WEBSITE
TEST
: 27
March 24
This
is written mostly to test my uploading skills of
text and image.
*************************************
THE
HARDEST QUESTION
WHO CAN SAY?
For curious and daring civilians, mortals all, the hard – perhaps
hardest - problem is What
is
consciousness? Tom
Stoppard, the
greatest living dramatist of ideas, dared to tackle it in a play.
Being far less brainy
than him, I will not be trying to: but I will note that it is a
problem
subordinate to how do eukaryotic cells acquire/become life-force?
Yet, for me, it is still not the hardest question. This is surely the
one I chose above. It was perfectly formulated by Socrates and then Christ : but it has for millennia mostly
remained missing
from religion and philosophy. And, though one would expect it to be
central to
the talking cure, it is most disgracefully missing there too. It is
embedded in
the perfect answer in one of the most honest songs ever written by a
man in any
culture, MacCartney & Lennon’s Getting Better.
You gave me the word, I finally heard
I'm doing the best that I can.
So, Reader: an easier
question –
on which word(s) should the stress fall. Like everyone else, I guess,
I
initially focussed on the word
:
and
wondered what it was and how new and differently complicated. But a
moment’s
reflection, even after thirty years, shows one – from the almost
immediately
following word finally – that
the
narrator is declaring he has been aware of the ordinary common word(s)
for ages : with the implication that many
other people – before
the women addressed in the song – have said, if not quite given, the word to him. It is an ordinary,
psychological fact and
thus a common literary trope, to distinguish mere physical effect and
intentional attention : sounds go in but
meaning are
ignored or twisted. The Fabs had already played beautifully with these
ideas
with respect to the senses in And Your Bird Can Sing on the
previous LP Revolver.
The narrator confesses to his broken and damaged and damaged past
: when he surely heard the words many times.
I
used to get mad at my school (No I can't complain)
The teachers who taught me weren't cool (No I can't complain)
You're holding me down (Oh), turning me round (Oh)
Filling me up with your rules (Foolish rules)
[Picture
ref:https://tribune.com.pk/article/48736/]
Because, The Beatles, unlike the sublime soloist Dylan, were always a
group,
counterpoint lyrics were always available to them: complicating
perspectives.
The Chorus famously has the line A little
better
all the time followed by (It
can't get
no worse). So even
the explanation
of troublesome school-days admits faults and failings on both sides
: if the modal verb can’t
means without reason rather than without power. But
no
extenuation is offered for the past-school misogyny.
I
used to be
cruel to my woman
I
beat her
and kept her apart from the things that she loved
Man
I was mean ...
What
is
fantastically honest about this verse is that it acknowledges that
psychologically abuse can be more painful and destructive than
physical
violence. To admit this, through the artistic distance of a narrator,
is one
thing: but it is another to admit the biographical connection, as
Lennon also
honourably did in the Playboy interview:
"I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically — any woman. I
was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and
I hit
women...That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the
most violent
people who go for love and peace.” (1980)
Controlling
men
prevent women not only from meeting other people but also enjoying the
exercise
of their own talents, alone as well as with others. The societal,
rather than
merely individual, expression of this is of course sex discrimination
in
education, work, sport, military, religion... I don’t know if it was
Lennon or
Yoko who minted the line Woman is the
nigger of the
world.
There
is
goodwill in it to both groups under oppression but it is too confused.
Help! Yes you! No, I won’t be told! Never by you! I won’t be given! I won’t be helped! But Help!
It
is
surprising, the number of middle-aged, even elderly, men and
women, that one
meets, who make these desperate speeches of absolute ambivalence.
Having felt cursed by words in childhood by parents and teachers and divines, they arrive at young adulthood absolutely determined
that never again will another human-being be able
to use words to harm them. But alas, this defence hardens into
rejecting all
speakers of kind words.
NO
ONE
CAN SAY! becomes their theory :
not even the kind strangers, especially not the
ones they themselves have has asked for help.
Who
the fuck are you! is
always ready in their mouths.
It
is a tone I have often heard from someone who was begging for rescue a
moment
earlier.
Of
course
it is not the what-words, or any kind of cleverness or originality,
that
is the difficulty.
No one has expressed this better than Freud : all kindness and understanding, let alone any counsel, becomes Menu cards in a famine!
