The art of conflict

Before and through it all, there is this. The arts remain: adamantine and irreplaceable; flexible as a contortionist; subversive as underground intelligence; impossible to paraphrase; resistant to reduction or redaction to populism; abused by presentation as sources of monetary profit.

The opposite of “soft diplomacy”: ungoverned by bureaucracy. Peoples of certain nations, certain cultures, languages, deep histories, assume and understand their value. Others ignore, trivialise or try to commercialise it. Some try actively to banish or destroy it. Such are the components of money control.

We’re seeing the results of this enemy’s victories every day: the Earth as consumable commodity. Control money, control people. It follows on. The enemy is thus identified. Governments of exploitation. Bureaucracies of state control. The arts are obstacles standing in their way.

Here in Scotland, we’ve moved on from those horrific days of the Thatcher government in the 1980s, when her buttoned, prim-lipped myrmidons and minions still considered Scotland a component part of the United Kingdom, and the arts (however narrowly defined) as a luxury that strengthened their power. In the 2020s, their braying counterparts have neither belief nor understanding of Scotland as a living culture at all. In fact, they have no perceptible sense of any cultural value whatever.

As nations independent in Europe: independent, interactive and between, the prospect arises: militant neutrality, enhancing the potential to de-escalate the innate human tendency towards self-destruction. But money made through the military complex of weaponry or the mental debasement of media is everywhere: sensibly repulsive, horribly effective and mortally dangerous. The former will tear your bodies apart, the latter will condition them for it. Europe stands between more than one hard place, more than one unstoppable force, more than one immovable object.

But these come to a stop. And will begin to move. Only in the balances and movements that all the arts require and deploy can whatever ways forward there are, be found.

One nation is never enough. Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England, and all the archipelagic identities known, every nation on Earth, are always and all in relation to each other. Scotland independent sends England back to its virtues: Blake, Turner, George Eliot, Vaughan Williams, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Tom Raworth, come quickly to mind. Deep England has so many layers, and all of them transparent to the trained searching eye. “Let me be clear” and “I have been clear” are politicians’ evasion of such clarity, assertions and confessions of their thickness and opacity.

6 CULTURE: It is only through the rediscovery and re-application of cultural value that the necessary convergence of culture, economics and politics can be realised. The second rules; the third serves the second; the first is the abused, neglected child. To keep separate political and economic priorities from cultural priorities diminishes each and all to the point of destruction.

Traditional Marxist understanding is that economics is the basis for superstructure. On this understanding politics proceeds, between the polarities of, on the one hand, individual greed and class privilege, and, on the other, communal benefit and social wellbeing.

Culture proposes a basis different from economics but complementary to it, not separate from it. The ideological basis of culture is twofold: language and geography. By language I mean all forms of communicating meaning, literally languages in speech and writing but also all the different arts and social behaviours in relation with them.

By geography I mean terrain, earth and sea, climate and conditions of the daily cosmic experience, whether you live in a city, town, or village, a desert or a forest, a landlocked nation or an archipelago, on a hill or by a riverside, and in whatever tropic or latitude, and surrounded by whatever sea or ocean.

Geography gives you location, which is static and normally absolute, at least for a lifetime or more. Its expansion is territorial and fascist (that is, based in the

over-rule of strength, not intelligence). Language gives you movement, exchange and narrative. We make stories and pass them around. This involves both power and sympathy. Geography is vertical history, back beyond humanity to fossils and geology and further yet, which itself is narrative. Fourteen feet beneath St Vincent Street: the Carboniferous.

Language has its definitions too, hierarchies of power, in political configurations, nationalisms, imperialisms. Each overlaps the other, different, not separate. Language and geography:

co-ordinates of culture. Without such co-ordinates, conditions of culture, awareness, without such values, politics are nothing. And without politics, economics has neither balance nor compass. There is no touching, and only one direction.

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7 ARTS FOR OUR ERA? There are paintings such as Goya’s “The Colossus”, Picasso’s “Guernica”. Or novels such as James Hogg’s The Three Perils of Woman, women and children dying in the snow after Culloden. Poems such as George Mackay Brown’s “Uranium” (the early version, that registers “the magnificent door of fire”: Armageddon’s horrible attraction).

There is music: try the third movement of Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony for the sound of war and that same symphony’s ending for a prayer for peace; Prokofiev’s “The Enemy God and the Dance of the Spirits of Darkness” from his Scythian Suite; John Blackwood McEwen’s String Quartet No.7, “Threnody” (1916); Cecil Coles’s “Cortège”; Bela Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle; Ronald Center’s Dona Nobis Pacem.

And there is sculpture, such as Will MacLean’s Lewis Land Monuments, the arts of resistance, endurance and survival. There are plays, such Ewan MacColl’s Uranium 235, which I talked about in

The National a few months ago (What has become of the Labour Movement that inspired great working-class plays?” October 4, 2021).

Or Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: maybe that’s the one. The Trojan War, both sides corrupt from top to toe, from head to tail, not one single sympathetic character, nor even one likeable one. Except, perhaps, Cressida – but no, Shakespeare gives you nothing about her to feel sympathy for, other than vulnerability.

Ulysses’s famous speech on “Reason” was for generations quoted as an ideal of rational balance, a reliable co-ordinate point of sanity in a world of chaos and bias. But read it again. It’s all its speaker’s rhetoric, uttered for his benefit alone, and it’s all, ultimately, fatuous, self-satisfied, self-ennobling blah.

Ulysses is as vile as all the others. The circumstance of this war and everyone engaged in it is rotten and its rottenness is embodied most of all in Pandarus, the arranger of liaisons between interested parties, attracted to each other by lust or possible profit. He’s the man who gives us our word “pandar”: a trader in flesh, let’s say arms dealers aiming for profit from cannon-fodder, human lives; let’s say child molesters; let’s say those who condone them; let’s say all those who vote for them. Traders in flesh. Shakespeare even gives him the play’s farewell speech:

Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths:

“As many as be here of Pandar’s hall,

Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;

Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,

Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.”

Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,

Some two months hence my will shall here be made.

It should be now, but that my fear is this,

Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.

Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

And at that time, bequeath you my diseases.

Exit. Finis. Blackout. Endit. What diseases are we leaving behind us? Nuclear poison in the earth. Chemical residues permeating substrata. Extinctions of species and languages. Literal defecation in rivers and streams. Fracking, oil, gas, carbon. Bad beliefs. Sickening faiths. The “world-beating” behaviour of those egregious creatures in public office, in full view.

Why would you want to keep the lights on? To read what? Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s most wonderful depiction of a world entirely caught up in its own systemic corruption and mortal human failure. Ostensibly set in the Trojan War. What a vision of London it gives us! And further.

“Not just for an age but for all time,” said that Scotsman by descent, Ben Jonson, of Shakespeare. He was wrong. In particular ages, Shakespeare has been written out by the prevailing culture, as in

18th-century England, or rather, the age of the European Enlightenment, which couldn’t understand or learn from what he shows us tragedy means: the most terrible ending of human potential. Sometimes the culture itself stops certain things from happening. Often, when they’re needed most. So in fact, Jonson was right. Let me correct myself. Thus, Troilus and Cressida ...

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8 THE EXCEPTION: I’m wrong. I must correct myself again. There is one character in Troilus and Cressida who survives the play’s devastations. Here’s the poem I wrote about him, drawing on AP Rossiter’s great study of Shakespearean tragedy, Angel with Horns (1961).

Antenor

for Marshall Walker

When I was told once, long ago, to write an essay on

“The character in Shakespeare you’d most like to talk to”

I’d never heard of Antenor. Now, he’d be my man. Perhaps

You haven’t noticed him? Never mind. You will,

Next time you read the play. Five times he enters, maybe six.

And five times he goes out, as silent as he came.

He never speaks a line. He never utters a word.

And when the others talk of him, they talk as if he isn’t there.

And he doesn’t object.

I see him in a dark prophetic outline:

The profile of a good man caught in war.

He didn’t choose the world he’s in,

And can’t get out or reach beyond its limits.

Nor is he scandalized. No protest would be adequate, he knows.

He simply will not use his voice

When speech is so corrupted.

He is a strong and silent man.

Shakespeare’s only one.