By Light Alone (23 page)

On alternate weeks Ezra and Leah came to stay, each with their respective carers. The first few times things were a little stilted, but soon enough George established the thing children value above all others, a routine. Not seeing them for a week meant that each re-encounter was kicked off with George’s quasi-grandparental astonishment at how quickly the two of them were growing.

They would do all the things they would do. And Ezra was up for almost anything; fearless, and adventurous, and keen to climb and swim and so on. George delighted in his vivacity.

But with Leah it was something different. With Leah it was more than the conventional, upholstered pleasures of parenthood, and the little thrills, and the comfortable surprises. With Leah he felt some more powerful tug in his soul. It was because, not despite, the fact that his love for her, its almost
edible
sweetness, was mixed with the memories of fear and bereavement. It was, as he knew on some deep level, the difference between the pleasure of taking a lungful of fragrant air in the sunshine, and taking that same breath in that same sunshine after surviving a round of Russian Roulette. The latter took pleasure and made it profound. He wouldn’t have put it in such terms, but he understood the truth of it instinctively: his experience with Leah had showed him that the heart is an abyss.

He began growing his hair.

Marie would never have tolerated it, of course; but he never saw her any more. At first he only let his hair grow unfashionably long; he looked disreputable, but it was just ordinary hair. But he woke up one morning, and was aware of a desire to get hold of the Bug, the Neocles Bug, and swallow it. It wasn’t hard to get hold of. On the contrary. It was perfectly legal, however infra dig. It would only be a matter of time. He didn’t autoanalyse this impulse, not being in the habit of such psychological indulgence. But, instinctively, he knew it was something to do with his daughter. He did not think to himself: it will make me an outcast, somebody seen as an eccentric at best and treacherously insane at worst. But there was some tidal force pulling his soul all in one direction, where the inner waters bunched together in his hollow-earth cranium. It is one of the most persistent and widely believed errors of human life that violence simplifies situations. In fact, of course, the reverse is almost always the case: violence complexifies, sometimes monstrously. But it’s only natural that we cling to the former belief, the lie of the Gordian knot, because of course we crave simplicity and we find the prospect of violence exciting and libidinous. It takes courage to see things truly.

George was perhaps the least courageous man in the world. But there are times when even the least courageous surprise themselves.

25

It was Walliam who introduced George to Raphael. But although friends assumed the hair-growing thing followed on from his attending Raphael’s performance art, in fact, George knew that his radicalization – if we want to call it that – preceded Raphael by months. Not that Raphael wasn’t important too. Which is to say: George’s experience was one of resistance to what Raphael was saying, followed by slow acceptance, and culminating in a kind of adrenalized intoxication. It’s just that the changes in George’s life predated these experiences. What Raphael revealed to him was confirmation, not revelation.

What it was: an extension of his interest in news. That’s how he put it to himself when he started attending: he was logging-on to the news in a more than merely contemporary sense. And many of the satisfactions he experienced were just the same as offered to him by the news channels. But there was something more, and that extra quality was something the news never gave him. Belief.

Believing Raphael wasn’t a question of content; it was a matter of
form
. It wasn’t about whether he agreed with what he said, or not. It was about whether he was ready to become one of
those sorts of people
. . . the earnest people; the laughably genuine people; the religious people; the political people; the
believers
. If Raphael had looked more professorial, he might have been able to tell himself that he had been overawed by the man’s aura of knowledge. But he was a lanky, painfully skinny guy, who wore his long hair ostentatiously fanned out at the back in a belt-loom. It was a statement. It was food, also, of course; although from time to time George saw him supplement his diet with little pastries, protein gum, and even little snorts of c:snuff.

On the other hand, what he spoke was
sense
. George couldn’t deny it. Raph would sync everyone’s Fwns and then run them through a lecture – great sprawling lectures, fifteen or twenty minutes long – about history. ‘There’s only one subject for history,’ he told them. ‘Power has told you otherwise, but that’s a lie.’ (
Power
was his catch-all for the people and institutions and structures in charge of the world: the privileged, the banks, the militarily well-equipped.) ‘Power tells you that history is a million little individual stories of people doing this and that, princes and kings, queens and princesses, generals and captains of industry. But looked at properly
they
all go into the dark.’

Dark?

‘There’s only one subject in human history,’ Raphael said. ‘Poverty. It’s the state most humans have been in for most of the time humans have lived on this planet. Viewed objectively, poverty is massively the defining aspect of human life. Wealth is a recent, occasional and – viewed overall – a vanishingly rare aberration from the human baseline. Is it a coincidence that almost all historians have studied wealth, that almost no historians have studied poverty? This is what they say: it’s not that it’s not a feature of human history, it’s just not a
significant
feature.’ And here there would be a blizzard of links to instances of two hundred years of historical focus. ‘They say a wealthy king is a more important topic for historians than ten thousand starving serfs. Is he?
He
certainly thought so! But that’s not it – the king does not build pyramids with his own two hands, does not wage war by himself, does not personally go into the world and gather wheat and gold and jewels.’

And George pictured to himself a heap of yellow wheat-ears and yellower doubloons and bright red rubies.

‘Historians have hitherto worked from the premise that poverty is not as
significant
as wealth. But they don’t mean that. What they mean is that poverty does not make for
diverting narratives
the way wealth does. They mean people would rather watch a book with a sexy actress representing Anne Boleyn in a splendid dress, than watch a book about ill-clad peasants grubbing in the dirt. They mean poverty is dreary. And so it is! They mean that poverty is boring. And so it is! So, only understand this: historians look to history for entertainment, not for the truth. They go to be diverted and titillated, not to see how things really are. History,’ he said, fiddling with his Fwn so that the slogan was properly isolated and could be sent, ‘is like a study of a mighty forest of fir trees that only ever talks about some primroses growing on the extreme edge. History that talks about rich people is a lie. Taken as a whole, mankind
has never been rich
.’

The thing was that George felt people were looking at him as if he, alone of all these people,
he
knew what that mystic signifier ‘poverty’ actually meant. But his daughter’s time in the village now felt like a very remote portion of his past. It had been real, of course. But it didn’t
feel
real. Raphael went on and on about poverty as the truth at the heart of the human condition. Conventional history was like a medical study of the human body that only interested itself in the jewelled earrings and hair-gen the person happened to be sporting. It was like study of the great oceans of the earth that talked only about oyster pearls and, more, that pretended that oyster pearls were the only thing
worth
talking about! That the whole focus of the ocean and all its force and depth, its ability to rise up and swallow whole civilizations, its still unmapped abyssal planes,
all
its multifarious life from krill to killer whales – that all of this must be understood merely as the backdrop to some few pearls. Absurd!

‘So what do we need instead? We need a history purged of queens and princes, that’s for one thing. We need a history that takes a total view, and understands that the being-in-the-world of human beings has always been overwhelmingly non-wealthy.’ Raphael proffered a link to
being-in-the-world
, but George didn’t follow it. He knew what being was, and what
world
was. Why would he need to follow a link that explained those two things?

‘Let’s start right here, right now,’ said Raphael, and the music underneath his voice changed, and it
was
exciting. It really was. George had had no previous interest in history, but still the thought that he was one of a select group of people completely reinventing the discipline, here in Manhattan, was thrilling.

‘The first thing we have to do,’ Raphael advised, ‘is to distinguish between different degrees of poverty. I’m not interested in the upper strata of the phenomenon, of the people with small monies who have been squeezed by society or circumstances – war, for instance. Not right now. We’ll keep that history for another day. I’m interested in the old bottom tier. The thing wealthy people don’t understand is that, for most of human history, poverty has been something that could always get worse. Human beings would appear to be completely down and out; but they could always sink lower. This was because for most of human history poverty was a subsistence phenomenon.
Poor
meant having the bare minimum. That is to say, it meant having something. And something can always be pared away. Not now! Now a new manifestation of poverty has come into the world – the most significant development in human history since the invention of farming. Now we have
absolute
poverty. And—’ adjusting the Fwn again, so that the music is right for the recording of another slogan, ‘absolute poverty is absolute freedom! It can’t be pared away, or threatened, or warred down.’

George wasn’t sure about this, but, like, you know. Whatever.

The following week was revolution; something the rest of the cadre excitedly chattered about on Fwn for days in advance. Secretly, again, George thought this, really, was missing the point – for he had taken to heart Raphael’s point (or what he assumed was Raphael’s point) that history had so often been hijacked by the dramatically engaging instead of by the True. And of course there was no doubt that revolutions made for more exciting books. He watched the ones they had been advised to watch: two about the American Revolution (there had been an
American
revolution! Who knew?), one about the French Revolution, which involved a lot of inventive decapitation, and three about the Russian Revolution, which seemed to be all about the swarming of crowds. It was hard to follow the narrative in this last one, particularly – a shipful of revolutionaries had docked and then all the crew had rushed about a city and up and down some stairs and . . . what? Something imprecise but very deeply felt. Something intellectually tangled but emotionally very powerful.

‘Here’s another thing conventional historians have missed,’ Raphael said. ‘They know that revolutions occur from time to time . . . which is to say, that for long stretches human societies go along without them happening, and then suddenly they happen. But nobody has really worked out what the underlying logic is. Is it an inevitable part of historical process? Does it happen to coincide with famine, or war? Can it be spread from country to country like a disease? Does it happen when tyrannical societies
begin
to reform?’ Yeah, yeah, get on with it. ‘I’ll tell you the truth other historians have missed. What’s needful for a permanent revolution? Not an industrial proletariat, and not even a peasant mass. What’s needful is a large enough lumpenproletariat.’ George was going to check the links on those indigestible words, but he saw that Raphael was morphing the musical accompaniment, which probably meant he was about to utter a slogan, and that would surely boil it all down for him. So he waited, and sure enough: ‘A large population of idle people is the perfect kindling for
permanent
revolution,’ he said. ‘Power keeps adjusting as the People keep trying to rise up against it, and Power has learnt a number of tricks for stifling revolution – strategic concessions, more effective police and army technologies, ideological propaganda. But the best trick Power managed was: keep people too busy to rise up. Keep them tired and distracted. And that kept a hundred and fifty years free of uprising. But the new hair has changed the game. The new hair means that there are
millions
of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with their time. Millions of idle poor, too well-situated to die, but not occupied with any of the tasks or chores of staying alive. The perfect revolutionary class!’