Humankind can only bear so much compromise, so much mitigation. It has an inbuilt desire to cut through the equivocation and (not to put to fine a point on it) the crap and take a stand that is black or white. Grey confuses the matter. And this is not just in our rhetoric; it is in our actions too. There are only so many months we can go on saying you can go into a cafe as long as you wear a mask on entry and when you stand up to go to the toilet and make sure you give your mobile number or better still use the ap. After a bit of this you just want to say oh let’s just not bother! In the end you just want to say people are rubbish or something like that. You want to polarise. Or, when you see the devastation, material and moral, after England’s defeat in the Euro final, that this is the Bacchae revisited, that when ecstasy is unleashed chaos will follow. But, the new heroic position is compromise, because truth isn’t simple. Faced with complexity, anyone can push out to the pole. It takes a hero to look at as much of the evidence as is possible, give due respect to those who know more or better, take into account political machinations and come to a balanced, considered position, which will not necessarily be sitting on the fence but may well be inhabiting a locality close to a fence.

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I cannot now even imagine a Hollywood film I would like to see. Yesterday I had access to the Amazon Prime catalogue of films and I scrolled merrily on through the catalogue of rom-coms, action movies and goofball comedies. In the end I plumped for Hangman (2018), a thriller of the serial killer variety with Al Pacino. Al Pacino is an elder statesman ex-cop. The younger male lead is a cop with a murdered wife. The female lead is a New York Times journalist also with a past trauma I was chatting to my sister during her big trauma recapitulation scene so I missed what it was exactly. The car chase came about 50 minutes into the film. The serial killer would be an white male between 25 and 35; this was smartly checked-off at the beginning of the film by the police as though they had seen enough of these films already themselves. The woman in the mortuary was conventionally jovial as the bodies piled up one every eleven o’clock at night. The killer was nothing if not punctual. You could set your watch by him. Al Pacino loved crosswords we saw in the first scene of the film, which made his inability to spell out the hangman word a mystery in itself. Victims were referred to as vics, a first time for me. The whole thing was serial killer by numbers. I suppose people want the familiar, the conventional arc, the genre they are can slip into like an old slipper, but if the stories we tell are all so neat, when do we ever get to confront the world we actually live in?

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French is a courtly language. I was putting a dollop of yoghurt onto my stewed rhubarb yesterday when I quizzed myself as to the French word for dollop. I was irritated because I should be able to come up with something adequate for this. It is not like the word for a combine harvester which you either know or don’t; it is a word you can construct yourself. Miffed, I looked it up, and to my delight and disappointment saw that I couldn’t come up with a word because French doesn’t do it. The renderings the on-line and hard-copy dictionary offered were cuilleree or morceau (literally, spoonful or bit). Delighted because my competence was not shown up but disappointed in the language. Yes. French is a courtly and a precise language but not very expressive sometimes. You can imagine at the French court no dollops would be permitted and it was the court and then the academy that dictated the development of the language. In German, by the way, the word is Klacks. Much nicer. The word Klecks with an e means blob. The change of vowel indicates a change of dimension. Three-dimensional Klacks (dollop) becoming two-dimensional Klecks (blob or smudge). Vowels can have this transformative effect. In English a splash is bigger than a splish, right?

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Around the time Macbeth was written in 1606 the topic of equivocation was rife in England. Equivocation was the business of telling half-truths or hidden lies to escape earthly and celestial punishment. As a Catholic in Protestant England you could deny you were harbouring a priest by saying something like “A priest lyeth not in my house” which in your mind meant he was not telling untruths in your house, or you could say of someone “he came not this way” whilst secretly pointing in another direction. Shakespeare evokes the business of equivocation, you might remember, in the Porter’s speech in Macbeth.

We see equivocation at large today in the bogus statement “I have no recollection of that”, which is not a denial, not perjury. But you also see it massively in various trotted-out boasts of the modern world. Affordable homes, for example. The other day I saw a recognition of this in the poster emblazoned on a building with the term Genuinely affordable homes, a wink to the equivocations of legalese. We know affordable homes aren’t really affordable. I also saw, in an extension of this, on the the side of a recycling lorry We really do recycle, the emphasis countering the claims of bogus recycling that have been in the press in recent months (only yesterday I heard the story of British plastic recycled materials being found dumped in Turkey). In a word, language is now needing to re-claim its own truth from equivocation. Unfortunately, the equivocators of today are no longer hung, drawn and quartered.

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Genuinely affordable homes

The Labour party had a poor performance in regional elections this week, many of their traditional strongholds in the north, the so-called red wall, turning Conservative blue. Many commentators agree that their problem is not so much policy as connection with voters, a personality deficit. The party has become the party of metropolitan elite Guardian readers and the factory worker in Durham and the supermarket checkout worker in Manchester don’t feel the link anymore. What they also don’t hear is the vocabulary. The lexis has shifted. When a politician talks about calling out or shouting out even I feel the disconnect; toxic is another one of those modern words that alienate and even that word oversight now apparently means supervision and not what it used to mean which was something that you neglected to notice. When you rob a person of their words you rob them of their past. The new lexis does not connect with the traditional working class who might not read The Guardian. What the party needs is some clever people who are not locked into the maze of buzz words of the modern left. Intended to free you, in the end these words will just create a new prison.

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A few weeks ago amidst all the Covid regulations there was a sudden overnight frost. The next morning the roads had been gritted, I noted as I ventured out that morning. This is just one example of how the cogs of society turn to keep us safe. Since the Enlightenment or before we have incrementally built up the safety mechanisms that have now become so transparent that we take them for granted. This week i was reading about the probable cause of Napoleon’s death on the island of St Helena. Napoleon was obsessed by a particular tincture of green with which he decorated the house he lived in when on the island. At his death six years from having taken up residence there his body was riddled with decay caused by this particular type of paint. It was noted that the servants who lived and worked in the house with him were also afflicted by the poisoning. Every advance we make has to be questioned, checked, made safe by an extensive system of controls, so that we don’t suffer from some random side-effect that had not been factored in. Think electricity, gas, plumbing, sewers, broadband, roads, railways, planes, everything. The Enlightenment and its assumptions help our world to function safely. You believe when you switch the light on that light will come forth with no explosions. Why would you believe that a vaccine has not undergone the same checks? Why would you not believe that our complex society could not unmask a fake moon landing? How do you think you remain safe when you turn the gas on?

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I saw a familiar face in Marks and Spencers yesterday. None other than Professor Chris Whittey, the Chief Medical Officer and perhaps the most famous face of the UK pandemic. From behind he is surprisingly thick-set. It is only when he turns round to reveal his Elfin features and particularly hirsute eyebrows that you see that it is indeed he. He could very easily be an Elf prince from The Lord of the Rings. His basket was laden with salmon. That figures. I’m sure he eats a lot of fish. All that data tracking requires good brain power. The fish will keep him alert. I looked sheepishly at my own basket with its set of crumpets. They would keep me less alert. Seeing Chris Whittey doing his evening shopping like that made me feel properly connected with the times. More so than when on Wednesday in Mayfair I saw Steven Fry.

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Looking through YouTube yesterday I came across a phenomenon I had not registered before: Reaction culture. This is when a young person, mostly of colour, reacts to a piece of music from a classic white band or artiste from the 70s or 80s. So, we see the face of a twenty-year-old hip-hop aficianado as she listens to a track from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for the first time, her eyes exploding as the weird sound explorations evolve or tears flowing as she listens to Wish you were here. What is happening? Are they sponsored by record companies wanting to introduce modern youth to classic rock to shift more units? There is something pleasant about communing with another person in listening to a loved piece of music. It flatters a baby-boomer to commune with another generation and another ethnicity maybe. It’s also part of pattern. The mediation of reception through others. We see it in X-factor and co. We are shown how to react by the judges. The programme Gogglebox where we focus on viewers watching telly and their reactions is another example that comes to mind. I suppose we have always had critics pointing us in the right direction; few zero-degree confrontations ever take place in aesthetic judgements. This seems different, however. It’s empathy culture in action. I am a believer that empathy is a more efficient pedagogical system than the magisterial system. A student responds better to a teacher reacting to material spontaneously than to his usage of prepared material. If the teacher sees, say, a text for the first time and reacts to it spontaneously in front of the students you see their process. The teaching is not dead meat; it is dynamic and questing. We like to see a spontaneous reaction, and as with the hip-hop fan reacting to Pink Floyd, we re-experience our first audition of the song through our empathy with the other’s reaction.

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There was an incident in my street yesterday. As we were coming back home, a crowd had gathered in the street and was looking up to the block on the other side of the road. On the second floor we could see a man’s arm hammering at a window. There was blood on the wall inside. The window swung open and the man in his thirties on the inside was naked. He started throwing things out of the window and shouting at the people on the street below. He sat out on the ledge as if he was about to throw himself down. Police arrived, an ambulance and a fire-engine. I said he must have a mental health issue. This is the first time I have used this expression. A woman behind me said he was a banker. A gas-man who was working on our building said it wasn’t surprising, him being a banker. Another man said his son played with the banker’s son. I wanted to go home. I said we shouldn’t be gawping. We went back home. From the living room window the banker’s window was just out of sight. I strained my neck but I couldn’t quite see. A couple of hours later the crowd had dispersed.

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Montaigne ascribes the quote about philosophy being the act of learning how to die to Cicero; it may well have been Socrates or someone else. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t tell you much about how you are supposed to think about it. Webster, roughly contemporary with Shakespeare and according to Eliot was much concerned with death. Shakespeare too, if we can interpret him through his characters. Consider Hamlet, constantly musing on it; what happens after death is his issue, ‘the undiscovered land from whose bourne no traveller returns’. Claudio, in Measure for Measure, runs a similar vein (‘Ay, but to die and go we know not where/To lie in cold obstruction and to rot’), written maybe in the year after Hamlet, 1602. Ten years before in Richard III Clarence’s dream of his own death is equally lurid, a mysterious journey inflected by guilt, where he is taunted by the ghosts of his past. At this time we were taught by religion to think on our death, to ponder it in all its gory detail. Shakespeare takes this on board though the religious get-out clause rarely fires his imagination.

The turning point comes with Montaigne after a riding accent. Before that he did what he was told and fretted about death, its torments and particularities. After his brush with death when he was thrown from his horse perhaps by another insouciant rider or perhaps by careless gunfire, where he felt he had drifted unknowingly into death’s ambit, he reviewed this approach. Death was just a few blurry moments at the end of life. Best not worry about it too much. And so to Goethe in the 1820s in his poem on the contemplation of Schiller’s skull. When you compare it with Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yoric it is uplifting. We might be tempted to see the skull and, like Hamlet with Yoiric’s skull, lament the terror of bones where once there was flesh. But no, the skull is a cause for refreshing thoughts because of what the man was and what he did in life. Goethe, unsurprisingly, had little truck with religion; he shook his head at the image of the crucified Christ. For him death was, as for Montaigne, just a nice blur at the end of life.

Cheering you up this post-Easter week.

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