I-Dentity
I wrote this a while back and promptly forgot to publish it. Gah!
“When we talk about the imponderables of life, we don’t really mean that we can’t ponder them. We mean that we can’t stop. Hence the conversation: a Sargasso of monologues that were all attracted to the noise. Some of the voices are talking murder while thinking it to be medicine. Others, the blessed ones, are talking reason. Almost always it is because they know their own limitations. But unless they were born as saints, they had to find out they were not infallible by listening to the words of others.”
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
When I read this perfect passage for the first time, I thought Clive should have said “the worlds of others”; listening to the borders and foibles of people foreign to you in order that you might better understand your own. Despite the poetic attraction, I’m infinitely glad he didn’t go there. I’ll try and explain why.
I grew up watching films; not so much listening to music when I was 13 or so. It took the entry level of Dire Straits and, eventually, the true fanaticism invoked by the White Stripes to conjure a deeper interest than casually listening to dance compilations, Saint Etienne, the Manic Street Preachers, the occasional James Brown/Van Morrison greatest hits selection, or whatever novelties were bothering the charts. I still really enjoy the novelties of the late 90s, as it happens. They were all unashamedly about the melody, otherwise why would I ever have been humming them?
But movies got me somewhere deeper than a non-committal miasma of catchiness. I thought for years that Taxi Driver was the best thing I’d ever seen, with On The Waterfront, The Life Of Brian and Trainspotting there or thereabouts; plus everything I ever saw by Hitchcock. It was Trainspotting, though, that would turn out to be most immediately important; it led me to Danny Boyle’s amazing Shallow Grave, and then onto wondering what else Scotland had to offer. Could anything else possibly be as unrelentingly dark? Was there something truthful in the psyche that these things projected? Was there any reason to be proud of them?
I didn’t like living in Edinburgh at that point. I wondered what else there was, but I especially hated that I still got homesick when I had the parentally organised chances to find out the answers. It was like being trapped in an obnoxious maze that one had built oneself, and then thrown out the blueprints. I started to fully explore the possibilities extant over the fence by living part-time in a suburb of Nottingham for a year or two; I still love Nottingham dearly for its manic combination of vibrancy and boorish hedonism. I love it because it was utterly the opposite of who I am, which taught me starkly just how much my own city is who I am; how much it represents the haphazard architecture and air of vague disapproval that I need to feel truly at ease, truly at home. Humans need mess and confusion to thrive, but I think everyone likes their fetishes dispensed in a slightly different way.
Let’s – hesitantly - go more personal still, but fast forward to now. For every single day of the twenty five years I’ve been alive and cadging oxygen, my permanent home has been Scotland. The room where all my stuff is has always been in Edinburgh – nowhere else. Born here, live here, work here, assimilated the accent. I am Scottish. I say so on forms - it must be true.
“I was often criticized for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities; humanism was the connection between them. “
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
So, then, what are the connections between (emphasise “between”) me and Scotland? Let’s have a think. My granddad is Hungarian, but both my parents are English (English in that they were born in England; my dad is a wanderer who happened to settle in Edinburgh nearly half a century ago, so define that as you want). As a kid my accent was, inevitably, excruciatingly southern, accentless yet overly accentuated, pseudo-RP English, until I got into the Edinburgh playgrounds where it slowly and naturally morphed into a phonological mush that isn’t in any way an English dialect, yet certainly isn’t attributable to any one area of Scotland, and remains substantially affected by the above mentioned stint in Nottingham. To English people, I sound deeply Scottish. To Scottish people, I just sound a bit weird, and to people from other countries whose English isn’t great, I’m completely unintelligible. I know – I know – that it is an irksome cliché to bemoan the sound of your own voice when you listen to it on tape, with a slight squirming discomfort – but my reaction is more like horror. Maybe it’s apt that even my vocalic realisations are utterly confused.
“What’s the matter with these people? What is this obsession with roots? And why is Scotland world leader in the roots caper?”
- Jonathan Meades, Off Kilter
There’s more, anyway. My girlfriend is Czech. My other favourite city is Copenhagen, in which reside some of my best friends, and from where my half a decade’s-worth of constant visitations have resulted in the ability to speak or understand absolutely no Danish whatsoever. Getting ever so slightly off-piste, I’m an atheist in a country responsible for four centuries of religious schisms, bickering and ridiculous posturing. I’m also a politically apathetic cross between a staunch humanist and a vague misanthrope, who nevertheless happens to have a full time job working for nationalist politicians. I am well placed to see how the daily confidence trick, the constant fraud of nationalism is sold, how the lies are spun despite the lack of any proper plans or argumentation beyond sloganeering dogma, and how people’s lack of base, set identity is expertly exploited. People are malleable, I am told. They can be configured to suit the senseless whimsy of a select group. This is why I pity anyone who has fallen for this masterful illusion before, and why I sadly and selfishly pity myself, because I know what’s about to happen here.
“It’s a stunningly beautiful building, inside and out. You must go and have a look at it, especially because it’s no longer the Parliament building, and the fewer Parliaments, the fewer politicians, the fewer nationalists and the fewer patriots, the happier I become.”
- Billy Connolly outside St Giles in Edinburgh, some years before the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999
I suppose my residual bugbear with projected identities is that Scottish people – people who live in Scotland - are well versed at defining themselves by what they are not. Not catholic. Not protestant. Not from the West Coast. Most pertinently - not English. That one is fabricated as a positive, defined as the belief in nationalism. That’s the thorough belief in the potential of Scotland, by the way, and certainly nothing to do with the endless, dismal, ill-defined plaints directed at the neighbouring country. We don’t do chips here, and certainly not on shoulders.
And there’s the weary crux of my weary problems – the definition of the self by what one is not.
“We demean ourselves if we define ourselves by the community that we supposedly belong to; whether that alleged community is determined by religion, skin colour, regional accent, political persuasion, football club allegiance or any other criteria.”
- Jonathan Meades, Off Kilter
Regionalism? My village is more fecund than your village. I am not part of your village. Clive James’s humanism dies at source. This is not living. This is living through what other people are. Actually, no, it’s far worse – it’s living through what other people aren’t. Whatever the shades of my misanthropy and the distant distaste for a lot of people I meet, whatever humanism I genetically have within me, in these instances, prevails. Human beings are more than this. Human beings are infinitely, unknowingly more.
This shabby tangent has distracted from a mention of Scottish filmmaking aeons ago. Shallow Grave eventually led to Mr Bill Forsyth, specifically Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero. Gregory’s Girl is a gentle classic, which works because of its all encompassing innocence and its perfect universality. The setting and idiomatic content are obviously Scottish – Gregory is growing up in a doomed new town shithole, but sociological interpretations are laughable because he doesn’t care - but the messy depiction of the inconveniences of falling in love at 15 are applicable to all people, to all countries, to all times. Dub this into any language you want and little would be lost. The portrayal of farcical awkwardness is immediate and likeable and unavoidable.
Local Hero goes one better, though. It’s gentle, and slow, and this time is led by its dialogue – stuttering and cynical and abrupt. It works gloriously because of Forsyth’s masterful tampering with stereotypes and the wilful dismissal of the chance to frame and dwell on any sort of regional characteristics – so there’s the Russian trawlerman docking in the middle of the Cold War so that a Scottish publican can doctor his investment portfolio, before taking to a stage at a ceilidh and singing about how he’s gone a-roamin’ away from Texas. There’s the black West African Minister called Murdo MacPherson, hosting clandestine meetings in his church to maximise profit while fighter jets engage in test bombings overhead. There’s the hopeless Scottish nerd (and a pre-Malcolm Tucker Peter Capaldi, at that!) who speaks all the languages under the sun except his own, Gaelic.
A more standard tale would have a small fishing village fighting to preserve their natural, beautiful, undisturbed habitat against the evil international conglomerate of oil company execs; instead, the villagers are cynically and mechanically taking the negotiator for a ride to bleed as much profit as they can in exchange for their homes being raised to the ground. Implicit in the narrative is that people are just people, and are perfectly adroit at egotistically managing their own affairs. A film that looks as if it is going to provide nationalistic themes and sentiments about the characterisation of Scots actually exists to make those who concentrate on such things look like fools. Mark Knopfler’s folky, wistful soundtrack would actually be out of place if it wasn’t so lingeringly gorgeous.
The connection between people and places and events need not be determined by a border, need not be determined by platitudinous nationalistic sentiment and flag waving, need not be determined by announcing that I am Scottish and you are English and that is a satisfactory criteria for superiority and aloofness, and need not be determined –again - by what people are not. This includes what people are not any more.
“History needn’t have been like that. That’s what history is; the story of everything that needn’t have been like that”
- Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
You, as you are probably a product of (mostly) free and open society, are free to dwell and free to pontificate, and free to get hung up on history and to use it to come to an understanding of why and how, and that’s fine. But as Mr Meades alludes to, applying co-incidental circumstance to proudly describe oneself in the present would entail automatically demeaning one’s own existence to a certain extent; the existence that happens to be going on now, and can be tailored, and can be improved, and in which one can try and live one’s dreams. The dreams of our ancestors are all romantic and good and well, but I refuse to live the life of someone else, and I don’t care how ordinary anyone else might find what’s happening in my head.
Talking of which, I’m off to wonder my now perennial sticking point of wonderment; which record do I prefer – Hex or Loveless? Maybe I’ll go to the shops and finally get outside on this greyest of grey public holidays. Maybe I’ll look up and notice a gable in the skyline that the corners of my eyes had always let slip before. Maybe I’ll put my Portishead t-shirt on. Maybe I’ll text someone and let them know, again, inadequately, just what I think of them, and how I’d go to bits if they weren’t here. Maybe I’ll wonder if Arsenal FC will ever be the same again. Or maybe I’ll just carry on reading Clive James. These are universal human options, unspecific to region, wholly unremarkable, yet wholly wonderful. This is my magic; this is who I am. If I ever get less than this by pretending to be grander, by pretending to be more – by getting older and more right wing, and less interested in people, and by falling for the ease of the nationalist con - then I beg of you to tell me. I’ll give you a hug or something.
x
