the universe of stories - peter beaumont's blog

Artistic accuracy

A couple of weeks ago the London Review of Books had an essay by Colm Toibin on the complete  and collected correspondence between the poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop -  Words in the Air, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. Toibin picked up on an intriguing aspect of Bishop's writing that was expressed in her letters to Lowell: Bishop's insistence that her art - and Lowell's where it crossed their shared  experience - should have an almost documentary veracity. It was a commitment to truthfulness that insisted she introduce an element of doubt where she felt her own expression of what she saw, or her memory, wanting. A self-imposed limit on the boldness of poetic imagination.

Here's Toibin's introduction:

"Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us. Indeed it all started from thinking about your letter, how indispensable you are to me, and how ideally we’ve really kept things, better than life allows really.’ In her response, Bishop questioned the accuracy of Lowell’s opening line, ‘It was a real Maine fishing town,’ and the line ‘where the fish were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote.

As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I know, and like Marianne [Moore], sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not) . . . ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple and so good."

I was struck most by Bishop's idea of her inabilty to "lie for art" which Toibin ascribes to an upbringing split between the impoverished but fondly remembered home of her parents in Nova Scotia and her wealthier father's family house where she lived less happily after her father's death and her mother's incarceration for mental illness.

I'm not sure about Toibin's explanation, which seems too mechanistically causal in a psychotherapeutic way. But that's beside the point. There is something else at work here. That is how and what we remember colours our individual experiences in different ways. And how we are attached in different ways to different aspects of that memory.

A while ago I sent a passage I had written to a friend about a day we spent together in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to get her to "verify" my memories. What was striking for me was that the moment that I recalled most vividly was one she had forgotten so completely that, for her at least, it had not existed.  At the same time things that had moved her most were things so peripheral to my recollection to seem hazy at least.

Which leads to the question: what is the reality of what we remember experiencing? Bishop chides Lowell in another letter that she wrote for idealising her as "tall and brown haired", while she insists she that she was short and grey-grizzled even in her twenties. But does that change the reality - for Lowell - of his romanticised recall?

It raises a more serious question. We believe that what we witness or remember is objective because it "seems" to be objective to us. Which presents a problem for observational writers. Do we insist on the veracity of our selfish and personal viewpoint or do we accept Bishop's insistence on being uncertainly literal which, as Toibin explains, led Bishop to produce:

"a body of work filled with meticulous observing. In her poems she often corrected herself, or qualified herself, almost as a duty or a ceremony. In the second line of the first poem in her first book, ‘The Map’, she wrote the word ‘Shadows’, and then immediately wondered ‘or are they shallows’; in ‘The Weed’, she dreamed that ‘I lay upon a grave, or bed’ then had to qualify that by writing: ‘(at least, some cold and close-built bower)’; in ‘The Fish’, when she wrote the words ‘his lower lip’, she had to wonder ‘if you could call it a lip’. Before she could allow the mountains in ‘Arrival at Santos’ to be ‘self-pitying’, she had to impose the words ‘who knows?’; in ‘The Armadillo’, when she mentioned ‘the stars’, she had to correct herself to say ‘planets, that is."

And who does know. Really?

Afghanistan. Rebuilding what?

Apologies for the break. My old laptop was struggling even to do such a simple task as type.

Deborah Haynes, the Times's award winning correspondent, who did such fabulous work covering Iraq has written an excellent article on how millions have been wasted by the British government on aid projects in Afghanistan.  The story is bracketed by the inevitable quote from the Department of International Development saying words to the effect "it was rubbish then it's so much better now." I say this with a degree of cynicism. The vast majority of post-war reconstruction projects that I have covered have followed a similar trajectory. There is first much hurrahing from the politicians and their flaks over how well things are going. The second phase sees journalists and others peel back the reality to discover how much money has been wasted for little demonstrable effect. Finally, there is a pained debate how in country X we did not get the formula quite right.

I was reminded of it recently in Bosnia which is now approaching phase three, where even those like the former High Representative, Lord Paddy Ashdown, are now conceding that there is something structurally wrong with the way we pursue post-conflict reconstruction. Not least that we think we have a magic fix than can be delivered in years rather than decades.

One of the problems is that we are burdened with an inappropriate model. There is a tendency to look at what happened after the conclusion of World War II and apply it to situations that are entirely different. Our governments look at the vast scale of the rebuilding that was necessary there, the speed with which the aid was delivered and political institutions rebuilt and - in a kind of moment of hubris - think that it is possible to apply that model universally.

Except that it is not. The difference, as I recall Michael Walzer pointed out in one of his meditations on conflict, is that wars end in different ways. There are wars that end with total victory and defeat, where the terms of the post-conflict reconstruction (and political relationships) are imposed by the victors. There are wars that - horrible term - bleed out, leading to a negotiation of the conflicts between the exhausted sides and opening up the political space for meaningful rebuilding. And then there are the wars most familiar to us - frozen conflicts where the tensions continue to exist (as in Afghanistan) effectively unresolved.

What is the consequence for reconstruction of frozen conflicts? Increasingly, I have come to the conclusion that post-conflict reconstruction in situations like this, where the causes of violence remain, is difficult if not impossible to undertake. Because if the underlying causes of tension that led to violence are papered over, then inevitably it leads individuals to appropriate power and influence - often ethnic or sectarian - under the umbrella of reconstruction, empowered by their own communities, and unchecked by a wider consensus in society. Which leads to the most venal kinds of corruption. And renewed friction.

The kind of failure described by Deborah, is a symptom. Not the cause.

Echoes

The way events echo through history holds a deep fascination. What we see in remnants, like the archaeological record, fragments of ancient letters and books, has a deep romance inspired both by the sense of mystery that is involved and the fact that we consciously invoke it. In 2001 I found such a fragment, a coverless exercise book in an Al Qaeda training camp in Kandahar, written in English by a nameless trainee in the business of bomb making whose intention – it seemed from the scrawled notes – was to return to the UK to undertake a mission that involved a massive van bomb.

All that was available as an insight into the nature of this man was what he had written and his  uncertain efforts to follow the instructions of his tutor, recorded in different coloured biros. From that I had to reconstruct an idea of his character. A process as unsatisfactory as the hunt for clues in his text was compelling. The footnote to the discovery of the book came several years later. As it had suggested Moorgate in the City of London as a target, I felt compelled to show it to a British diplomat as I left Afghanistan.

Much later, my friend and colleague, the journalist Martin Bright, then home affairs editor of The Observer, informed me that it had re-appeared as proof of the “threat” to the UK. It was a threat, insisted the government, that required a number of figures deemed as security threats to be kept under emergency detention rules. An unanticipated consequence. Echo of an event in its own right.

I was reminded of the notebook yesterday by a phenomenon that was entirely unconnected: thinking about the waves I had been surfing in North Cornwall, remnant and reminder in themselves of a distant weather event. The periodicity of waves is the first and most telling clue. The bigger the gap between the waves, the further they have travelled and the more powerful and better shaped they tend to be. Waves with a short period tend to have been produced by more localised events, recent storm winds close by, for instance, and tend to be weaker. Yet there remains something inscrutable about these natural events, no matter how far back through weather maps we can trace their genesis or break them down with science.

Because sometimes all that is necessary is that you immerse yourself in the echo.

Sri lanka: blanking out the truth?

After Gaza earlier this year, Sri Lanka is going down the same road: constructing its own reality about what is going on in the war zone in the country’s north by attempting to insist that there is no possibility of independent verification of claims that its army is continuing to shell areas full of refugees, despite having given assurances to the international community to halt heavy weapons use.

Human Rights Watch  and the  The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have released new witness statements and satellite imagery analysis that strongly suggests that heavy shelling has been continuing. The high-resolution images show what appear to be a large number of new impact craters and the removal of structures that had been built by refugees.

The Human Rights Watch intervention – an organisation that did so much to demonstrate how Israel, despite official denials, had used white phosporous in Gaza – comes hard on the heels of the expulsion of Channel Four’s Nick Paton Walsh for reporting allegations of serious human rights abuses. After the terse and angry reception given to the visiting British and French foreign ministers earlier this month by senior ministers, none of this suggests that Sri Lanka has much interest in keeping to its commitments.

Although there is not much new in human rights abusing governments blocking access to journalists and other independent observers, what seems to be pernicious in both Gaza and  Sri Lanka is the way  governments now appear to be using a tactic of short term denial of access in the hope that in the long term no one will be able to quickly challenge their version of events. And that the world will have stopped caring.  So denial of access to information in a conflict becomes another PR tool on the international stage, and perhaps the most cynical, in trying to erase history.

Empathy indictible?

The Republican Party - or at least some of its notables and cheerleaders - have been struggling to define the meaning of the word "empathy". They believe it is not a characteristic that should be found in a Supreme Court pick. Dahlia Lithwick has the story in Slate, which describes various grandees denouncing Obama for saying that, in seeking David Souter's replacement on the Supreme Court, he would like to find a figure "with empathy".

The problem for most of those quoted is that they appear to have confused the word empathy with sympathy. Both of which - judging by those quoted - are regarded as  sentiments to be checked at the court's door. I am not sure who I am more shocked by. By RNC Chairman Michael Steele  who described Obama's desire for an empathetic nominee thus: "Crazy nonsense empathetic! I'll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind!" Or by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah who believes that possession of empathy means that "politics, preferences, personal preferences and feelings might take the place of being impartial and deciding cases based upon the law, not upon politics."

But there is an crucial difference. Both words have their root in the Greek word pathos (which does not have the same meaning that we understand in "pathos").  The first  suggests an interconnectedness of emotions that indicates that the one feeling sympathy has an emotional common cause with the person, cause or event for whom the sympathy is being felt.

If one takes the Merriam Webster definition it can mean the following:

1 a: an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other b: mutual or parallel susceptibility or a condition brought about by it c: unity or harmony in action or effect <every part is in complete sympathy with the scheme as a whole

2 a: inclination to think or feel alike : emotional or intellectual accord <in sympathy with their goals> b: feeling of loyalty : tendency to favor or support <republican sympathies>

Empathy, however, is very different. The point about empathy is that it is largely the emotion of someone who is outside of the experience - often out of sympathy  - who is required by an act of imagination to attempt to understand someone else's point of view or experience.

The reality, I fear, is that the misunderstanding of the distinction between the two words is not simply a question of ignorance. It is rather more sinister. Sympathy is largely passive most of the time. It is an emotion that you feel or that you do not. It cannot be constructed out of effort.  Empathy is far more active. It requires facts, context and imagination in a process that will not necessarily bring one to sympathy but perhaps to a better knowledge of someone's situation and motives.

Which is why - for those quoted by Lithwick - it will always be suspect. Because knowledge is dangerous, above all the knowledge of how those who are our enemies, or of whom we disapprove, are inspired to behave.

Reading and Writing The Secret Life of War

There is a danger that this might be regarded exercise in solipsism or self-regard. But something struck me as reviews and emails from friends and colleagues have come in commenting on my book The Secret Life of War.That is the gap between what is intended by the writer - what the writer indeed 'owns' in his or her understanding of what they were attempting to achieve - and what the reader takes ownership of in the process of reading. It is a tension I have noticed before in my journalism. How readers through hostility or desire for you to share a common view with them, appropriate meanings that had, perhaps, never even crossed your mind.

What I had not considered properly before - was how there is so much more at work than the simple imposition of readers' own interpretive model - whether that is political, cultural or psychological - on what they read. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a  German philosopher who studied under Heidegger, was hugely influential in establishing modern ideas about the relationship between the reader and the read,  as a function of how we understand ideas like truth and meaning. If I understand Gadamer correctly, the idea that an objective truth could be excavated from a text by a reader was deeply problematic to him.

For Gadamer the reader inevitably was shaped by his own culture, background, experience and history. Whatever he observed in the reading process was necessarily strongly coloured.  Filtered if you like. Gadamer rejected the idea that you could describe the author's true intention, instead suggesting that all encounters between reader and writer are essentially a fusion of experiences. Others have developed on Gadamer's work to suggest that between the business of reading and writing there exists "play" - a constant backwards and forwards.

Precisely why this interests me  is because I became obsessed during the writing of The Secret Life of War with a related issue - how as a writer we can effectively interpret events that we see. In particular I became obsessed with attempting to relay as much as I could remember the precise details of situations as they took place, rebuilding the visual detail with the benefit of photographs with the notes of what people said and did, and emotional reflections.

Which left a question: was I writing about what I 'felt' had happened and whose meaning I had interpreted to my satisfaction, or had I managed to express something more true than a sketch of the provisional and foggy.

It is important because the more I think about attempting to be a witness, to observe and describe events, the less easy it becomes the more that I attempt to do it. Confronted by people's multiple viewpoints and interpretations. Which is what this blog will be about - not simply reporting or my reflections on events - but also an attempt to understand how we write about what we see.

The Secret Life of War by Peter Beaumont is published by Harvill Secker