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TEST :
14
May 26
This
is written mostly to test my uploading skills of text and image.
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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!
