Remembrance day for me is always a mix of sadness and anger, though the official ceremonies mostly stick to sadness. Every year at school we would stand through the reading of the names of the dead, honouring the sacrifice of boys who went straight from school into war. Never expressed was any condemnation of the people who sacrificed them.

The ratio of sadness to rage perhaps depends on how inevitable you think the First World War. If you believe there had been a chance to avoid the war, then you can only be furious at the system and the people who let it happen.

I cling to the belief that it could have been avoided. And in general, my default assumption is that everything is fixable until proven otherwise. This is as more psychological self-protection than reasoned analysis. Were the current state of the world something to be endured rather than changed, I’m not sure how I would be able to get out of bed in the morning.

This year, awful as it is, has given me more reason to believe in the possibility of change. Coronavirus in Europe has played out the way it did as the result of political failures and political choices. Some of them are structural, some are one-off mistakes by individuals. And we aren’t living in the worst timeline – other political choices could have brought us into an even worse situation. But it didn’t have to happen like this, and it doesn’t need to continue happening like this.

The real heroes of the first world war are the mutineers of Kiel, the German sailors who turned on their officers, sparked uprisings in the major cities, and so made it impossible for Germany to continue fighting. Eighteen months earlier, a mutiny had seized almost half of the French army. Imagine what better world we could be living in, if they had succeeded!

Cars, bickering and defensiveness are the ingredients of a good relationship, right?

Tonight’s unexpectedly delighful movie was My Cousin Vinny, a courtroom comedy. A New York teenager is facing a murder charge in Alabama, and the titular Cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci) is the only lawyer he can find.

Unfortunately, Vinny is in over his head. This is his first trial since scraping through the bar exam, and his New York wisecracking doesn’t come across well down in Alabama.

What he does have going for him is his fiancee Lisa (Marisa Tomai). Their relationship is the main reason to watch the movie. They are bickering, insecure, chaotic, defensive – and utterly, beautifully in love.

They have both spent time as car mechanics, which gives them a shared language and respect for each other’s competence in at least one area. When Vinny admits he messed up court procedure, he explains it through an analogy to fixing a carburetor.

Admitting that he’s stuck is, in fact, Vinny’s biggest problem. He keeps on pushing away Lisa’s attempts to help, because accepting help would mean admitting that he needs it. Whenever Vince gets past his defensiveness, he and Lisa make for an admirable team.

Lisa and Vinny have a relationship built on squabbling. Vinny’s client at one point defends his choice of lawyer because he comes from a family of bickerers:

“You have to see the Gambinis in action. These people…they love to argue. I mean, they live to argue.”

We then cut to a delightful scene, which begins with Vinny ragging on Lisa for leaving a faucet dripping. Then, as she gives a string of increasingly elaborate explanations of the correct torque to prevent drips, his anger fades into horny enchantment at her patter.

All these elements come together for the final courtroom scene. As a legal resolution to the case it feels painfully weak. As a resolution to their relationship, though, it feels fundamentally honest and hopeful

This is a horror novel, which I don’t usually read. But my boyfriend recommended it, and he was spot-on.

I’d recommend it enthusiastically but very selectively. I would need to grok somebody fairly well before knowing whether to push it on them

The setup is artistic collaboration between a dancer and a sculptor of mobile metal creatures. Then the dancer gets into increasingly extreme self-mutilation as a form of performance…

There’s a lot about work, about collaboration, about dedication to art. It’s a book where everybody is pursuing creation rather than happiness, which is just what I need right now. And the horror-extremeness keeps the emotional engagement dialed way up. So you get a nuanced relationship between the two main characters, bouncing between love and hatred and friendship and collaboration, which is psychologically realistic while being over the top.

Take the structure of a light-hearted caper movie. Then throw religion into the mix, specifically Polish Catholicism.

The result doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to say. But it is gloriously intense and has some very powerful moments.

Daniel wants to be a priest, but he is also just out of jail. Those two don’t go together – no seminary will take him, and instead he is expected to spend his parole working in a sawmill.

Then some banter gets out of hand, and Daniel finds himself impersonating a priest, to a village which believes him to be strange but authentic.

The bulk of the film examines Daniel’s attempt to fill the role of priest, in the absence of any training or ordination. The tension is between Daniel’s kindness and intense devotion on one hand, and on the other his betrayal of a church built on hierarchy and the special role of the priest.

The difficulty for me is that Daniel’s good qualities as a priest feel superficial. He gazes intently at the Crucifixion, benefiting from an angular face which seems permanently on the verge of passion. He preaches from the heart, he cares for his flock, he tries to reconcile feuding villagers. But he is the model of priest as coach and therapist. Jesus and the bible don’t figure much in his activities. Congenial as this is to my non-believing self, it feels like a very thin take on Catholicism.

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, an (over-?) celebrated moment in British anti-fascism. This is when a march by the British Union of Fascists was stopped by a combination of Jews, communists, Irish dockers, and other antifascists.

I’m glad of anniversaries like this, because they force us all to ask “What have I done lately?”. My own head has been pretty firmly stuck in the sand for a good few years now. You could take your pick of causes I’ve ignored, from Xinjiang re-education camps to migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. For me, Rojava is the one which triggers the most guilt.

Cable Street’s big brother is the Spanish Civil War. At the same time as Oswald Mosley was failing to establish fascism in Britain, Franco was making a much more violent and ultimately successful attempt to do the same in Spain. The war, and in particular the International Brigades, are for me one of the most clear-cut examples of why I am not a pacifist.

And then…Rojava. David Graeber wrote of the parallels between it and Spain:

A would-be fascist coup had been temporarily halted by a worker’s uprising, spearheaded by anarchists and socialists, and in much of Spain a genuine social revolution ensued, leading to whole cities under directly democratic management, industries under worker control, and the radical empowerment of women.

Spanish revolutionaries hoped to create a vision of a free society that the entire world might follow.

….

I never thought I would, in my own lifetime, see the same thing happen again. Obviously, no historical event ever really happens twice. There are a thousand differences between what happened in Spain in 1936 and what is happening in Rojava, the three largely Kurdish provinces of northern Syria, today. But some of the similarities are so striking, and so distressing, that I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we cannot let it end the same way again.

I saw articles like this, vaguely followed the news, but was a thousand miles away from providing any practical support to Rojava. So today, when I think of Cable Street, it is with rather more shame than pride.

#therapy

A dim premonition tells us that we cannot be whole without this negative side, that we have a body which, like all bodies, casts a shadow, and that if we deny this body we cease to be three-dimensional and become flat and without substance. Yet this body is a beast with a beast’s soul, an organism that gives unquestioning obedience to instinct. To unite oneself with this shadow is to say yes to instinct, to that formidable dynamism lurking in the background. From this the ascetic morality of Christianity wishes to free us, but at the risk of disorganizing man’s animal nature at the deepest level. [Jung, On the psychology of the unconscious]

Lately I’ve run into a cluster of references to Jung’s idea of the ‘shadow’ self. This is the set of unconscious urges which are formed in reaction to the overt, conscious personality. Just as the shape of an object determines the shape of its shadow, so our shadow self is the dark opposite of whatever values we hold in everyday life.

To me, the concept has an intuitive resonance. I’m not convinced it is true, but it is a useful tool for introspection.

I took a dive into Jung’s writing to find more about this, and ended up pleasantly lost. I can see why Jung, even more than Freud, appealed to a generation of artists and writers. He offers a world where stories matter. Literature, art, religion, culture – they are all routes to the same essence, and understanding one will cast light on the rest

I’ve been reading through Will Wight’s Cradle series, which is my first exposure to “Progression Fantasy”

Progression Fantasy is something like a book-length training montage. The main appeal is to watch the hero increasing in power or competence over the course of a book or a series.

In Cradle this power comes through training in the ‘sacred arts’, a combat-oriented idea of magic. Everybody wants to level up through a series of named ranks, from Copper to Iron to Jade, and beyond. Your rank determines, among other things, your chances of winning in hand-to-hand magical combat.

It all feels like Dungeons and Dragons, or a computer game. This isn’t just in the named levels, but in the shape the world takes on in order to accommodate them. So the hero starts in a low-powered village before venturing out to encounter increasingly more advanced enemies. It is considered dishonourable to fight somebody of a lower level, because otherwise every hero would be splatted immediately. A sister genre, LitRPG, leans even harder on these game-related aspects.

The end result is something which satisfies one very particular itch, but does that extraordinarily well. If you don’t want to play games yourself, but still want to vicariously experience the joy of leveling up, go for Cradle.

I found a collection of Walter Benjamin essays on the street. Bracing stuff, this!

I turned straight to an essay in praise of destructive personalities, and….yep, I already want to run riot with a sledgehammer

Der destruktive Charakter ist jung und heiter. Denn Zerstören verjüngt, weil es die Spuren unseres eigenen Alters aus dem Weg räumt; es heitert auf, weil jedes Wegschaffen dem Zerstörenden eine vollkommene Reduktion, ja Radizierung seines eignen Zustands bedeutet. Zu solchem apollinischen Zerstörerbilde führt erst recht die Einsicht, wie ungeheuer sich die Welt vereinfacht, wenn sie auf ihre Zerstörungswürdigkeit geprüft wird. Dies ist das große Band, das alles Bestehende einträchtig umschlingt. Das ist ein Anblick, der dem destruktiven Charakter ein Schauspiel tiefster Harmonie verschafft.	The destructive character is young and lively. Destruction rejuvenates, because it removes the remains of our age. It enlivens, because to the destroyer every removal means a reduction, a dissection of his own situation. This Apollonian picture of the destroyer arises in fact from a vision of how radically the world is simplified, when it is measured by its potential for destruction. That is the great bond, uniting all that exists. Such a perspective is what turns the destructive character into a spectacle of deepest harmony.
Der destruktive Charakter sieht nichts Dauerndes. Aber eben darum sieht er überall Wege. Wo andere auf Mauern oder Gebirge stoßen, auch da sieht er einen Weg. Weil er aber überall einen Weg sieht, hat er auch überall aus dem Weg zu räumen. Nicht immer mit roher Gewalt, bisweilen mit veredelter. Weil er überall Wege sieht, steht er selber immer am Kreuzweg. Kein Augenblick kann wissen, was der nächste bringt. Das Bestehende legt er in Trümmer, nicht um der Trümmer, sondern um des Weges willen, der sich durch sie hindurchzieht. Der destruktive Charakter lebt nicht aus dem Gefühl, daß das Leben lebenswert sei, sondern daß der Selbstmord die Mühe nicht lohnt.	The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees paths everywhere. Even where others hit walls or mountains, he finds a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it. The destructive character lives not from the feeling that life is not worth living, but that suicide is not worth the effort

Here is the original; here is a translation

Sober me accepts that there might be the odd problem with a life built on trashing everything you encounter. But my furious rebel self is starting to get fire behind the eyes, and craving the aesthetics of rubble. Everything looks the same after you’vde burnt it to the ground, right?

Erich Kästner is a National Treasure in Germany, and this might be his most treasured book. Telling Germans I am reading it, I have found, often results in glossy-eyed nostalgia.

I can partially understand this. It must be a very comforting book to read at the right age. Not only does everything turn out right in the end, but two of the adults are presented as boddhisattva-like images of perfection. One is the benevolent boarding-school headmaster, the other a drop-out living in an old railway carriage.

Reading it as an adult is less satisfying, for some of the same reasons. Many of the characters feel two-dimensional, and spend a lot of time repeating their gimmicks. One wants to be a boxer and is permanently hungry, for example, and another is easily scared. But I can’t complain, since this is obviously something which works better for the target audience.

I was also taken aback by some of the violence between children. Clearly, childhood has become less physically aggressive in the 95 years since the book was first published. A fight to KO, a child being tortured in a basement: I’m glad to say that these are well beyond my own experience.

I definitely enjoyed reading this. Had I read it at age 10, I would doubtless me many times more enthusiastic.

According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers. [James C Scott, Against the Grain]

This theory is probably too neat to be true, but that doesn’t stop it being fun. Scott is largely drawing on (and perhaps slightly exaggerating) the work of William Ruddiman

He is interested in how humans before and outside of sedentary, grain-based ‘civilization’ shaped their landscape with fire. By burning vegetation, you can herd animals into a spot where they are easy to kill. The plants which grow back first after fire might also be more human-friendly: less huge trees, more bushes with fruits or berries.

So before Columbus, humans in the Americas were burning the landscape every year. Then Europeans came, brought smallpox, and killed off a the majority of them. So the forests stopped being burned, leading to the reforestation forest of an area the size of Venezuela. This decreased CO2 in the atmosphere, which cooled the temperature, causing the Little Ice AGe.