Things of Global Significance

This week I am mostly reading Goodbye To All That …

… and have been interested to read that Robert Graves was based at Litherland barracks which is just down the road from us. I can’t find the exact location so I will have to ask around the local wrinklies to see if they know. It was next to the Brotherton’s ammunition factory which Graves and Siegfried Sassoon thought might take out both Litherland and Bootle should it explode. The book also mentions Sassoon throwing his Military Cross into the sea at Formby and his family believed this was true until very recently when it turned up on Mull. I was about to suggest a treasure hunting expedition to the children but they will have to stand down now. Sorry – the language of the trenches seems to have got to me.

I always thought that Robert Graves survived the war pretty much unscathed but he was severely wounded, so severely that his mother was informed of his death and his obituary published in the times. He returned to France but was sent back as unfit for trench service and despite efforts to return to some sort of active service overseas he spent the rest of the war in Britain. Graves and Sassoon were both affected with what was termed neurasthenia at the time but which is probably PTSD. Graves was so much affected that the shakes would be triggered by any strong and unexpected smell – even that of flowers – as a reminder of the gas which both sides used. The strange thing is that all this horror is written about in such a detached way that you seem to accept it like Graves did – he didn’t agree with the war and still tried desperately to fight in it – possibly because it was all he knew in his working life – it was all he could do. He goes from the severe trauma of the moment of his injury, through the hospitalisation in France to his recuperation at Osborne House on the Isle of White with little change of pace. I suppose this chimes with the title of the book – just a chronological charge through the events in order to put them behind him, though the pace is not really manic or plodding – just matter-of-fact and yet it still seems to draw you in with a sort of hypnotic rhythm. This is the first book in ages I have raced to finish.
GEB is still around though. Finished Ant Fugue and now I am into the juicy chapters about mapping brains structure to brain function at all levels, based on the brain/Ant Colony isomorphisms from Ant Fugue; pictures of neurons and that sort of stuff.

The Collected Thoughts of Desmond Hamster

I am in the rare state of having two books I want to read equally. Normally either one or other of the top two books on my pile gains full attention until either it is finished or I get bored. However, the two books at the moment have reached a plateau of interestingness (which must only be in the Spelling dictionary because Stephen Fry has lobbied for it to be there) and I am switching between them – reading a chapter from each in turn. One of course is GEB and the other is Goodbye To All That which despite being about the one of the most horrific experiences that man can go through, draws me in like lighter biography never does.

Having said this, the chapter of GEB just read was light in the extreme because it refers to computer programs from nearly 30 years ago and was therefore quite easy to understand, though this was covered in the text by references to what computers will become and have already started to progress towards. On to Ant Fugue.

Random Walk This Way

Well I suppose I have to review Goodbye to all That now don't I? Well as I said above, it is a lot less literary than I was expecting - anecdotal and down-to-earth rather than what you might expect from a poet but then again I suppose that even if you are a poet, living in the mud of the trenches might colour any prose with mundanity no matter how much good whiskey, silver cutlery and tasteful lighting you have in your dugouts. My overriding view of the trenches from the section I have already read is one of soft-lights, an ambience almost like those scenes of Victorians shopping you get on the top of chocolate tins. I know that this is wrong but not even the description of the poor sap who blew his face off with his own grenade gave me anything other than a slight jolt. I suppose that this is the horror – the acceptance of that horror as normal – the slow descent into trauma-causing disaster with out any real awareness that things are as bad as they can get.

Material World http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml yesterday was about Locusts. This together with the new Powergen advert for greener electricity involving millions of helicoptering sycamore seeds gave me a terrible dream of being in a world with thousands of locusts filling every available space and me being unable to avoid stepping on them. Actually there is a third influence for this which is Robert Graves description of stepping on mice and frogs that had fallen in the trenches. All of this dream happened in ten minutes sleep between seeing that it was nearly time to get up and then realising that I was late. I can still hear the crunch of the insects under my feet.

I have always wondered why we do not try and turn all the protein created in a swarm of locusts into something edible? Maybe the problem in locust-affected areas is that eating insects is against some local religious code. Locusts look like prawns anyway. I used to look after the locusts ate school. I had to go and gather grass for them at lunchtime and drop it into the cage through the hole at the top. There was always the thrill that one of them would escape. We made our own fun at that school.

Sniffy, Miffy and Lippy

I am very annoyed today. I just got to Part II of GEB to discover yet another issue with the printing and binding. This time it is whole page spreads which are completely blank every so often. This is not something you could spot before hand because it comes at a point where the book has blank pages anyway. I am beginning to wonder whether every copy has some flaw or other just to make some point regarding the content. They cannot comment that the book is battered through being in my laptop bag because they are GOING TO HAVE TO PULP IT ANYWAY. I am trying to spot some sort of Isomorphism between this and the things the book says and there is indeed a reference to an Author printing blank pages at the end of a book to foil readers who might go there first. However, this concept is extended to printing lots of gibberish to fool the reader as to where the end actually is. Some reviewers even suggest that lots of GEB is actually gibberish anyway though even in the parts which I may have skimmed it all seems to feel right. There was a scientist who once wrote a completely fake essay regarding the sort of philosophy and postmodernism that is beloved of the pseudo-intellectual crowd and they fell for it entirely. I think it was the sort of thing that attempts to quantify concepts that are completely beyond the reach of mathematics - equations regarding sociology and concepts of political correctness which are the epitome of The Emperor’s New clothes.

The upshot of this is that Goodbye to All that is now half-finished.