Island of Lightning (6 page)

Most delegates agreed stupidity could be a good thing. In the right circs. Was not stupidity light, playful, ironic, iconoclastic, even wise in the manner of Good Soldier Schweik, or Shakespeare's fools, or Peter Sellers' character in
Being There
? (Perhaps we should cut the Sellers)

And wasn't stupidity a useful tool for anarchists everywhere, though perhaps not the Black Block ‘anarchists' of the protests at Prague, Goteborg and subsequently Genoa. Indeed, was not stupidity
clever
in many respects?

This was where delegates (well, this one) equated stupidity with accelerating globalisation. Didn't such globalisation, I enquired, endanger cultural and economic as well as ecological variety? Didn't such a process engender the
stupidities
of uniform appetite and aspiration? And were not the symbols of that stupidity, such as the global brands of Gap, McDonald's, Pepsi, as visible in Lahti as Los Angeles.

I pressed on in that company of scribes. If McDonald's was responsible for environmental damage and poor health, if a paper plate of Chicken McNuggets had become a talisman for millions of upwardly mobile Chinese, if Nike and its globalising consortia represented Western culture at its nadir, weren't the stupidities of the consumerist machine yet marketed with genius? If nothing was crummier, nothing was cleverer.

Such was the paradox of our globalised world. At least, so it appeared on that undarkenable day. Because there is nothing cleverer than this type of stupidity. This stupidity understands its enemies are imagination, independence, curiosity, self-sufficiency.

Too simple, came the response. Globalisation was not necessarily a means of dumbing down. Or of controlling society. Globalisation had gone on in Europe since Latin grew its tree of languages, since religion took to reproducing itself, since the expeditions west out of the blue Tagus.

And forget McDonald's, someone said. A McWorld does not necessarily mean a McMind. America's totalitarian kitchens are the least of our problems. The godfathers of globalisation were Jesus Christ and Mohammed. English and Spanish were its midwives. Then came the combustion engine, the microchip. And now gene technology.

Globalisation? We've seen nothing yet. Because cloning is coming. And in our lifetimes too.

Booker-nominated Michael Collins related a story from his place of work, Microsoft in Seattle. One factor, claims Microsoft, that slows computers down is the English language. It's big, baggy, dirty, devious and adept at changing its spots. So why not give the software a break by reducing English to a necessary hardcore vocabulary?

The grave of George Orwell, I mentioned to Collins, is found in the English village of Sutton Courtenay. I had stood there a year previously, looking for something else, and found a white rose tree and a red rose tree hanging over the headstone. How their petals would fly as the writer revolved beneath. Collins shrugged. The woman who had that Newspeak brainwave was on the Microsoft fast-track. She would make her mark.

Collins is right, said a voice. In English. Stupidity is not the problem. The problem is intelligence. Intelligence has created more misery than stupidity ever could. Stupidity can be thwarted. But never intelligence. And what is intelligence doing now? Looking into the atom. And what does it see? That every atom has many rooms. And that those rooms are palaces too.

Don't worry. The more we see the more there will be to see. But truly the enemy is stupidity. The question is, how do we arm ourselves against it?

This sauna of debate was interrupted by evening readings. In Lahti's Sibelius Hall, an acoustics test proved the audience might hear a pin drop on stage. We bowed to the crowd in that resin-scented chancellery and toasted each other with Manohar Shetty's
feni
, an enamel-blistering Goan elixir distilled from cashew pulp.

The audience departed, switching its nokias back on, returning to the light that would not quit and plates of reindeer casserole. And to the trees. Because Finland is its trees. Without trees, it appeared to me, there could be no country called Finland at all.

I sympathised with the language irony. The irony that is always present at conferences such as Lahti. Here was I, an English language writer, representing a bilingual country that wasn't even a country, complaining about a shrinking world.

Easy for you to say, said the Byelorussians.

Easy for you to say, said the Lithuanians.

Typical of you to say, said the French.

To my aid I called Indian poet Manohar Shetty. But if Shetty writes in English, he remains multilingual. I quoted Nikolaj Stochholm, Danish poet now starting, slowly, to compose in English. But Stochholm is also, inevitably, a polyglot.

Thus it continued under Lahti's birchbark sky. It was the Russians who reminded us that if McDonald's was a clever stupidity, then the communism most Russians had experienced exemplified the malign variety. Which after a while became simply stupid stupidity. The kind of stupidity that gives stupidity a bad name.

A Russian joke was told to reveal what the Soviet system had done to personal initiative.

A woman notices two men at a roadside. The first man is digging holes. The second man shovels the earth back in.

Woman:
What are you doing?

1st Man
: Planting trees.

Woman:
No you're not. You're digging holes and that second man is filling them in.

2nd Man:
I'm not the second man. I'm the third man. The second man didn't turn up.

Our definitions of stupidity heated up. A stupid society, said one delegate, was one founded on logic. Societies should be based on magic. But logic is the enemy of magic.

Another said that a stupid society is a sated society. Because real stupidity is stupefaction of the soul. Personally, I was hungover from the recent General Election in the UK. No wonder people refused to vote. They recognised stupidity when they saw it. Not a word about the global commons, climate change, drugs, the arts, the life of the mind. Instead, aridities about how the wealthy might become wealthier. Endless media interest in…nothing very much at all. It had dissipated so quickly.

I replayed the Russian joke. Or maybe it was an Albanian joke. It could have been a Welsh joke. But Welsh stupidity is of the abject variety. The new National Assembly – our infant parliament – has granted money for the destruction of the Dunlop factory domes at Brynmawr.

These had once comprised the largest spanned concrete structure in the world. The factory was a structural forerunner of the Sydney Opera House. The building was unique in the UK.

Now it is rubble. The demolition was financed by people who purport to have the vision to run a country. In truth, the Dunlop fiasco demonstrates failure of nerve and imagination at the highest political level. Stupidity and self-loathing demanded that the extraordinary be replaced with the anonymous. Abject indeed.

But who is the second man? The artist, surely. The Dunlop architect. The campaigner to save the domes. In Wales, that ‘country of employees' as a correspondent writes, the second man remains a rarity. So save the second man. We need the trees.

As these things do, our theme expanded to include the role of the writer in a stupid society. How should writers, even stupid writers, live? The writer has one duty, a delegate said. To live the writer's life. That is not a teacher's life. Neither is it an academic's life. And in case you are beginning to worry, he added, it is not an ascetic's life.
Skol
, he added, cupping a Koff.

A writer's life should be a life of the imagination. A life of thought and idea and impression. Then of learning how to put these into words. Then developing structures for such words. As simple as that. And if a writer has to teach it is not to teach the mechanics of poetry.

A poet who teaches poetry is a serpent swallowing its tail. The poet must convince the pupil that the imagination is a midnight sun. It never goes out. Then he must instruct the pupil how to read. Because reading dresses us. Reading feeds us. Reading warms us in a hostile climate. Without the life of the mind that reading provides we are naked and unnourished. Without the life of the mind we have no life at all. We are frail and impotent, at the mercy of fashion and politics and nationalism.
Etcetera
.

Was it night? Was it day? That titanium light might have brought dawn or dusk. For once, outside, the voices were stilled. The only sounds were the liturgies of the birch, the primaeval birch and spruce that have always covered this country.

Back in Helsinki, I roamed the city. It seemed deserted except for the poor and the very poor, the drunk and the very drunk. Everyone else had left for the lakes. For the trees. The nights were darker here, but stayed the colour of cigarette smoke. The only sounds were the wail of the Estonian ferry, the clinking of passing trams like a toast of vodka glasses.

Holed up downtown on Bulevardi with an enormous television, I watched MTV and BBC World. Eminem was the star of the former. Bad as I am, he raged. Bad as I am. Caged in computer music, he incited phoney hysteria. Behind the din he spat the rhymes. Yet his words seethed with a racked, if remote, intelligence.

Bad as it was, I've heard worse. BBC World, meanwhile, claimed it was volcanoes, not asteroids, that had done for the dinosaurs. And will do for us too, some day. Make no bones.

Then came a programme about Tirana. I was transfixed. How it has changed. Even the inhabitants cannot recognise it now. At home, I have framed a photograph of the tomb of Enver Hoxha. The grave of that absolutist bears a jamjar of weeds. When I visited Albania the first time it seemed a country from a fairytale. The people despaired under the enchantment of evil. Everything was broken.

And then, overnight, Ryan Giggs was ascending in a silver elevator. What was hot on the street were not samizdat poems or blackmarket loaves but Levi's and Nike ball caps. In the end, nothing could keep capitalism at bay. Not ignorance, not paranoia, not a million air-raid shelters. The invasion of Albania happened all right, but it came down the wire straight into the pleading soul.

From a great stupidity to a small stupidity. From stupid stupidity to clever stupidity. And hardly time between to look around and ask what kind of country Albania might have been. Or still might be.

Exhausted by the screen, I tried the bars. Leningrad Cowboys was closed, an unsprung bottle of Finlandia in every booth. Next was Erottaja. Wash out.

In U-Kaleva, spartan, local, I thought about where we had left the Lahti discussion on writers as teachers. There had been a woman standing behind me for some time. Now she stepped round, took the book I had balanced on my knee, kissed me.

Tickets? Passport? I never leave the country without my
New Directions
copy of Rimbaud's
Illuminations
. Prose poems and letters that serve as a philosophy. Especially the letters of May 1871, written when Rimbaud was sixteen. And a half. Coming up to his A levels, I suppose.

I cherish the book, disorientating, boundless, because it has often served as the antithesis to the world in which I grew up. “A prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses”, the poet demands. Of himself and other poets. A
rational
disordering? Of
all
the senses?

No wonder we steer clear of the cracked kid these days. How easily he might offend the thin-skinned legions of the writing classes. Those letters are manifestos of scorn. But magnificent. The writer's attempt at decoding poetry's genome.

One thing Rimbaud does not do is endstop the imagination. And one thing he does is identify stupidity as the poet's enemy. So what would he make of my literalisms? Or of Lahti? And what would Rimbaud say to Eminem?

What problem? asked the woman.

I thought about it.

No problem, I said.

Her partner sneered at the next table. I noted his saurian eye. Unreconstructable pissheads. No question. The danger they radiated might have been my own unease.

I am lesbo, said the woman. She kissed me again.

I looked at the man. Days drunk. He sat slumped in a poisonous lethargy.

So am I, I said. And took Rimbaud from her like a baton.

Booze, I thought. Another thing that is really stupid. Really really stupid. The enemy of the writer. The enemy of the mind. Then I ordered another Koff medicine. Just to confuse myself.

Babble

I went to Babel once. There's not much left. The tower's gone, as you might have heard. Instead there's a crater with mud bricks at the base.

But there's a mosque. And when I was there, a pyramid of shoes. A big heap. It was prayer time and the men had taken off their shoes – sandals and trainers and some black Clark's. And all the men were inside the mosque. The mosque with the blue minarets.

But outside the mosque was a well. So I stood against a wall and looked at the boy, the waterboy, the servant of the well, and watched what he was doing. He seemed a happy child. Oh yes, he laughed a lot.

This boy put a stone in a bucket and lowered the bucket into the well and filled it and raised the rope and poured the Babel water into plastic bottles and jerry cans.

Then he did it again. And again. Women kept bringing him containers and he kept filling them up.

Yes, all the time I was watching, he did that. This laughing child. This boy pouring out the silver water – because it looked silver in the sun – and the drops he spilled darkening the dust around the well. The dust of Babel.

All that time I could hear the prayers from the mosque. Those voices like water, voices murmuring like the green Euphrates which was just over the hill, flowing there as it had always flowed.

And I thought, yes. There has always been a waterboy. Ever since Babel was built, there has been a waterboy, lowering a bucket, raising a bucket, weighting that bucket with a dark river pebble. A pebble from the Euphrates. A river-riven stone.

And I also thought, maybe God is in the well. Yes, maybe God is down there. Not in the mosque, not in our churches. But down there. In the well. Where the dark eye of water is the eye of God.