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2008-12-08 05:43:23
A POINT OF VIEW
Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess because chaos is inherent
in all our minds, even those of the great writers and thinkers, asks Clive
James.
The great thing about this slot is that I can pontificate. But a wise
pontificator should always remember that he won't solve a global problem in 10
minutes, or even do much more than usefully touch on it in 10 hours. There are
two main reasons for that. One reason is that the global problems are, by their
nature, devilishly complicated. But everyone knows, or should know, that.
The other reason is less obvious, because it lies within the nature of the
pontificator. He, or she - in my case he - speaks with a special pontificating
voice: integrated, judicious even in its doubts, purporting to contain the
distilled wisdom of a lifetime's experience. Almost always, I suspect, this
voice is at odds with the personality from which it emerges, and in my case the
discrepancy is so glaring that even I can spot it.
As I prepare this script, tapping away at the keyboard as Socrates might have
done if he had owned a PC, it seems to me that my brain is at my fingertips,
with all its scope and knowledge. But then, after looking up at the screen and
noticing that the last two sentences are all in capitals and include various
chemical formulae for substances unknown to science, I bounce my forehead off
the desk and make the supreme mistake of looking around my room.
It's in chaos. The pontificator with plans for fixing the world can't organise
his own desk, and as for what lies beyond the desk, forget about it. The
evidence that I've spent years forgetting about it is all out there. Piles of
old newspapers and magazines. Stacks of box files containing folders containing
memos about the necessity to buy more folders and box files. Hundreds of books
uselessly hidden behind hundreds of other books. A small statue of a Sumo
wrestler, or else a life-sized statue of a small Sumo wrestler. A bag of random
receipts that my accountant might have found quite useful in their year of
origin, 1998.
But let's start with the desk. Or rather, let's not. The desk is too much.
Little of its surface is visible through piled notebooks and shuffled papers.
But observe this vertically striped earthenware mug full of ball-point pens. If
the phone rings with information I must take down, I reach for one of these
pens and find that it does not work.
Shambolic
In the same vertically striped mug there are 15 other pens that do not work
either. Vaguely I remember the day when I planned to sort through these pens
and retain only those that did work. But I got distracted. What else is in the
same mug? Jelly beans, several of which have grown fur.
And that's just the mug. What about this desk drawer over here on the right?
Ah, there's a touch of organisation here. Every year I put a new set of vital
names and addresses in the designated section of my appointments diary. But I
never get round to transferring vital names and addresses from previous diaries
into the current one. So there are 10 years of diaries in this drawer alone, to
supplement the line-up of 20 years of diaries standing over there in the corner
of the room behind that valuable stack of obsolete phone books. Or, as I have
just typed, obsotel nophe kobos.
All over again I count my blessings that I have not been chosen as one of the
subjects for Eamonn McCabe's series of photographs called Writers' Rooms. In
London, an exhibition of these photographs has just opened. The photographs
have been running as a series in one of the upmarket newspapers. When I looked
at the early photos in that series I was envious. Would I be chosen? Then I
started praying that I wouldn't be, a prayer which has mercifully been
answered.
There are some prizes I would like. I would quite like the Nobel Prize, if the
money could be delivered tomorrow in a suitcase, clearly marked "Nobel Prize
money: bank immediately or it will burst into flames." I would quite like the
Booker prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Forward prize and the Uniecef prize for
the chronically disorganised. I can hear myself pontificating while accepting
any or all of those awards. But what I don't want is to be photographed in this
room, because any shred of credibility I had as a pontificator would evaporate
instantly.
I noted with shame that even the most shambolic of the writer's rooms in the
photographs was better organised than mine, and the majority of them might have
been deliberately arranged to remind me that I myself was working in a skip.
These paragons had got it all together without it getting on top of them.
Force of nature
You could tell that everything was there for a reason. If a woman writer had
the propeller of a Sopwith Camel mounted on the wall, it was because her
great-grandfather shot down Baron von Richthofen's second cousin in 1917.
Writers had their books arranged by category, in alphabetical order. I moved
into this office 10 years ago, the books came out of their tea chests in any
old order, and any old order is still the only order they maintain on my
shelves. There are books I know I own but I have to buy them again because I
can't find them.
Let me add that everything is well dusted. A cleaner comes in once a week and
she does a good job. But she is under instructions not to move anything, in
case I need it. So she has learned just to polish the whole lot as if it were
an installation at Tate Modern.
Other writers clearly find it easier to get their act together, and no doubt
most non-writers do too. But judging from my own admittedly extreme experience,
they can only get things under control by striving mightily against a force of
nature that wants things to be disorganised rather than not.
Scientists call it entropy. Back in the early 19th Century, Carl von
Clausewitz, in his great work about military strategy On War, called it
Friction. Clausewitz said that you have to have a plan for the battle but the
plan had better include plenty of room for the absolute certainty that the plan
will start growing fur from the first moment of its execution.
I have just been checking up in my copy of Clausewitz - I had to buy another
copy, because my original copy is somewhere in my bookshelves, which means that
it might as well be on Mars - and I can tell from every sentence that he was
writing with the insight conferred by self knowledge.
I'll bet all the money in my foreign coin collection - it's over there in the
fruit bowl, and some of those hundreds of obsolete francs and deutschmarks are
sure to be worth something to collectors a hundred years from now. I'll bet all
that money in the fruit bowl - and if you're asking where the fruit is, I
gathered up all my powers of organisation and threw it out only a month after I
forgot to eat it. I'll bet all that money that Clausewitz, when he was working
on his magnum opus in his last years, was sitting at a desk that looked like
the morning after the Battle of Waterloo.
His name for the accumulated effect of Friction was the Fog of War. When I read
that, I could tell straight away that here was a man who, like me, couldn't
toast a slice of bread without filling his apartment with smoke. When his widow
prepared his manuscript for posthumous publication, she probably found
sandwiches in it.
Dangerous signal
When DVDs came in, I rarely played my VHS tapes again, but the VHS tapes did
not move out. There are several hundred of them here, stacked on the floor. My
first copy of Clausewitz might be somewhere behind them. I know there is a
squash racket behind them because I can see the edge of its frame sticking up.
Will I ever play squash again? Of course not, so why is the racket still there?
Perhaps it's trying to remind me that the best equipped pontificator is the one
who is aware of his own propensities towards chaos. Unable to organise his own
breakfast, he will be less ready to condemn officials who can't organise an
efficient system for sending out student grants, or collecting private
information onto a CD-ROM that won't be left on a train.
But even the most self-aware pontificator is still likely to expect too much of
the world. Rarely will he be sufficiently amazed that society functions at all,
considering some of the human material it has to work with. In ancient Greece,
the philosopher Diogones, wedded to simplicity, lived in a tub. But he still
roamed the streets of Athens by daylight while carrying a lamp. He said that he
was looking for an honest man, and everybody wrote it down, saying that
Diogones the cynic was a piercing analyst of the human condition. But maybe he
just didn't know how to turn the lamp off.
Sitting at this computer, on whose keyboard I have just typed the word "lamp"
and actually written the word "lump", I am face to face with an item of
technology that Diogones would not have known how to switch on. I barely know
how to switch it on either, have often failed to switch it off - why does it
ask me "do you wish to report the error" when I don't know what the error is?
And yet I do know that its mere presence in the pile of rubble I call my desk
is sending me a dangerous signal.
This miracle of machinery is telling me that order can emerge from chaos after
all. Well, yes, it can, but only against heavy odds, because chaos is inherent
even in the minds of those who make the miracles. And it is certainly inherent
within the pontificator. I can pontificate about that with some certainty, even
as I type the last words of this sprict, scirpt, script, reach for my mug of
coffee and get a mouthful of ball point pens.