The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  Lucid letter followed lucid letter. Yes, yes, I saw it. Thanks to him, the word ‘epistemological’ was no longer a problem. The term ‘logical positivism’ neither. Another fortnight of this, I thought, and I’d be reading Heidegger for light relief. But then, in what turned out to be his final letter, came page 14, paragraph 3, and I was hurled once more into the Stygian night.

  All this is but a prologue to my admitting that I don’t grasp what philosophical problem concerning language and reality the sentence ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ addresses – but I am going to employ it, anyway, against those who don’t know their arses from their elbows and ought to shut the fuck up.

  Am I thinking of anyone in particular? Well, yes, although it is invidious to choose a fool from among so many, yes, actually, I am. And it is not a single fool but a whole troupe of them. Fools by profession, whose folly takes the form of political intervention. You will have guessed that the fools in question are the Spanish clowns who stripped off in front of the separation wall in Bethlehem the other day, to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian cause, only to discover that they had thereby enraged the very people they had thought to help. ‘Disrespectful’, ‘stupid’ and ‘disgusting’ was how Palestinians described their actions. And of no value whatsoever in their struggle against Israel. Every struggle has its dignity.

  To be clear, I abhor the separation wall. It is an eyesore in itself and makes tangible the failed diplomacy and cruel short-sightedness that causes such misery in the region. No Palestinian can see that wall and not wonder if the Israelis mean it to stay there forever, a constant reminder of what they never intend to change. I have been to Bethlehem and breathed the poisoned air. Build that wall and you might as well expunge all hope.

  That the wall has done the job for which, in no small part, it was intended, cannot be denied. Fewer bombs now go off in the cafés of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. This is not a negligible consideration. Viewed utilitarianly, it justifies its construction. But when hatred festers in human hearts, no edifice of brick or steel will subdue it. What the wall prevents other means will be found to enable. So the infernal logic continues. Hate, bomb, wall, hate, and anyone’s guess what happens next.

  What makes the Israeli–Palestinian conflict tragic, Amos Oz has long argued, is that it pits right against right. More recently he has spoken darkly of wrong against wrong. Either way, as he describes it, Israelis and Palestinians are partnered in intransigence and despondency. It is, in the end, irrelevant and meddlesome – and so far has been of little assistance to anyone – to apportion sympathy or blame. Whoever would effect change must act in full possession of what makes this tragic situation tragic. And to be in full possession of a tragedy is to understand what has before happened and been decreed, what immemorial fears and bloody histories motivate the actors, on what wheels of fire they are bound, how all participants explain justice and injustice to themselves. And should heed Othello’s plea to Lodovico: ‘Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.’

  Naked of knowledge and imagination, and mouthing banalities – ‘When you stand before this shameful fence all humanity is naked’ – the Spanish clowns rushed in, buoyed by their own conceit. Were ever fools more ludicrous in their folly, or solipsists more the victim of their own unenquiring solipsism? That they knew so little of Palestinian culture as to be unaware what might constitute gross indecency to a religious people only shows how little they knew – and how little they thought they were obliged to know – of the place in which they’d made their intervention. We can guess how much they knew, or cared to know, of Israeli culture.

  They are not alone. When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy. And knowledge? Why, knowledge is a sort of sacrilege. Who needs it, anyway, when you can pick up what to feel from any foul rag-and-bone shop of hand-me-down convictions, put on a clown’s nose and drop your pants. Though we are but of yesterday and know nothing, we will not let ignorance stop our mouths.

  Whereof one cannot speak, yet one will.

  It isn’t a day of rest we need, it’s a day unlike the day before

  Good Shabbes. Unless it’s gone 6.44 p.m. on the day this column is published, in which case it’s Shabbes no longer and I shouldn’t be wishing you a good one. Sorry to be punctilious, but that’s how it is with religious observance. You can’t be approximate.

  Which goes some of the way – all right, 86.55 per cent of the way – to explaining why I’ve never been a good Jew in the observing sense. What time exactly does a festival start and what time exactly does it finish; when, to the second, can I turn on the oven; what constitutes work precisely and what constitutes relaxation, and can it still be called relaxation even though it doesn’t relax me; if I can read a book congenial only to the spirit of Shabbes on Shabbes does that let Kafka in or Kafka out; and why shouldn’t I read The 120 Days of Sodom in bed on a Friday night so long as I pass adverse criticism on its obscenity – all this quibbling and cavilling presupposes a pedantic God, and since I don’t like pedantry why should I make an exception just because it’s divine pedantry, particularly on Shabbes when I’m supposed to be relaxing?

  Today is a bigger Shabbes than usual in the Jewish world because it has been chosen to launch the Shabbos Project, or ShabbatUK – and if you wonder why there are so many different ways of spelling Shabbes you put your finger on another problem I have with it. I knew where I was with Shabbes. I didn’t keep it. That made me a naughty boy, but my excuse was that my father was a market man and couldn’t have made a living had he not worked on Saturday and not had me to help him. In the robustly secular Manchester of the 1950s this was understood and forgiven by even the strictest rabbis. A man had to feed his family. But once Shabbes metamorphosed into Shabbat – for which blame creeping orthodoxy and Israeli pronunciation – what had been a venial omission, akin to letting down a friend, became a profanation of the sacred.

  However it’s pronounced, Shabbes exerts a pull on all Jews. Probably the only Jews who think about Shabbes more than those who keep it are those who don’t. I don’t say that when I climbed into my father’s swag-filled van on Saturdays to drive to Oswestry or Worksop my thoughts were filled with the wonder of God’s creation – for that’s what Shabbes goes on commemorating: the day work on the world was finished – but I did sometimes fear there would be a price to pay for my impiety, and often regarded boys accompanying their fathers to the synagogue not with envy exactly but a sort of reverential curiosity. Were their hearts filled with a peace, a holiness even, that mine would never know? Were they made more serious by their religious devoirs than working as a market grafter, knocking out shepherd and shepherdess wall plaques and nests of tartan cardboard suitcases imported from Romania, made me? I didn’t want to be those boys, indeed I scoffed at them, but I was still glad they were, so to speak, keeping Shabbes for me.

  And there are good arguments, whatever one’s faith, for a day unlike every other. In one part of myself I am pleased to have seen the back of those monotonous Sundays of the sort Dickens evoked in Little Dorrit – ‘Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows in dire despondency. Everything was bolted and barred that could furnish relief to an overworked people … nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up.’

  But in another I regret we have turned Sunday into one more day for driving out to shopping complexes and buying wider-screen televisions. How does that raise up the brooding mind?

  We call it the day of rest, but I’m not convinced it’s rest we most need. Just as I’m not convinced it was rest that God most needed on the seventh day. What had He done that was all that tiring? All right, He’d created the cosmos, set stars in the firmament, imagined great whales and winged fowls and cattle, and wished them a fruitful future, but He’d done this simply by expressing His desire that it should be so. Fiat lux. Let there be light. And then sitting back and admiring it. Reader
, if only my job were as cushy. Let there be a column. Fiat columna. And lo, there was a column. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. And for that I need to rest?

  Let’s agree that this is not the meaning of the seventh day. The meaning of the seventh day is the necessity to separate and distinguish, the Hebrew word for which is ‘havdalah’. Having created, God now chooses to be uncreative. Between making and not making, as between the waters and the firmament, as between light and dark, and as between the holy and the profane, there must be separation. One thing is not another thing.

  The moment in the Shabbes service that touches me most – philosophically – is the Havdalah benediction. Not because it brings Shabbes to an end but because it recalls to mind God the Great Discriminator, who discriminated between down here and up there, between the mundane and the special, between Mamma Mia! and Mother Courage, thus enshrining discrimination as the act that makes us Godlike.

  A second soul, with each of us for the duration of Shabbes, is said to leave after the Havdalah service. Hence the sadness those who believe in such things experience as Shabbes ends. They feel diminished, single, unexceptional again. It’s a wonderful idea – that for twenty-four hours (twenty-five to be exact) we accrue extra being. Let me be clear. I liked escaping the endless prescriptions of Shabbes to work the markets. We had fun. But it was just me and my dad irreligiously and ungrammatically flogging tat from the back of a van. No second souls came looking to take up abode in us in Worksop.

  These things of darkness

  The place could be any crowded city where the one-sided war between cyclists and pedestrians rages. You – the innocent party – are walking along the pavement minding your own business when you see the enemy coming towards you. Is he riding his bicycle at full pelt, or just doing semi-wheelies while in conversation with a friend? Not sure it matters. He and his bike just shouldn’t be here. You have already nearly been knocked down fifteen times this morning by cyclists jumping red lights, weaving through traffic, haring in the wrong direction down one-way streets, showing you the finger, mounting the kerb rather than slowing down or stopping – for cyclists are on the devil’s errand and have no time to stop – and so you are not well disposed to them.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ you say. Perhaps you say it with more forthrightness than the cyclist – than any cyclist, puffed up with territorial aggression and an inflated sense of rectitude – can tolerate. But you are an Asperger’s sufferer and don’t always get your tone right. Not that that should matter. I am not an Asperger’s sufferer and never get my tone right with cyclists. ‘Get off the fucking pavement,’ I might well have said. Which you could argue is asking for trouble, though it’s no more asking for trouble than cycling on the fucking pavement. You get punched in the face, anyway, whoever you are and whatever you suffer from, not by the cyclist himself but by his friend. Call that loyalty.

  The punch fells you; your head hits the pavement and you die. So what do you call that?

  The judge called it ‘wanting to cause some injury’. That’s as opposed to ‘wanting to cause grievous bodily harm’. Had the assailant intended the latter, Judge Cutler explained, the charge would have been murder. So it was lucky that he hadn’t. Intended grievous bodily harm, that is. ‘Lucky’ is the judge’s word. Lucky he’d only wanted to cause injury. ‘Some’ injury – unspecified. Gentle injury, maybe. Non-injurious injury. As though to emphasise how lucky he is, the sentence handed down to him is four years, before the usual deductions. So let’s call that two. From which the only possible lesson we can draw is that things go worse for you if you tell off a cyclist than if you punch someone in the face and kill him.

  Look, as Australians say. Look, I know it’s no picnic being a judge. Adjudicating between someone else’s spur-of-the-moment intentions can’t be easy at the best of times, but when you’ve got to make such fine distinctions – between degrees of intended injury: a little bit of injury, a medium amount of injury, a heap of injury – you need moral, psychological, intuitive and mind-reading skills beyond the common. You need to be Moses, Jesus, Freud, Dostoevsky, George Eliot and Derren Brown rolled into one, and even they might have trembled before such a task.

  So here’s a suggestion. Why don’t we just agree that punching someone in the face, whatever you intend by it and regardless of the fate of the person you’ve punched, is an act of barbarity for which you will be punished in a manner commensurate with the vileness of the offence and our utter abhorrence of it? Let’s say ten years minimum. I won’t complain if someone else says twenty.

  I don’t know about you, reader, but I have never been able to punch a person in the face. Maybe it’s cowardice that’s stopped me: a fear of being punched in the face back. But it’s also squeamishness. And what’s squeamishness but the outward form of an imaginative, not to say educated, reluctance? I’m talking about something more specific than wanting to cause pain. As a boy I wrestled in the school playground often enough and wasn’t above administering Chinese burns or baby headlocks. ‘Submit?’ I used to love asking. ‘Submit yet?’ Though the answer was invariably a shake of the head. But a punch in the face is another thing again. Cracking bone against bone, breaking flesh, causing blood to flow, smashing into eyes and mouth – not to feel the horror and the sadness of it in advance, not to anticipate another’s pain and foretell your own revulsion, is itself a mark of inhumanity, and that’s before you go ahead and do it. The face, reader! That subtle and most delicate tracery of expression, the mirror of our feelings, the register of our fears and sorrows, the place from which we look out and make connection, even with our assailant. You don’t touch it, that’s what the law should say. Go near it with your fists and it matters not a jot whether you intend to cause ‘grievous bodily harm’. It is itself an act of grievous bodily harm – and grievous spiritual harm to boot – regardless of consequences.

  Judge Cutler is reputed to be a religious man who openly rejoices in his power to show leniency, as though leniency were a virtue in itself. But leniency is creditable only where it is appropriate. To be Christian is to know what’s sacred. At the heart of Judaeo-Christian ethics is the inviolability of the human person, made in the image of its creator, and we don’t have to believe in that creator to understand the holiness of the concept. Lose that and we lose the wherewithal to feel outraged by brutality. If we live in an age inured to daily acts of ferocity, that is in no so small measure the fault of those who think it’s liberal, religious, humane or somehow cute not to cry out against them.

  We make monsters out of our cruelty, but we make them out of our indulgence just as well. These things of darkness, Judge Cutler, we must acknowledge ours. And that’s not a plea for leniency.

  Offence is sacred

  Anybody know what’s happened to the petition to boycott the film Zoolander 2 prior to its release on account of Benedict Cumberbatch’s role in it as ‘the biggest androgynous supermodel in the world’? I went away, a few weeks ago, just as the petition was gathering traction, and now I’m back the tumult seems to have subsided.

  That’s not a complaint. I wish neither Cumberbatch nor the film ill. I just don’t like not being up to speed in these matters. If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.

  The newspapers could be of more assistance in keeping us abreast of the progress of those witch-hunts which have become the defining characteristic of our age. Do you remember The Times when it was the organ of the establishment and so big you could read it naked in your club and not upset whoever was breakfasting at the next table? Somewhere very prominent – I might be wrong in imagining it was the front page – it used to carry a Court Circular which informed you not just of the comings and goings of royal personages and their footmen, but the visits of unsuitable foreign dignitaries and the wild doings of debutantes. Now it’s tucked away where you can’t find it. So much for the age we live in.

  Well, what I propose is a version of the Court
Circular, prominently positioned as in the good old days, listing the latest bans and boycotts: who is snubbing whom and why, the day’s petitions to expel a politician from office, remove a boxer from contention as sports personality of the year, whatever a sports personality is, keep an American presidential hopeful out, stop the showing of a film because Benedict Cumberbatch disrespects a transgender supermodel in it and therefore, by illegitimate implication, disrespects all transgender supermodels.

  A sort of rolling trolling diary is what I envisage, detailing every person currently suffering harassment and abuse for entertaining views contrary to whatever they shouldn’t be contrary to. That way we would know at a glance who the nation’s villains are without having to go hunting for their names. And then, maybe a list of the people doing the harrying so we would know at a glance who the nation’s fools are.

  Cumberbatch must be pondering the fickle nature of reputation. Only a few weeks ago, just moments after flights of angels had sung his Hamlet to his final sleep, he was haranguing audiences about Syrian refugees. ‘Fuck the politicians,’ he had declared, to rapturous applause.

  Theatre audiences love it when you throw them a fuck out of character. Throw a good cause after it and they are yours forever. And in the spring he had been a petitioner himself, calling to overturn verdicts of gross indecency passed on homosexual men in those dark days when all human sexuality but the boring sort was illegal. Another unimpeachably good cause. And yet within a year, let me not think on’t. Hero to zero within a little year.