Sunday, February 9, 2014

The Lightest Thing of All




Blue skies, snow on the ground, back in Beijing.  Up early, meditation, gym, coffee, smoothie; got the old routine back.   Steel rails there to hold on to once again and order your day with.   

The Stones, live at Madison Square Garden from 1969, “Stray Cat Blues” was the first tune on mix as I kicked it off with my familiar old stair master.  There’s another tune that I’ve heard since I was twelve or so, probably a few hundred times, in as many different contexts.  I never tire of hearing Keith’s grinding rhythm work on that tune, or Mick Taylors soaring solos with their perfectly timed pull off hammers that I can visualize how to do but can’t really approximate.  And it has always been a lewd, compromised theme, wherein the other Mick paints a convincing scene of paid sex with two teenage girls.  

My older daughter turned thirteen last week.  The second verse of the song was, perhaps for the first time, truly repulsive this morning, wherein Mick Jagger croons: “I can see that you’re just thirteen years old.  I don’t want no I.D.”  No way to equivocate or hold it up to the light any longer.  It’s just a vile thing to be triumphant about.   Then, irony added to insult when, at the end when 18,000 or so people explode, cheering. "Pedofile Blues!"  And had I been there, (alright, I was three,) I would have been one of them. 



Thoughts turn to hapless Dylan Farrow and hapless Mia Farrow and hapless Woody Allen.  The Nicholas Kirstof blog post and the Woody rebuttal I finally read today.  Case and counter case made to the court of public opinion.   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/woody-allen-speaks-out.html  For better or worse, we all rely on the rule of law, to make it through our day.  Injustice is real and in theory it is brave to fight against it.  Certainly we pride ourselves on being able to 广开言路[1].  But the village square is a rough place to seek redress.

Thoughts to turn Bauchi northern Nigeria, where the Time’s described the hapless men in the jail house, charged with homosexual crimes who will be flogged in punishment.  This, although the courthouse was surrounded by residents who insisted the proper punishment was stoning to death, under Sharia Law and who took to throwing what they could in frustration that it was 'only' a whippng.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/world/africa/nigeria-uses-law-and-whip-to-sanitize-gays.html?ref=world  It wasn’t long ago that England forced the sterilization of its key code breaker in World War II, for the same crimes.  How quickly public opinion in a certain swath of the modern world, can shift on such matters.

Thoughts move across the continent to Kenya where Isak Dinesen (a.k.a. Karen Blixen) had her farm “at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”  I finished “Out of Africa” the other morning and loved it.  There’s a bit of mob justice that she reckons with the hapless Kikuyu squatter boy who accidently shoots another child.  And, in her rendering it is not a moral question, but merely a matter of remuneration for the loss the other family suffered.  The innocence of the boy she has already decided.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Africa

The tale is a fascinating contrast of opposites.  Many things you might fault the English for, but she is Danish.  Many things you might fault as a male prerogative, to sagaciously adjudicate a native trial or kill one and then another lion, but then, she’s a woman.  Many things you might fault in association with the greed of a business, but then, her business fails. 



More elementally, she writes beautifully of a time and a sense of ethics both European and I presume East African, that is long gone.  They speak to me as a collection of views into that world, which in a way is not dissimilar, perhaps, to what I am trying to do with this blog, posting something every day about a life in China, for one year.

“The plan which I had formed in the beginning to give in to all minor matters so as to keep what was of vital importance to me, had turned out to be a failure.  I had consented to give away my possessions one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid of. 

There was a full moon in those day, it shone into the bare room and laid the pattern of the windows on the floor.  I thought that the moon might be looking in an wondering how long I meant to stay on, in a place from which everything else had gone.  ‘Oh no,’ said the moon, ‘time means very little to me.’  P. 322 Penguin Modern Classics

And one of the great joys of finishing a book is that you get to start another one.  Now, another remembrance of lost time, by a man who lived in the next generation after Karen Blixen, and shared quite a few turns of that moon on the earth with her, certainly, Patrick Leigh Fermor  “A Time of Gifts.”  The praise for the man and his writing and his heroic life, is so unequivocally I dig in expecting each paragraph to sparkle.  Another collection of views into a place and time, in this instance, prewar continental Europe, that was probably quite routine as it was lived and precious now, for having been captured.  




[1] guǎngkāiyánlù:  to encourage the free airing of views (idiom)

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