“Corund, when he saw it, heaved up his axe, but changed his intention in the manage, saying, ‘O landskip of iniquity, shalt thou kill beside me the men of mine household? But my friendship sitteth not on a weather vane. Live, and be a traitor.’

“But Gro, being mightily moved with these words, and staring at great Corund wide-eyed like a man roused from a dream, answered, ‘Have I done amiss? ’Tis easy remedied.’ Therewith he turned about and slew a man of Demonland. Which Spitfire seeing, he cried out upon Gro in a great rage for being a most filthy traitor, and bloodily rushing in thrust him through the buckler into the brain.

“In such wise and by such a sudden vengeance did the Lord Gro most miserably end his life-days. Who, being a philosopher and a man of peace, careless of particular things of Earth, had followed and observed all his days steadfastly one heavenly star; yet now in the bloody battle before Carcë died in the common opinion of men a manifold perjured traitor, that had at length gotten the guerdon of his guile.”

—E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, 1926, Pan/Ballantine, London, 1971, pp.471-72.

Just Like You and Me...
10.38, 30 Mar 2003: It’s a handy thing, to be able to dismiss uncomfortable ideas as propaganda: it helps you shut away your own doubts, tamp down your own mind. If Raed is fiction, it’s strong fiction — which of course is why people shy from it, attribute it by turns to to the CIA, to Saddam’s secret police, to whoever signifies comfortably. If the dusty, angry, unlettered, frightened, finger-jabbing desert-bound peasant-scape is the dimension of ourselves we want to deny and crush and eradicate, to bomb out of the stone age back into nothingness (which surely a deeper emotional reason for war-support than oil, for all but a wealthy cabal) then the counter to this is an Iraqi maybe-nobody we exactly know and recognise culturally, the self we believe we’re protecting. This particular one may be a fake: that doesn’t in any way diminish the idea that one such might exist, not actually blogging. Once the imagination is allowed in, the bad pull of facts (meaning the things you allow yourself to know) loosens.

Return of the Giant Quagmire
10.30pm, 30 Mar 2003: During the NATO bombing of Kosovo, I went to one of the big anti-war meets, at the great Methodist hall in Westminster. It was a depressing event, really: topping the bill were the Usual Left-Sleb Suspects — Benn, Dalyell, Pilger, three of the vainest men in politics — and they got laughs and applause for the easiest lines. In fact Benn got a standing ovation just for arriving, which is comical (like he was turning down more important engagements to be here), and the audience seemed weirdly pleased with itself for existing — is it just similar vanity on my part to demand to be surprised or challenged, rather than just have my boring prejudices pandered to? There was a strange, unlikeable undercurrent, as if to say (but never out loud), "Thank GOD for this War, it will prove us right after all — the unending carnage will bring Blair down and turn politics our way again...". The word ‘Quagmire’ seemed to have become a horrible summoning spell: you felt there were people there who secretly couldn’t wait for the internecine Balkan mess to turn into World War One all over again, at which point at last they demonstrate to all their slowpoke fellow radicals that they’d been the new Lenin all along... If you’re actually really against it, then probably you should also stop hoping in your heart that the Middle East turns out to be the pitiless unbiddable rock on which the wave of Neo-Liberal Free Market Globalisation gradually beats itself to impotent spray and dissipates forever. Bush has unleashed a battalion of demons which will, I continue to believe, end up eating him also, but only after a long and hideous feast on the innocent and the undeserving.

Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind
10:25pm, 30 Mar 30, 2003: If you learn Latin, even badly, you forget sometimes not to write backwards: that’s not my contempt for the marchers (I was one of them), it’s Anderson’s (my attribution of).

There’s the Society of the Spectacle – and on this side there’s me…
06:49pm, 4 Mar 2003: From his distinctively patrician Marxist perch, Perry Anderson knocks holes in what he considers the mainstream anti-war position. Since this entirely shares most of its deep assumptions with the pro-war line — for example about the sanctity of the UN as a factor — Anderson can, without much difficulty, show that logic and principle favour war. In other words, if you’re convincedly anti-war, you have to toss out some or all of these shared assumptions and radicalise. So quite what most of the Feb 15 marchers had in their heads, those sad-ass clowns — besides sentimentality, woolly self-regard, confusion or fear — Anderson pretty much disdains to imagine: everyone’s reasons except his are deluded pea-brain rubbish, he implies. Well, when has he not seen himself as a kind of intellectual Dzherzhinksy, set down on Earth to impose superior thinking on the would-be rad plebs by means of brain-terror? After all, he teaches history of UCLA — come the revolution (whatever this means) it’s in his interests to promote himself as the only one able to bring to the benighted masses all that they don’t or can’t yet know. Nowhere does it occur to him to concede that the Feb 15-ers already intuited these contradictions: that the reason for marching on so determinedly, without well-grounded beliefs or understanding — which is to say, in the face of the potential derision of the world’s wised-up media — is that you know the pro-war value system must be wrong to its core, even if you can’t articulate how. Anderson is professionally, indeed dazzlingly, articulate — but, intellectual snobbery to one side for a moment, all he’s actually doing is dotting the i’s of stuff the marchers already decided. He’s listened to in these times because the march elbowed him the space, at last.

smart ugly man scores thru intellect alone?
06:40 pm, 4 Mar 2003: The first bit of real proper moral philosophy I remember being struck by was J. P. Sartre’s argt that there’s no way to choose — morally or philosophically — between joining the Résistance, and staying home to look after your old, ill mum. Radio Free Narnia has been pretty quiet for some while: if people like it and have missed it, all I can say is, my mum has been pretty ill, and, yes, needed a fair amount of looking after. But as of last weekend, she seemed a lot better: older and more melancholic perhaps, but no longer trapped in stuff beyond her control. So RFN is back for a while, I hope. Resistance to what I'm not so sure I know…