Island of Lightning (17 page)

Killing the Cool: The Outlook from Piemonte

We drive through a thunderstorm. The lightning hangs in ultra violet sheets above us. At times it seems to form enormous blue insect-o-cutors over the hills and vineyards.

Suddenly Alpine hail is gravel under our wheels and the Fiat is gusted across the road. But we arrive at the ristorante and the storm is refused entry. Now there is beneficence. A platter of truffles is paraded for our approval. Next, the Barbera and then the Barolo of Sandri Giovanni are poured in celebration. The toasts are emphatic. To poetry. To difference. To pride in tradition and what the imagination might do with it.

After the feast, the reckoning. Sometimes my tongue is a silversmith's hammer. The words are burnished beneath it. Yet too often, even I know, it is the mallet that perpetrates mayhem with the metrics of Twm Morys and mangles the muse of Mihangel Morgan.
Mimi, mae dy long wedi mynd
, I declaim. Yes, Mimi, you have missed the boat. A little later, Morys's last troubadour is laid apologetically to rest.

No matter. I am doing my best and detect no pain in the dark Piemontese eyes of the audience. The Welsh language has come in low over the Italian Alps and landed in bookshops and lecture rooms in Torino and Alba. As European languages go, it might sound unusual to the students, but it has clearly borrowed generously from Latin. Our words are a
pont
between us.

We're celebrating two new anthologies from Italy's Mobydick press. Though they will not set the world alight, these are attractive volumes. But more than that, they are necessary books. It is crucial that Welsh writers escape Welshness. Being Welsh, after all, is an endless delirium. We rail at each other in the malarial earnestness of defining ourselves. But who cares? Certainly not those outside the fever hospital. It is time to emerge from our nightsweats. Some of the poets in these volumes show how it might be done.

Yet there are inherent dangers. If writing must be free-ranging it can also be well-rooted. Gerallt Lloyd Owen depicts the griefs of national conquest, but Emyr Lewis moves like mercury through the ancient metres, a surreptitious and slippery poet. For the English language writers, the dangers of cultural anonymity are greater. Amnesia International beckons. It's a seductive place to be.

Cultures often embrace each other in fear of a common enemy. In Piemonte, it was inevitably America, or rather the corporate USA that emerged as the threat. As a target it is irresistible. One way to encourage the students of the Langhe district to respond to our lectures was to predict that in one hundred years they will all be Americans. That Americanisation is a natural process to be welcomed. That in the next century we will construct ourselves with American-patented genes and cloned spare parts, as well as consume American food and art. That war and pestilence will be banished only when nations walk together under the golden clerestory of McDonald's.

You do not have to be a Piemontese or Ligurian speaker to blanch at this prospect. Across the Atlantic there are those who are equally aghast. For example, ‘Adbusters' is an “ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environments”. Based in British Colombia, its audience is two thirds American. Adbusters further defines itself as “a global network of artists, writers, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to launch the new social activist movement of the information age. Our goal is to galvanise resistance against those who would destroy the environment, pollute our minds and diminish our lives.”

The enemies are those who purport to be
cool
. Who aspire to states of coolness. Who believe coolery has something to do with living to the max. Who think that coolism is to be embraced. Because to Adbusters, cool kills. Cool is a corpse in Rayban's. Cool stands for paralysis of the soul, the vanquishing of originality and variety. For Adbusters, cool is a totalitarian world built to a consumerist blueprint. It is policed by style fear. Cool is paranoia. As a formula, cool = orthodoxy. And for the artist, cool = death.

To make war on cool, Adbusters employs the weapons of cool – the iconography of adverts and rock music. It has created ‘powershift' – an advocacy advertising agency that uses the global language of entertainment and brand names to subvert what it sees as the corporate hex big business has placed on our world.

Rock is especially important. Modern music (the wisdom goes) used to be challenging and thrilling. Once it demonstrated how writers and musicians could enrich traditional forms with new energies and ideas. Today rock is a global neurasthenic plague. Yet if it sounds like the bleating of babyminds, it is really brilliantly orchestrated money-music. The planet wears headphones and our fate is to listen to a digitalised hymn to corporate greed. Rock music, say the Adbusters, is nothing but the amplified death rattle of our own imaginations.

If so, Little Richard, strutting down his piano keyboard in 1955, has a lot to answer for. Yet inevitably, there are rubies in the rubble. The group, Catatonia, wrote an ironic song that runs ‘Every Day When I Wake Up I Thank the Lord I'm Welsh', covered by Tom Jones. Unfortunately coolness and irony cannot cohabit. The latter devours the former. So the song was taken literally by the Welsh media as evidence of Wales being somehow fashionable. It did not occur to the newshounds that the only cry of the artist can be: ‘every day when I wake up I thank the Lord I'm human.' Or at least, sober. Or if you're Tom Jones, rich. Or if you're Little Richard, making a comeback.

One of the editors of Adbusters is Kalle Lasn, who published
Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America
, (Eagle Brook, $25). Lasn believes the only way we can create a tolerable future is by uncooling ourselves, i.e. by celebrating human cultural and imaginational diversity, instead of representing them as barriers to profit and the growth of the corporations. Maybe the crucial question Lasn asks in
Culture Jam
is ‘what does it mean when a whole culture dreams the same dream?' History, of course, provides the terrifying answers.

Writers and readers might be puzzled here. Surely, the route to discover the real America is via its art. From Dickinson to Lowell, from
Moby Dick
to the poetry of Cormac McCarthy's novels, that is where America might live for us. Or we can listen to Mississippi and Chicago blues, attend the platforms of Latino poets, pray in a sweatlodge. We can learn about America through its environment, watching geese skidding down on frozen Massachusetts wetlands, or shielding our eyes from the dazzling porcelain of a Californian drybed. That is surely the way for the individual.

Yet America does not communicate itself like that to the world. Rather America speaks thus: “... if we make it impossible for… people to escape Coca Cola... then we are sure of our success for many years to come. Doing anything else is not an option”. (
Coca Cola Annual Report
).

And
“
... we'll someday sell a variety of products on a daily basis to every living person on the Earth”
.
(
Pepsico Annual Report
).

And “We are moving across the oceans and into new states and blocs. The joy of it is there is no speed limit to our progress... Rather, the cheering will grow louder and stronger the faster we go... especially from our share-owners”
.
(
Campbell's Soup Company Annual Report
).

To these, now add the pronouncements of gene-splicing and biotech companies. This is the America that Kalle Lasn targets, using its own armaments of ‘mind bombs' and ‘meme warfare'. To make a mind bomb, Adbusters takes an advert like “escape to Calvin Klein” and prints picture and text as normal. Except ‘to' is changed into ‘from'. Seen on the page, so inured are we to the original, nothing looks different. But an explosion, Lasn would insist, has occurred in our subconscious.

Maybe. But once again I suggest it is easier to turn to American literature, which offers online guerrillas all the weaponry of revolutionary thought and mind piercing literary ammo they can use. In this respect, a page of Melville or Lowell is nitro-glycerine. If, as a culture, we read more, and remembered our reading, we would know this instinctively. Because books are our allies and will always be there. Our peril is that we will forget how to read them.

On the day we arrived in Piemonte, McDonald's announced plans to double the number of its Italian outlets. From what I saw, this would make little impact on a region confident of the validity of its traditions, the future of its culture. If the young love the burger chain, most older people find it as attractive as the Albanian mafia. In Diano d'Alba, there was room only for hearty appetites. A vintage Barolo was being broached in happy conjunction with the book launches. (For tipplers, this wine is a snorting indigo beast, sacrificially garlanded with sorrel and Alpine gentians.) It washed down beef, wild boar, rabbit, and raw Langhe veal minced fine as a spider's web. Big Macs and the emaciated imagination and oedematous ambition that have created them, were not conspicuous.

Yet the future, of course, will not be literary. It belongs to film, although assembling a novel is as thrilling and demanding work as any now experienced by young people switching on the power of their personal editing suites.

And I look forward to a society where science receives its due. Where workshops in physics, astronomy and yes, biotechnology are as common as writing classes today.

The Dictatorship

I step off the path. And into the woods. How easy to get lost here. The air is full of resin whose grandmotherly jewellery, cairngorms and zircons, is strung around the pines.

But what are these? Loaves dipped in red wine, nuns in black who have painted their faces gold. Here is the death cap in its clergyman's collar, the fly agaric's acne on a rosy cheek. Fallen under the birch are the dead with holes in their heads.

At the sides of the road wait the mushroom sellers. It is autumn and the forests are full of fungi. A woman has laid a napkin on the grass, the entrepreneurial young erected stall and awning.

The roads run straight between the trees, and although there is no traffic yet, the mushroom sellers offer their harvest, reputed to be excellent. Our van turns down a track into a car park.

We're five miles outside the Lithuanian town of Druskininkai on the border with Belarus. At the museum entrance is a soviet evocation of ‘Spring', enormous yet not without grace. Spring too could be put to work, its rite propagandised and suborned. And yet this maiden with arching limbs, giantess in her joy, has a poignancy now.

Such museum parks are found throughout what was the ‘Eastern bloc'. True, these are tourist sites, but for me they are amongst the most important places in our new Europe.

I wander off to meet the dictators. There is Lenin, there Stalin in his worker's weeds; and here the ferro-concrete images of the forever shamed, carried from squares in Vilnius and Kaunus, the collaborators, the placemen, the true believers. But here is Hitler too, and the henchmen of the Third Reich. Pogrom, purge, purgatory, this is Lithuania during its double occupation and desperate decades.

The faces of the disappeared stare from the walls of the galleries. Martial music plays from loudspeakers in the trees. There are recreations of peasants' huts and the shelters of those who hid, hid for years in these forests, writers amongst them.

Everything takes place in the woods – glade after silent glade of birch and pine. I walk with the Estonian poet, Jaan Malin, in the cemetery. Graves have been dug between the trunks, not trees planted between graves. We kick through the upholstery of needles, scaring red squirrels. Druskininkai is a quiet place. Its citizens wander past under the leaves. They seem preoccupied.

Strangely, I think about rubbish. At home, anything we throw away is taken to an incinerator. There, all recyclables are salvaged by hand. The people who do this are Lithuanians. In Porthcawl library they book time on the internet.

Labbas ritas
I said to one woman. She looked away as if I could read her thoughts. Or as if she had read mine from the contents of my dustbin. Clever, determined, such people are welcome in democratically-fatigued Wales.

That woman is a harbinger, I have no doubt. Since 2004, Lithuania has been a full member of the European Union, and change in that country, as in all the former Soviet occupied states, is astounding.

Traffic, at least in the towns, grows exponentially. New banks ring the squares, and in Vilnius, a once dangerous district such as Uzupis with its anarchist and gypsy history, offers apartments for wealthy incomers. This is a Europe of incessant movement, where the ambitions of the formerly oppressed are palpable. But what flux. The young and energetic coming one way, the middle aged with their appetites for sun, self-expression and
meaning
going another. It seems a fair exchange. Yet there is people-smuggling also, and a vicious sex trade. Lithuanian odalisques, lupin-eyed, spruce-white laths, are part of its currency.

Yes, the mushroom harvest is good this year. Some of these forest steaks are thick as EU environmental edicts. But, my companions have warned, we dare not eat the mushrooms. Look at the map. The mushrooms carry the poisons of an old Europe, the wisp of Chernobyl that endures more powerfully here than almost anywhere else, a dictatorship that will survive for three billion years, and on every June 26, celebrates its anniversary.

Salvaging the City

The gates were open but there was no-one about. I spent an hour in the yard looking at the roofs that had been dismantled over the last decade, the bricks and lintels, newel posts and railings.

Here was the capital of Wales laid low, Cardiff stacked in wire cages: doorknobs, chimneys like pantomime crowns, all boxed into the Lego of an Alzheimic language that would never be spoken again.

In the warehouse I went upstairs. There was a black school honour board against the wall. In gold letters was my uncle's name: 1933, a silver medal. And again 1933, a scholarship of £100 to Jesus College, Oxford. Ivor Minhinnick died young, but not before he had written a mathematics text-book once in regular use. Maybe the book was here too, with the
Hymnau Calfinaidd
and Showaddywaddy albums.