Explaining

1

How can I explain to you?

This place is so different, so very different from the rustling leaves you laughed at, the wide-open fields you ran and played in. Here, stretching in every direction further than anyone could walk in a day, is a bewildering maze of highways, byways and buildings.

The fertile earth has been crushed beneath paving stones, towering office blocks and acres of close packed houses. More people live here than you and I could ever count.

For you infinity begins when you have exhausted you tiny vocabulary of number. On a clear and star packed winter night, I remember your joyful exclamation “I can see two!” What flimsy tools you possessed for the ordering of the world. They have not developed far since then. And here we are. As we walk among these empty shells, these relics of community, I find myself asking, “How can I explain?”

You will tell me sadly that the houses are broken.

“Yes, “ I will say, “The houses are broken. Soon there will be workmen with picks and drills and other engines of destruction, who will tear them down, clear and level off the ground so that building may begin again.”

As we wandered through those lanes and fields of summer in that other world where we lived so joyously, we would occasionally discover a dead bird or animal. I remember a swallow that we found dying in the garden. Seeing then how fragile was your scaffolding of concepts, I feared for you as I fear for you now. How could I explain? The pain and ebbing life of that tiny bundle of feathers, whose fellows swooped across the sky over our heads, confounded me. I prayed that we might share a wordless burden. Perhaps we did.

But this? How can I explain this? This is not the decay that we discovered when we played on woodland carpets of expired leaves. This is decay mean and threatening. Already insolent flames are licking at the timber of a foundered house. The grimy demolishers unleash the fire to destroy whatever has resisted their clamouring, noisome machinery. Here my knowledge cannot be simply shared in quiet watching. I have seen these engines and the wilderness they have created many times before. I see how you cower before the din and dust of this destruction. How can I explain?

I have seen and felt the sudden thunder of your rage. I have seen it boil within you, watched you struggle with all the energy that you possess to vent your gigantic passion. Imagine your fury orchestrated for giants, and controlled by unreflecting calculation. How could you imagine that? Yet what other explanation is there? What you see before you is the same immense and regimented energy that erupts on the battlefield, or, glowering and sullen, hides at the heart of the power generation on which our world depends.

How can I explain?

2
Nothing was further from our minds than procreation when you were conceived. We were gypsies then, and you, when we became aware of your approach, were a challenge. You were completely unexpected. We had been lovers, you see, for several years. Lovers and but fitful practitioners of contraception. We lived only in the moment. The future was a precipice on whose brink we danced unheeding. When we made love, we celebrated ourselves. When egg and seed completed our union we grew gradually aware that we faced a problem, a challenge to our way of life. Yet we were excited. This dilemma had been faced by several of our friends, being, as you can see so clearly, the consequence of our loose and easy life. Marriage was an institution, against which, in long nocturnal conversation, we arrayed formidable ideological argument. If we subsequently chose it, we understood it only as a gesture of solidarity with you. There were, of course, other choices open to us, and there were those in our circle who made each one of them.

Responsibility was death’s second cousin. His grey hair and sunken cheeks were not welcome in our gypsy world. Responsibility was the heavy force that had imprisoned our parents in a cage of lies and misconceptions. We knew the Gaoler’s name only too well. It was Duty. The gypsy world was harassed by his minions. For some of us only the sacrifice of the unborn could keep these grim ministers at bay. Others, whose love of life or fear of taboo prevented them, elected to carry and labour only to give the prize away. Though these perhaps staved off the claims of Duty and Responsibility, they paid a terrible price in anguish. We learned a little of how much it had cost them when we watched these friends become your aunties. As we watched it seemed they were still trying to embrace what could never be embraceable.

Yet we were excited. It dawned on us, more slowly than you can imagine, that we had the power to banish spectres, even that menacing pair, Duty and Responsibility. I prepared myself for battle. Armed with collar, tie and fashionable suit, I took up my pen and wielded it in an unfamiliar fashion. Like Samson before me, I preserved my being by allowing my hair to hang around my shoulders still.

You might laugh, but as my hair fell before my eyes while I bent at my desk, or flowed behind me as I struggled through the rush hour, I was reminded that nothing had been surrendered, that all I did I did because it was expedient. It made your coming into the world as propitious as it could be.

3.
Explanation is at best an uncertain business.

For us the serene confidence and stately language of the eighteenth century is far away. Ours is a precarious world, as much for the mind as for the body. Since Freud sunk his shafts through our consciousness to the darkness below, we have had to rationalise, to tell ourselves the story that accounts for what we did with as few inconsistencies as possible.  So there is more irony than you can know in my question “How can I explain?”

Explanation for you consists largely of the answers I give to your constantly repeated “Why?” Disarmingly, you embrace these brittle responses of mine with enthusiasm. You mistake them for real things of substance, you build houses of sand on such puny foundations, innocently believing them capable of withstanding the gales of reality. Irony, if you could for a moment form a clear conception of it, would seem like a blemish in a universe of certainties and bold distinctions. Yet that same irony is our only defence against the inconsistencies and injustices with which we have to live.

You know this city now. It contains us both. You carry with you still, I hope, the memory of that summer world we have left behind. Yet you weren’t born into that world. Your first year was passed in a city even larger than this one. We lived there in a basement flat, in a street of decaying terraced houses that stood under sentence of destruction. Though the residents had not yet departed the buildings helplessly awaited their end. Our basement flat had a tiny garden that trapped the afternoon sunshine. On Saturday mornings we would stroll through the endless Portobello Market, which stretched from the weary streets of North Kensington to prosperous Holland Park where the town houses of the wealthy had been cherished in their century of life. They stood, elegant and confident in the expectation of at least a century a century more. We listened to the rock bands that played on the waste ground beneath the motorway flyover, easily drowning out the busy rattle of tube trains along their track nearby. That was a world within a world, for North Kensington harboured a way of life not generally accepted in that busy, dirty and despairing city. We lived on the boundary between the ordered, striving world and the gypsy world that it enclosed but never understood.

We moved from that world to a valley dominated by a great chalk down that had been the backdrop of my childhood. From there we moved again to this sober Northern city. Here, not far from the demolisher’s bulldozers, we have made a camp.

Yet we are of the gypsy world and we must always feel its presence. We must always hear on sunny mornings the bright song of our homeland calling us to leave behind these terraced certainties, to be on the move. We shall not always heed it. When we do, we shall accept the invitation with reservations, and we shall smile ironically, knowing that the gipsy song has always been bright with irony.