An Exercise in (Forced) Empathy

It is a truism in psychology that sheer, mere contact with your enemy dissolves the hostility between the two of you: you begin to see each other as individuals, rather than as representatives of all the bad things about your respective groups, and you begin to distinguish between those things. This sounds like a panacea for the world’s problems. Stare into space for a moment and remember the outside world: if it’s a panacea, we’re having some trouble in the application, or in making it stick.

In academic journals, we might call this effect something sterile and blunt-force obvious, like The Contact Hypothesis. Contact begets empathy; empathy breaks down the dividing wall of intergroup hostility. And it works in the lab, where we can get away with locking two people in a room and making them talk to each other for an hour, and then bringing them back the next week to talk to each other for an hour, ad infinitum. It’s hard to make it happen in the real world though, since, left to our own devices, we won’t ever choose to engage meaningfully enough with our enemies.

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For those who don’t know, in The Last of Us Part II you are Ellie, and at the beginning of the game [and here is your chance to click away from this page] you must watch helplessly while some person called Abby slowly murders your father-figure, Joel. Naturally, you are devastated by this turn of events, and are perhaps still more devastated than might reasonably be expected because this Joel is the very same Joel in whose shoes you’ve already spent upwards of twenty hours (per playthrough of the first game), doing your morally questionable best to survive and protect Ellie from other morally questionable survivors and from multiple hordes of particularly freaky zombies. So for an especially distressing and existentially disorienting moment, you must watch as your complicated relationship with your surrogate-dad is cut unceremoniously short by a golf-club-wielding psycho, which is also simultaneously the murdering of your own erstwhile self with golf club by psycho. It makes for a complicated grief, just like Ellie’s. And it makes for an uncomplicated, rage-driven premise: you are Ellie, and you are out to hunt Abby down by hunting down her friends, who were involved to varying degrees in Joel’s murder. And this is what the game is going to be, you think: a straightforward revenge tale. You are wrong. Because after three in-game days of doing a whole lot of very bad things to other people who may or may not deserve what came to them, Abby herself turns up to repay the favour, pretty cross that you systematically hunted down and murdered her friends, and expresses her displeasure by fatally wounding another small handful of your loved ones, and is about to do the same to you, Ellie, when…

When the game leaves you on an unbearably precipitous cliffhanger, and transports you instead into the body of Abby, in whose father-murdering shoes you must re-play the last three days.

Here I ought to stress that the genre of The Last of Us is survival: the mechanics are all about making use of whatever random junk has been left behind amid the collapse of society and using it to kill people/zombies so they don’t kill you first. So treading around in Abby’s father-murdering shoes cannot be a passive thing: it means doing as much as you (the player) can to keep yourself alive—and (here’s the rub) you now means Abby. You’re going to have to make her stronger, find her better stuff—strength and stuff which will assist in getting her to the point at which she will be better able to fatally wound ‘you’ (though here the pronoun is being stretched beyond its elastic potential, you feel you are still really Ellie, deep down) and your friends at the end of these three days.

At this point you know exactly what the designers are up to, and you hate it. ‘They’re forcing me to have contact with my enemy,’ you exclaim. ‘I hate this!’ You want nothing more than to throw down your controller in disgust, eject the disc, take it back to the shop at which you got the game second-hand at a fraction of its original retail price because you, as a cost-saving measure, waited this long past the release date.  

And here we must give props where props are due to the game’s designers, who figured out how to execute the highly ambitious strategy of making the player no longer want to play their game, while still managing to not actually push the player over the edge into throwing down their controller in disgust and etc. I don’t know how they managed to make the gameplay sufficiently compelling to force me to keep going. I suspect it has something to do with easing you into playing as Abby with a lengthy non-combat section, in which you get used to the idea that this is happening and the precisely dual nature of your choices (eject; continue), while not actually requiring you to take any active decisions on Abby’s behalf.

I have rarely felt less in control while engaging with any piece of media. I have watched films and TV in which characters do things I don’t want them to do: but I know it’s part of the televisual deal that I don’t get to decide what they do. I have rarely been put in the position of having to actually do the things I actively don’t want a character to do. You are Abby: every movement you make with the controller is a movement you make as her. The equivalent in television, I suppose, would be filming not just an episode but an entire series from the perspective of the show’s most hated character: unthinkable, in other words; an idea impossible for the writers to take from whiteboard to execution. It’s interesting to experiment for an episode before getting back to programming as usual, but to push so determinedly against what your viewer/player wants is like stroking a cat the wrong way: dangerous. I did not want to develop empathy for Abby. I was irritated at the game for even trying to make me develop empathy for Abby. Perhaps I was not quite determined not to develop empathy for Abby, but I was certainly guarding against the possibility.

But it transpires that the adage about the mile and the shoes holds up to virtual testing. The Last of Us Part II accomplishes something extraordinary—something possibly unique, given that it’s something only a video game could accomplish. It doesn’t just tell you both sides of the story, it lets you enact, walk around in, live in both sides of the story. It lets you be two people who hate each other (with a murderous kind of hate) and through the simple act of being, of being two—this simple fact of perspective drains the active ingredient out of the hate. It forces you to acquire an empathy you didn’t want to acquire. By the end of the game I had been both Ellie and Abby. I didn’t have to think Abby was nice or good, I just had to be her, to know her. I saw her become to Lev what Joel had been to Ellie. And I spent enough time with both Ellie and Abby to want them both to escape the violence of this story.

One of the primary ways I experienced this empathy was, once again, in a resistance to the story. The Last of Us is a game series known for its extreme violence. That’s not usually a plus in my book unless it’s for a very good reason. In the first game, it served the legitimate purpose of making the player feel the cost of survival. In Part II, I think the point is to make the player feel how the soul empties, how the heart gets sick, how weariness heavies the limbs, when violence keeps begetting violence. The game makes you fight your selves on two different occasions: first as Abby fighting Ellie, second as Ellie fighting Abby. Both times I said verbally to my television, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I didn’t want to inflict the kind of bone-crunching, blood-spraying human carnage—carnage I was happy to inflict upon the faceless NPCs of the world—upon this person, upon this other who is myself. Both times, the game will give you no choice. As Ellie, it makes you sacrifice the good things in your life so you can keep killing and wounding until you find Abby again, and when you do, you must keep pressing the buttons, must keep hurting and wounding her, long past the point at which you had given up any desire at all to do so. The game had to kill me multiple times to convince me that I had no other option but to play properly, that I had to keep pressing the buttons I didn’t want to press. It will give you no choice: you must kill and you must wound until you are sick to the stomach of violence. And you must trust the game to make your characters realise that before it is too late.

And that—the fact that you find yourself doing everything you can to resist the game as it tells you this story of inexorable revenge and violence, that you no longer feel the hatred that motivates the actions you are causing your character to perform—that is when you realise that this game might have actually dragged you, kicking and screaming to something approximating love for your enemy. You no longer wish harm on her, by virtue of having been her not all that long ago. And whether that’s love or not, the game has made you want to cease treating her as your enemy.

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A note on controversy

Before I played this game, I was aware that controversy existed in relation to this game, though I was careful not to find out about the substance of that controversy before I played. Having finished writing, I’ve just had a look, and while my understanding of these positions comes through a range of mean-spirited memes, I get that The Last of Us Part II wasn’t the story fans of the original game expected or wanted. Much of the criticism is directed towards what feels like the subordination of beloved characters to an unwelcome/unjustified moral lesson, and a resistance to the substance of the moral lesson. Having loved Joel and Ellie, I didn’t think they were ill-used by the story (any more than people are ill-used by life). I thought they lived in service to a story worth telling.

The point of my writing this was to marvel at how the makers managed to pull off an extremely difficult moral manoeuvre upon me, largely against my will. In order to do that, the game had to be deliberately provocative, had to challenge its players to the limits of tolerance. For a video game so to do is wildly ambitious, just like forgiveness. There is a unity of form and theme and story here, which is a hallmark of art. I have seen many bitter cries against the whole idea of forgiveness itself, as being either naïve or immoral. We seem to prefer cold justice for Abby. Forgiveness is more difficult, it is much more dreadful, but it is better. It is not unrealistic: much more radical forgivenesses have been accomplished in the real world, though with no less difficulty. For a game that is against hatred, the (deeply ironic) hatred with which it was met doesn’t show that holding to forgiveness against hatred is wrong, only that it is difficult.

Grief

It is feeling like something has died. It is a cold light that makes a garden feel empty. It is a silence that draws attention to itself.

It is a terrible paradox, itself the only possible expression of an unapproachable truth: that someone so full and bursting with particular instances of life can abruptly no longer be, can be instantly and permanently gone.

Grief and loss, holding hands, eternal twins with whom everyone makes acquaintance. Acquaintance with them is the quintessential human experience. And it comes in words simple enough to fit every tongue, words that everyone has spoken, or is yet to speak one day: that I just can’t believe he’s gone, that he will not come around again.

You’re aware as you say these words, as you ask why to the heavens and sob out feeble denials, that you are speaking the language of cliché. They are the words that everyone uses because they are the only words, the only equation by which the paradox can be expressed. They are the right words: dim, impotent questionings of the right and the power and the audacity of the nothingness which creeps always in and cannot be pushed back. Their universality is not a comfort.

It feels more real as time passes, and less real too. I am coming to recognise that the cold and quiet evenings into which he does not all at once tumble will be all the evenings from now on. Yet it all still feels like a misunderstanding, like the pattern he wove alongside mine is too solid, too dependable to somehow suddenly cease. I do not understand how his life can have spilled out and evaporated—how he can be over. Even now, it would make more sense to me if he sauntered through the door in his usual way, and I would cry out, and everything would be normal again in ten short minutes.

Loving him, caring for him, companionship with him—all this was grafted into my life, once. My heart has grown lobes just for him, and my brain has written more space for him into my mind. Just as he changed me, so now I find myself changed again, now that these verbs have lost their subject. My hands itch, suddenly useless now that they have no service to perform for him, no warm body to touch. I was surprised by the sound of my own crying, yesterday. Now I am familiar with it.

It changes you. It diminishes you. I cannot read, I cannot write. I cannot be alone: this house is cavernous. I can only think of him, and look at old pictures of him, and remember what it felt like to touch him. I can only cry, or try not to cry. I can only do all this, or try to distract myself from it. And so I have lost the capacity to be alone with my thoughts. I am terrified of my thoughts. I keep my mind spun up to a light whir—I listen ferociously to business segments on the radio, all the way through. I always hated the radio, before. Even it is preferable to the great, empty silence. And distraction works well enough: you half-forget for a minute, and you crave the forgetting, the distraction, the departure of the mind to untainted territory. It can’t be kept up, though. Memory always wins. And I force myself to remember, just as much as I force myself to forget. I am anxious to forget the fact of his death, except that I can’t bear to, lest in putting down the bottomless cup of grief I fail to honour him.

I am told that grief is like waves on the shore, and that eventually the tide does recede and the impacts do soften. But it is also relentless like waves, repetitious like waves. It hits you over and over again, continually. It is tedious, in the way that only pain can be. How many times can it hit me each day that he is not coming back? That I will never see him again? Hundreds.

It doesn’t last forever, at least not in the same way. There comes a point at which you realise that life will go on regardless, that suns will once again give their light, irrespective of whether he is here or not. That he will definitely never come back, but that other things will not cease their coming. That time is no respecter of persons. It is worst when I go back to doing something I did before he died, each old activity pressing the vulnerable memory of when it last was done, and he was alive. And this happens quickly: the house needs cleaned, the washing needs done, food needs made, and bought. I did not imagine just how much grief would feel like depression. I mean real depression: the depletion of the soul’s vitality. Every chore feels impossible, feels like it must run up against the wall of his absence. I cried terrible tears the first time I watered the plants in the garden, the first time since he had died. It felt simply wrong to be doing it without him, wrong that he wasn’t there. It felt like there would never be a point to it again, to anything again. But there is less pain on the second pass, because the shock has come and gone: the shock of just how much every simple thing was given colour and life by him, and how cold and dead everything feels in his absence. I have re-introduced most things into my life now, taking each hit as I feel stable enough to manage it. And life does go on: a deadline looms, that half-dug trench in the garden needs finished. Soon there is nothing left that hasn’t been resumed, nothing which hasn’t lost its colour. And you feel kind of ok: functional. Colour is inessential, after all.

I do feel like I’m struggling uphill for my survival—or for the capacity to go on, to progress through life, beyond the point at which all suns are eclipsed by this grief. And a large part of the problem is that I don’t really want this to happen. I want the suns to be eclipsed; I do not want life to just go on without him. It cuts me to the heart to imagine that I may yet have fifty or sixty years to live without him—a time plenty long enough for him to fade into a disembodied memory, a nothingness, a name. I will never see him again, or touch him again, or have any experience which will ever again shore up the fragile memory of him. I knew him for not even a year: what a pitiful fraction of time. And yet, he was everything to me. I must have been so happy, and I didn’t even know it.

I once thought of my self as a labyrinth—now it feels like a single locked room. Grief is the room’s only air, and it goes rapidly stale. Grief is the only subject of observation. Or it’s like gravity has been switched off: the pressure that once gave me shape is gone and now there is only me, contorting in my own personal way, under the power of nothing. Grief is all about the effect of loss on my own personal self: it’s a selfish thing, concerned with the effect and not the cause, which is love. For truly there is much that ought to turn my heart to thankfulness. There was a precious life, well-lived, joyful and giving joy. There was a golden year in which we were never apart, in which we learned each other and knew each other intimately. There was an indelible, enfleshed character, and I witnessed the holy mystery of him, and I alone knew his particularities, and I loved them. But death closes the door, and grief is a single room.

Spiritualist nonsense bubbles out among many a well-meaning condolence. He’s not really gone, someone might say. He’ll always be with you, says another. In a spiritual sense, I mean. What does it mean, a spiritual sense? That some sensation of his presence will persist? That some form of communion is yet available? As time passes and the grief becomes less acute and less all-encompassing and more like a heavy stone carried always on my person, I find (to my great surprise) that there is something to some of that stuff. I don’t know whether it’s the product of leafing through his pictures, or whether it’s because I have kept up the habit of talking to him about what new thing is going on, but he does often feel close. Like he can be spoken to. Like I carry him around with me. Like our relationship has somehow survived that great violence. I suspect I’m just clutching the receiver when the line has been severed, indulging in the muscle memory of communion. There is some strange comfort in that. So much so that I have to remind myself, to bring my mind back to his death, to remember that he is never really coming back. To reopen the wound again, and taste the blood.

Gravitational Pull on a Person’s Timeline

I am coming soon to one of those rare moments upon which the rest of my life will either turn, or it won’t. It is two weeks out of town, steadily eating dirt and distance and days. I raise my eyes and catch the glint of its sharpening light as it barrels down the fixed track of time towards me.

The problem is, I can’t but raise my eyes. The act of living reminds me that I will soon be living through it: it will soon be now, it will soon be past; the warm rush of a new thing will soon have quietened, the emptiness left by an aborted reality will have ached, and resisted filling. I have put myself in this situation, opened myself to the possibility of either violent change or receipt of a wound that throbs long after it has healed. Both of these possibilities are to be reckoned with, and not lightly. I don’t think about this so much as I feel it; I feel the chemical surge and I remember what it signifies.

Anxiety occupies me with nothings. If I toss a thought around my head I might glance at it in my mind, just beyond its casual ricochet. And without even glancing at it, I know I can feel its heavy hand reaching out from the future, pressing down on me. If I think to plan, I feel the gentle tug of its gravitational pull on my future, reminding me that the future is yet to be decided. If I try to prepare I catch a glimpse of its great bulk and wonder: how?

Anxiety is a product of investment. I hope for this change, and not a little. I’ve been building to it, shoring up the likeliness of its materialisation. I have been considering it for so long that it feels like I’ve convinced myself that I am the person I’d have to be for the change to occur. But the future exists, and so I still don’t know whether I am. My identity is yet to be determined.

I think because I feel fixed in place, because I am a person in flux, that I don’t feel very real. My plough won’t cut any earth. Regardless of where I turn my hand, my blade proves too dull, the ground too hard. I have forgotten the true names of things because my own is changing.

It is exhausting, the whole thing: to be too dry to create, to be transfixed by anxiety, to be sundered from myself. The good thing about time, I suppose, is that it happens: things come to be over, and decided.

The Enduring Popularity of Aslan’s Country, as a Destination of Travel

Narnia, I think, is quite unique among modern fantasies for being an unashamedly Christian story that enjoys the devotion of an irreligious and unchristian readership. Ardent love for Narnia requires the unchristian reader to resolve a conflict between a Christian story they love and a Christianity they don’t. I’ve searched out threads that deal with this conflict, and have found that the resolution tends to consist in either:

• Reading around the Christian bits
• Re-interpreting the Christian bits as life-lessons.

It’s unclear to me what either reading would actually look like, since the author’s Christian worldview is dispensable neither to himself nor to his stories—and so cannot be simply read around. The Silver Chair, for instance, is almost allegorical in its overlaying of the journey of faith onto the literal journey into Underland. It’s probably better to say the journey into Underland is also a journey of faith for Jill and Eustace, which in turn is able to speak (via metaphor) to the Christian journey of faith outside of Narnia. Subtract the stuff about faith and you’re left with an exciting plot, but precious little meaning. Or consider Aslan. If Lewis wrote him to represent the Christian God, what remains of his character when you strip him of anything that sounds too Christian? Read round the Christian bits then, and lose the whole.

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The underlying problem with these readings is one common to a good deal of Narnia’s readership (and of which the Christian part is surely most guilty): the assumption that Christianity sits atop Narnia like a layer of oil atop water, like a code. Decipher the code and you can separate the Christian meaning from the story—to be discarded, or to be milked for all it’s worth. Such readings are illiterate and basically wrong, neglecting as they do to consider that Lewis set out to write literature, not code. Literature is written to mean something, and does so by an artistry of narrative and language. The Christian meaning is in the story and isn’t divisible from it, but is focused by every image and scene. Neither, then, does Lewis satisfy his Christianity by proselytising for a few lines before returning to the real story. As with all art, the meaning is integrated into the whole.

In his biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath makes a valuable distinction between Lewis’s apologetic writing and his fiction:

‘Lewis’s remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this [Christian] metanarrative—to get inside the [Christian] story, and feel what it is like to be part of it. Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story, and to judge by its ability to make sense of things, and ‘chime in’ with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty and goodness.‘ – C.S. Lewis, A Life

According to McGrath, a mature Lewis wrote Narnia as a re-telling of the Christian story as a way to allow the Christian story to make a full and striking impression upon the imagination of his readers. It isn’t a re-telling in the sense that the reader ought to be able to spot Abraham and Christ and Moses. Narnia is the story of how the Christian God may have dealt with another world of his making in a way that reflects his character and behaviour, as known to us through his actions in our world. When you look at it this way, Narnia isn’t an allegory at all. It is instead an imaginative world in which the whole narrative has a thematic, theological meaning, all intended to beautifully illustrate what the Christian story and the Christian life are like. To take just one example of possible hundreds, Eustace’s transformation into a dragon is a reflection on the human condition of sin. He chooses selfishness at every opportunity, and his whole being eventually contorts as a result, manifesting it in his transformation into a dragon atop its hoard. He begins to understand his sin and to bitterly regret it—but the transformation has occurred, and he can’t do anything about it. The God of Narnia must intervene, painfully and tenderly, to heal him and set him back on the path towards life rather than death. If you subtract the Christianity out of all that, you get a story about a selfish boy who becomes a dragon, is sorry, is set right by a magical lion, and becomes a reformed character. If you try to make it a life-lesson, you may learn that it is bad to be selfish. But only the narrative wedded to its essentially Christian meaning is beautiful.

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To all this, I came across the objection that it is possible to ‘enjoy the view without buying the house,’ i.e. if Narnia is a Christian re-telling, it’s possible to appreciate its essentially Christian beauty without taking up, or being convinced by, the Christian faith. And I think that’s pretty much true and essentially reasonable, if I may add to it a caveat.

Everything Lewis wrote in Narnia he believed to be true, and beautiful only because it was true. Lewis believed that all nature would be reconciled under its true King; Lewis believed in Aslan’s Country where the dead are young again; Lewis believed that the only water that can satisfy our thirst is found next to the terrifying paw of the Lion; Lewis believed that belief in the Christian God, in that reality which is truer and more real than the visible one, must be clung to despite the creeping whisper of despair and nihilism. Lewis believed that Peter’s decency, Puddleglum’s courage and Lucy’s faith were all true expressions of the Christian life and responses to the Christian story as ardently believed; that heroic knighthood, love for nature and also the prohibition on females fighting alongside males (even if we may disagree with him on that part) were part of the beautiful whole of the Christian tapestry. Everything attractive in Narnia, Lewis poured into it from his understanding of Christianity, and the only reason Aslan is attractive is that Lewis wrote him to reflect the character of the Christian God. To love Narnia is to be captivated by the Christian vision—only dressed a little differently.

The atheist may love Narnia and reject its worldview as I may a story written by a devotee of scientism. I may reject such a story as a beautiful myth and love it all the same. I may consider it to have failed its duty of true-telling, but I will not be able to reject it on the grounds of ugliness. The atheist may indeed ‘enjoy the view without buying the house,’ but such a view is only consistent if they can do the same with the story of Jesus of Nazareth. The atheist who loves Narnia has been convinced that Christianity is beautiful and that its God is beautiful, and beauty is next-door to truth. The only fallback that remains is an appeal to scientific claims that disqualify God from existence, held tightly against the hot breath and the earthquake-purr of the Great Lion.

A Treaty with Reality

As the Great War broke out and threatened to swallow the lives of he of his countrymen, C.S. Lewis brokered what he called a ‘treaty with reality.’ Its terms: he would fight in the war, but he would not think about it; he would draw a border in his mind, allowing the war thus far and no further. The war could have his body, but not his person. Thus he read poetry in the trenches, and wrote his own—and acquired a lifelong aversion to newspapers.

The war ended the lives of millions, and swallowed the lives of uncounted millions more. I imagine the unusual prevalence of important events generated a great deal of news: of battles won; of battles lost; of frontlines shifted; of political manoeuvres; of important people and important declarations; and on; and on. I’m sure it seemed crucially important to keep abreast of each of these, that it seemed part of one’s civic duty to be informed on all aspects of the war effort. The coronavirus pandemic often receives comparisons to war, but in this way at least the comparison is fair. Momentous events entail a grand narrative that exhausts and replaces all others; they produce a miasma of information and pseudo-information, of news and opinion which all seems like an important part of the story—and demand that all this must be paid attention to in order to keep one’s bearings in the swift current of occurrence. Momentous events make a malign conjunction with digital capitalism, which sweeps more and more people up into clicking on websites that (falsely) offer some relief from anxiety and some certainty in futurism. This new abyss gapes and swirls, and would very much like to swallow us all whole. It threatens personal oblivion: the annihilation of our private mental space.

The lie is that all of this is necessary, or essential. When the abyss swallowed me for a time (with Brexit as its bait), the countless other fellow victims I found in its belly made it seem natural for me to be there—important, even. It’s easy to forget you’re in a belly, and easy to forget the most important thing about being in a belly: getting out of it.

When a foreign legion blows the loudest, most important-sounding horn, you are not required to let them through the gates, to permit them the occupation of your territory. If we are to be people who are truly ourselves rather than repositories for events-adjacent factoids and opinions and anxieties, if we are to cultivate an inner, creative life, then a border must be drawn in the mind, and it must be policed.

The pandemic must have my body, as a matter of duty and conscience. I am required to be isolated to protect others: so be it; I will continue to uphold the law of the land in its letter and its spirit. Thus far and no further. My mind remains my own, and I refuse to be swept into the abyss. To that end I’ve sworn off looking at the news in every form, barring the spending of some time with a weekly paper. Everything important tends to filter its way through.

I hope to let only artists and experts in, who have either knowledge or perspective that is different than mine, and wider. I hope to be expanded by the composed thoughts of those who believe they are speaking a vital truth, and have cared enough about it to whisper it to me in beautiful words, in the dead of night. For the life of me, I will read.

Lewis walked under ordinary, grey Oxford skies and was caught up not by the story of successive events, but by myths that he found to be true. He found that interlacing an imaginative world with our own made bright the shards of truth that can be discovered under grey skies, by the one who looks. There is a subtle magic inherent in this world that the occupied mind finds easy to miss. There is a grander narrative than any we can find in the papers. It’s my hope that if I cease to listen to one, I will more readily discover the threads of the other.

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Update, mid-February 2021: Somewhat comically, on the very same day that I published the above, terribly optimistic post on how I was going to withdraw most of my attention from the news, Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government, prompting impeachment trials and a news cycle that has, even still, failed to end. That was a pretty good test of my continence and commitment to the above Treaty with Reality, and one which I failed a couple of times. But I think even though those events were properly newsworthy events, it’s still better to be able to read about them from tranquility, after the reactions and counter-reactions have ceased, and to refuse to give them unending free real estate in one’s head.

Covenants of Old

One of the founding principles of Susanna Clarke’s mythological worldview, borrowed from Inkling Owen Barfield[1] and treated explicitly in her recent book Piranesi, is the idea that the ancients had a substantial, personal connection to the land they inhabited – a covenant which has been transgressed and forgotten since the industrial era. Magic in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell stems from the alliances John Uskglass, the Raven King, once made with the land (i.e. the hills and trees and rivers) of England. Piranesi is set in what is almost the present day, at which point this magic of the natural has flowed out of the world completely, though some work towards its recovery.

In the venerable Inkling tradition, Jonathan Strange is Clarke’s attempt to write a folklore back into England’s past. The academic depth of her alternate history of magic, the vivid character of Fairie and its inhabitants, and the mystique of the North’s golden age of independence under the Raven King – all these attest to her mighty success in that project. Like those of Tolkien and Lewis, Clarke’s myth is also a messianic one: her characters secretly and ardently desire to restore the past order to modern England, and we are caught up with them in fervent hope for the return of John Uskglass whose reappearance will re-open the old roads to Fairie, and bring the trees and stones to remembrance of their old alliances, and bring English magic bursting once more into its summer bloom. This is the culmination of Clarke’s messianic hope: the return to a lost ideal state of communion between humanity and nature. We get only a taste of what that might look like in Jonathan Strange when Stephen Black becomes suddenly privy to the alliances the Raven King has made with nature, and the rocks and hills help him vanquish his foe. This is the climax of the book, a prophecy fulfilled – but alas!, it does not last. A new order is not ushered in; nature discovers Stephen for an impostor; the moment of consummation recedes. It’s a disappointing end to the reader’s inflamed hope: we hold our breath for the Raven King’s return, only for it to be brief, and of little consequence; we anxiously await the outcome of Vinculus’s prophecy, only to find it’s fulfilment in a brief moment, in a rather technical way.

To my mind, Susanna Clarke brings us to the very threshold of the new creation, and can’t but hesitate long enough for the door to close. This, I think, is completely understandable. How can the author hail a changed world when the world around us remains unchanged? To do so would send her readers blinking back out into the harsh daylight of modern life. I think Clarke would prefer we look with fresh eyes on the world around us, to renew our own covenants with the grey skies and with the stones, rather than to be blinded by utopia. In Jonathan Strange, then, the messianic hope for new creation can’t be other than deferred.

The Christian reader of fantasy is, however, accustomed to reading stories in which prophecies of the world’s renewal can be fulfilled, and Clarke’s predecesors, Tolkien and Lewis, were able to tell them because they believed their myths were, in the deepest sense, true. Lewis believed Aslan would appear to set things right at the Last Battle, just as Tolkien believed the rightful King would return to rule the kingdoms of Man. Each spoke of a renewed covenant between humanity and nature because they believed it would come to pass when all things were reconciled in Christ. Neither had any compunction about ending their fantasies in the gloriously perfected future because they intended such a vision to spark a secret and fervent hope in the reader, and because they believed that such a future is present now in seedform – that people can participate in the renewed covenant even now. We can’t know how Clarke intended her story to end, since her unfinished sequel languishes in the tangle worked by her illness.[2] She may indeed want to conclude the story with the restoration of nature and magic. For now, Jonathan Strange ends with a definite emphasis on personal change in an unchanged world: the King’s quiet return seems to leave the promises unfulfilled, but the people caught up in that pivotal event have been flung outwards into their own story arcs, changed, proclaiming that change to others. Perhaps its ending is less of a hesitation and more a mirroring of the biblical story.

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Clarke has spoken about how her Christian faith has been rekindled as she suffered under her illness in the sixteen-odd years between her two novels.[1] Piranesi certainly contains more of an explicit theism than does Jonathan Strange, whose influence succeeds in resolving some of tensions left unresolved in her debut novel. If Clarke’s ideal is the restoration of the relationship between humanity and nature, then Piranesi (the character) is the living embodiment of this new covenant. Due to his long-term imprisonment in the Distributary World he calls the House, which has been made by the outflow of magic from our world, Piranesi has of necessity developed a firsthand relationship of dependency with the elements, which have become to him companionable, and personal. Through long exposure, Piranesi has come to recognise a kind of personhood in every inhabitant of the House (from statues to birds to the flowing waters): they are his friends; he knows their tendencies; he communes with them. This companionship is not the same as a mutual communion between two people, nor is it as fulfilling. Nor, I think, does it stray into pantheism since it works to attune Piranesi to discern the hand of a benevolent creator in the events of his life. Though his beliefs about the House are often mistaken, he is grateful to the House for sustaining him and for populating his world with good things for his benefit. The House is not just benevolent, but active in the care it takes for its inhabitants. He expresses praise for the House, and develops his own kind of ritual religion of upkeep. When all his other identities are stripped from him by others, he identifies ultimately and only as the Beloved Child of the House.

It’s important to note the radical change of emphasis from Jonathan Strange to Piranesi. The latter does not lean upon the messianism of the former to reconstitute the relationship between nature and humanity. Piranesi’s messianics are actually the villains of the novel, deplorables like Laurence Arne-Sayles and Valentine Ketterley who intend to bring the wisdom of the ancients to modern England and usher in a new age of mankind in order to bolster their own reputations and occult powers. These men are like Tolkien’s villains, attempting only to control nature and magic and ending only with violence and death – they make the House nothing but a prison and a tomb. Piranesi couldn’t be more different. He’s a holy fool who, by losing himself in it, is able to see the House’s beauty. He is able to wonder at it, and so to discover the wisdom of the ancients – which, it turns out, is not power, but casual communion with a good world and with the creator who provides it.

Importantly, at the end of the book, Piranesi is able to bring the House’s wisdom into our world, the modern world. In his final entry, Piranesi looks around a park in the city, recognising virtue in an old man and some children from similar statues he has known in the House. He ends by describing a fairly barren, unremarkable scene:

‘I came out of the park. The city streets rose up around me. There was a hotel with a courtyard with metal tables and chairs for people to sit in more clement weather. Today they were snow-strewn and forlorn. A lattice of wire was strung across the courtyard. Paper lanterns were hanging from the wires, spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind; the sea-grey clouds raced across the sky and the orange lanterns shivered against them.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.’

In this remarkable ending, Piranesi is clear that there isn’t much to recommend this city: it is forlorn and freezing cold; it is not obviously beautiful. Even still, Piranesi has learnt a deep knowledge, a deep wisdom in the House: that life, that sheer existence is beautiful; that the world is a generous and well-intentioned gift, for those with eyes to see it as such.

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Both Jonathan Strange and Piranesi long for the renewed communion of humanity with nature. Jonathan Strange prophesies a transformed world, but ultimately fails to realise it. In Piranesi, Clarke shows us that this ideal can be recaptured by individuals, chiefly by the act of losing oneself in the natural/magical world. Piranesi visits another world to understand the beauty and wonder of this one, to learn the goodness of its creator. As he returns to our world, he does so changed. And the world is changed around him, made alive, personalised, animated – which, for Clarke’s readers, is both the fulfilment of the promise of Jonathan Strange, and also good practical wisdom for living in a world yet unchanged.

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[1] https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/11-december/features/features/susanna-clarke-rescued-by-faith-and-strictly

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/12/susanna-clarke-i-was-cut-off-from-the-world-bound-in-one-place-by-illness

A difficult thing to fathom

I must have been ­in the midteen wilderness, lost, a boy looking desperately for some secure means of being someone whom others would find sparkling on the palate; a boy feeling fiercely that he alone had a true and sophisticated soul which alone reverberated sympathetically with the True Way of the Universe. I remember being caught up in one of those family gatherings I hated so much, which felt like a competition designed to reward everything I could never be. I remember being weary of my own fake smile and upset by the difference between my family and myself, which I perceived as the only salient fact that could exist in reference to us both, and so I remember being quiet. Whether by some watchful benevolence on my mother’s part or some insolence on my own, I remember leaving the room where the hubbub was and going to sit on the floor in from of the television, flicking to Film4, expectations low. When the channel changed, I found myself looking at an animation, a girl sitting companionably with a masked-and-shrouded something, side-by-side on a train that glided on serene tracks across a flat, untroubled lake. This moment, this scene, has left so great an impression upon me that I remember it vividly still. And I think the reason it impressed itself upon me so is that it was a moment of complete visual otherness—it was entirely visually distinct from any film or media I can remember seeing up to that point. It was an animation, but it did not have the rounded, childish features, nor the artificial colour palate of something like Disney or Pixar. It was simply beautiful: in its colours, in its bizarre serenity, in its lingering on characters sitting in silent companionship, in its allowance of the existence of the melancholy shroud and the possibility of togetherness under it—beautiful in a way nothing else was. I was enthralled.

Good things cannot last when a party is happening around them, and before I could watch much more I was dragged off to submerge myself once more in my own private adolescent misery. It can’t have been long after that before a very similar episode recurred: family gathering, loneliness-among-crowds, refuge within television. Only this time, the family voices were much closer, just in the next room (making it much less likely that I could have gotten away with sneaking off to the TV, but here we are). I think I might have been asked to prepare the TV for my grandparents—if so I did not, and I found again on Film4 by some glorious accident a very similar thing. A man and a boy working a plough together in the sun behind a small cottage, surrounded by fields of the most splendid green and a sky that made my heart leap. Conscious of the proximity of danger, I watched for as long as I could, on mute, on the carpet, until I was reminded of my duties and asked to resume them.

These are my memories of discovering Studio Ghibli: a private, soaring delight, a longing, a Joy. I think it must have been a year afterwards when Film4 next ran their Studio Ghibli Season that I caught glimpses of Chihiro et al. in their trailer for it and put two and two together. I remember that year, my attempts to reconstruct what I’d seen, of researches frustrated by the lack of anything much to go on, of trying to recreate the inciting incident by sneaking off again to the TV, of longing.

I loved Studio Ghibli the first time I laid eyes on any of it. I suppose because I happened upon the films in their moments of melancholy emptiness, the moments in which the characters rest from their involvement in the plot and invite the audience to rest with them. I was captivated because it seemed to me that someone else knew what it was like to be alone and quiet and melancholy. And I loved Studio Ghibli with a fierce and almost entirely interior love, since nobody in my life was willing to venture to share them with me. My Japanese cartoons won me ridicule from friends and family alike, so I kept them quiet and loved them on my own—which was probably a healthy thing for me, identitywise.

It was not for many years after that I discovered Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea—I think it must have been 2017 when I took the first four books on a holiday to the beach, consumed the first one in a compulsive, tearful gulp, and did not read the others for fear that in reading them they would be read. I cannot for the life of me remember with any accuracy what drew me to the shores of Earthsea, but I do have a vague memory of that peculiar call from a nicely illustrated paperback to a prospective reader happening in a bookshop in Waterford. It might be that I sought out the book in the shop on some other recommendation, but I know I did make a very deliberate and very desperate journey to Lisburn to get my copy an hour before we left for that beach-holiday.

All this to say, my loves for Earthsea and Ghibli are distinct entities. Earthsea, by way of the film, bears some measure of responsibility for my love of the Studio which produced it, but in a way that is entirely separate from the books, and which does not go vice versa. I must at some point have made the connection between the two; I know I at some point read Le Guin’s famous blog post – though I can’t remember when for either. I do remember watching the film post- reading the books, at which point I presume I had already made the connection.

Netflix did a wonderful thing in early 2020 in making nearly every Studio Ghibli film instantaneously available to me, solving that age-old problem of how one gets one’s hands on the things. I rewatched Tales from Earthsea, and I learnt a few things about the production history I didn’t previously know, and I’m just a little perplexed at how it came to be that Tales from Earthsea is pretty much Studio Ghibli’s one really bad film (my eyes pass lightly over The Cat Returns). I learnt that Miyazaki considers the Earthsea books to be a seminal work of great personal significance, on which he based an early manga. I learnt that because of Earthsea’s (entirely deserved) status in Japan, everyone involved in its production must have known they were hallowed texts, a special thing. And I learnt that Miyazaki, when the rights were secured and Le Guin eventually convinced, promptly lost all interest in the project and handed it off to his son (who had never before made a film).

With Le Guin, I wonder at the disrespect Miyazaki showed her work and her characters – no one could have dreamt of chopping up, say, Tolkien’s characters in the same way. While anger is here fully appropriate, whenever I think about it I mostly feel grief. I can’t help but think of the squandered potential. Earthsea in the hands of Miyazaki! It would have been the perfect collaboration. He would understand Ged’s slow journeys on Lookfar, would understand Tehanu’s tormented peace – would understand the intimacy of the epic. He would draw a dragon who could dance on the wind like no flying-machine ever could. He would paint the perfect embodied mingling of nature and humanity and supernatural, and he would paint it dancing on such a sky! Le Guin was right that he is the only director who could have made Earthsea into a film – and, for whatever reason, he ceased to care. And so passes a golden opportunity the like of which I will never hear again, to have two of my heart’s dearest delights come together in splendour.

And she would have let him add his own story to the canon! I lament!

Ordinary Time

Chaos seems to have been the watchword of the past three years, in many ways, on many levels. It has seeped into the common psyche, has characterised the national mood, has coloured the spirit of this mini-age. Chaos, but chaos of a peculiarly mundane sort. Several long, drawn-out, awfully boring crises have unfurled lazily among us, crises which have been technical and regulatory and bureaucratic, and also emotional and irrational and passionate, and the bumping loggerheads of these things all resulting in a diagnosis of uncertainty, prognosis: terminal.

And then, all of a sudden, in the space of approx. a month, our special dispensation of uncertainty seems to have come to a sudden end. And when I say end, I mean at least that a final end to the thing in question has been promised, and that certain advances have been made significant enough to place the thing in question beyond question, and that those advances have been presented as ones which shall now continue, decisively.

In the month that straddled the turning of the new decade:

• Brexit was to be got done (after three years)
• Government was to return to Northern Ireland (after three years)
• (And the world seemed to decide that it would prefer not to have a nuclear war (despite some really convincing interest shown by USA and Iran))

This three-year state of constant uncertainty and eternally politically overcast skies has got under our skin, I think. It has troubled the still waters of our souls. It has caused a great many people a great deal of emotional turbulence. Angst, worry, anxiety, dread – these have been our constant companions for a while now. And that’s probably not healthy; it may have shortened our lives. We’re all probably a bit more neurotic than we were.

For this vile cocktail to be suddenly replaced by the slow draught of resignation – I don’t quite know what to make of it. Things have been decided, but there are still difficult roads to the implementation of all the less-than-ideal solutions. I feel unmoored. Like I’ve been following a preset way on Google Maps, and now the signal has suddenly cut out. Rerouting…

For the life of me I can’t not still feel unsettled. I suppose much of this is because I’m not terribly happy about the resolutions we’ve been given (Brexit; DUP/SF back in power). But I think it has more to do with that prolonged exposure to uncertainty: none of these happy endings really seem like a sure deal to me. I expect that Brexit won’t have an easy birth; I expect that power-sharing won’t last for very long, or very happily. I feel a bit like an abandoned child facing my returning parent: I greet them with a suspicious eye. I suspect I’m not alone in this. I imagine that our political systems will have to reckon with the damage that has been done to us, that has left us fragile, sooner or later. This will not be a simple thing: if our crises are now about regulations and dense legal codes, how can even a skilled populist engage us enough with their resolution to impart the warm glow of security that Everything Is Now Alright? Will we not continue to be dissatisfied by incomplete resolutions; will we not continue to disbelieve? How can more principled players oppose him, if they must make argument about bureaucracy?

I’ve been wondering for a while about whether people have historically tended to return to the feeling that the world is precariously balanced on the brink of its end. As we marked the new decade, it seemed like people generally expect things to get worse beyond repair before the next, like we’re toasting the last beautiful setting of the sun.

Is it recency-bias to think of the times we live in as being in any way truly exceptional? Nobody who ought to be able to remember can give me a good answer to this. But I am reminded that Things have been in bad shape before, and indeed worse shape. I am reminded that to have a tyrant or a world-king in charge is not so unusual a situation, in the grand scheme. I am reminded that at many points throughout history, those living inside it must have believed that civilisation was about to crumble. The Horrors of Twentieth-Century Europe will always be abstract to me, thanks to their being a core module of my History GCSE – so it’s hard to pull myself down to the actual daily-life moment-by-moment feeling of how generally terrified, how mundanely anxious ordinary European people must have felt when [insert regime here] was gaining power, let alone at the height of that power. The past century attained a degree of obvious evil and blatant disruption we have not (yet, I suppose) matched in this one. History turns. All of these things pass. There is always a fresh dawn. (Unless our ecology collapses.)

How do I live amid all this noise, amid manifold crises which happen intensely and then amount briefly to nothing? It seems that panic has become the state I’m supposed to be in. Internet capitalism certaintly wants me to be panicking more often than not (to capture my attention and my clicks). The world has come a little bit loose. It is drifting free of its moor. But these crises, these hopes, these moorings to some established and conventional order which is currently being disrupted – these do not belong to me, they are not mine to carry.

The ancient prophets called the faithful to live in the cities of their occupiers on an axis of engagement: pray for the city; help it to prosper – but never buy into its way of thinking: don’t forget that you don’t belong to it, that you aren’t a cog in its machine, that you have been claimed by a greater worldview and a better story.

The system is insidious, and it is everything about our modern lives. The same phones that are essential tools for our daily lives are also inexhaustible vortexes of headlines and notifications, digital hands reaching out to grasp, to hook, to toxify and addict, to make reliant, to annex.

I’d like to stand more outside the system. I’d like to focus on the things I want to think about and do, the creative pursuits and spiritual substance that are the good life. I’d like to learn how to live a peaceful, quiet life.

The Church is beginning to count Ordinary Time now, post-Christmas, in January – a time between periods with distinctive characters, but having none itself. It’s kind of disappointing to me, now that I find myself at the abrupt end of a particular dispensation which I thought was the ultimate thing about now. I’ve sought to understand it, and I’ve spent a good deal of time and energy doing so because I thought it was meaningful. I thought it was important to drink it all down, poison and all, to prop up my eyelids and absorb the soul-horror of it all – these post-modern crises which Kafka would have been proud to invent, of apocalypse by labyrinthine bureaucracy and catastrophe by regulatory re-alignment.

It’s a good thing really, to remember the glad and quiet news that life is more than high drama, but is instead mostly (if you’re fortunate) the sitting still in a low-lit room at the end of the day, watching your family talk about no Thing that stretches its taut and struggling line beyond the room.

 

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Addendum from the future

In the past, Giles Deleuze said it like this,

‘It’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves, but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.’

And further into the past still, Kierkegaard like this,

‘While one kind of despair steers blindly in the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair allows itself to be, so to speak, cheated of its self by ‘the others’. By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name.’

 

Review: The Top Table

You know how it is—you’re sitting alone with your loved one, staring at the darkness creeping up the walls, feeling the whisper-voice of anxiety at your ear, afraid to glance at your phone lest you find a BREAKING NEWS notification, afraid to read a book lest your mind strays and finds its way back to the memory-foam groove of current affairs, afraid to look outside lest Brexit itself manifest in living flesh and walk among us. This condition of yours becomes unbearable; you decide to medicate. You could bingewatch some show on Netflix. But it’s 2019 and you remember how too much screentime makes you feel all sticky and unwashed inside. A voice whispers to you from across the years, and remembrance of a most analogue pleasure comes flooding into your mind like the light of revelation: you decide to do a jigsaw. But it’s 2019 and analogue stimulation just isn’t enough to cut it these days, so you set the TV playing in the background—set to some safe, apolitical programme, a nature programme let’s say. You steer well clear of David Attenborough though, since you’re in too fragile a state really to bear the weighty load of corporate climate guilt. Countryfile, or something.

Picture it: You’re having a nice time, a time of total thoughtless oblivion. You’re on the home straight (the jigsaw straight), and you’re pretty much unable to get up until you find and fit every last piece. You need this, to finish the thing, to make it perfect, for just one thing to be perfect and finished and satisfying and complete. But now your programme winds up, and you begin a merciless slide into the passive consumption of whatever’s-on-next. After a few moments of laserlike focus on the hunt for a giraffe’s neck, the word Brexit breaks like a wave into your mindless state. You can feel your heartrate climbing. You keep your eyes trained down, hunting among the pieces. People are screaming at each other, screaming Remain and Leave. And through it all, the voice of Stephen Nolan loudly cuts. The remote has come to rest halfway across the room, thrown aside earlier with unaccountably reckless abandon. You devote all your energies to a wild search for pieces as the panic curdles in your gut once more.

Unfortunately for you, it is in precisely this way that you discover the existence of The Top Table. For the reader who has managed to avoid it, The Top Table is BBC NI’s latest venture in late-night political-talk television. The premise is this: on one side of the table, a straggle of under-21s from across the UK; on the other, a number of politicians/professional-talkers ranging from the obscure to the Jims Allister and Wells. A politician might also be beamed in from Westminster and the like. With Stephen Nolan playing the somewhat unlikely role of moderator, they sit round the eponymous table and debate the hot-button issues of the day. How fortunate that you’ve tuned in just in time for the very hottest of buttons on tonight’s Brexit Special edition.

The show begins and, just when you’re weighing up whether you can risk breaking your jigsaw-flow to make a lunge for the remote, just when you’re asking yourself  what exactly the point is of a programme exposing you to yet more political blather, Nolan happily elucidates. ‘This is the show that puts young people in the very heart of political debate in this country.’ It’s the show in which the youth of today get to ‘take the politicians to task’.

You discover very quickly that while yes, you can’t not take your hat off to the BBC for having unambiguously accomplished the putting of young people in the heart of the country’s political debate, that accomplishment is by no means the kindness they’d have you believe it to be. The debate in question is that eternal, flagellistic one, whose heart turns out not to be the sort of place you’d volunteer to go—the heart of something dark and swirling and malevolent. So The Top Table certainly succeeds in inducting this handful of poor, unelected unfortunates into the unrelenting firestorm that is what every discussion about Brexit must inevitably become. Or maybe it’s more like The Purge, but for words. The Top Table locks young people and politicians in a room together, and affably tells them, ‘Anything goes, there are no rules—but just for an hour. [Do with this information what you will].’ And they really maximise it, the young people, this opportunity to shout at politicians. Yes, lots of shouting gets done. Unfortunately, as you’ll rapidly discover, in no way is that the same thing as holding those politicians accountable.

Under the weight of these discoveries, it won’t take you long to slump exhausted to the floor, no longer able to lift a single piece of jigsaw, no longer able to tear your eyes away from the trainwreck on your screen; you wonder aloud: why would anybody ever agree to be on this programme?

And I suppose the answer is that the contestants on the show see The Top Table as the means by which to catapult themselves towards a career in journalism, or article writing, or mainstream politics, or professional-talking-on-the-news. Certainly, The Top Table seems to be setting itself up as the gateway to that kind of success. It extends to our contestants the promise of Thomas, Thomas-who-was-once-a-mere-contestant-and-is-now-a-serious-journalist, Thomas who is now to be seen conducting interviews on behalf of Stephen Nolan—this could be you, if you’re good enough. And what, you ask, does good enough mean? Happily again, Stephen will tell us. At the end of the programme, he commends the contestants for their performances, saying ‘you’ve been loud, you’ve been passionate and you know what you’re talking about.’

Consider the behaviours The Top Table is selecting for here. It has chosen from among a great mass of hopefuls four contestants who are loud, who are passionate, who hold tightly to rigid ideological doctrines and who are neither apprehensive nor ashamed to use every rhetorical trick in their rhetorical trickbox to score cheap and petty victories over their opponents. The Top Table rewards young adults for being good at the dirtiest type of political discourse: the type that shouts interlocutors down, that wouldn’t be seen dead listening to someone from the rival camp unless it’s to watch with beady eye for an opportunity to dodge—riposte!—fire one of their slightly-off-topic-but-pre-prepared-debate-winners. Success here means knowing how expedient the cheap shot can be. It means knowing that answering a direct question can expose you, and that it is good to refuse to do so.

All this is just the nature of the game that has been constructed for our generation. We’ve seen the Internet, we know how it’s done. When you’re constantly under threat of interruption or irrelevance, it is imperative that you pre-package your words, that you hone your beliefs into positions and then into projectiles, designed for maximum impact. It’s a style of play modelled by one side of the table, and taken up by the other. On The Top Table as everywhere else, you must score points rather than discuss views.

I’ve been calling these young people contestants because it’s impossible to get around the fact that The Top Table feels like a gameshow. It wouldn’t feel at all out of place if points were dished out at the end, if celebratory fanfares began to sound, if a contestant gasps in mock-surprise, shaking hands with her rivals before being told she’ll be jetting off on the next flight for Westminster to work an all-expenses-paid internship with the BBC.

I know there’s nothing new about this, I know this is just what political discourse looks like now, I know we’re all used to it. But the distinctive sin of this particular programme is to put it all in the mouths of young people, of people not so much younger than me, and to reward them for it. There’s something deeply disturbing about discovering that this sort of behaviour isn’t just the special domain of politicians, about watching in horror as people who ought to see all that as fake and counterproductive likewise shuck off all vestiges of authenticity, so as to better run the race they’re given to run. To know that they know it’s a game; to see they already know how to play it.

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The central premise of the show is that the youth of today have voices which are just as valid as those belonging to the political class. And I mean, ok. But what becomes astoundingly, violently clear in the course of this episode is that yes, politicians exist for a reason—they are more knowledgeable about politics and the people of their own constituencies than their youthful opponents. Let that be a lesson for us when next we denounce the political establishment.

In many ways, the programme is set up to address the question of authenticity. ‘These politicians,’ it cries, ‘they don’t know what the man on the street is about. What really matters to the youth of today?’ And you’d think that if authenticity is what we’re after, the young adults would have it in spadefuls more than the politicians. What’s startling is that the reverse is true. Our (English) contestants make appeals to ‘Irish blood’ and ‘Scottish blood’, or their ‘Irish Catholic heritage’ to give themselves rhetorical license to speak knowledgeably about Ireland or Scotland. Another contestant can tell us what Northern Ireland wants, because, as she says, she grew up during the Troubles. They invoke these sacred liturgies in the hope of summoning up the Will of The People in aid of their cause. Without authenticity it all devolves into clichés by the hour’s end. ‘Without democracy there is only tyranny,’ is the impassioned plea of one contestant. New lows are reached when, using his final opportunity to speak, a contestant chooses only to repeat wholesale the infamous slogan, ‘Let’s get Brexit done.’

Across the table, the politicians find themselves commanding authenticity much more easily, and can even be seen to defer to the experience of others better informed. Anna Soubry, for example, tells us that the Johnson Brexit deal is ‘really bad for the future, if I may say, of Ireland, in my opinion.’ These are the sorts of qualifications that are admirable and important to make—to show she self-consciously lacks the authority, experience, knowledge and, yes, authenticity to make pronouncements about Ireland. A lot of that can be chalked up to the maturity a venerable politician might hope to have developed over a long political career. Regardless, it’s something you will not find on the other side of the table.

There’s a particular moment of schadenfreude when one of our random dudes summons up the optimism to challenge Ms Soubry about what her constituents might think about her now-independent status. Watching her pull rank and slap that boy down felt good, like how I imagine kicking the cat would feel.

If I’m a little uncomfortable writing that last line, that’s the point—The Top Table takes the gladiatorial brawl political debate has now become and turns it into a bloodsport. It hands the captive Christians a sword and points them in the direction of some metalbound juggernaut swinging a morning star. The crowd, naturally, goes wild.

It’s political theatre, basically. We judge our politicians based on their rhetorical performances—we shake our heads in embarrassment when they are caught wrongfooted, we cheer at particularly impressive slapdowns. In as much as the show wants to make sport out of taking aim at our politicians and letting young people dunk them in the gunge, in as much as the show wants to make sport out of locking our politicians in a cage and watching them take bites out of each other, I say fair enough. They’ve managed to get themselves elected; they’re used to this game. But The Top Table flips the script, and that’s what’s uncomfortable. The young people who’ve made themselves contestants on this show are now set on that same stage. They’re naïve, they’re not experienced entertainers, and we still want them to perform, to dance for us, to cover all the songs that make us want to dash our heads against the nearest wall. The joy of seeing a particularly awful politician humiliated, dispatched by quick wits in debate, now becomes the twisted pleasure of seeing particularly annoying and vocal members of the young citizenry kicked about by experienced politicians, and by each other. It’s a strange game when it becomes about which politician has the good sense to pull their punches.

Even Stephen Nolan, who has made a career out of shouting people down, gets a bit uncomfortable about all this. At one point he reprimands Edwina Currie for belittling one of the contestants. At another he stops the debate altogether to make a plaintive plea, ‘Can we not have a conversation around this table without screaming at each other?’ Butter does not melt; there is no hint of irony.

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What can move us beyond our impasses and red lines? Can the unifying fabric of society be restored between people who have separated themselves to ideological extremes? These are the questions we think of as being most important at this socio-political juncture. I had thought people broadly accepted that the answers to those questions had something to do with thoughtful consideration of another’s viewpoint, refusing to vilify your interlocutors, building relationships across the gulf(s), etc.

Another formulation of these questions might be: what possible merit can there be in creating cultural structures which reward those among the upcoming generation who most readily conform themselves to the cookie-cutter mould of extreme, monochromatic ideology? Does ‘getting the youth engaged in politics’ mean beckoning them inevitably into the same old, loud, rigid camps? I can say this for The Top Table—it surely offers us some answers.

The Top Table will next appear on your screens at the end of the month, and the Brexit Special is available on BBC iPlayer. If you’re of the opinion that what we really need is another hour of people screaming invective at each other, if you enjoy that feeling of teetering on the brink of an imminent toxic apocalypse, or if you just need to harness stress as fuel to finish your jigsaw at double speed, I’d commend it to you.

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This review was written in a time before Brexit had been got done.

A Magic of True Speaking

Consider this fragment from A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin:

‘Quick as he had done at Roke, Ged took the shape of a great hawk: not the sparrowhawk they called him but the Pilgrim Falcon that flies like an arrow, like thought. On barred, sharp, strong wings he flew, pursuing his pursuers. The air darkened and among the clouds stars shone brightening. Ahead he saw the black ragged flock all driving down and in upon one point in mid-air. Beyond that black clot the sea lay, pale with the last ashy gleam of day. Swift and straight the hawk-Ged shot towards the creatures of the Stone, and they scattered as he came amongst them as waterdrops scatter from a cast pebble. But they had caught their prey. Blood was on the beak of this one and white feathers stuck to the claws of another, and no gull skimmed beyond them over the pallid sea.

Already they were turning on Ged again, coming quick and ungainly with iron beaks stretched out agape. He, wheeling once above them, screamed the hawk’s scream of defiant rage, and then shot on across the low beaches of Osskil, out over the breakers of the sea.

The creatures of the Stone circled a while croaking, and one by one beat back ponderously inland over the moors. The Old Powers will not cross over the sea, being bound each to an isle, a certain place, cave or stone or welling spring. Back went the black emanations to the tower-keep, where maybe the Lord of the Terrenon, Benderesk, wept at their return, and maybe laughed. But Ged went on, falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfailing arrow, like an unforgotten thought, over the Osskil Sea and eastward into the wind of winter and the night.’

So I’m here again, full of the vision, the open sea stretching unbroken to the sunset, the painted eyes of Lookfar skimming above the water, the golden dragons on the golden wind, dancing in the peace and the beauty and the truth of Earthsea. I’m reminded of how vast it is, the Archipelago, as the pages of Gollancz’s new edition stretch out to the thousand. I didn’t know there was so much of it, before. Like Ged I’ve travelled to the Farthest Shore, still happily burdened by the untapped mystery, the shrouded bulk of the rest of the world – the countless mist-veiled islands I’m yet to explore. And it’s made more radiant by Charles Vess’s colours, and made more thoughtful by his haunting charcoals.

I read Chapter 7 The Hawk’s Flight before a long drive, and a couple of its phrases got stuck in my head. I kept turning them over and over, a meditation, trying to figure out what makes them so perfect. I’ll pull them out for you:

Ged’s falcon-flight is ‘like an arrow, like thought’, and then later, ‘Ged went on, falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfailing arrow, like an unforgotten thought, over the Osskil Sea and eastward into the wind of winter and the night.’

and also

‘Swift and straight the hawk-Ged shot towards the creatures of the Stone, and they scattered as he came amongst them as waterdrops scatter from a cast pebble.’

Even now that these images have revolved hundreds of times over in my mind, I still don’t really know what makes them perfect. I can try, as the preacher says, to unpack them: how ‘a cast pebble’ conjures up with astounding clarity in my mind the precisely appropriate image of casually achieved speed and definite purpose; or how the scattering of the waterdrops from the pebble seems to describe with dreadful precision the exact way the hurtling hawk would strike the black creatures, forcefully, overpowering them in an instant with the lightning-flash of his will, leaving them to flap and fluster and right themselves in confusion, and so to be caught irresistibly in his slipstream and be pushed behind by the eddies of agitated wind.

Perhaps all it is is the harmonious correspondence between the images – the movement of the waterdrops and the cast pebble – they just work together. When she says them I know precisely what she means. But it’s in the degree of the correspondence, perhaps, and in how it’s all saturated in characterisation – Ged’s decisive action, his purpose, his power, and the scattering triviality, inconsequentiality, pettiness of the foul things that do harm.

I can’t explain it any further than that, so I’ll simply call it what many have before me: magic. It is a wonderful thing that Le Guin, whose system of magic is founded upon power being conferred by the saying of true words, is so devastatingly capable of saying those true words, of subtly crafting and fashioning the true way of saying. Even in the smallest of moments – this rare blip of violence in which the hawk-Ged dives the winged creatures – she finds the way of saying it truly, describing the moment beautifully and rightly.

This is what I love about Earthsea and its author: beautiful, fitting conveyance. It’s probably what Le Guin herself would call ‘accuracy’ and ‘music in the words’. Strange to say, but I can spot some of the artful vagueness of expression in the earlier books that I know all too well from reviewing my own writing. It’s something I often find in an author’s earlier works, something that gives people like me hope, whose creations come only with great labour and pain into the world, and then silently, and briefly. That said, it is a true delight to observe as the great writer increases in skill and accuracy from book to book. And her writing always confers to me a supreme sense of comfort at being caught up in the hands of a master. I aspire to that mastery.

Thankfully, Earthsea is so much more than beautiful word-pictures. The saying is true because it tells a deep truth well.

Both trilogies exposit an unusually rich and moral vision of what true life is. Ged overcomes by understanding, by love and friendship, by spending himself for others. He learns that in losing his life, in dying to power and prestige, he can take up a far better one – a little life, a larger life, a loving and quiet and happy life, a life in which he can cultivate slow righteousness. Le Guin weaves a story about how the world can be righted, how the good king will come to rule with vulnerability under the banner of peace, how the gentle and the mourners and those who thirst for justice will usher in a changed world, and be satisfied. My heart burns within me for her good vision to come real. I can’t help but think that this woman was not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.

One of my favourite accolades for Earthsea comes from the back cover of my now-redundant little green single-volume, (peculiarly) four-book edition. Village Voice have this to say, ‘Composed sparingly, shaped by narratives so basic they must be inscribed upon our cells, they read as if they were not written but found, dug out like jewels from rock.’ I don’t know who you are Village Voice, but thanks for saying it well.