other hand, was a strong defender of traditional modi operandi and was appalled by postmodernism and multi-narrative histories, seeing the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing it.

    Thucydides Mosaic from Jerash, Jordan, Roman, 3rd century AD at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

    Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides

    The Carr/Elton debate can be seen as a more recent reenactment of a controversy which has reoccurred throughout (as it were) history, for example in relation to perceptions surrounding the virtues and drawbacks of Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides as historians of Ancient Greece, or of Suetonius in contrast to Tacitus of Ancient Rome, the methodology espoused by each echoing the practice of their predecessors. Thucydides and Tacitus may be more analytical and less anecdotal than Herodotus and Suetonius, but their histories are still based on interviews with participants and eye witnesses, and then drawing their own conclusions. How do we know if these interviewees were telling the truth, or if their memories were accurate or faulty? They could be deliberately lying, or accidentally misremembering. Plus, these informants are rarely named. Then there is the question of how much bias effects the reliability of Herodotus’ Histories and Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, given their respective Athenian and Roman sympathies, which they freely admit. Herodotus may have been accorded the accolade the ‘Father of History’ by Cicero, but at least as early as Plutarch’s pamphlet On The Malignity of Herodotus, he has also been known as the ‘Father of Lies’. When introducing his English translation of the Annals, Michael Grant even refers to Tacitus’ ‘mask of austere impartiality’. Meanwhile, much of Plutarch is pure entertaining hearsay. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that the Greek word Ιστορία (historia), from which our own specialised meaning is derived, meant ‘research’ or ‘inquiry’, rather than the definitive account, and is how Herodotus’ titled his work.

    So, while from an early twenty-first century perspective, Herodotus may seem more like a chronicler rather than an analyser, it is important to remember history’s origins in storytelling, and the influence of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – the stories from both of which were recited orally long before they were ever written down – on Herodotus’ mindset and methodology. Indeed, in an echo of those tales told around a campfire, which rhymed to facilitate ease of memorisation, it is believed that Herodotus would have given public readings from his Histories in Athens. For this reason, we may find it more understandable that he is nebulous about the differences between tradition and history, and that he did not always realise that eye witness accounts of the same event can vary. If literature is what is written, and Herodotus was writing history, we should not forget the debt both literature and history owe to the oral tradition.

    Of course, professional historians will argue that historiography has come a long way since antiquity, especially through the use of documentary evidence – inscriptions, manuscripts, treaties, newspaper and (latterly) television and radio reports, court records, archival material and archaeological discoveries, etc. But all of these (un)reliable sources are, finally, human products and personal artifacts, and thus subject to the fallibility of the species – certainly in their interpretation if not equally so in their inception. Just because something is written down does not make it true, or even representative. What pressures were being exerted on those doing the writing and signing, and what did they stand to lose or gain by their acts of scrivening – their Oaths of Allegiance and their Declarations of War? How far can we even rely on those who observed them, or who claim to have done so? Indeed, overreliance on these constituent parts privileges literacy over the oral tradition, one which Herodotus (influenced as he was by the Homeric epics) came out of and which historians have always relied upon – however unreliable it, in turn, may be, based as it is on folk memory. To favour the written over the spoken word does a great disservice to so-called ‘ordinary’ people, and smacks of a ‘made by great men’ approach to historiography. In this prejudice originates the elevation of History over Memory.

    History Faculty building on the Sidgewick Site of the University of Cambridge.

    Worthwhile Academic Pursuit

    None of the foregoing is intended to denigrate the study of History as a worthwhile academic pursuit. But one has only to trace the history of nationalist, revisionist and counter-revisionist narratives of past events on our own island over the preceding century or so to glean an inkling of the fluctuations of fashion in how history is done and disseminated, and to be aware that all readings of history, whatever the original sources or new evidence which come to light, are necessarily provisional. Plays by Brian Friel like Translations and Making History engage with how this history has been made, and remade. The presentation of the past, whether in memory or history (or historical memory), and the relation of both forms of presentation to the ideal of an unmediated past – that is, to an account of the past not distorted by the medium in which it is presented – is illusory. In this regard, every form of (re)presenting the past is a construction and an attempt to pass on something that is already forever lost.

    The concept of historiography as representation, which can easily shade into fiction, while being presented as factual truth, has correlatives in our own time. Herodotus’ treatment of the Persian invasions under Darius and Xerxes implies an underlying conflict between the absolutism of the East and the allegedly free institutions of the West, between Persian monarchy and Athenian democracy. The fact that we have no Persian record of the Persian Wars is down to the fact that Persia was an oral culture, and their version has been lost in the mists of time. In this case, written words would have proven useful. Herodotus’ contention that democracy was the cornerstone of Athenian superiority, and his praise of it as responsible for Athens’ pre-eminent position, might make us mindful of the justifications invoked for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. While bringing the benefits of democracy and freedom to a former dictatorship was the general goal of the invasion, the proximate goad was the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction within the jurisdiction of that regime, a piece of ‘intelligence’ which was subsequently exposed as a faulty, if enabling, fiction. However, that the reason for going to war ultimately proved to be another instance of imaginative invention, every bit as much a representation (or spin) as elements of Herodotus’ Histories, did not bother the advocates of that invasion unduly after it was discovered, evidence that people are still as enthralled by mythic embroidery masquerading as objective fact as they ever were.

    To be sure, in Herodotus’ day it was the Persian Empire which was the aggressor, looking to colonise Greece, and the united city-states, including Athens, were merely defending themselves. The notable difference in our day is that it is the democrats who are doing the invading, with the sanctioning intention of toppling an absolute ruler, or eradicating terrorism. Again, how often today do we hear the sound bite, employed not only in defence of Israel’s right to defend itself, but also in support of its continued existence, that it is ‘the only democracy in the region’? Without too much of a stretch, it could be argued that Herodotus was indulging in an early version of what Edward Said subsequently termed, in the title of his masterly book which almost single-handedly founded postcolonial studies, Orientalism (1978). Having initiated the debate, Said developed it further in Culture and Imperialism (1993), sensitising the average western reader to this strange and sinister colonialism of culture. Sadly, these tropes will not cease, for obscurantism is not the sole prerogative of any epoch, or political grouping.

    Said’s originality was evident in the way he defined the subject of his book.  Orientalism is, first, an academic specialisation: a topic studied by archaeologists, historians, theologians and others in the West who are concerned with Middle Eastern and North African cultures. But Said added two further meanings to the term. Orientalism is also something more general, something that has shaped Western thought since the Greeks: namely, a way of dividing up the world between the West and the East. What appears to be a simple geographical fact is, says Said, actually an idea. The division of the world into these two parts is not a natural state of affairs, but an intellectual choice made by the West in order to define itself. The third meaning for Orientalism is more historically specific. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century, when European colonialism in the Middle East developed most fully, Orientalism has been a means of domination, a part of the colonial enterprise. Said argues that colonialism is not only about the physical acts of taking land, or of subjugating people, but is also about intellectual acts. The academic study of the Orient is unthinkable outside its colonial context and vice versa. So, rather than just an innocent scholarly topic, Orientalism is a general way of imagining the world’s divisions and a specific mechanism for furthering the colonial quest.

    Following Foucault, Said describes the Orient as a product of discourse; that is, not as something in the world that is discovered and analysed, but as something created by Western institutions and ideas. The definition of the Orient is a means of regulating it; the apparent truths discovered are in fact ideas circulated and accepted as part of Western colonial activity in the Middle East. The sense of the Orient as a discursive construct, in turn, enables Said to make one of his most important and striking arguments: what the West believed it had discovered about the East tells us little about the colonised cultures, but much about the coloniser’s. The texts and disciplines that comprise Orientalism – historical narratives like that of Herodotus, analyses of religion, travel writing, etc – reveal the values and preconceptions of the West, of the way people in Washington or Paris or London, or indeed fifth century Athens, wanted to see themselves, their fears and ambitions and prejudices. In particular, the image created of the East is used as a means of constructing one’s own identity. The picture of the East functions as a distorting mirror image, enabling the West to say that whatever they are, we are not. This emphasises the way in which a duality, often referred to as a dyad, is set up: West and East, us and them.

    In spite of the growing influence of Asian nations and the recent ‘Easternisation’ of international politics and trade, such exclusively Western- or Euro-centric readings still predominate our understanding of global history. This is a mindset which has been challenged, in what can be seen as a continuation of the Orientalism project, by Peter Frankopan, in his The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015), and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018). One would do well also to have a look at Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi’s books Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997) and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2017), in which he depicts Israel as a settler-colonial state, and argues that the modern history of Palestine can best be understood as ‘a colonial war against the indigenous population’.

    Bakhmut_during_the_battle_(2023-04-05).

    Proxy Wars

    Both of the ongoing international conflicts which dominate the news cycle in these times, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israeli-Hamas hostilities, are in truth complex proxy wars. Appeasement, or its more recent first cousin, conflict management, does not work. As Professor Yossi Mekelberg, of the venerable Chatham House Think Tank, has written:

    One conclusion from the collapse of the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is that conflict management is a fallacy that has failed time and again. As a long-term instrument it at best buys time until the next round of violence begins. More than 75 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have seen periodic outbreaks of hostilities and periodic efforts to bring peace based on a two-state solution. For most of this time the focus has been on managing the conflict. This exposes a lack of belief that a peace agreement laying to rest the differences between the two peoples can be reached. It also shows that the international collective security mechanism set up after the Second World War has failed in its mission to peacefully settle conflicts.This conflict does not need management, it needs its root causes to be addressed.

    The Northern Ireland Peace Process, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (‘Sunningdale for slow learners’), provides some hope that reconciliation is possible in ‘lost cause’ situations, even if underlying tensions still persist. At least it put an end to what were euphemistically termed ‘The Troubles’, with their violence and loss of life. A United Ireland will happen sooner or later, and it will be an economic problem, much as the reunification of Germany was: Britain does not want to continue footing the bill for the statelet, and the Republic of Ireland is charry of taking it on. Meanwhile, most of those resident in the territory – from whatever side of the Unionist/Nationalist sectarian divide – are more preoccupied about having to pay for G.P. visits and prescriptions, should they find themselves in a New Republic.

    The Russian/Ukrainian stalemate might be resolved if Putinistas were to be purged of their nostalgia for the Russian Empire and the former reach of the U.S.S.R., and had their fears over N.A.T.O. encroachment addressed; and if Zelenskyyites were not so ardent in their pursuit of N.A.T.O. membership. The Russian invasion was not, as is routinely heard in Western governmental and media discourse, entirely ‘unprovoked’. As Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs of Colombia University has written:

    A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective. […] The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

    As for the seemingly intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict, with its attendant apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and genocide on the part of the more powerful and well-resourced combatant: if Israel were suddenly left to fend for itself, without being massively underwritten by the U.S. and the E.U., it would soon have to start behaving itself, and acting in a civilised manner with its neighbours – just as a reduction in Iranian (bankrolled by Russia), Qatari and Yemeni support for Hamas would greatly alleviate tensions in the zone. Alas, this is not going to happen, given the North American imperative for a strategic foothold in the region and Zionist funding of their politicians through AIPAC, coupled with German Holocaust guilt, and the onus on oppositional sympathisers to provide some sort of counterforce. The only difference between the I.D.F.’s war crimes and those of Hamas is that the latter lacks the technology to do as much extensive damage, because the former enjoys such disproportionately huge investment, and impunity.

    History makes no mistakes because it has no purpose – that much Hubert Butler must have known by that time (1930s and 40s) if only because at Oxford he read the Greek and Roman classics. In any case, the dishonesty, self-deception and self-aggrandizement of those evoking history to pull the trigger didn’t escape him, not did their utter humanness. His knowledge of Russian…and of Serbo-Croatian,not to mention his French and his German, helped him along the line, no doubt, enormously. The detection of humanness in those whose words and deeds obscure it is, however, his own feat. On the other hand, this must have been easier for him, an Irishman, since schizophrenic uncertainty is humanness’ integral part.

    So wrote the great Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in ‘On Hubert Butler’ (1994). In what could be read as a corrective to the notion of this blind, ahistorical history, he also gave this insight in his essay on the work of the great Greek pre-Modernist poet, Constantine Cavafy, ‘Pendulum’s Song’ (1975): ‘The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive.’ However, if the school principal in the ‘Nestor’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Mr. Deasy, is blatantly antisemitic in his exchanges with Stephen Dedalus, Brodsky, in another essay, ‘Flight from Byzantium’ (1985), is patently Islamophobic, displaying a smug ignorance and revulsion of ‘the East’. Indeed, so vitriolic is his repugnance, it is tempting to speculate that he is intentionally verging into parody:

    The delirium and horror of the East.  The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet.  Nothing grows here except moustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world.  Bonfire embers doused with urine.  That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban.  Racism?  But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?  And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle even in the city, poking the world out of your eyes – and yet one feels grateful even for that.  Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the colour of an upturned grave.  Ah, all that nearsighted scum – Corbusier, Mondrian, Gropius – who mutilated the world more effectively than any Luftwaffe! Snobbery?  But it’s only a form of despair.  The local population in a state of total stupor whirling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up.  Or else they’re dealing out cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole accessible abstractions, the single means of concentration.  Misanthropy?  Despair?  Yet what else could be expected from one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear principle? From a man who has nowhere to go back to?  From a great turdologist, sacrophage, and the possible author of Sadomachia?

    Brodsky even goes on to argue that: ‘By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to non-existence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.’ He also implies that: ‘…the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing – i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique’, originates in the East, and that Western Christianity’s neglecting the experience supplied by Byzantium is the reason why college campus killers are classed as mentally ill, and presumably suicide bombers are labelled religious fanatics, as opposed to just plain evil. If supposedly enlightened classical humanists can harbour such sentiments, what hope can there be for reconciliation and mutual understanding?

    Interestingly, in ‘A Man Must Not Be Too Moslem’ (1953), Paul Bowles (while admittedly, no friend of Said – See Hisham Aidi, ‘So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?’, New York Review of Books, 20/12/2019) took entirely the opposite tack, and was so prescient that the ideas contained therein could have been ripped from today’s headlines. He wrote:

    Rationalizing words like ‘progress’, ‘modernization’, or ‘democracy’  mean nothing because, even if they are used sincerely, the imposition of such concepts by force from above cancels whatever value they otherwise have. There is little doubt that by having been made indifferent Moslems, the younger generation in Turkey has become more like our idea of what people living in the 20th century should be. The old helplessness in the face of mektoub (it is written) is gone, and in its place is a passionate belief in man’s ability to alter his destiny. That is the greatest step of all; once it has been made, anything, unfortunately, can happen.

    Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt (‘Forcibly pulled out of bunkers’)

    Victims of Oppression go on to Oppress

    It can be argued that what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has done to the countries which surround it since its foundation, partakes of the classic pattern of abusive behaviour, on a national rather than an individual level. ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’ as W. H. Auden had it in ‘September 1, 1939’. It is not unheard of that victims of oppression go on to oppress even more. The Jewish people, who were victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, are now themselves perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Perhaps Brodsky’s Jewish ancestry accounts for his self-advertised blindspot: he was merely conforming to stereotype. But the Children of Gaza by now far outnumber Butler’s ‘The Children of Drancy’ (1968/78) – with the added developmental difference that now the whole world is watching their slaughter. Yet the majority of Western leaders persist in standing staunchly by Israel and its policies, paying mere lip service to popular calls for a ceasefire while continuing to supply the weapons used for the razing of Gaza and the annihilation of its people. The last thing our planet needs in this day and age is the continued endorsement and maintenance of yet another theocratic ethno-state. We in Ireland should know this all too well. George Santayana’s famous aphorism is usually misquoted as ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, but in its original form read, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Unfortunately, no one learns any lessons from history, and remembers only what suits them, which is why it constantly repeats itself – first as tragedy and then as farce.

    Bad things undoubtedly follow when any ethnic or national or religious grouping (often a toxic concoction of all three) claim to have all the answers, and so start getting notions that they are The Master Race, or The Chosen People, or undertake Crusades against the Heathen or Jihad against the Infidel, or any convenient Evil Other. Note that I include here such secular religions as Fascism and Communism, which too frequently manifest as latter-day utopian belief systems which can be used to sponsor mass murder.

    All wars are, at root, economic. The geopolitical importance, the religion and the patriotism, the toppling of tyrants and establishing of democracy, are just the attendant window dressing. (Doubtless, all those anti-materialists who would prefer to forget, or only remember in an approved way, will here dismiss my arguments with the classic cheap insult of ‘vulgar Marxist’ – incidentally, a phrase Foster has appropriated from Benjamin’s Theses, although used there in an entirely different context. Apparently, there exist kosher, refined Marxists, and objectionable, vulgar Marxists. Thus, E. P. Thompson is deemed acceptable within the academy, despite the fact that he expressed sentiments such as, ‘so great has been the reaction in our time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated a ridiculous reversal of historical roles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution’ (from The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1978).) Yet all wars also end eventually, if only for longer or shorter periods, either through disengagement, conquest, de facto surrender, formal surrender or negotiated peace agreement. The means of disseminating misinformation may be more covert, efficient and persuasive, but what does not change is human nature. The apportioning of blame, who has right (or God) on their side, is in most conflicts a question of ‘How far back would you like to go?’ (which is, in turn, a slightly more grown-up rendering of the childish playground staple, ‘You started it’). Would that be the first incursion or the latest atrocity, or any point on the calendar in-between?

    At some point, the origin of the primordial offence recedes from history into myth – found in sacred books and the stories people tell. Sometimes it is even, conveniently, the Word of God (be it Yahweh or Allah). Arguably, memory is more historically accurate than lots of competing histories. Indeed, as has been demonstrated, many of those histories, official and unofficial alike, are based on recollections after the fact. Ultimately, history is nothing more or less than memory. Yet memory fades, unless it is recorded – however rigorously or haphazardly – in history. We currently stand as helpless as we ever were when The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Goya had it, and Voltaire’s admonition, ‘Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ is still, sadly, applicable.

    Feature Image Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (“Stormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack”), 1924.

  • Joujouka Redux

    My wrist watch stops dead shortly after we arrive in Tangier (at 21:16 – 2/6/2022, to be precise), which is symbolically appropriate. Time runs differently in Joujouka, the rural village located some 110km south of here in the Rif Mountains, for which this urbane, noisy, historically cosmopolitan port city is on this occasion serving as a gateway. I’d been to Morocco once before, in 2013, when the fissures in our marriage were beginning to make themselves felt. For that reason, and others, I was then flying solo. Now here I am again, with J, bringing her on part of the pilgrimage I had made then, having separated and reunited in the interim, working through whatever it was we’d had to sort out, together and apart. This would be a shared experience. Love me, love my obsessions.

    In his monumental history of the drone in music, Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion (2021), which ranges from vibrating sound waves at the exploding dawn of the universe to the stoner/doom/drone metal of bands like Sleep, Earth, Boris and Sunn O))) – via the choral chanting of Buddhist and Christian monks, Indian raga, free jazz improvisation, various indigenous folk traditions, Krautrock, contemporary classical and avant garde, and electronic experimentation (drone is not codified or confined by genre) – Harry Sword devotes an entire chapter to The Master Musicians of Joujouka, in which he writes:

    A mystic Sufi sect … the Masters – members of the tribe Ahl Serif – produce a narcotic cacophony that hinges on frenetic tribal drums, gruff call and response chants and the screeching drone of multiple rhaita pipes. Playing a music unique to the village and passed from father to son, the Joujouka sound is unlike any other.They’ve been at it for centuries. William S. Burroughs (or was it Dr. Timothy Leary?, provenance is disputed) famously called them the ‘world’s only 4000-year-old rock’n’roll band’. Playing for up to twelve hours straight, musicians and audience alike entering a waking dreamscape, theirs is a brutal trip. Joujouka music is principally about healing, delirium and fertility.

    The Masters entered western consciousness initially through the Beats in the 1950s, and then the 1960s counter culture. Paul and Jane Bowles, Burroughs and his Canadian painter pal Brion Gysin, had all taken up post-War residence in Tangier, with visits from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, among others. In 1951, Bowles and Gysin attended a Sufi music festival in Sidi Kacem, a couple of hours from Tangier, with a painter from Joujouka they’d met in the city, Mohamed Hamri. When he heard the Masters, Gysin was enthralled, saying he wanted to listen to their music every day for the rest of his life. Bowles, while an avid archivist of Moroccan tribal music – he made over 250 field recordings on location, Alan Lomax-style – was less enamoured, finding the Masters’ music ‘too crude’, and the hardships of village life unseemly. Later, when Hamri took Gysin to Joujouka, the ex-pat discovered to his astonishment that the music he’d fallen in love with was played by Hamri’s uncles. Gysin and Hamri then opened a restaurant in Tangier, the infamous 1001 Nights, where members of the Masters became the house band. It was there that Burroughs first heard them.

    When the Rolling Stones arrived in Tangier in 1967, seeking respite from the fallout of the Redlands drug bust and attendant media attention while awaiting trial, Hamri and Gysin met them and Hamri struck up a friendship with Brian Jones, the only Stone to stay behind for a longer, more immersive encounter with the culture. Hamri brought Jones to the village, where he too was overwhelmed by the Masters’ music. Ever the ethnomusicologist, the troubled musician returned in 1968 to make recordings, which eventually saw the light of day in 1971 on Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. Before his death in 1969, Brian had produced the album and prepared the cover, which brought the Masters’ music to a wider audience outside Morocco. Later, in January 1973, jazz musician Ornette Coleman and the Masters recorded together, with ‘Midnight Sunrise’ surfacing later on his album Dancing In My Head (1975). In 1980, The Masters played at Glastonbury, as part of a three-month tour which included a week’s residency at London’s Commonwealth Institute. They were at Glasto again in 2011, opening the festival on the Pyramid stage. They have since toured as far afield as Japan.

    The Masters’ performances in their home place feature a dancer sewn into goatskins: he represents Bou Jeloud, a Pan-like figure, half-goat half-man. In the legend, Bou Jeloud gave an Ahl Serif ancestor the gift of flute music and bestowed fertility on the village every spring when he came out of his cave and danced. This is commemorated in the Joujouka festival, now held every June. In 2008 the Masters honoured the 40th Anniversary of Brian Jones’s influential recording by opening their annual Rite of Spring to outsiders. Since then the extended gathering has become an annual occurrence, attracting artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers and fans from around the world. As well as generating valuable global publicity, the boutique festival is an important economic factor in the life of Joujouka, which remains predominantly a working agricultural village. These guys are still primarily farmers, who have not turned pro.

    The extended festival offers a unique opportunity to around fifty guests, on a first-come first-served basis, to spend three days with the Master Musicians. This small influx stay in the village with the Masters and their families as hosts, and experience the music in the place – set amid a spectacular landscape – where it originated. The Masters play non-stop each night for three or four hours, in a large three-sided, green-and-red tent at the madrasa. During the lazy afternoons, spontaneous jams break out. Tickets are limited because you lodge in family homes, enjoying breakfast with them, and partake of a communal evening feast in the madrasa, before the Masters get down to business. It may be more arduous to get to, as well as more expensive (although with transport from and to the railway station, plus full board and lodging included, it probably all works out fairly equitably in the end), but it sure beats hell out of the rough and tumble crowds at Electric Picnic.

    J is an ’80s and ’90s indie pop and rock girl (just as I, to some extent, am that boy). These days her principal favourite listening is Bach’s concertos for harpsichord, the plinkity-plonkity predictable resolves of which grate on my nerves (although I do have a certain tolerance for some of his keyboard works for church organ, for example the Fugue in G minor, which at least occasionally utilise the harmonic possibilities of that instrument for dronish effects – even if the lauded composer can never quite help himself when it comes to showing off his considerable chops). Sitting at our table on a terrace overlooking the swimming pool in our well-appointed hotel, with the techno beats of synth pop booming from the nightclub downstairs, I wonder how she will take to Joujouka – the village, the people, and the all-enveloping drone?

    The next morning we are sharing a taxi with Richie and Marek, two Joujouka veterans I met there on my last visit, bringing us to El Ksar El Kebir, the nearest town of any size to the remote village. From there, we join another local taxi to take us up to our weekend destination. Like any expedition of faith – religious, quasi-religious or secular – Joujouka inspires devotion. Muslims may be required to take the Hajj to Mecca only once in a lifetime, but many Joujouka heads – those who get it and realise this ritual is for them – wind up coming back every year. Richie, a Scottish guy living in Portsmouth, and Marek, from London, are two such. Later I will reunite with Phil, hugging like long lost brothers. He’s an American labour lawyer now married (to a woman he met in Joujouka) and relocated to Mallorca, who always appears on some rented, high-end 1000cc motorcycle, which he then takes off on when the festival is over on Monday mornings, lighting out for the High Atlas mountains and the desert beyond, getting to places inaccessible by car and bus, or even camel.

    But as every good nostalgist should know, you can’t step into the same river twice. The lingering pandemic, which had made the brandishing of vaccination certs mandatory at airports and passport controls on our journey here, means that Covid-hesitancy has depleted the usual number of attendees. There are about twenty-five people here this year, rather than the full complement of fifty. While facilitating more intimacy, this in turn makes it slightly more difficult to get a spontaneous vibe going later in the evening. Add to this the news that the festival’s chief organiser will be absent this year, for personal reasons, and one of the main points of contact and social lubricants between the villagers and their guests is removed.

    There are other notables missing: Miho Watanabe, the indefatigably humorous Japanese academic, musicologist and multi-instrumentalist, who has travelled to many remote corners of the world to discover more about diverse native musical forms of expression, but who keeps returning to Joujouka; and Stephen, Phil’s ex-Navy biker buddy, now some sort of recondite computer coder – if Phil can be formidably cerebral, Stephen is possessed of the imp of roguish madness which lets him share my absurdist sense of humour. On the previous occasion I also met Donal, London-Irish friend-of-friends, and purveyor of the Exploding Cinema club; and David, copywriter and author of numerous articles on the Beats, Lou Reed, and the Deià of Robert Graves. Then there was Paul, music magazine editor, and writer of books on Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and Brian Jones. So: interesting folks. I have since noticed that the Masters’ website, in advertising the 2023 festival, starts with the admission that: ‘After two years of absence and a small offering this year, The Master Musicians of Joujouka annual festival is back in 2023.’ Still, reduced is better than nothing – and there would surely be fresh encounters to be had.

    Last time I was assigned the room in which Brian Jones purportedly stayed during his sojourn here (I’m sure they tell more than one guest that, every year). This time J and I are billeted in a smaller room in a house a little further afield from the madrasa. But at least it has a double bed (with a straw mattress), instead of reclining sofas all around the walls. Family homes here are built around a central shady courtyard with a well in the middle. There is no running water, and the toilet is the proverbial hole in the ground, a shower is buckets of water (heated if you are lucky) thrown over yourself. Electricity only arrived in the mid-’90s.

    Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this. Also, I fret over J’s adaptation to the Spartan conditions. But that’s before the music beings. There again, I have my misgivings about how she will respond to that, too.

    the definition of a gentleman..

    Q: “What’s the definition of a gentleman?” A: “Someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, but doesn’t.” Corny, I know; but telling. Why do some people have such an aversion to many other iterations of the drone? I have heard the bagpipes described as one of the greatest instruments of torture ever invented. How can people be repulsed by the soothings of the uilleann pipes, or driven to distraction by sean-nós singing? Because of cultural associations that they would prefer to forget? Or are they genuinely put off by what they perceive as the sheer monotony of the sound, and its accompanying volume? More commonly than irritation, you hear people say they can’t stand drones because they find them boring. But drones are not boring – or else they are meant to be. A commercial device called the Mosquito discourages young people from loitering in shopping malls; it emits sounds in the 17.5-to-18.5-kilohertz range which, in general, only those under the age of twenty-five can hear. Drones are life’s underlying hum made more manifest. Louis MacNeice certainly thought so, in his jocose poetic lament for the decline of folk culture in the Western Hebrides, and indeed throughout Europe, ‘Bagpipe Music’ (1938). It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky/All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi seeks to mimic the sound of the titular instrument.

    The cultural dissemination of the drone is beautifully captured in Tony Gatlif’s wonderful documentary, Latcho Drom (Romani for ‘safe journey’) (1993) – perhaps the greatest film ever made about music and people. With scant dialogue and no voiceover, it presents scenes from Gypsy life, starting in Northern India, and working its way westward through Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France and Spain. This is one route drone music took from the east, the other being through North Africa, Galicia, Britany, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, to Ireland. It is a sound fundamentally at odds with the Anglo-Saxon conception of the world. Ethnomusicologist Joan Rimmer has suggested that the music of the Arab world, Southern Europe and Ireland are all linked, while folklorist Alan Lomax has said in interview: ‘I have long considered Ireland to be part of the Old Southern Mediterranean-Middle Eastern family of style that I call bardic – highly ornamented, free rhythmed, solo, or solo and string accompanied singing that support sophisticated and elaborate forms.’ Máirtín Ó Cadhain compared the singing style and dark physical appearance of Seosamh Ó hÉanaí to that of the Gitanos of Granada. This so-called ‘black Irish’ appearance is often attributed to Spanish Armada shipwrecks in the west of Ireland, or ancient trade routes from there with the Berbers. Film-maker Bob Quinn, in his Atlantean series, suggests a North African cultural connection, explaining the long physical distances between the cultures with the seafaring nature of the Connemara people. The musical connection has also been tenuously connected to the fact that the people of Connacht have a significant amount of ancient Berber or Tuareg DNA.

    If you find drone music boring, or oppressive, or maddeningly distracting, I suggest that the fault may lie with you or your attitude to life, rather than with the drone. Your antipathy is explicable as rage against the unwanted. The trick is to turn this anger to your advantage, through

    Metanoia, an Ancient Greek word (μετάνοια) meaning ‘changing one’s mind’, which refers to the process of experiencing a psychotic ‘breakdown’ and subsequent, positive psychological re-building or healing, a transformative change of heart, a transcendental conversion. Try focusing your attention, meditating, being ‘mindful’ as they say nowadays. In other words, whether squatting cross-legged on the ground, or whipping yourself into a frenzy of idiot dancing, don’t be afraid to enter the trance state. Listen to the voices within – until, one by one, they all disappear. Drones are as much about providing profound spiritual balm as they are a reminder of mournful, cosmic tedium. The choice is yours as to which way to go. The drone is what prayer should be – as Beckett has it in Malone Dies, the ‘last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing.’ Om.

    And that is about as historical/philosophical/spiritual as I’m going to get in droning on about drone.

    Understandably, J had grown accustomed to hearing me rattle on about Joujouka, long before she decided to come here with me. Or so I had thought. Strangely, when I talk to her about it now, she says that I never said much except that I loved it, so she wasn’t sure what to expect. We had been living apart since the pandemic began, and neither of us had travelled on an aeroplane in over two years, so there was appreciable anxiety and hesitation around the trip, on both our parts. There was more at stake than just a holiday.

    She makes friends with the family we are staying with, especially the teenage daughter of the house, Selma, who begins teaching her Arabic. Selma’s father is a French language teacher, and works in another town. Most Joujoukans of working age have migrated to Tangier or Chefchaouen, sometimes visiting for weekends, leaving a preponderance of the very young and the very old in the village. Selma spends a lot of time with her grandparents. As for the status of women, like the urban/rural divide in any country, there is more freedom and equality to be had in the cities, while traditional roles still obtain in the countryside. Selma will not make her life here.

    Slowly, J is becoming more like her old self again. After a number of serious health issues, and being cooped up for lockdown, caring for her dying father, she is impressed by the way people here ‘just let things be, how happy they are with little’. This is what she remembers about being there:

    Being with you again. The well in the middle of the farm. The great, fresh food. The green canopy. The hole to pee in. Taking my shoes off outside our room. The chickens outside. Donkeys, goats and chickens wandering around and the large village square. The walk to the music. The dust on the road. The heat. The trance of the music. The sweet, sweet mint tea. The talk around the table. The Goat Auntie – her lovely smile (a reference to Nadia, a Copenhagen-based Lithuanian pianist, who came with her aunt, a former concert violinist grown frustrated with orchestra politics, who now breeds goats – thus amalgamating two good personal reasons for being in Joujouka). Feeling shy. Feeling out of condition. The great walk to the cave. The music. The language barriers. The dancing. The strange day when I was blessed. The Japanese dancing. The long, colourful djellabas.

    Ironically, given the Dionysian intensity and volume of the Masters’ sound, and the frenetic movements or trance states which it induces, this music is believed to have healing powers to cure instances of insanity. Legend has it that in the fifteenth century the Sufi mystic saint Sidi Achmed Sheikh, the ‘healer of disturbed minds’ who brought Islam to the surrounding area, arrived in the village and bestowed the ability to heal manifestations of madness on this group of local musicians, in return for which he was given the gift of their music. The village is his resting place. For centuries visitors have peregrinated to his tomb here to seek cures for mental illness. The musicians are said to be blessed by baraka, the spiritual power of the saint, and people also seek them out in the hope that they might partake of it. I’m as cynical as the next person when it comes to Rousseauan idealisations of the Noble Savage, and am fully aware of Edward Said’s critique of western Orientalism. Perhaps the salutary properties of this supposed baraka transmitted through the Masters’ music is a load of superstitious codswallop after all – but I’d still rather go to Joujouka seeking a cure for anxiety, depression, neurosis or psychosis, than to any psychiatrist from the so-called ‘developed world’. The experience of hearing the Master’s music live is indubitably preferable to undergoing a course of electro-convulsive therapy, and undoubtedly no more or less efficacious.

    Talking to me now, J concludes: ‘Would I go again? Not sure – time is short, perhaps I’d like to try other places, other experiences. Compared to how you said it would be, it surpassed it. Joujouka was more primitive than I imagined, but Morocco more modern. You were right about an out of this world experience. Thank you for taking me.’

    J is Scottish, and grows wistful when she hears bagpipe music: I knew she’d get Joujouka, and its ecstatically healing drone.

    Believers undertake pilgrimages all the time, be it holy expeditions to Marian apparition sites such as Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, or our own Knock (a destination to which my devout father, who was unquestioningly and without any trace of scepticism well into this stuff, organised an annual busman’s outing), or the religious journey which provides the backdrop for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or the bereaved who traipse the Camino to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. My own parents’ idea of a summer holiday was the parish pilgrimage to Rome, Assisi and Loreto (they never quite had the wherewithal to make it to the Holy Land), a trip sixteen-year-old me declined to share with them, understandably not fancying a week or two in pullman coaches with the blue-rinse set, shepherded by the local dog-collared men-in-black. Better to remain at home, and have a ‘free house’ with my friends. Loreto is a particularly interesting case, as its showpiece is the Holy House of Loreto, or as it is also known, the Flying House – the purported childhood abode of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth where, according to the Bible, an angel appeared to her to tell her she would give birth to Jesus, a feast day in the Catholic calendar dubbed The Annunciation – which according to the tradition was miraculously saved by angels so that it would not be destroyed by infidels after Christian crusaders were expelled from Palestine in the 13th century, and flown by them to its present location on the Adriatic coast.

    I hold all revealed religions to be inherently daft, as any old bollocks will do in constructing one. At least Buddhism, which indulges in neither polytheism nor monotheism, and is more of a non-authoritarian guide for contented living, doesn’t go in for divine intervention of any kind to bolster its paths to enlightenment. At the same time, I try to cultivate in myself respect for people of faith, however ludicrous their gullibility may appear to me, and have no wish to offend them. People are welcome to their delusions, as long as they don’t start trying to foist them on me.

    Of course, my pilgrimages would have to involve music. My first, and the first time I was ever outside Ireland, aged seventeen, was to see Bob Dylan play at Blackbushe Aerodrome in Surrey in July 1978. My mother stipulated that I couldn’t go unless my older cousin Raymond accompanied me. Thankfully, he did – which was kind of fortunate, as on the way back, sleepless at 6am, I nearly boarded a train for Glasgow instead of Holyhead, until he alerted me to the fact that this was not necessarily our preferred destination. I wrote a poem about the weekend round trip, a long meandering ballad which was accepted for publication by the late David Marcus in the New Irish Writing page of The Irish Press, my first appearance in a national outlet. And now here I am in the midst of this Moroccan musical trek, for the second time. As Bernard MacLaverty has it is his finely-wrought novel Grace Notes (1997), when describing the conclusion of his composer heroine Catherine’s creative journey: ‘Music: her faith.’ I might imagine myself more sophisticated than the regions of religious pilgrims, but I may well be just as much another kind of fundamentalist. After all, lots of people don’t get the fascination, devotion and reverence Bobcats have for Bob Dylan.

    The afternoons are spent listening to some of the musicians play folkier jams, on liras (a recorder-like flute, quieter than the night-time’s oboe cousin, the rhaita), doumbek drums, lute-like ouds, and a bodhrán gifted to the village by an Irishman. A revolving door of players sit in for a while, have the craic, then go on their way, for all the world like a trad session in an Irish pub. The one constant, and the highlight for me, is Sheik Ahmed Talha, one of the most musically talented and humble guys you are ever likely to meet. A tebel drum player by night, he turns fiddle-player by day, improvising away with a bow on the strings of his instrument, held upright like a miniature double-bass, resting on his knee. Unlike the Bou Jeloudian suites of the evenings, these melodies come with vocals, and are really local folk songs.

    Later on Sunday afternoon, when the sun has eased, a group of us walk to Bou Jeloud’s cave, a mile or two from the village. The legend begins with Attar, a young shepherd, who dared to rest in the forbidden cave of Magara, while his flock grazed on the greenery below. The cave was seen as taboo by villagers and, soon enough, Attar was roused from his slumber by the sound of pipes being played by the part-goat, part-man figure of Bou Jeloud – the ‘father of the skins’. Bou Jeloud made a deal with Attar: he would teach him the secrets of his music, on the understanding that Attar never share them. If he did break this vow, his teacher would be entitled to take a bride from the village. As is the way of these stories, Attar couldn’t keep the music to himself, and was heard playing by an infuriated Bou Jeloud, who then came to take his promised bride. The villagers kept to the bargain, but presented Bou Jeloud with the mad Aisha Kandisha, who tired him out with her insane dancing. Although briefly gratified, Bou Jeloud could eventually take no more, and left the village alone. Following his departure the villagers enjoyed a successful harvest. The ritual would continue each year, and time after time, Bou Jeloud would leave without a woman, and a rich harvest would follow. When Bou Jeloud finally vanished for good, Attar continued the ritual by dressing in goatskins himself, dancing with local boys who took on the role of ‘Crazy Aisha’. And so it continues to this day.

    The final ascent to the cave is rocky and precipitous. Some of us make it up, some of us don’t. Last time, I didn’t, taking a perverse pleasure in making the journey and then not entering. This time, I manage to climb up, gingerly finding my footholds, and clamber inside. I’m obviously making progress in conquering my vertiginous fears. We gaze out at the sun declining over the rolling hills and valleys, verdant with their precious crop. J didn’t trust herself enough to get up here with me, or perhaps it was getting down afterwards that proved too worrisome. Ascent is only half the battle, and descent can be just as tricky. Maybe she will complete the final stage next time – if there ever is one.

    Back at the ranch on Sunday evening we gather once again for an exquisitely lengthy post-prandial goodbye set from the Masters. Rhaita players sit in a row on one side, tebel players on the other, and work up their non-stop, improbably inventive rhythms, defying any conventional time signature. The percussionists pound out an incessant barrage of colliding patterns on their goblet drums (with sheep hides for skins), struck with a piece of wood shaped like a spoon in one hand and a thin stick in the other. Just as one passage of play is reaching a crescendo, one of the drummers will suddenly throw a curve ball change of beat, and the rhaita players kick in again, building another fugue, carrying on a follow-the-leader routine, constantly upping the ante, using circular breathing techniques to maintain the notes, until unified screeches ring out in ascension, gaining in intensity until the pitch is ringing out beyond the lavish tent, high into the homestead hills, reaching the starry sky above. And Jesus Christ, it is loud. Who needs electricity?

    If you are going to attend the oldest, most exclusive dance party in the world, you better get up on your feet and get lost in gyrating to the pure sonic upheaval. It’s then you feel the music coursing through your body, and the visceral sensations transcend any rave you’ve ever been at, until you don’t know where you end and it begins. By moving alternately on the carpeted dance floor between the horns and the drums, you can control the mix. Ahmed El Attar, the group leader, lends a hand, setting aside his drum for the moment to entice all sitters to jive, starting with the prettiest women, but not stopping until even the most reticent man is on his feet. I watch as J cavorts with Marianne and Tomoko, her American and Japanese sisters. Then Bou Jeloud appears, brandishing his leafy olive branches, twitching with venom like a strung-out speed freak, and the bonfire is ignited. The diminutive Mohamed El Hatmi is a quiet, dignified village elder by day. Now, in the guise of the goatman, as if possessed, he attacks the musicians, the village boys, and ourselves with his sticks. We will doubtless be made more fertile, and a good harvest is guaranteed.

    From a safe distance, Selma stands watching her grandfather perform with the other men of the village. Will the secrets of baraka ever be passed on from father to daughter, as well as from father to son? It will take a while to change a system which has existed since time out of mind. Or maybe it’s just not her thing. She has told us she wants to be a policewoman: a very perspicacious and practical career choice in these parts, considering the possible perks.

    I have heard vague murmurs, accusing organisers and attendees here of ‘cultural appropriation’ and, even worse, ‘poverty tourism’ – in short, that the whole affair is just another hipster stop-off on some world music global circuit. All nonsense, of course. The concept of cultural appropriation is annoyingly imprecise and so deeply flawed. It seems to me to be little more than an academic version of the hoary old chestnut ‘Can white guys play the blues?’, which is insulting not only to the white guys (and girls) who love the music and want to play it, but also to the black guys (and girls) whom it exoticises as having a superior aptitude for expressing genuine feeling in a musically authentic manner because of their racial purity and troubled history. This is the equivalent of claiming, ‘My residue of inherited emotional hurt and suffering because of my ethnicity is greater than yours and, furthermore, is directly the fault of yours.’ It may be a valid area of enquiry for sociologists and postcolonial theorists, but it makes little or no sense to actual musicians. It’s as reprehensible as defining your identity around patriotism, which is, if we are still to accord with Dr. Samuel Johnson, ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’. Even if such essentialism does account for part of what you are, why get so reductively precious about it? Why not, instead, share it? For the fact is that there wouldn’t be any blues at all if it wasn’t for cultural and racial miscegenation and cross-pollination. Blues music is a hybrid form derived from the meeting of African polyrhythms, field hollers and microtonal inflections with European melodic and harmonic structures and counterpoint, coming from the folk and even classical traditions – which is what makes it, along with jazz and rock’n’roll, North America’s greatest gift to the world. That slavery was a component in this process is undeniable and immensely regrettable, but such exclusionism is hardly going to retrospectively correct it now. For every Led Zeppelin, who had to be dragged through the courts before giving the African-American composers who influenced them the credit and royalties they or their estates were due, there was a Rolling Stones, who always gave songwriting credit to their musical progenitors, and through the 1960s British Invasion helped the U.S.A. to discover its own musical heritage, as well as making the twilight years of many original bluesmen and women a whole lot more comfortable. Just watch them worshipping at the feet of Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig! in 1965. Prior to accepting the booking, they had in fact insisted that The Wolf also appear on the programme, or else they wouldn’t.

    As Zadie Smith has said in interview about her work, after the success of her debut novel White Teeth, “If I didn’t take a chance I’d only ever be able to write novels about mixed-race girls growing up in Willesden”, adding, regarding political correctness: “Identity is a huge pain in the ass.” Or, as Bernardine Evaristo put it more succinctly, “This whole idea of cultural appropriation is ridiculous. Because that would mean that I could never write white characters or white writers can never write black characters.”

    Add to this that the music of the Masters is very much a live experience, of which all recordings are but an approximate representation. We hear sound and, by extension, listen to music, not only with our ears, but also with the rest of our bodies. Detonating shells set off supersonic blast waves that slow down and become sound waves. Such waves have been linked to traumatic brain injury, once known as shell shock. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are often triggered by sonic signals: New York residents experienced this after 9/11, when a popped tire would make everyone jump; so too did Halloween bangers in Belfast and Derry during the Troubles. It is necessary to induce and re-enact the initial trauma, in order to heal it. As Keith Richards said in 1974, when many of his band’s contemporaries were concentrating on studio work, “A band that doesn’t play live is, to me, only half a band.” Plus, everyone who goes to the trouble of getting to Joujouka in the first place really knows their music, and is respectful of the people and the place. It’s about cultural appreciation, rather than appropriation.

    Besides all of which, as Harry Sword reports in his book, Gysin was almost bitter when Hamri brought the Joujouka musicians to do shows in Tangier in the 1960s, as if the music should be kept secret. The same sort of protectiveness, which verges on proprietorship, can be found Paul Bowles writing, where it is evident that he was a somewhat colonial figure who saw old, underdeveloped Morocco as a tableau, and hated any modernisation. But this attitude underlines a disrespect and disregard for the people. Bowles wasn’t kind to Moroccans in that he was writing about a medievalesque Morocco, and disliked seeing that changing. But that somebody in Joujouka has a fridge is a good thing – otherwise meat goes bad and children get sick; or you can’t keep your insulin if you’re diabetic. Your lifespan is going to be reduced if you don’t have access to a road or a water system. Should that culture be preserved at the expense of modern healthcare?

    There is also the hope that by bringing in visitors each year from all over the world, the children of the village will get a perspective of how important the music is, and in turn, keep it going.

    And now, if you’ll excuse us, me and Sheik Ahmed are off to check our privilege.

    Monday morning, coming down, we say our goodbyes, and share a taxi with a Japanese couple to Chefchaouen, the famous ‘blue city’, about two hours away to the east. We will have a relaxing week here, in a beautiful hotel with all mod cons, lush vegetation, hanging gardens full of bougainvillea and hydrangeas, loungers and a pool. We visit the medina, the Kasbah, have massages in a hamman spa, take a day trip to the waterfalls at Akchour. J’s recollections are of ‘The blue, the cats, the shower, the swing chair, the food, the swim in the pool so fresh, the echoing, haunting call to prayer – like bees swarming, at first threatening then meditative.’

    On our last evening here, we climb to the disused Spanish Mosque, overlooking the town from a hill to the east, to watch the sunset, as many tourists, Moroccan and foreign, do. On the way back down, we hold hands and then kiss, almost as though we’ve just met a few days ago, for the very first time, and the years dissolve and reassemble around us.

    It is notoriously difficult to capture the obliterating thrill of listening to music, much less playing it, never mind describing the music itself, in mere prose. It’s what makes most rock journalism, or any kind of writing about music, even and perhaps especially academic studies, painfully redundant. If anything can be said to, music partakes of the ineffable – and therefore is usually relegated to being discussed in terms of its theoretical structure or sociological impact. As a maxim attributed to several sources has it, ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’

    So too, in my opinion, is writing about intimate relationships. Unlike some writers who have made great hay out of their marital problems and breakups (or, conversely, washed the clean linen of how enviably happy they are with their perfect partners in public), I have never wanted to capitalise on my disappointment, heartbreak and stress by writing about it in any directly confessional, memorial-ish way. I never wanted to be divorced (although, in fairness, perhaps some of them didn’t either). For proof – and while one should never tempt fate by speaking too soon, pretending a journey is over – I even waited long enough so that I could finish by recounting a reconciliation rather than a rupture. As far as I can see, most people don’t get divorced because of infidelity or domestic violence or the easily pleaded ‘irreconcilable differences’, but because they have grown bored with the patterns of the relationship they have established, and fancy a change. They want to try something different, or they start wondering if their lives would have turned out completely differently if they’d married someone else. Or else, they resort to unfaithfulness and partner-bashing and their differences being irreconcilable because they are bored, and need an outlet. Equally, most couples who choose to stay together – after a given time – do so ‘because of the children’, or because of their mortgages, or because they are fond of their creature comforts and dread a downgrading change. Or maybe some people even get good at getting divorced, after they’ve done it a couple of times. But there are different ways of being married, even to the same person.

    For boredom, as we have established, is an inescapable fact of life. If it wasn’t, then explain games to me. Like chess, or its poor man’s version, draughts; or cards, be it anything from Bridge to Snap, or the gamblers’ Holy Grail, Poker; or golf, or Formula One motor racing, or even football. Or board games: they don’t call them bored games for nothing. They can’t all be accounted for by ambition expressed through competition, because very few people are good enough at them to compete at a level that really matters. Rather, all these activities are about passing the time. Granted, social theorists and educationalists will tell us that children playing games is part of the process of socialisation – learning how to deal with other people. But as J.M. Coetzee has the narrator of his novel Disgrace (1999) note about its protagonist David Lurie, an academic who has been downgraded to teaching Communications 101, ‘Communication Skills’, and Communications 201, ‘Advanced Communication Skills’:

    Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: ‘Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.’ His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

    Drone is about acknowledging this taedium vitae, and transforming it. Instead of being crushed by it, you are subsumed by it, putting it to good use. Drone slows time down, and makes room for memory. The journey is inward, as well as outward. You won’t hear the sound of yourself, or the sound of the world, or the sounds of the world inside yourself, or yourself in the world, unless you listen intently.

    Unlike the exciting and/or relaxing holidays of flings and affairs, it is difficult to be married, to anyone. Although it can, on occasion, perhaps even often, be rewarding and fruitful. Good marriages, bad marriages: first they are good, then they are bad, maybe then they are good again, then maybe they are bad again. It’s a cycle. Irreconcilable differences? We have them every day of the week. Maybe all true love is a form of masochistic endurance. Try it, if you think you’re tough enough.

    As for pilgrimages, they too can be one facet of self-mortification, as well as a way of merely filling in time. But, just as with my marriage, and just as with my lifespan on this earth – I came to dance. Did ye get healed? Oh yeah, we did. Just like every time. Joujouka has vouchsafed its miracle of harvest once again. But this time round, since it’s all circular and everything is connected, let’s have an epilogue instead of an epigraph. In my end is my beginning.

    There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.
    William S. Burroughs, Letter to Jack Kerouac, from Lima, Peru, May 24th, 1954

  • My Team / Your Team III

    In the final part of his essay on the joys and woes of being an Irish Manchester City fan, Desmond Traynor delves into psychological and emotional reasons for sustaining sporting allegiances, through thick and thin.

    Even if nothing in the foregoing fact-based rant convinces City-sceptics, it is not the main plank of my justification for my continuing City fandom. Facts don’t care about your feelings; but, equally, feelings don’t care about the facts. Support for City, or any sporting association, is an unchanging and unchallengeable tribal loyalty – it is instinctual. Economics is science, albeit it a dismal one – it aspires to rationality. These impulses speak to very different parts of our nature as human beings. Despite the discipline designation ‘Political Science’, politics is where instinct and reason try to intersect – and usually fail. The personal is political; but the political is also personal. My love for City is emotional – like the feelings of fans of any other sports club – and I will present the facts to suit my feelings as much as they do, because I love every single bedbug in the mattress I’ve chosen to lie on as much as they love whatever bloodsuckers are infesting theirs.

    My hero Michel de Montaigne wrote: ‘Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously; it means he doesn’t take life seriously enough.’ Perhaps this is true. But, then, it means there are an awful lot of people (and not only men) who don’t take life seriously enough – myself included. Noam Chomsky goes further in his criticism of sport. In one interview in his book Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1988), the linguist and social commentator asserted that sport is one of the means by which capitalist ‘special interests’ that dominate government control public opinion, providing a distraction from more important and meaningful matters, after the manner of Roman ‘Bread and Circuses’ (food and entertainment) to mollify the unwashed masses. However, it is worth noting that Chomsky’s analysis was formulated before English football, as the late lynchpin of Manchester musical legends The Fall and lifelong City fan, Mark E. Smith, put it, ‘went middle class’, with all-seater stadiums replacing the terraces of old because of health and safety concerns following several crowd disasters at matches, the formation of the Premiership to replace the League and the Champions League to replace the European Cup, and the sale of television rights to the highest bidder (predominantly Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV) – all accompanied by the concomitant rise in ticket prices to the exorbitant levels of today. What was once a boozy day out for a bunch of lads is now fireside family entertainment, or an adventure in corporate hospitality. Granted, many of those enjoying the Thatcherite dream of ‘everyone his own home-owning, sole-trading, small business operating entrepreneur’ middle-class heaven may have sprung from working-class backgrounds, but they could have chosen to spend their new found disposable income elsewhere.

    Besides which, such reductive critiques ignore the sublimatory social functions of sport. After all, battling each other on a soccer pitch, even in a particularly dirty game, is better than waging all-out war between countries. For example, for many nationals of both nations, England’s 4-2 victory over West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final signalled the real end of the Second World War. (It doesn’t always work, of course: football as metaphor for war can occasionally turn into actual war. As every schoolboy knows, the immediate casus belli for the so-called 1969 ‘Soccer War’ between El Salvador and Honduras was the two-legged World Cup qualifier and subsequent play-off the two countries played against each other, in preparation of the 1970 World Cup hosted by Mexico. But, in truth, longstanding tensions already existed between these two small and very poor Central American countries. For more than a century they had been accumulating reasons to distrust one another. Each had always served as the magical explanation for the other’s problems. Hondurans have no work? Because Salvadorans come and take their jobs. Salvadorans are hungry? Because Hondurans mistreat them. Both countries believed their neighbour was the enemy, and the relentless military dictatorships of each, forged at a U.S. factory called the School of the Americas, did all they could to perpetuate the error. El Salvador suffered about 900 mostly civilian dead. Honduras lost 250 combat troops and over 2,000 civilians during the four-day war.) Here, I cannot help but succumb to the temptation to quote one of former Liverpool manager (from 1959 to 1974), the late, great Bill Shankly’s most famous pronouncements: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’

    Football is a serious business, then, for many. But what differentiates City fans from those of sundry other clubs, in my opinion, is that we retain an ability to see the funny side, to laugh at ourselves. Apart from their ubiquity, my other chief gripe against supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United is their ingrained sense of entitlement. They take it very seriously. Despite City’s accumulating successes over the past ten years, I cannot as yet detect the slightest note of triumphalism among our fanbase. Sure, we like to indulge in ‘the bants’ (as it is abbreviated) as much as the next person with a strong affiliation, a practice posh people call ‘schadenfreude’ but which is known locally by the more colloquial term ‘slagging’. While this practice can degenerate into mere trolling, that is largely a matter of perspective, as to how seriously one takes the banter. Where is the line, and when does it get crossed? Irish practitioners of the two major English footballing religions seem especially quick to take offence. But then, they are fundamentalists, who follow the one true faith. If you are looking for an illustration of real, blatant, vicious trolling, there used to be a banner United fans would unfurl across the Stretford End at Old Trafford for every single home match, in the form of a mock digital clock, a wind-up to commemorate the number of years their cross-town neighbours – us – had not won a trophy. This ticking Date/Time reminder was finally retired in 2011, with the notch stuck between 34 and 35, after we lifted the FA Cup v Stoke.

    Manchester City supporters invade the pitch following their 2011–12 Premier League title victory.

    Underhand Spying

    Worse than trolling was stealthy, underhand spying, as exemplified by Liverpool FC employees allegedly hacking into City’s scouting platform in 2013, to gain access to its database, resulting in an out-of-court settlement of £1m being paid by Liverpool to Manchester City – without any admission of guilt. Worse than that again was the attack by Liverpool supporters on the Manchester City team coach in 2018 (‘Let’s show them what money can’t buy’ ran the rabble-rousing rallying cry on their social media groups) as it made its way to Anfield for the Champions League quarter final first leg. Bottles, coins, flares and cans were thrown by home fans, rendering the City bus ‘unusable’ for the return journey. All the while the Liverpool Metropolitan Constabulary – who publicised the route the bus would take in advance – were noticeably uninterested in intervening in any potential standoff between supporters of either club, or in bringing any of the perpetrators of this criminal activity to justice. Liverpool FA were subsequently fined a paltry £20,000 by UEFA on foot of the incident.

    City was, and is, a club with a heart and a sense of humour, which is often turned on itself for good measure. They say we have ‘no history’. But every football club in existence has a history, from Grimsby Town to Leyton Orient to Wycombe Wanderers to your local GAA Under-15s squad. What they really mean is, ‘you have no history of winning big, important competitions’ – an approach curiously akin to the ‘great men’ methodology of historiography. Yet, as outlined above, even that is not true either, as we have won League titles and Cups in the past. As with most history, it all depends on how far back you want to go. Granted, no matter how far into the distant past you care to venture, until recently we’ve had no history in the European Cup/Champions League, as they are constantly fond of reminding us. So what? Neither have Arsenal or Spurs or Newcastle United. Nor Grimsby.

    We are an eccentric club, to be sure, with a neat line in self-deprecation – something I didn’t know when I became a devotee aged seven, but which I find is congruent with my personality now. Helen Turner, a flower-seller outside Manchester Royal Infirmary, would sit in the front rows of the North Stand and offer Joe Corrigan a sprig of lucky heather before every game, and then thunder her bell every time City won a corner. In 1978 the club bought Kaziu Deyna, the Polish World Cup captain, for a consignment of toasters and fridges, a deal arranged by electrical goods magnate and megalomaniac chairman Peter Swales. Someone once stumbled onto the away terrace at West Brom with an inflatable banana and, within weeks, there were thousands of them at every game, joined by paddling pools, crocodiles and fried eggs. (Such playthings have long since been banned by the F.A. as a health & safety hazard. It’s not the same in an all-seater stadium anyway.)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5RtnXcQ_lw

    Poznan

    Then there is our adoption of the Poznan, a celebratory dance which involves supporters turning their backs to the pitch, linking arms and jumping up and down while singing favourite songs or chanting in unison. It all began in 2010, when City were playing in the same Europa League group as Polish side Lech Poznan, who came to the City of Manchester Stadium on October 21st of that year. Throughout the game the Poznan fans impressed with their noise, organisation and creativity. While City fans were initially unimpressed with the backs-turned bounce, they were gradually won over and soon appropriated it as a mark of respect. The Poznan supporters are still widely thought to be among the best away fans ever to have visited Eastlands. We acknowledge the debt by retaining the name. Now we ‘break out the Poznan’ when we score, or simply when we are dominating play. The explanation – if one is needed – seems to be that it is done in order to taunt the opposing side, as much as to say, ‘Our team is so good that we don’t even need to watch what is happening: we know we’ll win.’

    If more evidence is needed that nothing is quite as appealing to City fans as the irreverent and the absurd, consider some of our oldest terrace chants. For example, ‘We never win at home and we never win away/We lost last week and we lost today/We don’t give a fuck/’Cos we’re all pissed up/MCFC OK’ did sterling service when we were ‘down among the dead men’. Another song of denial, Camusian in its sense of existential dread, was, ‘We are not, we’re not really here/We are not, we’re not really here/Just like the fans of the Invisible man/We’re not really here’ (sung to the tune of ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’). Various myths circulate about the origin of this one. Some say it began at Luton Town in the 1980s, when away fans were banned, while others claim it was a reaction to media claims that City had no fans. Another story is that the City fans who defied the ban on away fans at Millwall’s notorious Den began singing it after managing to sneak into the ground – although it is unlikely anyone who did that would survive to tell the tale. At first it was a fitting reflection on the woes and misfortune of the old City, a big club that found itself wallowing in the murky depths of English football. But in the last ten years it has metamorphosed into an ode to hope and joy, an expression of incredulity at the transformation wrought at the club by Sheikh Mansour’s takeover. Again, equally an expression of chronic insecurity as an affirmation of fragile or grounded identity, there is, ‘I’m City till I die/I’m City till I die/I know I am/I’m sure I am/I’m City till I die.’ Like a character from Samuel Beckett’s work, the verbal reiteration might just make it true, even if you’re not so sure. Then there is our official club anthem, the Rodgers and Hart standard, ‘Blue Moon’. With its narrative trajectory over three short verses and a bridge from the yearning loneliness of searching for ‘Someone I really could care for’ to finding ‘The only one my arms will hold’ and the Blue Moon turning to gold, it would seem perfectly to encapsulate City’s recent journey – although it was adopted as long ago as 1989. The fact that the first verse is sung as a slow-tempo forlorn ballad and the second verse speeded up to the breakneck pace of hardcore punk adds to the sense that it represents a reversal of fortunes.

    Finally, mention must be made of that recurring two-word phrase which has become a byword among City fans for the club’s travails: ‘Typical Citeh’. The Urban Dictionary sums it up well: ‘When Manchester City somehow mess up an easily winnable situation and everyone is disappointed but not surprised.’ We have never done it the easy way. Even the Agüero moment was ‘Typical Citeh’ after a fashion, although on that occasion we just about managed to win. It may have less currency now, yet it is part of the fabric of Manchester City, because it is living and breathing in every single one of the fans who can remember anything before 2010.

    Sadly, there is a feeling that, mixed in with all this hilarity, it was a product of a time when City had become a joke team. Fans of other clubs generally warmed to us, but there was a sense in which they were just patronising the lovable-losers. We were told we had a great sense of humour – a humour that was used, as so much humour is, to hide massive hurt – but secretly they were laughing at us, not with us. Well, no one is laughing now. Except City fans. They liked us when we were struggling. They don’t like us now that we are strong.

    Dublin Branch

    I have been a member of the Manchester City Supporters Club – Dublin Branch since 2011. Prior to that, I had thought I was ‘the only City fan in the village’. But the branch, founded in 1975, currently has 104 members, and there are other branches all over the country. A quick Google search helped me to unearth it – social media is useful for something. We meet every three weeks on a Monday evening in an upstairs room in a city centre pub. Apart from the social interaction, the branch is mainly a focal point for topping up one’s account and ordering match tickets – although, post-Covid, these functions have gradually shifted online. We travel to matches together, organise trips and social outings, yak about City. I enjoy the comradery. It is an egalitarian freemasonry – guys help relative strangers out, with lifts, loans, mortgages, that sort of thing, like any other mutual benefit society – with a conducive absence of petty politicking, where the only qualification for acceptance when you walk through the door is that you support City. (Liverpool-loving Declan Lynch is still welcome to visit, if only for research purposes.) You meet people from all walks of life, whom you might never encounter elsewhere. The brain surgeon mingles with the binman, the senior civil servant with the rank-and-file bank or post office clerk. Plus we have your usual quota of cops and taxi-drivers, your ex-cops who are now tax-drivers, or freelance ‘security consultants’. We have an accountant, a chef, and a postman (who used to be a car salesman). We even have déclassé, would-be literary intellectuals like myself. We are prepared for every eventuality.

    My feeling of welcome and at-homeness in the Supporters Club is all the more noteworthy because I am not, and have never been, a great joiner. Also, I tend to lack a competitive spirit. (Maybe I was more driven, once upon a time, but I can’t remember.) But I admire it in others – at least when there is something tangible at stake, be it as arbitrary as club affiliation, national pride, even individual will. As an inveterate observer, I am fascinated by people of action and ambition, probably because they seem to be animated by a force that I do not possess.

    In Crowds and Power (1960) Elias Canetti explored the recurring battle between individuality and the urge to lose ourselves in crowds. He writes:

    A crowd isn’t just a large number of people – it’s a mass in which members identify with one another. When that happens, people enter into something that’s greater than the sum of their individual parts: a crowd. In that moment, there’s a sense of equality. Every member enjoys the same standing, regardless of previous differences.

    Attendees at football matches and music concerts are more than familiar with this feeling. It is the same impulse which motives religious people to undertake pilgrimage so they can gather to be present at Mass offered by the Pope in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, or to go on Hajj so they can circle the Kaaba in the Al-Masjid Al-Haram Mosque in Mecca counter-clockwise seven times, in both cases blending in and losing themselves in the throng of their fellow faithful. Some may even be aware of the great paradox at the heart of such gatherings: how many times have we heard popular singers on stage in a large auditorium or stadium exhorting tens of thousands of their hysterical fans to ‘embrace their individuality’ and ‘just be themselves’? Canetti continues:

    Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd… Each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.

    Musicians, too, are cognisant of this transcendent feeling – not only in witnessing the euphoria of the audience, but also in the experience of playing with their peers. It may not happen often, but occasionally all egos dissolve in the performance of a piece, as it comes to seem that the music is playing itself rather than being executed by each individual participant. As with team sport when enacted with unselfconscious fluidity, it becomes a synergistic endeavour where everyone contributes to achieve something which is not only beyond what they could produce by themselves, but much more than what the ensemble could be expected – on paper – to realise as a functionally competent unit. Alas, this form of collaborative creative magic is one to which solitary writers are not privy.

    And so, I can understand the desire to gather, to club together, to compete, and to win (if only voyeuristically and vicariously) – even if, for me, it is largely confined to my support for a football club I was attracted to before I could rationalise my attraction to it. What I share with my fellow countrymen and women who are fans of Liverpool and Manchester United, and any other instance of the Not-Manchester City, is not only our common humanity, but the fact that we all have a passion. They have just chosen different – if more popular – sides in the pursuit of the same goal: the ecstasy of being part of a winning crowd.

    We are all party to the truth of group sport: when the tedium vitae hits, even when you think you’ve lost everything, even when you have lost everything, when you are at the lowest of your lows (as well as the highest of your highs) there is always your team, and your fellow supporters. As a means of developing a social network, and sometimes life-long friendships, it seems relatively benign. Even if, at least for the time being, my team is magic and yours is rubbish, or not as good as ours. In Ireland, you may be many, and we are few. But I realise that all I am really saying here is that, due to a penchant for independent thinking, my group affiliation in this land is more uncommon and less of a legion than your group of choice – and therefore partakes of the cachet that derives from esoteric exclusivity. My support betokens more rugged individualism than yours, which is, or was – relatively speaking – an easier route to glory. You just want to be on the side that’s winning, and for a long time you were. So, deep down, did we; and now, surprisingly, we are.

    So there: I have removed my fig leaf, transformed it into an olive branch, and am offering it to all of you now. Let us practice peaceful coexistence.

    All empires crumble. For my part, I hope City’s reign lasts for a thousand years. It won’t, of course. Is there any need to quote Shelley here?

    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    But should City someday in the not so distant future wind up back in the Championship, or worse, League 1, stripped of every trophy we have won over the last decade, with all our star players hotfooting it to the exit doors for clubs where they can compete for top honours (and earn wages comparable to what they now rake in) – because we have been adjudged guilty of one or more of the infamous alleged 115 breaches of Financial Fair Play rules against us – I for one, and many others, will still be following them. To reiterate: I was there when we were shit. And I’ll be there again if we are shit again. Blood is thicker than principle when it comes to football. Your team is your team is your team, as much when it embarrasses or shames you as when it delights and gratifies you. How could I walk away from my team after all these years? Remember those words again, previously sung with shy ambivalence, now with full-throated force: ‘I’m City ’til I die/I’m City ’til I die/I know I am/I’m sure I am/I’m City ’Til I Die.’ And, who knows, maybe even after that.

    And that is how I can be Red-as-they-come politically, but when it comes to football, ‘once a Blue, always a Blue.’