. . . The gross materialist may try to approach the anti-material worlds by endeavouring with spaceships, satellites, rockets, etc., which he throws into outer space, but by such means he cannot even approach the material planets in the higher regions of the material sky, and what to speak of those planets situated in the anti-material sky, which is far beyond the material universe . . . Master yogis who control the anti-material particle within the material body by practice of mystic powers can give up their material bodies at will at any given moment and can thus enter the anti-material worlds through a specific thoroughfare which connects the material and anti-material worlds.
This is a sad piece of writing; barely literate twaddle in which the jargon of popular science is treated with a superstitious reverence. Reading it, one suffocates in the appalling intellectual constriction of its vision of the world, and senses, too, in its ramshackle and reduced vocabulary and grammar, some of the sheer difficulty which its intended audience must experience when they try to think about the world at all. (A more unpleasant, because more grandly commercialised version of the same style, may be found in the work of L. Ron Hubbard and the Scientologists – another group of urban evangelists who operate in London from a shop in the Tottenham Court Road, and have had some success in converting people off the streets of the city.) The liberation of spirit which it purports to offer is a liberation into chains; it drops one into a mental abyss in which the simplest of ideas, the most elementary of rational processes, is impossibly large, foreign and unwieldy.
But when the swami writes of a ‘thoroughfare’, he indicates a route for believers which goes not so much to the stars as through the city streets. For the devotee, London becomes legible by being relegated to a plane of inferior consciousness. It turns into a chimera: the ‘material’ city is there to be transcended by homemade mysticism and holy gobbledygook. The chanting, the amazing dress, the razored skulls of these young men are there as a fierce announcement – they have seen through the illusory life of shops and automobiles; for them, the city we inhabit does not exist. In their city, the stars are under their feet, and the cosmos has blacked-out Bourne and Hollingsworth; they process through the chimerical void to the unearthly tinkling of their tambourines.
Krishna Consciousness presents its ideas as uniquely expensive commodities: but they are freely available to anyone who is prepared to pay for them with self-abasement, discipline, and by wearing the proud stigmata of robes and tonsure. One of the most significant features of the movement is the way in which it embraces the caste system; it promises the status of a brahmana to the believer. ‘The caste system’, writes the swami, ‘is very scientific’; but the castes of which he writes are fundamentally different from real castes in that anybody may elect himself to the caste which he considers himself fit to belong to. We are instructed to search our hearts for signs of ‘spiritual advancement’, and if we find ourselves qualified, then, automatically, we become Brahmins. Status is a matter not of external circumstances but of the deliberate exercise of will over consciousness. It is inside our heads that we are aristocrats; the impersonal world, represented by the judgments and deferences of society at large, is, in the rhetoric of Krishna Consciousness, an irrelevant delusion.
It might be consoling to see the beliefs of the Krishna people as merely grotesque or dotty – the extreme responses of faddish, under-educated, under-employed young people to the unassimilable scatter of the city. But there is something more to them than that. Every western metropolis is at present swarming with bands of devotees, some flying political colours, some resurrecting or inventing exotic religions, some committed to eccentric hobbies and crazes. Some are as harmless as the radio-controlled model glider enthusiasts who foregather every Saturday on a corner of Richmond Park, cocooned from public inquisitiveness by their impressive technicalities, their talk of thermals and wavelengths and launching-ropes, mightily oblivious of the dogs and children who scamper among their balsa wood aeroplanes. They have a weekend world of their own, a private city which is invisible to the uninitiated. But at the other extreme, there are the revolutionary cells, and gangs like the Envies; people who have – like the members of the Hare Krishna Temple – concocted elaborate philosophies to prove that the city is a bead-curtain of illusion. The convicted conspirators of the English ‘Angry Brigade’, who had been accused of planting bombs in a number of public institutions and in the London house of a cabinet minister, subscribed to the theories of the Paris Situationists – who speak of the ‘spectacle’ or ‘facade’ of capitalism, and of revolution as imagination liberated from hierarchical modes of thought and behaviour. There can surely be no doubt that the unreality of the city, its prolixity and illegibility, its capacity to exceed all the imaginative shapes we try to impose upon it, enables its citizens to treat it with a terrifying arbitrariness. Georg Simmel, the nineteenth-century German sociologist, identified the characteristic urban habit of mind as blasé, Engels saw the city’s major evil in the lack of curiosity shown by members of the crowd for each other. When the city becomes a mere facade, when Oxford Street ceases to exist, when violence can be casually inflicted by one metropolitan group upon another, then realism – a respect for detail, objects, independent and various lives – becomes the most pressing of all necessities.
At the Radha Krishna temple near the British Museum in Bloomsbury, a pale communard with a Glaswegian accent pointed to a man with a droopy moustache who was sitting next to me. ‘Telex operator, right?’ said the communard. The man stopped turning the pages of Krishna Consciousness: the Topmost Yoga System, and nodded slowly, reverently. ‘To me’, said the communard, ‘he is pure consciousness. We do not see a person’s job, or his clothes, or his house and family. We see his soul.’ The man with the soul looked grateful; few other telex operators can visit distant planets or turn, like magic pumpkins, into Brahmins, the ultimate aristocrats of the world-soul. He was leaving the street outside far behind; its dense puzzles, its intricate social networks, its inequalities, its confusion of noises and smells, were, he had learned, just dull impediments from which he could liberate himself at a blink.
Such subjective inspirational clairvoyance is a hallmark of these isolated groups within the city. It is shared by Weathermen, Diggers, Sufists, Envies, by moralistic thugs and by placid vegetarian contemplatives. Each holds an idea, an idiom and a uniform in common; and each believes that the city is a ‘facade’, easily transcended by an act of will, a trick of the mind, or the lit fuse of a bomb. The word ‘consciousness’, whether employed by the revolutionary or the religiomane, is a shorthand-notation: it conveys the notion that the intuitive self might actually come to replace the edifice of society – that the world on the ground might be moulded into the shape of a totalitarian world inside the head.
It is a dangerous kind of dreaming, this solemn, simple mentalism. It releases the dreamer into a domain of total possibility in which his reality is as inventive, psychotic or banal as his own imagination. He imagines himself a Brahmin . . . he is a Brahmin. If a toolmaker’s apprentice from West Ham wants to turn into an Asian mystic, he may do so simply by rigging himself out in the appropriate uniform and chanting the prescribed abracadabra. If one shifts from group to group, one watches London dissolving; from a paddy field of disembodied souls, to a systematic capitalist conspiracy of banks, police stations, court-houses and monuments, to a range of Cuban hills where fellow guerrillas squat in waiting wearing patched jeans and ex-WD windcheaters, to the gothic, magical city of signs prophesied in the writings of Nostradamus.
In a television interview transmitted the day after her conviction in the ‘Angry Brigade’ trial in 1972, Anna Mendelson talked in what is increasingly becoming a characteristic idiom of our time; a style in which familiar words are pronounced as if they were components of an arcane code. She spoke distractedly in a dream-monotone: phrases like ‘working class’, ‘conspiracy’, ‘change of consciousness’ came out rounded as pebbles, but what they meant to me was cle
arly not what they meant to her. When she was asked whether the bombings had had any tangible effect on the progress of the revolution in England, she stared mildly, apparently incomprehendingly at her interviewer and said ‘I suppose they must have . . . yes . . . they must have, mustn’t they . . .’ so vaguely that one felt that one had trespassed illicitly over the far side of her dream.
These intense, private groups, compacted around a core of symbolic objects and ideas, are very serious symptoms of a metropolitan condition. They may or may not be politically important in themselves; and when they take a religious turn they may indicate nothing about the spiritual awakening which fond members of the clerisy enjoy forecasting. But the club, the clique, the cell, the commune, the code are proliferating forms in the city. Huddled, defensive, profoundly complacent in their indifference or hostility to the rest of the city, they are the foxholes for all those whom the city has isolated, for whom no larger reality is habitable. Mayhew saw the illegible mass of the nineteenth-century city as a network of tight castes, each one operating independently of the others and of society at large. Money, education and social welfare provisions have largely released the castes of the modern city from thraldom to their occupations. Just as the poor can render themselves invisible in cheap fashion-styled clothes so they can acquire ideas and identities of a much wilder and grander kind than could Mayhew’s costermongers and mudlarks. In our city, it is easy to drift into a privacy of symbols, a domain of subjective illusions made concrete by the fact that two or three people have gathered together to conspire in them.
It is impossible to miss the crackle of tribal hostilities in London and New York today. What is most worrying is the subtlety, narrowness and parochialism with which the lines are drawn. The fierce antagonism between blacks and whites, between haves and have-nots, is tragically comprehensible. What is not so easy to understand is the continual barrage of explosions from wars so small that only the participants can explain which sides are fighting them. Gay News reports vicious factional quarrels between opposed groups of London homosexuals, with smashed typewriters and bloody noses. A party for the opening of the Women’s Lib magazine Spare Rib ended in an internecine brawl. Like the cross-hatching of bitchery which keeps literary coteries (themselves highly developed examples of self-conscious caste groups) alive, the malevolent buzz of city life is a way of marking boundaries of taste, staking out the ever-more-questionable frontier between us and them. People in one postal district despise those in the next; the owner of the baby Renault reproves the driver of the expensive Jensen; the revolutionary dismisses the Buddhist, the Buddhist the revolutionary. It is a war of ideas and epigrams, in which objects are called on to play the parts of ideas, to express the ideologies of their owners; and its local battles are passionately territorial in nature. Each party has its own city, its own version of the self, its own route through that other, endlessly malleable city of fact.
A two-year-old conversation, if that is the word, with the manager of a pop group . . . He and I were about the same age; he smoked a joint of marijuana while he talked. He spoke, since our only purpose was ritual disagreement, with unctuous priestliness; no doubt he would describe my manner as equally odious. But this is my story. His eyes, slow-lidded, were fixed on a spot ahead of him on the ceiling.
‘If you don’t know what I mean, man, it’d be, like, redundant to explain it.’
‘You might condescend to try.’
‘It’s where you’re at. The level of consciousness. What you know, not something to explain. That’s the whole rational hang up . . . like . . . justifications. I can’t tell you what you can’t know.’
‘I thought that was what language was for.’
‘Oh, Jesus, I am light-years ahead of you, you know? Like in experience. Words are shit. You’d only know it if that was where you were at, right?’
His accent was brisk public school, slackened at the edges with Notting Hill Gate-stoned, and his face was cold, fair and beatific. He was merely hardening the boundaries between his caste and mine on the principle that good fences make good neighbours. The exchange was a piece of formal theatre which one might find duplicated – with slightly changed vocabularies – again and again in the modern city. The sound of New York in 1967, so an excited expatriate told me, was Bob Dylan singing with what I thought was quite excessive relish, ‘Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?’
‘Mr Jones’ is a ubiquitous punch bag. Every group in the city seeking self-definition invents him; he is the indifferent, unknowing other, the man in the crowd who never managed to pick himself out, the loser dogging one’s footsteps as a continual reminder of what the city threatens – its anonymity, its conformist anomie, its tacit hostility to all its citizens. To become someone in the city, it is first necessary to affront Mr Jones. He is the recipient of everybody’s messages: the man who envies your car, is suspicious of the revolutionary content of your magazine, throws sidelong glances at your hair and clothes, disbelieves your ideas, stands alone in the street gazing at your housefront. Every coterie assures itself of its own tightness and rightness by excluding him. His incomprehension validates, his dullness is a measure of our own brilliance. Even Thomas Bird despises Mr Jones.
A city life is, in very large part, a life lived through symbols. Possessions – both the hardware of purchasable objects and the software of beliefs and ideas – become precious in exact ratio to their expressiveness, their capacity to define the relationship of the self to the city, and, more especially, of the fellow devotee to the depersonalised outsider or enemy. Perhaps the city forces these strategies upon us, or perhaps we have resorted to them thoughtlessly and unnecessarily. At any rate we have found ourselves living in an elaborate and barely understood system of castes. The intense cliquishness of metropolitan social life, that patchwork quilt of cells, communes and coteries, everywhere provides evidence of a society which has drifted out beyond our conventional means of thinking, talking and feeling about it. The groups I have described exist side by side in a state of ignorance, hostility or indifference to each other. They all command a route through the city, but no common economic necessity nor any system of direct industrial dependence binds them together. There is no special reason for them to unite as a class (and the recent attempts to forge links with the unionised working class, made by cells of young revolutionaries, have been hopelessly unsuccessful). Their possessions, their cult ideas, their arcane codes and jargons, form stockades around each group. The social diversity of the city, which so delighted the eighteenth-century citizen, has, during the course of the twentieth century, multiplied to such an extent, accelerated by the industrial processes which have manufactured its essential symbols, that no overview is possible. London now is not so much an encyclopedia as a maniac’s scrapbook, filled with colourful entries which have no relation to each other, no determining rational or economic scheme, merely a common drive to find an identity, a route, in an environment which is perceived as invincibly impersonal and alien.
The small worlds of the devotees are concrete and self-contained. They have managed to make their dreams real with ornaments, toys and philosophies. They have little to say to those outside their caste, and the boundaries become continuously hardened and more finely drawn. The street-Buddhist, the book-reviewer, and the bandannaed guerrilla are not unrepresentative city men (though their styles of self-advertisement may be more garish than most); but the cities in which they live might as well be separate planets, so little do their individual routes cross one another. Perhaps this freedom to live out a dream of an exclusive community, cosseted by consumables, is the most important freedom that the city offers; it invites a dramatically extended conception of the self, it provides a stage for grand and uninhibited performances. It is also heavily shadowed with loneliness, indifference and the possibility of a pervasive unreality.
SIX
No Fixed Address
The very turmoil of the streets has some
thing repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? . . . And still they crowd by one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
It is as easy to lose other people in a city as it is to mislay one’s umbrella. They are always being carried away with the crowd. When the Victorians looked at London, they saw with some shock that one of its chief evils was the ease with which the individual disappeared on the streets. The work of both local government and social and charitable agencies was made harder by the labyrinthine nature of the metropolis. Here was a place where the thief and the footpad could fade into thin air, where those people most in need of help – the poor, the witless, and the diseased – could render themselves invisible in their trek through successions of furnished rooms, where no-one could keep track of the citizens who strayed from the narrow path of a permanent home and a permanent job. The image of the nomad, employed independently by Mayhew and by Charles and General William Booth, haunts nineteenth-century writing about the city; and nomadism – the vision of a city of aimless and irresponsible wanderers – was seen as just as great a threat to the health of society at large as revolution, destitution and physical disease.
The street-folk whom Mayhew talked to revealed a great deal about the haphazardness of the honeycomb of mid-nineteenth-century London; a structure into which a person might drop, only to fall and fall, going ever further out of touch with his family and friends. There is no trace now of Mayhew’s original questionnaire, but it is clear from the portraits in London Labour and the London Poor that he started each conversation by asking how many relatives each of his informants knew, and how frequently they saw them. The answers added up to a general picture of families that were shrinking drastically in size as the husbands or the children went deeper into the city. The closest relatives of many of Mayhew’s interviewees had already faded into the distance; and the city immigrant – probably illiterate, certainly inadequately equipped with the basic skills needed to trace and communicate with his family across that widened space which the metropolis brought with it – became a nomad, a loner, scratching acquaintances off the street or in the gin-shop. An Irish girl of twenty-two who sold apples told Mayhew: ‘I’m an orphan, Sir, and there’s nobody to care for me but God, glory be to his name! I come to London to join my brother, that had come over and did well, and he sent for me, but when I got here I couldn’t find him in it anyhow.’
Soft City Page 14
