Leviation - Chapter 13.

So it’s not long now until I’m off to the unknown lands of North Carolina. Four days to be exact.

Things have been rather hectic the last few weeks since I returned from Poole Harbour; a trip to the south of France, buying suitcases for the big trip over, researching where to purchase things in North Carolina, finishing fairytales and having my twisted sister come to stay for a long weekend. It’s been lovely to see the people that mean so much to me before I go and I think if I hadn’t seen them these last five days before the move would feel so much more difficult.

I’ve started packing, probably a good thing with four days to go. The suitcase I’ve bought is huge, it could probably fit me or my sister in without a problem plus clothes and toothbrush.

Anyway, I’ve been packing books. In goes a couple of Nortons, James Wood ‘How fiction works’, Ulysses, Milton, some theory, some criticism, a hard drive of all my scanned notes, some Flaubert and Dostoevsky, Zola, a load of fairytale stuff... And then I reach philosophy. Which of the nearly one hundred or so books of philosophy do I try and add to my collection of heavy texts as it stands? Well I started with ‘Think’ because Simon Blackburn is going to be my teacher and then I added my copies of Berkeley and Locke, but whilst I was browsing the shelves for anything on Hegel (oh yes I am psyching myself up for a whole semester of becoming familiar with Hegel’s dialectics) I came across Hobbes and a notebook I’d entitled ‘L is NBS’ of course referring to the infamous quote that was preached numerous times in both Ethics (year one) and Literature (year two).

“Life is ... Nasty, Brutish and Short.”

Hobbes is commenting on man, on his idea of the political state, of the need for society and social constraints so that we do not live in the grim reality of our human condition that he so aptly describes above.

As we sat in the idyllic port of Sanary-sur-mer a week last Saturday, we talked about that exact quote. The sun was setting above the hills, a whisper of a breeze cooling the heat from our prickling skin and Alex, who would be so easy to describe as ‘afrothdizzingly’ dappy, explained parts of her life that resonated with it.

I don’t know how we arrived at the topic in the first place, probably discussing books we had read. But she told us about her father, about how he’d fought in Ireland having just left secondary school. He knew two nineteen year olds who were torn limb from limb after making a wrong turn in the road. When Alex was little, they lived in Ireland, everyday ‘playing a game’, secretly checking that there were no bombs under the car every time they went out because they wouldn’t have cared if little, blond, three-year old army brat Alex was killed in the middle of a war she was too young to understand. She told us stories of kindergarten teachers putting a drill through a doctors kneecap and a man shot-dead on Christmas Eve in the last tour before Christmas.

It makes you wonder, when most of the time people tend to ignore that Hobbesian sentiment, are we really civilised? Maybe we are just animals. How thin do you think that veneer of humanity truly is? We are more brutal, more mindless, more cruel than any other species when that facard falls. Yet we pride ourselves on our sense of superiority and propriety. We all like to think that we’re not like the mob that took down the Bastille, or that tore those two off-duty officers apart in Ireland, or like the boys in Lord of Flies, or even the hooligans in London right now. But what could we be pushed to? Is it human nature? Is it society’s fault?

Scary thought.

We also talked about the ‘Junior Officer’s Common Room’ by a man Colonel Lloyd once knew. He wrote about Rwanda. I probably don’t need to explain but what shocked me was the fact that this autobiographical novel describes the way that the UN repeatedly didn’t act despite the presence of ground troops because America (too busy with Afghanistan) and France (who’d given their support via Congo to the Hutus) used their right of Veto. This UN soldier sent notice after notice until he was reporting the blood on church walls and the fields of dead bodies. My brother’s teacher from prep school was there too; he gave up counting the bodies at 2000, only a quarter of those sprawled across the area. How could America and France do this, when they’re so proud of their culture and history and superiority?

Ignoring facts, turning a blind eye or a deaf ear, that’s not so strange is it? Do you remember that sickening moment in the Heart of Darkness when the protagonist sees a pit being dug but he wilfully ignores it purpose in his narrative despite seeing the emaciated forms of black slaves dying in the shadows. A mass grave, but he doesn’t allow himself to acknowledge it, even in the surreal silence and darkness of the yawl he tells his tale on.

As you can tell I’m in a funny mood. But I had better return to my packing otherwise it’ll never be done in time.

Four days!! How exciting!!

Body Electric

I woke up today with one of those headaches that makes your whole world wobble every time you move, and even the dull sounds of distant planes and the tapping of keys seem painful. I’d had the weirdest dreams thanks to my mother’s lasagne last night. In it I was sitting outside on a warm grey day in London, perched on a dark wooden bench, no dedication, looking out across the Thames. In the corner of my vision was the London Eye and in the other the painted bow of HMS President (1918). She’s a naval vessel turned restaurant. Talk about recycling. The Thames is beautiful. Its grey-green wrinkles are speckled as the sun peaks out for a moment and the Eye glows in the distant bend, the Westminster flags flying as silhouettes. I think in the dream I was wondering about the riots and if they’d reach me but there wasn’t any sign of them.

It’s odd really. Two nights ago we were all sprawled out in the sitting room, my Twisted Sister, my brother and I, after eating far too much roast dinner. We were contentedly watching Top Gear when my brother’s computer tells him that he’s being called on Skype. So he wanders out and despite the good humour in the air, as James May wins the challenge for the mere reason that his tin car was £2010 under budget (despite losing all the mini-competitions).

“Are you ok?” I hear him asking, “When did it happen? Are the police there?”

Arman, a boy that I’ve known since he was thirteen, who sang bass in the school choir and has more charisma in his little finger than half the people I know, is calling my brother from the wreckage of his family’s shop in Enfield. Terrifyingly, my brother himself was there the night before, out partying without a care in the world. The shop, a family owned and run watch shop has been looted, the windows emptied of the painstakingly toiled over watches and items of jewellery.

I can’t quite believe the extent to which these rampaging hooligans are going. It’s almost terrifying but because it seems very far off from here, most of our conversations are rather self-righteous and philosophical.

I started an article when we were away in France, comparing how the police in London treated me when I was burgled to how they treated my best friend Alex in Paris. The police in London didn’t come for eight hours, simply told us to sit tight and not touch anything. The police in Paris, on the other hand, laughed at my friend Alex and said it was her own fault for being a girl, took her watch from her wrist because it was ‘evidence’ and then told her to stop wasting police time all the while leering at her.

“Every day,” she said, “there’s a new story in the papers about how someone has been injured or killed by the gendarme in random acts of brutality.”

They’re corrupt.

“There’s no point in telling them about the fact that you’ve been mugged or sexually assaulted because they’ll blame you.” She continued quite candidly, after telling us about a man who followed her up to her room one night and attacked her but who she luckily managed to fight off.

I think we should put into perspective just how ‘bad’ the Metropolitan police are – we’re actually very lucky in the UK to have a Police Force that tries to do their job. Maybe if they had a little more power (eg. to actually attack a man whose drawn a gun, real or not because how can they tell from a distance) then they’d be able to do their job properly. A hooligan who’s struck down by the riot police should NOT be able to appeal for compensation because of police brutality; I almost feel the police should be able to sue them for wasting police time. The limitations we’ve put on our police make little sense when it means they are rendered almost useless in the face of criminal activity like we’ve seen the last few days. Of course we don’t want to see a return to the 80s but a mob cannot be stopped without reciprocal force.