Last night, a wonderfully pleasant evening for my sixtieth: eight people at table in a Persian restaurant, then back to mine for ice wine and sweets.
•••
(And, as I am thinking now of England, and my English friends, many of whom were around me at that table, I am also suddenly aware that the three grammatical/idiomatic elisions in that first sentence are deeply embedded in the utter Englishness of this language – the overlapping of two linguistic heritages, Romance and Germanic, with prestige and immediacy carefully distributed across particular groups of words and phrases – plus twenty-first-century remnants of firmly Victorian social structures...)
•••
A slightly odd moment: when N. gives me a beautiful print of those strange, high arches – the ones near the Tyne Bridge: stretches of eerily Pirandellian architecture that bloom high above the streets, that you can see from that intersection into Queen Street or this one, down at Sandhill – the card from her and from R. says:
'May you gaze upon this with beautiful memories in your heart from your amazing new home – wherever that may be.'
Kindness, love, support for all my back and forth talk of moving in a couple of years, of Barcelona, of a different future –
but I feel a pang of guilt: for my entire life, I've always talked about what I hoped for in my future(s) (cf. Zimbardo's book on time perception, and the very, very different ways people divide their pasts, presents, futures: I do tend to regard the past as a time of innocence followed by loss, the present as unstable transition, the future as hope of change – which, in Buddhist terms, means I have an unfortunate tendency not to be-here-now) – but I suddenly wonder: do I seem, to these kind and smart and funny people who are so dear to me, to be constantly saying good-bye?...
Probably I do, and probably it is my own fault. Allegiance: I always speak of Newcastle with a selective respect and affection – a good place, but not my place. But when does that become ungrateful, or cold?...
I suppose we all eventually learn that half a love isn't much love at all. Even for a city, for a community: and that suggests something unsatisfactory on my side of this relationship...
•••
Chris Wood, folk musician. I download his newest album; Chris often sings anger for the guilt of England, bitter reminders of the darknesses that shadowed its power and elegance. A song, 1887, is based on Housman's strange and graceful portrait of Victoria's Jubilee year – with dim but inescapable reminders of dead soldiers, their supposedly noble service undercut by the darkness into which they fell.
Subtle enough, partly because of the shifting, unstable nets of not-quite-traditional hymnal chords and wistfully backwards-looking chord progressions, that the throne and the glad peoples, the kings and bishops at the grand Jubilee dinner, all that noble pride and joy, was also built on many graves and the sheer cruelty of apparently dignified military control over the young, who don't even know what is being taken from them before it's all gone –
•••
At times, with television shows such as QI or Mock the Week, I become frankly angry: the contempt British comedians show towards Americans, towards other nations, always seems to ignore their own painful failings: they pretend to have intelligence, history, wisdom – ignoring the dreadful voices of the opium wars, of Raj and rebellion, of heartlessly dropping Hong Kong into its past as they packed their moneybags in 1997...
But of course the British, and the English especially, do know all this: and they don't really pretend that it didn't happen. I often feel resentment that they want to ignore their own guilt, the guilt of a smallish island that built an astounding if relatively temporary empire, and then gave it up, mostly voluntarily – but that's not quite fair: they do remember.
And admittedly they behaved a bit better than Spain, than Portugal. Than France.
•••
Perhaps my intermittently cold anger at, my dismissal of, England – which my friends sometimes perceive as a rejection of them – is unfair: I am not admitting to what is really here.
We are taught in psychoanalysis that, despite categorisations and diagnoses, each mind is a vast and unique place: the path to individuation is never the same, is always unexpected and disorienting. Structures that seem comparable are not so: balances and awareness and ambiguity are different, every time, and even across time.
That is all about individual people, of course; but perhaps it also applies to nations....
•••
This land, these people, these crowns: for a mixture of groups that somehow defined itself as English, that absorbed its Angles and Saxons and Normans and Danes. That placed itself in often ruthless command over Celts and Picts and others, but also eventually discovered some respect, even love, for them....
Who traveled and grabbed land, but also gave things back; who lorded it over others but with a certain supportive tolerance. Who were never quite as heavy-handed as other colonialist powers, while simultaneously being weirdly successful at extending their control over a third of the world.
Who, as Marx explained, were the source of a that terrible scourge of modernity, capitalism... which is also, often, better than most other systems we've tried.
Whose own stories have such ambiguous relationships to power: all those children's tales, myths, legends – Arthur, who is so gloriously noble, and who fails to hold back the disintegration that starts in his own beds; or the children's books I read when I was young – Five Children and It, the Bastables and Armitages, Green Knowe, and all those fantasies where the world was saved only through a calm acceptance of enormous sacrifice –
•••
Would it be true to say that Stephen Fry, with his erratically parodic aristocracy, and Dara Ó Briain, as a sort of loyally Celtic opposition, as well as all their less subtle or less ambivalent guests and audiences, do indeed see England as both important and worthy of love, yet also full of grievous fault?
Brexit and the vilification of foreigners, class aggression and self-hatred, individualism and human rights and dignity. Brilliance and cosmopolitanism, smallness and all those damned shopkeepers.
I also feel some embarrassed guilt in relation to my sister – L. loves England, she studied here when she was younger, and I know she would rather be here than anywhere. Whereas I, who have been here for more than fourteen years, feel... what? I'm no longer sure what I feel.
Of course, there is be a lacerating self-disgust that can get on my nerves – when one criticises the English on historical or cultural grounds, they can cave in so quickly and agree that it's all been a terrible mess; but that doesn't seem quite true, either...
•••
But perhaps this land, which is always both so self-aware and so self-conscious, so much more sensitive to multiple interpretations of its past and its nature than many, but also exasperatingly neurotic about the winding paths of its self-understanding –
Perhaps there is a way that England, more than most lands, can hold pride and guilt in the same space without ever quite losing sight of either.
And perhaps I should respect that a bit more....
•••
"Haven't you noticed that we are two countries ? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney – and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain."
•••
"And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?"
•••
"Don't you feel it? The very quality of England. If we've got an ass's head it is by walking in a fairy wood. We've heard something better than we can do, but can't quite forget it..."
•••
"And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!
Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!
She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare."