D - A Book Against Fear (b)

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A BOOK AGAINST FEAR

bydavy lisle (davy girardet de l’isle)

consists of two parts:

SITTING IN MEDICI’S

(new century press, durham 1998: ISBN 0 948545 06 2) pp 2-41

LIVING IN THE SUN

(new century press, durham 2000: ISBN 0 948545 13 5) pp 42-67free email copy from: davy.girardetdelisle@yahoo.co.uk post: 11 springwell avenue, durham DH1 4LY, UK

SITTING IN MEDICI'S

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Ia title can just as well record the moment a book began as tell what it's about; and this book began withlaura buying me dinner in medici's because i didn't have much money after abruptly leaving the university. andnow it's begun i must go on with it.what i hope is that what i write here will have both the unpremeditated quality and the irreversibility of speech. what i say in speech cannot be unsaid and if i wish i had said something different, there is no delete keywhich will make it as though it had never been; all that can be done is to negotiate the sense one now wants tomake, out of the collective memory of what has already been said. one of the grievances i have against the word processor is that processing is not something which should be done with words, that they should not be tooelaborately messed about with to prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet. this is the verbal equivalent of not being able to meet the world without being groomed and pomaded. it is at the other end of the scale from thesudden contact of ‘i would meet you upon this honestly’. or say that the difference is between the eerie perfectionof a musical performance recorded and re-recorded bar by bar until no blemish is to be heard, and the rougher lifeof the piece heard live (perhaps the phrase live music should invite a description of its recorded opposite as deadmusic) - to want speech, or live writing as its written equivalent, is not to suppose that human communication issomehow best when it is careless or slovenly or approximate; rather it is to suggest that the best communication iswhat is distinguished by ingrained habits of honest, fearless, direct and accurate language. the habit of sayingwhat one means and of using only words that mean something is so much to be preferred to the crafted intricaciesof much modern language - and so i come to the fragment of vergil which has been pressing upon my mind for alittle while, waiting to be used, and say that i hope this book will be ‘breve et irreparabile’, short and irrecoverable,and also vivid with the human life that vergil was celebrating as he mourned in those words its swift passage.* * * * *IIchapter one sounds like

the undefended heart

, and at this precise moment i can’t think of any other kindof book to write, and this because the things i couldn’t find ways of writing about then still leave my pen hoveringover blank space - now is the moment to try, and as is surely always the case, it is only at the precise moment whenthe endeavour rightly starts that the energy and ingenuity is suddenly there to be drawn upon. it is not fear that hasmade me hesitate but rather the thought that a book from which its readers turn away might as well not have beenwritten. - i shall say what seem like many absurd things or offensive things or indelicate things, but really i don’teven want to lose a single reader who has read this far.i look directly at that reader and say that the heart of the matter is never to cause fear and never to feel it,and that those two different states of darkness which are the readiness to cause fear and the helpless experiencingof it are intricately and closely linked; so that behind the inhuman mask of a causer of fear one may always detectterror, although the reverse need not apply, so that to feel afraid need not mean that inevitably one begins on the business of making someone else afraid - indeed, it may be a sudden relief to realise that the resolution not to replyin kind when another human being tries to make you afraid is the most effective form of escape from fear.to cause fear is the central act of darkness, and even the mildest form of that causing associates one withthe grossest form, much as an anti-semitic joke touches hands somewhere with the extermination camps, as of course does the willingness to bully someone out of an anti-semitic feeling with the observation that this is so. thehunters down of nazi war criminals are dancers in the same dark dance as those they pursue - indeed conceivablymore so, because there is perhaps no deeper form of self-deception than to suppose oneself on the side of the lightas one defends it with the weapons of darkness, so that the most convinced and whole-hearted dancers are thosewho think that by fear something may be done that is other than dark. it is the judge who is more deeply deceivedthan the criminal, and the lunacy of his understanding of reality will cause him more severe momentary vertigoafter he dies and reality offers itself to him in its proper shape.the great, if temporary, triumph of darkness is to be found among those who are prepared to use it for good ends - the light-bearers, the lucifers, who can say ‘evil be thou my good’, and it is in this sense that the very

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centre of darkness in milton’s poem is to be found in the God of

paradise lost

. the great concentration camp in thesky (far better and more cruelly organised and run than the nazi variety because run for the express purpose of creating fear and suffering) that milton’s God prepares for the fallen angels would have been for the seventeenth-century mind the ultimate justification of all humanly imposed punishment, every judge a little God presiding over his little hell in the name of good; but milton’s unconvinced humanity revolted against what his creed obliged himto believe, as happened with leonard cheshire when he was required to accept that the successful bombing of hiroshima showed that God was on our side.i believe judges still go to church before they set about their grisly business, and there they bow their wigged heads, their heavily disguised and burdened humanity, to milton’s God. i wish for them freedom anddelight, and for milton’s God a place amid the relics of other savage superstitions.* * * * *IIIis there then to be no law? are there then to be no regulations? - is the world to be like the land of ulysses'nightmare fancy?take but degree away, untune that string,and hark what discord follows. each thing meetsin mere oppugnancy. the bounded watersshould lift their bosoms higher than the shores,and make a sop of all this solid globe.strength should be lord of imbecility,and the rude son should strike his father dead.force should be right, or rather right and wrong, between whose endless jar justice resides,should lose their names, and so should justice too.then every thing includes itself in power, power into will, will into appetite,and appetite, an universal wolf,so doubly seconded with will and power,must make perforce an universal prey,and last eat up himself.it has about it the insistent logic of nightmare, this vision of what must happen if the order of our societyis shaken; and it has the characteristic touch of many defences of the established order, that it writes in the blank spaces of what would happen without that order, familiar monsters, rather like the almost tame, almost well- beloved sea-serpents and anthropophagi that crowded the unknown parts of the world in the old maps, and nowcrowd the outer regions of space in the new films. this conjuring up of horrors introduces us to worlds notunknown enough, it uses all the old ideas - like a politician evoking with awe the prospect of a world without politics. we need by contrast to think in really new ways, ways that spring neither from a defence of nor anopposition to what surrounds us now - this book is not a tract for the times; it can only take place in the absence of news.for it is our daily ration of news, in the papers, on the radio and television, which holds us firmly to the belief that no order is achievable without fear, without threat. if ulysses' speech is a set-piece of reaction with itsown intrinsic momentum, then the envisaging of a world without news would trigger a reaction every bit asconfident, as richly and familiarly detailed in its exploration of the spaces thus made blank.it is the characteristic of the most effective kind of propaganda that everyone believes it, even (or perhapsmost of all) those who produce it; even (perhaps most surprisingly) those who oppose it. to see instead a worldgenuinely without news of the kind we have every day, one has to live without it so that it drifts into a kind of irrelevance. then it may seem mildly surprising to contemplate a strange, orwellian culture in which everyone issubjected daily to an account of the latest laws and their attached punishments, to stories of the frightfulness of law-breaking, to exciting stories of the pursuit, capture and punishment of law-breakers (with special mention of parts of the world where the punishments are inhumane), and to the latest information about wars and the rumours