Reading text, June-July 2007

Strong Opinions nos. 13, 14, 21

Soft Opinions nos. 01, 08, 18, 24

Strong Opinions: 13. On the body

We speak of the dog with the sore foot or the bird with the broken wing . But the dog does not think of itself in those terms, or the bird. To the dog, when it tries to walk, there is simply I am pain , to the bird, when it launches itself into flight, simply I cannot .

With us it seems to be different. The fact that such common locutions as “my leg,” “my eye,” “my brain,” and even “my body” exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body's “parts” and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience.

All parts of the body are not cathected to the same degree. If a tumour were cut out of my body and displayed to me on a surgical tray as “your tumour,” I would feel revulsion at an object that is in a sense “of” me but that I disown, and indeed rejoice at the elimination of; whereas if one of my hands were cut off and displayed to me, I would no doubt feel the keenest grief.

About hair, fingernail clippings, and so forth one has no feelings, since their loss belongs to a cycle of renewal.

Teeth are more mysterious. The teeth in “my” mouth are “my” teeth, part of “me,” but my feeling for them is less intimate than my feeling for, say, my lips. They feel neither more nor less “mine” than the metal or porcelain prostheses in my mouth, the handiwork of dentists whose very names I have forgotten. I feel myself to be owner or custodian of my teeth rather than feeling my teeth to be part of me. If a rotten tooth were to be extracted and displayed to me, I would feel no great sorrow, even though my body (“I”) will never regenerate it.

These thoughts about the body occur not in the abstract but in relation to a specific person, X, unnamed. On the morning of the day he died, X brushed his teeth, taking care of them with the due diligence we learn as children. From his ablutions he emerged to face the day, and before the day had ended he was dead. His spirit departed, leaving behind a body that was good for nothing, worse than good for nothing because it would soon begin to decay and become a threat to public health. Part of that dead body was the full set of teeth he had brushed that morning, teeth that had also died in the sense that blood had ceased to course through their roots, yet that paradoxically ceased to suffer decay as the body cooled and its oral bacteria cooled too, and were extinguished.

If X had been buried in the earth, the parts of “his” body that had lived most intensely, that were most “he,” would have rotted away, while “his” teeth, which he might have felt to have merely been in his care and custody, would have survived long into the future. But of course X was not buried but cremated; and the people who built the oven in which he was consumed ensured that it was hot enough to turn everything to ash, even bones, even teeth. Even teeth.

Strong Opinions: 14. On the slaughter of animals

To most of us, what we see when we watch cooking programmes on television looks perfectly normal: kitchen utensils on the one hand, items of raw food on the other, on their way to being transformed into cooked food. But to someone unused to eating meat, the spectacle must be highly unnatural. For among the fruit and vegetables and oils and herbs and spices lie chunks of flesh hacked mere days ago from the body of some creature killed purposely and with violence. Animal flesh looks much the same as human flesh (why should it not?). So, to the eye unused to carnivore cuisine, the inference does not come automatically (“naturally”) that the flesh on display is cut from a carcass (animal) rather than from a corpse (human).

It is important that not everyone should lose this way of seeing the kitchen – seeing it with what Viktor Shklovsky would call an estranged eye, as a place where, after the murders, the bodies of the dead are brought to be done up (disguised) before they are devoured (we rarely eat flesh raw; indeed, raw flesh is dangerous to our health).

On national television a few nights ago, amid the cooking programmes, a documentary was broadcast about what goes on in the abattoir in Port Said where cattle exported to Egypt from Australia meet their end. A reporter with a camera hidden in his backpack filmed scenes of cattle having their hind tendons slashed in order to make controlling them easier; in addition he claimed to have footage, too gruesome to broadcast, of a beast being stabbed in the eye, and the knife embedded in the eye socket then being used to twist the head to present the throat to the butcher's knife.

The veterinary supervisor of the slaughterhouse was interviewed. Unaware of the secret filming, he denied that anything untoward ever took place there. His slaughterhouse was a model establishment, he said.

Atrocities at the Port Said facility, and in the live export trade in general, have for a while been a source of concern to Australians. Cattle exporters have even donated to the slaughterhouse a killing-bed, a huge mechanism that traps the animal between bars and then lifts and rotates it bodily to make the death-stroke easier. The killing-bed stands unused. The slaughterers found it too much trouble, said the veterinarian.

It is too much to expect that a single fifteen-minute television programme should have a lasting effect on the conduct of the cattle trade. It would be ludicrous to expect hardened Egyptian abattoir workers to single out cattle from Australia for special, gentler treatment during their last hour on earth. And indeed common sense is on the workers' side. If an animal is going to have its throat cut, does it really matter that it has its leg tendons cut too? The notion of compassionate killing is riddled with absurdities. What well-meaning welfare campaigners seem to desire is that the beast should arrive before its executioner in a calm state of mind, and that death should overtake it before it realizes what is going on. But how can an animal be in a calm state of mind after being goaded off a ship onto the back of a truck and driven through teeming streets to a strange place reeking of blood and death? The animal is confused and desperate and no doubt difficult to control. That is why it has its tendons hacked.

Strong Opinions: 21. On apology

In a new book entitled Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, John Hirst returns to the question of whether white Australians ought to apologize to Aboriginal Australians for the conquest and takeover of their land. In sceptical spirit he asks whether apology without restitution means anything, whether it is not in fact “nonsense.”

This is a burning question not only for the descendants of settlers in Australia but for their equivalents in South Africa too. In South Africa the situation is in one sense better than in Australia: the handover of farmland from white to black, even if it has to be enforced handover, is a practical possibility there as it is not in Australia. The ownership of land, the kind of land that is measured in hectares and on which you can grow crops and run livestock, is of huge symbolic value, even if small-scale farming is declining in importance within the national economy. Every parcel of land transferred from white to black hands thus seems to mark a step in a process of restitutive justice whose end will be the restoration of the status quo ante.

Nothing so dramatic can be projected in Australia, where the pressure from below is, by comparison, slight and intermittent. Among non-indigenous Australians all but a small minority hope for the issue to simply go away, in the same way that, in the United States, the issue of indigenous rights to the land was made to go away, to disappear.

In today's newspaper, an advertisement by an American lawyer, an expert on legal liability, who for a fee of $650 an hour will coach Australian companies in how to word apologies without admitting liability. Step by step the formal apology, which used to have the highest symbolic status, becomes devalued as businessmen and politicians learn that in the present climate – what they call the present “culture” – there are ways of taking the moral high ground without risking material loss.

This development is not unconnected with the feminization or sentimentalization of manners that began two or three decades ago. The man who is too stiff to cry or too unbending to apologize – more accurately, who will not perform (convincingly) the act of crying, who will not perform (convincingly) the act of apologizing – has become a dinosaur and a figure of fun, that is to say, has fallen out of fashion.

First Adam Smith placed reason in the service of interest; now sentiment is placed in the service of interest too. In the course of this latter development, the concept of sincerity is gutted of all meaning. In the present “culture,” few care to distinguish – indeed, few are capable of distinguishing – between sincerity and the performance of sincerity, just as few distinguish between religious faith and religious observance. To the dubious question, Is this true faith? or, Is this true sincerity? one receives only a blank look. Truth? What is that? Sincerity? Of course I'm sincere – didn't I say so?

The expensive American coaches his clients neither in how to perform true (sincere) apologies nor in how to perform false (insincere) apologies that will have the look of true (sincere) apologies, but simply in how to perform apologies that will not open them to being sued. In his eyes and in the eyes of his clients, an unscripted, unrehearsed apology will likely be an excessive, inappropriate, ill-calculated, and therefore false apology, that is to say, one that costs money, money being the measure of all things.

Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Soft Opinions: 01. A dream

A troubling dream last night.

I had died but had not left the world yet. I was in the company of a woman, one of the living, younger than myself, who had been with me when I died and understood what was happening to me. She was doing her best to soften the impact of death while shielding me from other people, people who did not care for me as I had become and wanted me to depart at once.

Despite her protectiveness, this young woman did not lie to me. She too made it clear that I could not stay; and indeed I knew that my time was short, that I had a day or two at most, that no amount of protesting and weeping and clinging could change that.

In the dream I lived through the first day of my death, listening carefully for signs that my dead body was faltering. There were the faintest flutterings of hope as I saw how well I was coping with the demands of the everyday (I was, however, careful not to exert myself).

Then on the second day, as I was urinating, I saw the stream turn from yellow to red, and knew then that it was all true, that this was not a dream, so to speak. A little later, as if standing outside my body, I heard myself say, “I can't eat this pasta.” I pushed the plate before me aside, and knew as I did so that if I could not eat pasta I could not eat anything. In fact, the interpretation I put on my words was that my internal organs were decaying irremediably.

That was the point at which I awoke. I knew at once that I had been dreaming, that the dream had gone on for a considerable time, at the same pace as its own narration, that it was a dream about my own death, that I was lucky to be able to wake from it – I still have time left , I breathed to myself – but that I did not dare go back to sleep (though it was the middle of the night), since to go back would be to go back into the dream.

An intriguing idea: to write a novel from the perspective of a man who has died, who knows he has two days before he – that is, his body – caves in and begins to fester and smell, who has nothing he hopes to achieve in those two days save to live some more, whose every moment is coloured with grief. Some of the people in his world simply don't see him (he is a ghost). Some are aware of him; but he gives off an air of superfluousness, his presence irritates them, they want him to go away and let them get on with their lives.

One, a woman, has a more complicated attitude. Though she is sorry he is going, though she understands that he is passing through a crisis of farewell, she nevertheless agrees it would be best for him and everyone else if he accepted his lot and departed.

A title something like “Desolation.” One holds on to the belief that someone, somewhere, loves one enough to hold on to one, keep one from being torn away. But the belief is false. All love is moderate, in the end. No one will come with one.

The story of Eurydice has been misunderstood. What the story is about is the solitariness of death. Eurydice is in hell in her graveclothes. She believes that Orpheus loves her enough to come and save her. And indeed Orpheus comes. But in the end the love Orpheus feels is not strong enough. Orpheus leaves his beloved behind and returns to his own life.

The story of Eurydice reminds us that as of the moment of death we lose all power to elect our companions. We are whirled away to our allotted fate; by whose side we get to pass eternity is not for us to decide.

The Greek view of the afterworld strikes me as truer than the Christian vision. The afterworld is a sad and subdued place.

Soft Opinions: 08. On the erotic life

A year before he died by his own hand, my friend Gyula spoke to me about eros as he knew it in the autumn of his days.

In his youth in Hungary, said Gyula, he had been a great womanizer. But as he grew older, though he remained as keenly receptive to feminine beauty as ever, the need to make love to women in the flesh receded. To all outward appearances he became the chastest of men.

Such outward chastity was possible, he said, because he had mastered the art of conducting a love affair through all its stages, from infatuation to consummation, wholly within his mind. How could he do that? The indispensable first step was to capture what he called a “living image” of the beloved, and make it his own. Upon this image he would then dwell, giving breath to it, until he had reached a point where, still in the realm of the imagination, he could begin to make love to this incubus of his, and eventually conduct her into the utmost transports; and this whole passionate history would remain unbeknown to the earthly original. (This same Gyula, however, also claimed that no woman can be unaware of the gaze of desire settling upon her, even in a crowded room, even if she cannot detect its source).

“Here in Batemans Bay they have banned cameras on beaches and in shopping malls,” Gyula said (Batemans Bay was where he spent his last years). “They say it is to protect children from the predatory attentions of paedophiles. What are they going to do next? Put out our eyes, if we are above a certain age? Make us wear blindfolds?”

He himself had scant erotic interest in children; though he collected images (he had been a photographer by profession), he was not a pornographer. He had lived in Australia since 1957 without ever feeling at ease. Australian society was too puritanical for his tastes. “If they knew what goes on in my mind,” he said, “they would crucify me.” “I mean,” he added as an afterthought, “with real nails.”

I asked him what the imaginary couplings he described were like, whether they brought him anything approaching the same satisfaction as lovemaking in the real world. And by the way, I went on, had he ever reflected that the wish to ravish women in the privacy of his thoughts might be an expression not of love but of revenge – revenge upon the young and the beautiful for disdaining an ugly old man like him (we were friends, we could talk like that).

He laughed. “What do you think it means to be a womanizer?” he said (it was one of his favourite words in English, he liked to roll it on his tongue, wo-man-i-zer ). “A womanizer is a man who breaks you up and makes you come together again like a woman. Like an a-tom-i-zer that breaks you up into atoms. It is only men who hate womanizers, from jealousy. Women appreciate a womanizer. A woman and a womanizer belong naturally together.”

“Like a fish and a hook,” I said.

“Yes, like a fish and a hook,” he said. “God made us for each other.”

I asked him to say more about his technique.

It all hinged, he replied, on being able to capture, through the closest, most dedicated attention, that unique unconscious gesture, too slight or too fleeting to be noticed by the average eye, by which a woman gave herself away – gave away her erotic essence, that is to say, her soul. The way she turned her wrist to look at her wristwatch, for example, or the way she reached down to pull tight the strap of a sandal. Once that unique movement was caught, the erotic imagination could explore it at leisure until the woman's every last secret was laid open, not excluding how she moved in the arms of a lover, how she came to her climax. From the giveaway gesture all followed “as if by fate.”

He described his procedures to me with great candour, but not, it seemed to me, in the spirit of one offering a lesson to be followed. He had no great opinion of my eye, for women or essential gestures or anything else. Born on a savage continent, I was barred, in his opinion, from what came naturally to Europeans, namely a Greek, that is to say Platonic, turn of mind.

“You did not answer my original question,” I said. “Do these masturbatory conquests of yours bring you true satisfaction? In your heart of hearts would you not prefer the real thing?”

He drew himself up. “Masturbation is a word I never use,” he said. “Masturbation is for children. Masturbation is for the beginner practising his instrument. As for the real thing, how can you, who have read Freud, use that term so irresponsibly? What I speak of is ideal love, poetic love, but on the sensual plane. If you refuse to understand that, I cannot help you.”

He misjudged me. I had every reason to get a grasp of this phenomenon that he called ideal love on the sensual plane, every reason to get a grasp of it and take it over and practise it on my own behalf. But I could not. There was the real thing, which I knew and remembered, and then there was the kind of mental rape Gyula performed, and the two were not the same. The quality of the emotional experience might be similar, the ecstasy might be as intense as he averred – who was I to dispute that? – yet in the most elementary of senses a mental love could not be a real thing.

Why is it that we – men and women both, but men most of all – are prepared to accept the checks and rebuffs of the real, more and more rebuffs as time goes by, more humiliating each time, yet keep coming back? The answer: because we cannot do without the real thing, the real real thing; because without the real we die as if of thirst.

Soft Opinions: 18. On the birds of the air

Once the strip of land across from the Towers belonged to the birds, who scavenged in the creek bed and cracked open pine cones for the kernels. Now it has become a green space, a public park frequented by two-legged animals.

From these new arrivals the birds keep a cautious distance. All save the magpies. All save the magpie in chief (that is how I think of him), the oldest – at least the stateliest and most battered looking. He (that is how I think of him, male to the core) walks in slow circles around me where I sit. He is not inspecting me. He is not curious about me. He is warning me, warning me off. He is also looking for my vulnerable point, in case he needs to attack, in case it comes down to that.

At the end of the road (this is how I conceive it) he is prepared to entertain the possibility of a compromise: a compromise, for example, in which I beat a retreat into one of the protective cages that we human animals have erected on the far side of the street, while he retains this space as his own; or a compromise in which I agree to come out of my cage only during specified hours, between three and five in the afternoon, say, when he likes to take a snooze.

One morning there was a sudden imperious clatter at my kitchen window. There he was, clinging to the ledge with his claws, slapping his wings, glaring in, serving me with a warning: even indoors I might not be safe.

Now, in late spring, he and his wives sing to each other all night in the treetops. They could not care less that they keep me awake.

The magpie in chief has no firm idea of how long human beings live, but he thinks it is not as long as magpies. He thinks I will die in that cage of mine, die of old age. Then he can batter the window down, strut in, and peck out my eyes.

Every now and again, when the weather is hot, he deigns to drink from the bowl of the drinking fountain. In the moment when he raises his beak to allow the water to run down his gullet, he makes himself vulnerable to attack, and he is aware of that. So he is careful to maintain a particularly severe mien. Just dare laugh, he says, and I will come after you.

I never waver from according him the full respect, the full attention he demands. This morning he caught a beetle and was very proud of himself - chuffed with himself, as the English say. With the beetle helpless in his beak, its wings broken and splayed on either side, he hopped towards me, pausing at length with each hop, until he was no more than a metre removed. “Well done,” I murmured to him. He cocked his head to listen to my brief, two-syllable song. Was he acknowledging me, I asked myself? Do I come here often enough to count, in his eyes, as part of his establishment?

There are visits from the cockatoos as well. One sits peaceably in a wild plum tree. He regards me, holds out a plum kernel in his claw as if to say, “Would you like a bite?” I want to say, “This is a public garden. You are as much a visitor as I, it is not up to you to offer me food.” But public, private, it is no more than a puff of air to him. “It's a free world,” he says.

Soft Opinions: 24. On Dostoevsky

I read again last night the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov , the chapter in which Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found myself sobbing uncontrollably.

These are pages I have read innumerable times before, yet instead of becoming inured to their force I find myself more and more vulnerable before them. Why? It is not as if I am in sympathy with Ivan's rather vengeful views. Contrary to him, I believe that the greatest of all contributions to political ethics was made by Jesus when he urged the injured and offended among us to turn the other cheek, thereby breaking the cycle of revenge and reprisal. So why does Ivan make me cry in spite of myself?

The answer has nothing to do with ethics or politics, everything to do with rhetoric. In his tirade against forgiveness Ivan shamelessly uses sentiment (martyred children) and caricature (cruel landowners) to advance his ends. Far more powerful than the substance of his argument, which is not strong, are the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realized by Dostoevsky, not his reasoning, that sweeps me along.

Are those tones of anguish real? Does Ivan “really” feel as he claims to feel, and does the reader in consequence “really” share Ivan's feelings? The answer to the latter question is troubling. The answer is Yes. What one recognizes, even as one hears Ivan's words, even as one asks whether he genuinely believes what he says, even as one asks whether one wants to rise up and follow him and give back one's ticket too, even as one asks whether it is not mere rhetoric (“mere” rhetoric) that one is reading, even as one asks, shocked, how a Christian, Dostoevsky, a follower of Christ, could allow Ivan such powerful words – even in the midst of all this there is space enough to think too, Glory be! At last I see it before me, the battle pitched on the highest ground! If to anyone (Alyosha, for instance) it shall be given to vanquish Ivan, by word or by example, then indeed the word of Christ will be forever vindicated! And therefore one thinks, Slava, Fyodor Michailovich! May your name resound for ever in the halls of fame!

And one is thankful to Russia too, Mother Russia, for setting before us with such indisputable certainty the standards toward which any serious novelist must toil, even if without the faintest chance of getting there: the standard of the master Tolstoy on the one hand and of the master Dostoevsky on the other. By their example one becomes a better artist; and by better I do not mean more skilful but ethically better. They annihilate one's impurer pretensions; they clear one's eyesight; they fortify one's arm.

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Copyright © J M Coetzee, 2007.