The Old Man, his Broken Lantern
and some Doggerel on the Moon
Diogenes, it is said,
once went through the city at mid-day with a broken lantern peering into each
person’s face as he passed by. “What is all this about?” they
asked. “I am searching for an honest man,” he said, “someone to
enlighten me.” “But this,” said another, “is Athens, are you
mad?” Diogenes laughed at them: “Woof-woof!” And which of
them was most crazy, the laughing philosopher, the broken lantern or the rhyming
canine? Hence the name Cynic from kynik, a dog.
Who can looking at
politicians these days, find an honest one among them all, let alone a likeable
personality? They even lack charisma and charm, so that though they
lie, prevaricate, boast and promise us the moon, they cannot convince: their
rhetoric falls flat, their gestures range from the obscene to the fatuous, and
their arguments, such as they are—and they aren’t much—trail off into bombast
and lunacy. Instead of a laughing philosopher, we have foolish,
egotistical comics, who stand up and insult everyone in the most obnoxious way:
their satire never rises above invective and their wit twitters into
catcalls. Meanwhile, dictators posture in their own incredibly ugly
way, taking pratfalls as heroic poses, slipping into senility and insanity,
with hardly a hint of power other than the fear of anarchy and chaos should
their regimes tumble.
Proust's Aquarium
Recently, at a
funeral, in a room filled with what seemed like grotesque shrunken statues and
people wearing distorting masks—something Proust’s Marcel reports experiencing
as he realizes these are the friends and acquaintances of his youth—someone
asked me what I thought the world would look like in twenty years (that being
the uttermost limit anyone could expect to see who was in that room, though
many were in the mid-80s and older); and I answered, somewhat flippantly but
upon reflection not so much) “It would look like the moon.”
A Long Way to
Tipperaray: A Raree Show on the Moon
Had I another
metaphorical hand, perhaps I should have added (and as I think I intended) that
the moon was really a distant blank which neither I nor any of the assembled
old acquaintancesAs this was one of those occasions when the person I spoke to
was only partly recognized as a left-wing friend from many years ago and I
could not be sure how he would react to anything coming from my now far more
conservative self (at the age of 75), my answer was only flippant to the extent
that I wished to be ambiguous and thus avoid an argument no longer welcome, and
certainly not at the funeral we were both attending at the time. Saying
the future would show the earth to be “like the moon:” could mean, on the one
hand, that we would all see a desolated planet, as the environmentalists raucously
assert—a world without rivers and fields, animals or plants; on the other hand,
it might also have meant that the world would remain a dreamy cipher,[1] waiting to be
inscribed with some idle thought grown in agony or an idol’s groan as a scribe
falters with his pen, the survivors of our own professional careers and
domestic dramas, could ever hope to see in twenty years (this symbolic score
representing a limit to our presence in the world), and given the great changes
in the last few decades far beyond our imaginings. It is a long
distance in thought from the possible to the probable and eventually to the
certain, as distant as a journey from the earth to the moon seemed to
speculators one hundred years ago.
They, our parents or
grandparents (depending on our own family’s traditional longevity) were in the
midst of a world war and the idea of the world lasting another twenty years,
let alone being able to picture its contours, was probably an even more fatuous
speculation: as we can see in old newsreels of the Western Front, the bleak,
pock-marked surface of the moon might have seemed a lovely alternative to the
blood-stained mud holes already laid out before their eyes. Already,
for many, the belief in a bright future, the triumph of reason and science was
revealed as a lie, and the nostalgia for the recent past an empty hope. All
they could do was lie to themselves a little more and wait expectantly for the
Great War to repeat itself.
Journey to the Moon
and Back
in less than a Light Moment
Now they seem to be
doing it again. On the one hand, those who bury themselves deep
under the skin of ignorance and fear, mocking the neologisms of the new digital
technologies, “deeply impactful” expressions of sour milk; and on the other
hand, those, like myself, who refuse to accept that anything has changed, and
therefore are short changed in every encounter that cannot be avoided. Both
are forms of lunacy.
Some people see a
face in the moon, a moon that could be made from Swiss or blue cheese,
depending on your taste in fungoid mythology; others see an old man, his dog
and a lantern. It is as easy as finding whole menageries and
street-markets of used ideas in the clouds. Like pie in the sky, the
visionary speculation of environmentalists, human rights activists and
politically correct journalists belongs to the great movement for anti-reason
in our world: those against scientific and technological innovations, and hence
wish to divest, boycott and sanction Israel for being a world leader in the
advancement of civilization and morality. Yet, as used to be
said—who knows if anyone says anything now that is not jargon, neologism and
empty sound-bite—whatever you can say about Israel is True: for these are the
best of times and the worst of times, the most modern and the most regressive
of perceptions, and the most perceptive and least cogent of discourses.
Another elderly
person at the funeral was standing alone and someone I know went up to him and
said hello, giving his own name; and the other, once a great and powerful man
in the university, whose decisions ruined our professional lives and set
graduate students on the path to failure, smiled politely, as he had been
coached, merely miming a social act. Then several minutes later, the
formerly influential gentleman came to my friend, greeted him by name, with a
hearty smile and shake of the hand.” How have you been?” he said. My
friend told me that he turned away, all the memories of the other’s miserable
dealings flowing back into consciousness. The Great Man stood there, still
smiling, unaware of what had just happened. I looked, and there he was, not
forlorn or befuddled, but beaming with the emptiness of his pride. “Your
turn,” my friend whispered. Then I walked up to the previous source
of my unhappy career, slapped him on the shoulder, and said to his face: “You
really are a ridiculous creature, aren’t you?” He grinned back and
answered: “Yes, yes, we must meet again and talk about old times.” My
final word was an expletive.
The House of Fame
On the moon, too, not
only are there mausoleums, tombs and monuments for everything lost on earth,
from broken bicycles to twisted umbrellas, rusting prams and burnt out electric
ovens, but also bird-cages, hives and jeroboams for mumbled words, vagabond rumours,
wisps of gossip and idle threats, the fame of the clinically inane and the
notoriety of the terminally portentous.
Flibbertigibbet the
Gossip and her Virtuous Twin
In the Middle Ages
there was a little demon whose special task it was to round up all the nasty
little things people say about one another and carry them to the moon where
they could be sorted, catalogued and used for future reference. No
little passing remark or expletive or angry curse would thus be lost. In
our own terms, the lunar station (or lunatic asylum) was thus both a listening
post and a data bank, with himself, Flibbertigibbet as the generic name for the
agent in charge.
On the other hand, as
the Jewish response to words of praise, encouragement and well-wishing, “From
your lips to God’s ears”, indicates that perhaps on the far side of the moon,
the shadowy realm we cannot see, there is a different social-moral colony set
up to gather up elusive messages of a better sort, and, since they are so rare,
at least when uttered with sincerity, or never quite making it past the local
censorship board, or extracted by subtle means from all those souls too weak to
be heard above the confusion of ordinary hypocrisy, brought up beyond the
breathable atmosphere and through the numerous belts of broken promises and
fragmented dreams, to be nursed back into health, given the basic education
they never had, and ultimately released for a new life in the Milky Way.
