It is a beautiful game

In June 1969 a second hotly contested World Cup qualifying match between Honduras and El Salvador was played in near riot conditions, with violence between fans and players spilling on to the pitch. Shortly afterwards the Salvadorian armed forces started to strike targets within Honduras, and what’s often described as “The Football War” broke out.

This incident, which took place over 40 years ago, is often quoted as a counter-example when anyone argues that international football promotes peace and harmony among the nations – yet what’s striking about it is that it’s pretty much a one-off. While there have been innumerable near-riots and many ugly incidents of racial intolerance in club-level football, international games – especially those played between national teams – have been amazingly free of such incidents.

This fact is especially surprising when you consider that the purpose of these matches is to establish rankings among countries – and what is potentially more inflammatory for a thin-skinned patriot than to discover that his father/motherland has been eliminated by a traditional rival or hated neighbour? But that isn’t generally what happens, and the current World Cup provides many examples.

Walking past a bar in Paris yesterday during the France-South Africa match (in which les Bleus were playing for a last slim chance to stay in the competition) I heard a great cheer of triumph from the assembled TV-watchers. Assuming that France had at last taken the lead, I looked in at the screen to check my supposition, and was amazed to see that the goal they had been cheering was actually South Africa’s – the first of the match. This morning’s newspapers offered the explanation that the France team had been behaving so disgracefully and playing so poorly that the fans were hoping rather for a South African triumph which at least would have enabled the host nation to qualify for the next round.

In fact, the World Cup offers a chance for nations to experience themselves, and each other, in quite a different way from the usual economic and productivist perspective of the media. Tiny Slovenia suddenly becomes the equal of the United States, while South Africa sends France back home to lick their wounds. Even semi-pariah nations enjoy their moments of respect and glory: Serbia, the scars of the ruinous conflicts of the 1990s still far from healed, overcomes Germany, and North Korea is able for a moment at least to challenge mighty Brazil.

And for the first time in many years the rest of the world sees North Koreans as footballers like any others, with their families at home cheering them on and their hopes and fears, their challenges and disappointments – rather than as the figures of fun or horror which are usually presented.

The Ivory Coast, normally associated with an ongoing civil war and massive official corruption, meets Portugal, ten times more affluent even in the midst of its debt crisis, and they play a good-humored game which leaves them equal (0-0) in a way which in the “real world” they perhaps never will be.

Isn’t there a glimpse here of a world which might be but which we rarely experience, where people are valued for themselves, not for their material assets or their economic potential, and where passion, skill, teamwork and creativity are enough to extricate oneself from the most hopeless situation? If football is a metaphor for life it’s a very optimistic one, and everyone, winners and losers alike, will go home from South Africa with a little more faith in humanity.

To the children who never lived

Wandering around the green hills and valleys of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris’s busy and crowded 19th district (which I wrote about in an earlier post), one comes across this neat, slightly anonymous-looking green stele, with its troubling image of two hands reaching in vain for one another.
It’s a monument to the several hundred Jewish children of the district who were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps during the WW2 German occupation of France, and in particular to the 33 little ones who were too young even to have started school.

In fact, there are plaques and steles to these vanished children all around this area of Paris: they’re outside most of the schools and in many public squares. While the Nazi death machine – which became more frenetic as the war went on and as Germany’s eventual defeat became more certain – claimed French Jews from all walks of life, the inhabitants of North-East Paris were among the most vulnerable and defenceless. Recent immigrants or refugees, poor and already dispossessed, barely speaking French in many cases, what chance did they stand when even the wealthy and well-integrated Jews of the affluent western districts, French citizens for many generations, were stripped of their property and possessions and forced to wear the despised yellow star?

And what fragment of a chance did their children stand – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, therefore the ones whom it’s our implicit duty as human beings to protect and defend – when this incomprehensible madness was raging all around them?

I don’t think we can enter into the mental world of people who are prepared to send not-yet-weaned children to be exterminated because of their racial origin, and I doubt that we should even try; it’s something which only a few writers have attempted, and with very patchy success. Perhaps the novelist E.M. Forster’s injunction to “only connect” doesn’t apply in this uniquely appalling case; perhaps the duty to oppose it in all its manifestations overrides any need to comprehend it, let alone to empathise.

Because this kind of mindset does continue to manifest itself, albeit usually in less extreme forms. I’m not referring merely to outbreaks of genocidal hatred such as those in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia, but to any and every time that an idea or ideology takes such possession of people’s minds as to override compassion, humility and even common sense. I’m talking, for instance, about the so-called “birthers” in the United States who are convinced despite all the evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that he’s an alien interloper bent on imposing totalitarian socialism. Or the Chinese ideologues who claim that the Dalai Lama is an evil and power-mad plotter seeking to undermine the unity of the Chinese nation, or the followers of a religion whose very name means “peace” but who claim that it sanctifies random mass murder – and so many, many others.

Most of the misery that people have inflicted one each other stems from this unfortunate deformity of the human mind, whereby we can elevate an idea, a mere construct, above all the other impulses, emotions, experiences and impressions which go to shape our actions. It’s something which we all need to guard against.

Let’s pause a while to reflect and to shudder, and, in the moving words of the stele in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont: “Passer-by, read their names. Your memory is their only burial.”

The Tale of the Green Children

Woolpit is a pretty little village in Eastern England just off the highway on which thousands of huge trucks thunder each day between the cities of the Midlands and the ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg. Its origins are Saxon, going back to well before the Norman conquest of 1066, and the name probably refers not to wool but to wolves, and to the pits full of sharpened stakes with which villagers defended themselves from the wild animals that roamed England in those far-off days.

What distinguishes Woolpit from hundreds of other similarly picturesque little boltholes (whose inhabitants today think about data networks and stock prices rather than wool or wolves) is the legend commemorated on the village sign. Sometime around 1220 CE – we can only guess at the year, as the first written records of the events date from some 60 years later – some reapers in the fields on the edge of the village heard cries from the (by now abandoned) pit, from where they saw two terrified and bewildered children emerge.

The children – a girl of around 10 and a somewhat younger boy – were dressed in unfamiliar clothes and spoke a language which no one in the village could understand or recognise, and, strangest of all, their skin was quite green. They were taken to the house of the local squire, where the servants plied them with bread and meat and other foods – the children had given to understand with gestures that they were very hungry – but they refused to eat anything at all until, by chance, some green beans were brought in. Not even the peas in the pod, but the pods themselves, was all the food they would eat for some time.

The boy sickened and died not long afterwards, but the girl started to eat other food and lost her green colour. After a while she learned English, and told her story to the villagers: she and her brother came from a land called St. Martin’s, or Merlin’s, across the water or possibly under the ground (the accounts differ) – a place of eternal twilight where all the inhabitants were green. Hearing a bell ringing in a cave, the children followed a blinding light which brought them suddenly into our world – hence their terror and bewilderment.

In time the girl became baptised, married a local yeoman, and became a normal member of the community, apart from her “somewhat wanton customs”, as one of the chroniclers observes – but the story lives on, and has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years. It’s been a children’s book, an opera and even an off-Broadway play – thanks to its multiple resonances and its value as a litmus test of the way that we interpret and experience the unknown and the unknowable.

To start with, there are the “objective” explanations. The children had been subsisting on wild plants and leaves – hence their colour. They came from a distant village – in the 13^th century people rarely travelled more than a few miles from where they were born – and so spoke an unfamiliar dialect. Or they were Flemish, from what’s now Belgium, the orphan offspring of refugees from the wars raging just over the North Sea. None of these “explanations” is completely satisfactory, but obviously none can be disproved either at a distance of over 800 years, and with only half-remembered hearsay to go on.

The story also calls to mind the various accounts of feral children supposedly raised by wolves (again) or other wild animals, which are scattered across history and across the world – children who sometimes inexplicably failed ever to integrate into human society and sometimes, equally inexplicably, did so perfectly.

But what makes this legend so uniquely multi-layered, haunting and even disturbing is the colour of the children: green is not only the colour of growth and fertility, but also of decay and death – and the children not only were green but would only eat green beans, traditionally the food of the dead. Greenness also evokes a riotous and promiscuous fecundity which tramples over social norms and customs (note the “wantonness” attributed to the green girl): the traditional figure of the “Green Man”, a kind of vegetable deity, is a disruptive figure as much as a symbol of rebirth – evoking as he does an almost forgotten pre-civilized level of consciousness.

And, last but not least, green is the colour most commonly associated with the extraterrestrials whose sightings over the last 100 years or so are the modern legends which the Woolpit story immediately brings to mind. If it had happened 7-800 years later the children would have been described as aliens, and perhaps their story would have been recast and retold as a botched space trip (as a matter of fact, this is one of the “explanations” of the legend currently in circulation now).

However, the ultimate challenge of the Woolpit story is to our ability to accept the complexity and multiplicity of the experienced world itself, and of the consciousness with which we experience it. The current orthodoxy is a kind of brutal and levelling-down reductionism which seeks to nullify and devalue the moral, spiritual and aesthetic aspects of our mental life; “explanation” today all too often equates with dismissal – as if understanding the world (as if we could ever fully understand it!) took away the impulse to respect it or wonder at it.

Stories like that of the green children of Woolpit are gifts made all the more valuable by our ignorance of where they come from. Like all mythic gifts, they’re two-edged, showing us what we fail, or fear, to see in ourselves - even as they reveal the unseen wonders of the world.

Love is a waterfall

The 19^th district of Paris, where I’m currently living, is a bustling, chaotic, low-rent part of the city. Once a proletarian neighbourhood where newly-arrived country folk rented rooms while trying to find work as porters, dressmakers, or maids, it’s now a magnet for immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and as far away as China. The streets are grubby, the accommodation cramped and basic, there’s graffiti on the walls and garbage blowing in the wind; it’s a world away from the ultra-affluent quartiers around the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées which most tourists associate with “the city of light”.

Even so, it’s difficult for us today to imagine the squalor and misery of Eastern Paris 150 years ago: the barefoot children running and sleeping in the streets, whole families sharing one dingy room, lives framed and enclosed by a few dark, dirty and dangerous streets – unable to imagine or afford any form of recreation much beyond stupefying themselves with rotgut booze.

Much of Paris, even right in the centre, was similar when Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to reconceive and reconstruct Paris as a modern city worthy of its glorious name. An important part of Haussmann’s plan was to provide the working classes with access to fresh air and the beauty of nature – hence the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

Built on the site of an abandoned quarry, the Parc is an extraordinary achievement of artificial landscaping, full of steep hills, mountain-like trails, hills and promontories, the highest of which is surmounted by a pagoda. There’s a large lake, where carp and tench swim and where herons and cormorants come to fish – and, most exotic of all, a 100-foot-high artificial waterfall, where clean, clear water flows over black rocks and into the lake. It’s as popular today as it must have been in the days of Baron Haussmann; small children chase each other up and down the hills, lovers embrace each other on shady benches, purposeful joggers plod around the tracks, and groups of friends spread picnic cloths on the grass and pass Sunday afternoons laughing and chatting over wine, cheese and pâté.

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is immaculately maintained by the city council, the flower-beds regularly weeded, the collections of exotic trees and shrubs carefully labelled and nurtured, and the tracks and paths swept twice a day – and, a nice 21st-century touch, free wi-fi is available throughout the park for people who want to bring their novels in progress or their Facebook accounts into its green shade.

What stupendous acts of love such places are, and the glories of the world’s great cities. Not built as the private property of a king, an emperor or a nobleman, nor to enrich some greedy great corporation, but simply to enable the people, starved of green and of contact with the countryside to breathe clean air and to rise their eyes to the beauty and simplicity of nature – and their maintenance today is an ongoing act of love which we all too easily take for granted. It often seems today that whatever’s free is somehow diminished in value thereby; shopping malls mean a lot more to a lot of people than municipal parks, while the natural world is fragmented and atomized into suburban gardens and country clubs.

Yet in parks we city-dwellers not only touch the eternal splendour of the natural world without effort or travel, but we also do so at no cost, and together. They remind us of what we share, as citizens, as people, and as living creatures upon the Earth – living lessons in history, civics, and ecology.

Sub specie aeternatis (through the eyes of Eternity)

In a world where finance and economics override all other forms of intellectual activity, and where speculation is what people do on Wall Street, the name of Greece is linked in most people’s minds with words like “debt” and “crisis”. As for “austerity”, that today refers not to a restrained and dignified philosophy, but to brutal cuts in public expenditure aimed at appeasing the same bankers whose lending caused the debt crisis in the first place.

Personally, when I hear Greece mentioned, I like to think of Monemvasia, as it was when I discovered it by accident, over 30 years ago. Hitch-hiking and bussing around Greece with a girl-friend, we were dropped from a beat-up old Peugeot into the small and nondescript modern town on the mainland, from where a narrow causeway leads to a jumble of 3- to 400-year-old stone houses clinging to the side of a huge flat-topped rock. Some are piled on top of each other, some half-ruined and others half-restored, some painted in primary colors and others left in an “austere” gray which is still dazzling in that almost-white Peloponnesian sun. It’s a chaos of shape and form which seems to grow out of the ancient rock and is infinitely soothing to the eye and the soul – unlike, say, the jumble of industrial buildings, apartment blocks, warehouses and freeways that surrounds modern cities.
And then, as we wandered around those narrow streets, picking ripe figs to eat, we came across a path leading up to the top of the rock and to a third and even earlier incarnation of Monemvasia. This was the Byzantine castle, abandoned in the Middle Ages and with little left standing but this ruined church (where the devout from the town below still came to pray and to leave offerings of a few hard-earned drachmas), looking out over endless vistas of clear blue sea and uninhabited rocky coastline, seemingly perched on the edge of the world’s end.

Even at that young age, I was deeply moved by Monemvasia and its message of eternity – the seemingly vast gap between the Byzantium of 1000 years ago and the late 20th century compressed to a 20-minute hike, and all around the stillness of rocks, sea and sky; the changing and the unchanging set in the starkest possible contrast against each other. And there was an additional poignancy for me, traveling with a girl I was madly in love with but whom I feared (rightly) that I would lose once we got back to England – to see so clearly laid out before me that disjunction of people’s fleeting passions and ambitions with what little remains behind when they’ve gone.

Somehow, young as I was, Monemvasia helped me to see that the transitory nature of our hopes and desires doesn’t diminish their value, in fact that’s what gives them their value – but that, like stone walls, they quickly crumble and fade away, leaving only the rocks and the sea and the wind whistling through the empty sky. And the time it takes for this to happen, whether it’s a few years, a few hundred years or even a few thousand years, is a mere blink of the eye of eternity.

Greece, maybe more than any other country, allows us to glimpse the world through those eyes that aren’t ours, but which we can borrow for a moment to acquire some much-needed distance from the tiny concerns which tie us down from day to day. Lifting our eyes to the skies, we remember for a moment who we really are and where we really come from.

A low-information diet?

There are lots of good reasons for paying as little attention as possible to news and news media. Tim Ferriss, in his “Four Hour Working Week”, recommends a “low information diet”, not only to avoid time-wasting distractions but as a way of asserting the primacy of your own agenda and world-view. Many writers on self-help and personal development put forward a similar argument – that we should focus our attention on our own goals and the changes we can make around us.

The stories in the media are doubly disempowering, this argument runs: firstly they redirect our concern and attention to distant tragedies which we can do nothing about, and secondly they control the discourse by determining what we should be thinking and talking about, and what we shouldn’t. (For instance: Louisiana oil spill and European debt crisis yes, ongoing tragedies in Darfur and Congo, no.) And from there it’s only a small step towards sharing in the conventional wisdom on the topics in view: Obama isn’t doing enough to stop the oil; European countries need to become more competitive and to enhance economic growth. Then you can waste huge amounts of time in internet forums clashing with people who don’t share the same “wisdom” as you – as if either your opinions or theirs made any difference, or challenged the power of governments or corporations in any way whatsoever.

Most creative artists and other highly productive people spend little or no time surfing the media – they’re too full of their own goals and agendas to give headspace to anything else. Shouldn’t we all be emulating them, becoming more effective and productive in the process, and cut these intellectual and spiritual parasites out of our lives?

Largely speaking, yes we should – but there’s a fault in the argument that these tragedies have nothing to do with us, or that we can’t do anything about them. Of course, we can’t directly stop the oil spill (even if we’re the CEO of BP, apparently), but it’s a direct consequence of our oil-focused economies and our general failure to act as caring and responsible stewards of the planet which we go on casually wounding.

Perhaps it’s a duty to feel above all – to feel our connectedness with all humanity and all life, and then to act accordingly. Not in internet forums or saloon-bar discussions, but out there in the world, in our own world, wherever we can make a difference.

A low-information diet yes, but not a no-information diet. To be aware of what’s happening, and then to find our own original and authentic response to it – that’s the way to use the media, and not to be used by them.