Once Upon a Daydream

I don’t know whether it was a bumble bee or a bluebottle, but whatever it was that just buzzed past the window, it was the size of a sparrow.*

It’s so hot here today I’m wilting on the sofa. Maybe it will be cooler on the seafront. J., who is in the UK this week is missing all the good weather. It was cloudy at the start of the week and then there was a thunderstorm the other morning, and it’s been roasting ever since.

I was watching a baby bang a couple of plastic balls together a few weeks ago and it got me thinking about instinct. Babies love rock-banging. We have been rock-banging for millions of years (two to three million to be more precise). There was a time in our history when rock banging was very important for our survival. I think if we have any innate instincts as a species, they must take a form similar to this – appearing in childhood and disappearing as we grow, uncultivated, ephemeral things not required by modernity. The baby already has cravings for sugar. In nature this would be for fruits or honey to fatten her up to survive the hard times. Of course, the rock-banging could have all been a coincidence of human physics. Two arms, two plastic balls, what else do you do but bang them together?

I was thinking about Jung and other psychoanalytic theories. Having come across so many references to archetypes during my researching of plots it has been playing on my mind. I don’t believe these things are ingrained in our genetic psyche – (they got there how, exactly?) but maybe our social and cultural psyche. We have been eating meat for four million years, but there are vegetarians around today. We have been using fire for two million years. These things are ingrained in our genes, have shaped our bodies. Yet we can still free ourselves of the instincts surrounding them, and that, I think is what has given us a genetic advantage over other animals – our lack of hard-coding.

* It was actually an enormous beetle, and beetles like these regularly startled us for the rest of the summer.

Do you ever feel like we’re standing on the brink of a cliff looking over the edge into something ghastly? Something like the valley of the shadow of death, something like German people must have felt when Hitler came to power?

Lately I have been feeling this feeling more and more. I see the brash and overt corruption of the US and UK governments, as I see the transparent veil of lies knitting together the collective dialogue of the “coalition against terror”, the pathetic excuses offered in the face of blatant war crimes committed in Iraq and Guantanamo. It was never about anything but oil and race.

America was supposed to be the example to us all – according to the James T. Kirk model of the universe. America was supposed to be neutral, powerful, benign, the model of democracy setting example to the rest of the world, the peak of civilisation against which all others could be measured. America was a wise ruler who interfered only at the appropriate times, interfered for the right reasons, with the right authority, for humanitarian reasons. Was this dialogue ever true? This ideal we were brought up on, that the media coaxed us into believing? No. Never. But that myth is crumbling fast and what it is exposing is not something we want to see – it is nihilism, that underneath all previous certainty, all confidence, all civilisation, we are left with bad parents, savages fighting over a carcass, children fighting over toys.

Now America abuses people like those “terrible dictatorships in the Middle East” – now America throws away lives and commits atrocities like the Chinese. The corruption so obviously riddling American government, from congress to the madmen who run the White House, and their close ties to the oil and other powerful industries, this corruption is reminiscent of the Mafia. America has become what it has so vilified, and now we are seeing that America has always been this way, we are remembering Vietnam in a different light, Korea in a different light, remembering how the Second World War was already won, that Enola Gay should never have flown, that those atrocities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exactly that. Atrocities. America has never been punished, because there is no one there to punish it. America is to the UN what a criminal is to a state of anarchy – a happy abuser running riot without fear of reprisal.

In Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore touches on what is known as the dialogue of fear. It is the American media that dictates this dialogue of fear. The media whips up a frenzy of fear – of black people, of shootings, of crime. It dwells on these subjects, exaggerates these subjects, makes people afraid in their own homes, makes them feel they need to keep guns. The black man is a shadowy figure – a mugger on the street corner, a criminal waiting for the right moment to attack.

A similar dialogue sprang up with the events of September 11^th. Of course what happened was wrong. A lot of people died. Who could watch those images and not be moved – horrified, angry, questioning? But to watch them again and again? To listen to the constant news: Al Qaeda Al Qaeda Al Qaeda! These shadowy terrorists who hate America – for no particular reason – unless it is jealousy of civilisation, of superiority, these barbarians and animals who veil their women (and here America suffers one of many cases of amnesia, forgets, perhaps, Mormon polygyny, attacks on abortion clinics, Christian fundamentalism, the makeup of congress, the continued plight of the Afghani women whom it did not bother to consider in the new Afghani government, forgets even the slave trade and the racial makeup of its prisons, forgets its own ghettos).

America does not understand why it is so hated, it does not have that level of insight. A large section of America’s people are now mostly overweight, pre-diabetic, and no longer rational. As long as the coca-cola and the fast food keep flowing, they can be led like the proles in 1984. America is a nation of hypoglycaemics, and the dialogue coming out of America is the dialogue of someone with low blood sugar. It is overly paranoid, it is panicked, it is angry and aggressive. It isn’t interested in reasoned thought, it will attack anyone who gets in the way without any thought or reason or excuse. Soon, America will be too confused to attack anything. It will wander around tapping its fingers and mumbling and trying to remember what this was all about. It will surf the web but not read the pages. It will stare at the television, and believe the television without really taking anything in. It will reach for another soda and hope someone else will bring in the corn chips.

Riverbend is an Iraqi girl educated and raised away from Iraq but now back home. Until the war she was a computer programmer. In Iraq. Iraq was a modern nation before the war. Now she sits at home and writes about the war. She is politically enlightened, thoughtful, articulate and intelligent. Each day she receives emails from paranoid and aggressive Americans who tell her she should be grateful for being liberated, who call her a Baathist and a Saddam supporter because she doesn’t support the occupation. Riverbend isn’t a Baathist, she’s just a democrat (remember those?). Riverbend doesn’t feel she should be grateful for all of the deaths of friends and abuses and destruction she’s witnessed.

I look around and everywhere I see a degeneration. I see the human body distorted and sickened to the point of grotesquery by the profits of global food corporations. I know far too many people who have cancer, who should not have cancer. I see babies in Africa being killed off by the formula Nestle is still allowed to hand out. I see addicts everywhere – junk food addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, people with empty lives. I see asylum seekers scapegoated for the failings of government. I see stupid people – stupid because capitalism has left them undernourished and they have never reached their full potential – and these stupid people are voting other stupid people into power. I see corruption and selfishness everywhere. I see Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, and America smiling and holding Saudi Arabia’s hand. I see no Al Qaeda in Iraq. But then, those Muslims are all the same, aren’t they?

Sometimes, the more I open my eyes, the more I want to close them. When those planes hit the World Trade Center the world went mad. America had been going under for some time, but at that point it truly snapped. Osama cannot have had any idea of what he was unleashing upon himself and the rest of the world. He wanted to cause the downfall of America. In a way he has succeeded. I am not the only person whose faith has gone. He has shown us all what America is really made of.

This weekend we went to Geneva. A little background: Geneva is in Switzerland, just over the other side of the Alps, and only 40 minutes from here. Think Heidi, Saint Bernards with barrels of brandy attached to their collars, flowering meadows of lush green grass, goats, Swiss chalets and snowy Alps. Well, that’s the stereotype anyway! We stayed at the imperialistic Hotel President Wilson (5*), “convenient for the UN building” apparently – the human rights convention is right next door, and the main UN building is just a short drive down the road.

The hotel overlooks Lake Geneva. The opposite bank is wooded, with parks and widely spaced houses. Geneva town centre feels very small yet widely spaced, and from the air the houses look spread out, groups of half a dozen with a couple of fields in between and some patches of woodland. There’s something civilised about this – the distinction between town and countryside not being so great. Something that Marx advocated in The Communist Manifesto, but is rarely repeated by modern Marxists today. From the air we could see lots of square buildings, three storeys high with shutters on the windows and quirky symmetrical folded out roofs (I am sorry, I cannot explain in words!). We even saw some log cabins on the edge of the lake.

We could learn a lesson from the Swiss

The cleanliness of the lake astonished me, the water was very clear for a long way down and the bottom was coated in healthy green pond weed. Swans and ducks clustered at the shoreline and herons posed on the grassy banks. There were many small boats moored around the edge of the lake, a water-skier, tourist boats, a ferry, but very little sign of rubbish or pollution. This was confirmed when, aghast, we watched a hawk swoop out of the air and catch a fish in the water. Not just one hawk – we must have counted a dozen in the air over the lake at the same time. I didn’t think hawks came in flocks! The lake must be a veritable cornucopia of fish. Perch was on the menu at every restaurant, we think from the lake. It is a most telling sign of a clean, healthy ecosystem in which the predators at the top of the food chain are numerous. In England, we would be lucky to see even one hawk.

The Swiss speak French and German and are influenced by both cultures. I believe their cuisine lies somewhere in between the two, and they are very fond of their dairy produce like the French (think Heidi). Choucroute was on the menu at several restaurants. The hotel we stayed at was completely obsessed with low-fat foods, but I think this is probably because it was designed to cater for Americans.

There is something fertile about France, and Switzerland too. You rarely see a young mother in England, unless she is a chav, looking scruffy and screaming at her kids. Middle class mothers are much older in England, and most of them have wrinkles before they give birth. In Nice and in Geneva too, there are young, well-to-do mothers everywhere, and shops to cater for a fashionable pregnancy rather than a frumpy English one.

One thing that did strike me was the sheer quantity of naughty children around. I think there were a lot of tourists, certainly Americans and Germans. The population wasn’t as slender as the population of Nice. In Nice children are remarkably well behaved, precocious, and passive. They follow their parents quietly and stop to look at the views, if they’re sat at a brasserie they don’t complain about it – a drink or a bit of bread is enough to keep them quiet.

By contrast, the children in Geneva were running around causing riots, yelling, whining and screaming. Unfortunately our boat tour of the lake was somewhat claustrophobic, due to the presence of one such child – a naughty little boy who couldn’t sit still and ran up and down the deck being violent and loud and seeking attention from everyone. The family spoke French but were somewhat stocky and large, so could have been French or Swiss. The child was clearly overloaded on additives and short of nutrients – perhaps the parents thought he was merely boisterous: I think he had ADHD.

On the tour of the lake we passed the house where Byron and the Shelleys stayed during that fateful period when a nineteen year old Mary Shelley got high on laudanum and various other substances began to write Frankenstein. There are several large mansions on the lake shores – Rothschild, Manoir Colgate, and a few historic palaces now owned by unspecified Arabian princes.

There is a little mermaid – The Little Mermaid of Lake Léman, or, The Siren, a bronze statue by Natacha de Senger, who was set on a rock there in 1966. Of course there are mermaids in Lake Geneva! What was I saying about biodiversity and good ecosystems? There’s also a mermaid in Copenhagen, but, strangely, she has legs. Must be the PCBs.

I don’t like to pontificate on the processes of writing too much – writers who write about writing are a very tedious read for non-writers. Bloggers who blog about blogging are much the same. But really! I chanced upon the blog of someone who likes to call herself a writer – a girl much like me – has never had anything published but indeed, has a degree in the subject. Hurrah, thinks I, at last a kindred spirit. But what do I find? Non-English, half sentences, subjects as worthy as “I ran out of deodorant this morning.” What self-indulgence! At least if I am going to bore people, I try to do it in an informative, educational or thought provoking way.

Undoubtedly when I re-read this in a few weeks time it will sound as snotty as something you would read in The Times, but I am familiar with postmodernism, I am familiar with sarcasm, but both of those particular activities require some intellectual force behind them. You will never get published as a writer if the extent of your writing abilities is posting the results of personality tests, the status of one’s toiletries, and yes, one’s own personalised viking name. I know, I know, I personally share part of the blame as an initiator of the dreaded “name generator posting in blog” phenomenon, and as such will be one of the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. I have seen people’s fairy and vampire names in a hundred different blogs. But I have read some good blogs as a result, often from teenagers – precocious young girls with ample drama and emotion in their lives, or merely the ability to make astute observations. They do not pretend to call themselves writers.