Mad Fools
Those who love and those who hate the powerful are often
blind to their absurdity. It is
only later, when they are in embalmed inside history, that we appreciate just
how silly some of these characters really are: Hitler, Reagan, Thatcher and
Blair recent examples of the pathological idiocy of which leaders are capable.i Each one delusional, and yet all had
their worshippers and disciples, and haters too, their oddity part of the
attraction; for it requires a leap of faith to overcome our common sense suspicions
about the eccentric and strange so as to believe in their extreme even bizarre
messages.
Watching an old programme on the alternative community
Findhornii we are disorientated by its weirdness: the place existing completely outside our
experiences, while its language is one we can hardly understand – do they really mean what they say; are we really supposed to listen to their words literally? Too distant from our life and thoughts
we cannot engage with such ideas; which neither attract nor repel us;
instead, we are mildly curious at a worldview so different from our own. Only if you are inside a community, or
feel threatened by it, can its reality be taken seriously.iii Too odd to compel assent the religion
of Findhorn requires a leap of faith too big from us; we do not even
make the attempt, remaining utterly indifferent to its attractions. Time can also make such long jumps
impossible. If too many years
separate the founder and his cult from ourselves his charisma and
its influence will be erased, until they become a few harmless footnotes in a half-forgotten
century; material only for an academic article, on ecstatic rituals and flour symbolism
in the 13th century, given to the 25th congress on
sub-Lacanian Readings in Religious Orgiastic Practice, held in the anthropology
department of Heidelberg University, seminar room 14C on floor 3 in the Olga
Steinwitz Bau. By now these
communities have lost all their compelling power.
The problem of the mad leader is their normalcy. This seeming normality, coupled with
their big presence, that powerful immediacy, can persuade too many people into
accepting their odd and disorientating worldview, which although recognised as
different is nonetheless regarded as an acceptably rational perspective,
offering prospects for a radical transformation of a political landscape ruined
and in decline. They usually
achieve power in a crisis, when extreme answers seem the only solution; and the
electorate is prepared to take a chance on the unknown. Blair seemed like an ordinary politician
until 911, after which he became a messianic prophet; the moment he should have
been removed from office. However,
only a few noticed that he had lost
his mind, and so the political class continued to treat him as if he were
sane. A disquieting comment
on the gullible passivity of the establishment whose members we expect to
protect us from the dangerously irrational.v
It is the absurdity of the powerful that we are shown in
Muriel Spark’s The
Abbess of Crewe. A convent run on original Benedictine
lines – even the Counter-Reformation is too modern for this place – and which
uses the latest electronic surveillance to monitor its members’
conversations. For those at the
top of the convent’s hierarchy this fusion of the ancient and the modern
appears little more than common sense; a return to the order’s original purity
by enforcing The Rule of St Benedict using the methods of science: medieval
values combined with 20th century technology to produce an antique
strictness, microphones replacing the ear of god, for those who have lost their
compulsive faith. A sly comment on
the secularisation of even the oldest and most enclosed of Christian
institutions.
Of course, such juxtapositions create great incongruity; a
sort of children’s playground where the novelist can enjoy herself playing with
the contrasts between the different centuries; although here they are too wide
to be completely plausible. For
though human nature has remained essentially the same, thus the spiritual
yearnings of our contemporaries who long for the ascetic life are little
different from St Augustine’s, the religious garb that clothes these longings
has changed significantly. To be
successful an allegory must get the tone of these “sartorial” differences
right.
The Abbess of Crewe
is just too crude in its contrasts.
The bolting together of such extreme opposites feels too forced and
mechanical; too human in its conscious construction to produce a sense of
historical reality, which requires a lot of contingency for it to seem like a
living organism. Most of the time
we react to life not create it; our ideas left behind in the library when we
leave the house to work, shop or play.
The novel thus lacks a certain integrity, that recognisable link between
our actions and our self-conscious intellectual thoughts, a unity where the
proportions between them must feel right – the latter little more than an extra
in our daily performances. In trying
to retrieve an essentially dead ideology and apply it through modern gadgetry
this book reads more like fantasy than fable. Muriel Spark is trying to force an idea into our heads… we resist like a bad pupil. For there should be a correspondence
between the nature of a community and the spirit of the times where they are
historically located, which in the early seventies meant more hippy commune than
a Benedictine order with its own control centre.vi Findhorn,
for all its new age weirdness, seems more normal than this abbey in, of all
places, Crewe. For it reflects a
live current of ideas, which existed in the intellectual and social atmosphere
when the place was founded in the early 1960s.
The novel is having fun with Watergate; and where the
parallels are too close we see its weaknesses too clearly – the novel then
looks too thought out and programmatic to be convincing. Nevertheless, at its strongest the
silliness of power is captured; the main protagonists two charismatic but
absurd people who are competing for the vacant abbess’s throne.
Alexandra wins the election by using foul means. She is a powerful woman, and like her
rival, comes from aristocratic stock.
The source of her particular power originates in her willingness to
submit to the ascetic tradition, which she mixes with aestheticism – both herself
and the rooms in which she lives are places of exquisite beauty. She is highly intelligent, although
tellingly that intelligence is limited in scope: to a sort of mystical
philosophy and a receptivity for English poetry. Her analytic intelligence is poor, and living within her own
numinous cloud she is unable to engage with the mundane activities of the
convent, which she leaves to subordinates; who miscalculate badly when
pressurised into acting outside their competence – when asked to commit an
absurdly trivial crime. Towards
the novel’s end, and in some wonderful scenes, Alexandra appears to fall into
madness. Power under pressure is
the cause. She may have remained
sane if she’d been left to her own imagination, but forced to act she applies
her too fabulous ideas onto a reality that cannot easily accept them. So returning the order to its original
Benedictine spirit may just have been possible. But microphones in a convent! Her insanity increases as the journalists arrive, the
Church investigates, and the nuns begin to rebel or leave. In response she creates her own
mythological world to live inside; too far out for anyone but herself. Earlier we had seen the warning signs:
‘In these days,’ the Abbess had said to her closest nuns,
‘we must form new monastic combines.
The ages of the Father and of the Son are past. We have entered the age of the Holy
Ghost. The wind bloweth where it listeth and it listeth most certainly on the
Abbey of Crewe. I am a Benedictine
with the Benedictines, a Jesuit with the Jesuits. I was elected Abbess and I
stay the Abbess and I move as the Spirit moves me.’
With no external pressure such a personality can hold it’s
rich variety, with its contradictions between practical organisation and
utopian dreaming, in tension, and thus become a useful and powerful figurehead. Under pressure such a character can
easily turn to megalomania, as it seeks solace in its own imagination, a gothic
tower high above the surrounding plain, locked and double bolted against the
commonplace and sceptical, who could, if allowed entry, save the occupant from
herself. Alexandra is a tall and
attractive and dominant woman who is attuned to the realm of spirits and a lost
world of ancient values. Her
abilities can seduce particularly the intelligent disciple, such as Mildred and
Walburga, who are blind to her absurdities. They are typical intellectuals who
are prone to idealise their masters and mistresses. Not so the author, and the reader she guides with her
satiric pen.
Felicity is also absurd. She is a promiscuous nun who preaches free love, and who
wants to turn the convent into a modern commune… that incongruity again. She is the charismatic rebel, who is
not powerful enough to gain office, but can destroy an institution through her
energy and the wildness and vigour of her ideas and actions. Felicity creates the hope and the
promise of a potential new world that exposes the compromises and shoddiness of
the existing one; changes in the wider society refracted through a powerfully
charismatic kaleidoscope that turns the convent’s daily round into an
oppressive and dull routine. For
Alexandra and her cronies Felicity is a danger, and frightened of her impact,
like all tyrants they have totalitarian instincts, they cannot submit the
election to chance, and so overreact to the threat she poses. Yet they are innocents. Unable to act themselves they call in
the Jesuits, who botch it badly (an in-joke we assume); their plans leading to
ultimate ruin, and the end of the abbey.
Alexandra is now transformed into a Greek heroine or an
angel in a Christian heaven... at least inside her own mind. The rest of us look on in mild
amusement as she sails away into ridicule and oblivion…
… She sails indeed on the fine day of her desire into
waters exceptionally smooth, and stands on the upper deck, straight as a white
ship’s funnel, marvelling how the wide sea billows from shore to shore like
that cornfield of sublimity which never should be reaped nor was ever sown,
orient and immortal wheat.
[i] Tolstoy’s Hadji
Murat gives us a good idea why:
his portrait of Nicholas I shows how the fantasies are never openly
contradicted, so that even his worst mistakes are transformed into successes by
his officials and courtiers, which he himself comes to believe.
[ii] Embedded in another excellent Adam Curtis post, Bodybuilding
and Nation-Building
[iv] In the interminable debate over what is the difference
between a cult and a religion this may be the crucial distinction: a religion
can outlive its charismatic founder. Thus Christianity, freed from
its reliance on Jesus Christ, can periodically renew itself, and thus keep its
spirit alive. Was this one of the
reasons why the Catholic Church came to venerate the Virgin Mary? It needed an alterative symbol to break
the charismatic hold of its founding man…
Later
of course was the Reformation.
The
late medieval church was like a pilgrim who at first was able to carry
all his possessions on his back, but who by the 15th century needed
a long convoy of carts to carry all his worldly goods. It took him months to cover even the
shortest distances.
To
an intellectual, and the more ascetically minded, his progress looked absurd,
so exhausting and obviously futile, especially when they passed him on the way
back from Canterbury for the second time.
The answer seemed simple (it always is for the intellectuals): he didn’t
need most of these possessions, which were worthless anyway, so he should get
rid of them. He could then put all
he needed onto one horse and almost fly between his pilgrimages. Ah! Intellectuals. Little do they know
what will happen to their simple ideas!
[v] And one wonders…if democracy, by giving legitimacy to party leaders, allows them to stay
in office beyond the time they are mentally capable - think of Churchill in the
Fifties and Reagan in the Eighties. The party establishment
preferring a leader who is popular, albeit crazy, to one too dully rational to be
interesting and therefore electable.
One
could argue that the press at least would prefer a mad prime minister to a sane
one, for it gives them better copy, providing they don’t inform the public of
the truth. A possible reason for
the travails of the all too sane Major and Brown after the mad antics of their
predecessors – the press were missing the excitement of a particular kind of lunacy.
Although
it could also be argued that with elections turned into advertising campaigns
and politicians into products it is increasingly difficult to tell the
difference between fantasy and insanity.
Even the maddest can appear to be only playing the PR game.
[vi] The way to avoid this in-authenticity would have been
to have isolated the order from the modern world, and created the contrast
through the interaction between them.
Comments
Post a Comment