Galileo was a close reader, too, of the Greek philosophers, Philolaus in particular, who had argued that the earth revolved around the centre of the universe, imagined as a central fire. He combined, in other words, his sense of the new science’s potential, with close reading and nuanced interpretation of biblical scripture and ancient philosophy alike.
He taught old things a new way because he was riven by the contradictions of his own age. The trial and the recantation, the life under house arrest, all of these came about because something in those contradictions singled Galileo out as the one who must be made an example of. But he himself was not immune from what seems so paradoxical to us about that age. That is why his example, his bravery, retain their fascination. That is why he is the dissenter who still matters.
A WINTER RENTAL
Portland extends four miles out into the English Channel. A graduate of no fixed abode, I caught a bus onto ‘the island’ one cold night at the end of 1991. In the one-bedroom stone cottage which I found there, I was going to write about the collapse of Communism as I’d witnessed it. I wanted to set down my thoughts, now that the threat of nuclear war was past, about what that threat had meant while I was growing up with it and what its withdrawal meant now. The theme was too abstract and I was much too churned up by all the aftermath to get any perspective on it. The Soviet Union had just gone and Yugoslavia was about to blow. Iraq had already happened. Even as I tried to write, I could feel my idea being superseded by events. It was something else that captured my attention that winter.
I knew I was supposed to be ‘getting into the media’. That, of course, is what an arts degree from a top university is for. Something about my recent experiences seemed the obvious place to start. But having travelled and worked in formerly communist countries, I’d noted how few of Eastern Europe’s dissidents were journalists. Partly that was because the media under Communism was state-run and therefore simply not available as an outlet for the more scrupulous kind of writer.
So it was to philosophers and novelists, to playwrights and scholars and poets that you had to go, if you wanted to find out what the opponents of Communism had actually been saying. And I was haunted, as I read, by a new and uneasy feeling. One consequence of the collapse of the Berlin Wall was that the surface area of my ignorance had just doubled in size. I wonder if other Western Europeans weren’t similarly daunted to discover suddenly how much they did not know. Isn’t that a part of why some people now resent the easterners so much? They make us feel ignorant. And we are.
The dissidents were already yesterday’s news but there was something about them I was only noticing now and couldn’t get enough of. As long as the Western media paid them any attention it was as ‘our’ advance guard. These had been the risk-takers, or, rather, the guys who were now vindicated through having been on our side all along.
But when you read them, they weren’t like that. They were a varied lot but very much the kind of people who would, in this country, have been dismissed as hippies or ignored as academics. They were intellectuals, misfits. A cottage towards the southern end of Portland was just the sort of place people like that would have ended up here, listening to the wind in a stone chimney. It was true that they had opposed the Communists – for which they had often paid dearly – but their ‘anti-Communism’ was, just as often, highly sceptical of what the West so rapidly set about replacing Communism with.
In Russia, the physicist Andrei Sakharov was already in the 1960s warning about the impact upon the climate of continuing to burn coal. He would become one of the Soviet Union’s fiercest critics. In East Germany the first ‘Environmental Library’ (Umweltbibliothek) was established in 1986 and found a welcome in the basement of a Lutheran parish office in Berlin. It published a magazine called ‘Environmental Pages’ (Umweltblätter), which concerned itself with the impact of burning (and mining) brown coal as well as human rights and global poverty. When the Stasi arrested and detained the people who were running it, this triggered country-wide protests in 1987, the first of the wave of unrest which led ultimately to the mass demonstrations of 1989.
One of the finest expressions of the Czech dissenting spirit, Václav Havel’s ‘Politics and Conscience’, took our collective mistreatment of the environment as its starting point. In Hungary, opposition to the construction of a nuclear power station on the Danube triggered wider protests against Communist rule. The appearance of a WWF calendar in 1989, the so-called ‘otter calendar’, made an impression which is still fondly recalled today. In Bulgaria, the Chernobyl cloud and the Soviet state which had lied about it were central to the growing concern about how the country was governed.
It is surely striking, with hindsight, how concerned these people already were with questions of energy generation. Yet westerners remain largely unaware of the role the environment played in the undermining of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. This isn’t the story the winners chose to tell, although they could have. Indeed, had they chosen to, Europe might not have found itself in its current fix, because it would have set itself more meaningful goals than malls and motorways, more cake forever. It wasn’t the story western companies with their ‘logical growth strategies’ wanted to hear, so nobody heard it. Even easterners rarely seem to be aware of the role environmentalism played in their ‘liberation’.
A writer like Jan Patočka, for example, mentor to Havel and many others, did not oppose Communism with hopes of the ‘other’ system’s victory. He countered it, rather, with the awareness of a thoroughgoing crisis of human identity to which Soviet communism was plainly inadequate. Capitalism, for its part, only swamped what communism stifled. Each might loudly proclaim its superiority and each had armed itself to the teeth in its own defence. To this my surroundings (Portland was still then home to a Navy base) bore eloquent testimony. But neither system was able to resolve that deeper crisis of human identity of which both were symptoms.
Dissidents of this kind were sceptical from the start, in other words, about the ‘free market’. Their message, in so far as they had one, was less Coca-Cola® than a plague o’ both your houses. After their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Russians had hoped to stifle further unrest by introducing their own cut-price version of consumerism, so the blandishments of bad TV and the rest were not entirely new. For some the western ‘package’ – elections every four or five years plus cool stuff for the lucky ones and entertainment for everybody – was arguably worse than Communism. All that package did was disguise the underlying crisis more efficiently.
But what intrigued me most was that wars, for Patočka, were no longer discrete events with a beginning and an end. ‘The contempt for life, the same poisons of suspicion, slander and demagoguery spread everywhere’ and are deployed, just as they are in war, ‘in order to drive [the enemy] to an inner collapse serving one’s own interests.’ War, as he put it, ‘has insidiously changed form without coming to an end.’ Ten thousand terrible films attest to our helpless fascination with it. But our everyday lives, too, he argued, have been recreated in the image of a ‘savage liberty’. The single-minded pursuit of one’s own interests, together with the deliberate undermining of anyone who is in the way – these are expressions of the same principle. These qualities are what we truly admire in people and our culture of consumption no longer makes any effort to conceal it.
The Centimetric Early Warning Radar Station was built next to one of Portland’s prisons in the 1950s. It was designed to track incoming missiles and the guardhouse was built in local stone in an effort to disguise the whole facility as a kind of posh bungalow. The control room, seventy feet below the surface, was reached by a lift. Those tarmac oblongs all around are long-vacant radar plinths. Missile technology moved on and the station was obsolete within a few years. By the time I got there the area was being used to train the dogs which patrol military airfields and other installations.
The Cold War might be over, but if peace had broken out you would hardly have guessed it o
n Portland. Military helicopters descending into HMS Osprey swung in over Chesil Beach as alarmingly low as ever. The concrete stanchions and wire fencing around the Admiralty research facilities remained firmly in place. Submarines and warships went on arriving and departing.
So did wars not really end anymore? Was Patočka right? On one ramble, I happened upon the Naval cemetery and noticed how many of the headstones had been set up not during conflicts but in the intervals between them. Accidents or deaths from injuries received in wartime, I supposed, and left it at that.
But I know now others shared the Czech’s intuition about this, and not only to the east. Theodor Adorno, a German émigré in America, had been similarly unconvinced by the end of the Second World War: ‘The idea that after this war life will continue normally or even that culture might be “re-built” … is idiotic … Is it conceivable … that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism?’
For others, the machine which had been built to win in Europe and the Pacific was on such a scale that it would never voluntarily dismantle itself. Paul Goodman in New York suspected as much even before it was over – war, as he put it, was now ‘for the duration’. Of this the Vietnam War seemed to him, as to many other Americans, further confirmation. And the evidence is still accumulating. Current fixations on the Second World War, particularly in Britain and Russia, are surely symptoms of the same condition.
But Patočka was saying both this and something slightly different: that no matter how the system we live under officially describes itself, the military machine is an expression of a deeper destructiveness about modern humans, both in relation to each other and to the world around them. ‘Peace’, as we understand it, based on over-consumption, was for him better described as ‘demobilisation’, because it can only issue in further wars over the resources which make that consumption possible. The war is for the duration because our common war against the earth never lets up.
Portland was not short on confirmations of this pessimistic theory. The top of the island is a vast messy workshop, a landscape of spoil-heaps and back-fill and stock-piled blocks. Much of its surface is a jumble of loose rubble terraces, bulldozed into position once the valuable underlying ‘freestone’ has been removed. I remember the siren which eerily preceded the sound of blasting back then. This place was plenty sombre enough for a twenty-something with a lot on his mind.
Much of its coastline is still littered with boulders or rough-cut blocks, among which post-industrial, unemployed-looking foxes still glide gingerly around in the middle of the afternoon. Ravens and falcons scrape some kind of a living amidst the brokenness. I gather the spoil-heaps and abandoned quarries are home to other survivals. Information boards palm this off on the gullible as ‘wildlife’.
My point is you don’t need to travel for this. Our engagement with the natural world right here is war-zone enough, all be it for a different kind of correspondent. You do need to know some background for this one, but then that is true of any conflict. It is through centuries of furnishing the official culture with what it required that this island has been steadily degraded.
By later standards, the demands of that culture started out reasonable. For James I’s Banqueting Hall, in central London (to replace the hall in which The Tempest was first performed) a thousand tonnes of freestone were required. For St Paul’s, begun fifty years later, fifty further years were required to build it and fifty thousand tonnes of stone. The world is still admiring the result. One of the west towers was designed to house a giant telescope while the cathedral was under construction.
Two hundred years on, Victorian convicts cut and lifted five million tonnes for Portland Harbour’s breakwater. From tea rooms nearby a better class of person could watch them work. They built what was then the largest artificial harbour in the world, for what was then the largest navy in the world. Convicts built the Verne, too, the prison which still overlooks that harbour. The Navy left in 1999 and the prison is now the United Kingdom’s second largest Immigration Return Centre. Its current inmates are kept in cells which look out onto walls and barbed wire.
I still visit Portland often and was there again only recently. Perhaps the more significant part of anyone’s twenties is passed in sheer bafflement: I still find the island a useful place to put my troubles in some perspective. Take a close interest in any place over time and it will slowly begin to furnish you with answers. Though the answers, when they come, may well take the form of further questions.
The writers who brought me further news, that winter, about how little I knew, were sometimes bleak to the point of debilitating. On the face of things such a disturbed landscape might reinforce this outlook. But after all the National Gallery and the headquarters of the UN are also built of this stuff. How bereft of a language are we? Are we really unable to see the moral distinction between a phoney bungalow with a Doomsday machine in the basement and a St Paul’s Cathedral built to double as an observatory? Nothing to choose between an Immigration Return Centre built by convicts and the UN? What this island has given us is not just an excellent product in search of a market, or a scene of desolation, but a language and different ways to speak it, some more truthful than others.
My most recent visit to Portland is relevant in a way. In summer, you can swim off the rocky ledges along its south-eastern edge and that is what the owners of the nearby beach huts like to do. Recently they were notified by a formal letter that a permission granted in 1951 to quarry this part of the island was still active. A meeting was immediately called in a village hall and a group was formed to fight for this coastal strip.
The landscape under threat lines the approach road to the Bill, at Portland’s southernmost tip. Hundreds of thousands of people travel that road each year. What they arrive at, after the war zone of the island’s top end, is a bird observatory and its garden set in a landscape of fields with some beach huts.
It’s true that London, Coventry, Southampton and Exeter were all rebuilt after the war using Portland stone. But more than sixty years on from that original permission, the proposal to clear up on this farthest extremity of the island feels different. I asked a couple of locals from the protest group if there were any misgivings at the time about the quantity of stone removed during the 1950s and 1960s. ‘Nobody worried about things running out in those days.’
No. Maybe such scenery felt dispensable in 1950. That it no longer does is telling us something. But what? Or how do we answer those larger questions in the language of this particular place, this particular argument?
We might start by recalling earlier occasions on which our cities have had favours to ask of this long-suffering landscape. We might recall that Robert Hooke, as surveyor after the Great Fire, was appointed to check the stone arriving in London for the city’s reconstruction. Hooke was a new kind of explorer, and in his line one of the greatest. He never left the country but performed instead prodigious feats of noticing what was there and always had been. He noticed cell structure in plants. He noticed that about 20 per cent of air seemed to be made of something combustible, though it was not yet called oxygen.
He noticed the ammonites arriving in stone shipped from Portland. They were so large and so unlike any living creatures, that they must, he thought, be the remains of a species ‘totally destroyed and annihilated’. Two centuries before Darwin, in other words, Hooke deduced from Portland stone that species are not permanent.
Hooke was an astronomer, too. His Monument to the Great Fire of London was designed to be a giant telescope and the Greenwich Observatory was also his work. We are surely justified in arguing that, both through the amazing inferences he drew from its fossils and the effects he achieved with it as a building material, Hooke’s use of Portland stone was, in the deepest sense, both reasoned and imaginative.
And what of our own use of this resource? Are we for uprooting every last corner of this landscape, because a post-war permission says we can? Can w
e still put this island and its stone to reasoned and imaginative use, or is it too late for that?
It isn’t too late. The Mass Extinction Monitoring Observatory (MEMO), scheduled for construction at the top of the island’s West Cliff, obtained planning permission and has an architect’s design. It was designed as a tribute to what Hooke so precociously noticed. Its sombre, spiralling form, modelled on that of a locally abundant fossil, would comprise an inclined walkway, lined with sculptures, wrapped around a giant central exhibition space or auditorium.
Visitors would learn here to situate humankind in the longer story of life’s emergence on this planet. They would leave with a deepened sense of our collective responsibility for the rate at which species and habitats are now disappearing. They would be encouraged to search for ways of developing beyond our past destructiveness, towards each other and the planet. MEMO, in short, would advocate just the kind of new planetary awareness we need. It would be the realisation of what dissidents east and west once called for separately and must now insist upon everywhere.
Theodor Adorno once analysed the press coverage of a dinosaur fossil’s discovery in Utah. He speculated that our fascination with dinosaurs was not at all the harmless entertainment it is marketed as, on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast or anywhere else. Their true but unconscious meaning for us, he argued, was a ‘collective projection’ of the monstrous forces at work in the present world. People were using films and news stories about dinosaurs, he thought, to prepare themselves and their children, through these ‘gigantic images’, for the terrors of our own world. But he saw something else too being expressed in the way we recreate these long-extinct animals. ‘The desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life,’ he wrote.
The Paradoxal Compass Page 7
