A hunger for books
Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet
Saturday December 8, 2007
The Guardian
I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.
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There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended. My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.
On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and cooked it in a great tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast: boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was still going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.
I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?
I do my best. They are polite.
I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.
Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.
Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship classes - and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the Tonga language, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.
It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.
This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.
Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."
But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.
I have been looking at the speeches by some of the recent Nobel prizewinners. Take last year's winner, the magnificent Orhan Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition. Take VS Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition. Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes; taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind. In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off. There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.
Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me."
Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."
My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?
There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American, seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"
"It is about Russia," says the girl.
"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."
The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."
The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.
Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.
"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."
This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.
It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.
Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.
A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looked around at his fellow passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man was used to people listening when he spoke. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel."
When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane.
Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling on to it, the thick folds.
She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.
This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."
She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.
You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?
It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.
On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.
We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.
© The Nobel Foundation 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Insemnare din ghetou
Tocmai am citit "Ravelstein", scrisa de Saul Bellow, castigator de Nobel din Chicago. Cartea e biografia lui Alan Bloom, filosof si elev al lui Leo Strauss, inventatorul curentului neocon. Saul Bellow a fost insurat cu o profa de mate romanca, a fost in cercul lui Eliade, si ii pune si pe ei in carte. Asa ca avem o descriere a romanilor universitari, niste "francezi balcanici" (adica super snobi, aristocrati cu mosii prin locuri greu identificabile pe harta), un Eliade fermecator, care arunca dolarii fara se se uite la nota de plata si care pare sa nu fie deloc deranjat de trecutu-i fascist, Christinel cea fina si retrasa, o nevasta (a lui Bellow) fermecatoare insa de neinteles (parca asta zicea si sotul american al Nadiei Comaneci).
E o caracterizare partinitoare (divortul e descris si el), insa destul de precisa, a tipului de roman de prin universitatile americane. Pe mine m-a distrat, mai ales ca m-am saturat sa citesc despre criminalii din Italia si Spania.
Si la final, documentarul lui Adam Curtis din 2007, "The Trap", descrie interventia specialistilor in economie educati la Harvard in Rusia si Iraq. Ideea centrala e aplicarea "teoriei jocului", cea care i-a adus premiul Nobel lui Nash ("A beautiful mind"), adica: elimina controalele si economia se va organiza de la sine prin interactiunea indivizilor care-si urmeaza exclusiv interesele personale. Interesanta explicatie si pentru haosul din tara.
E o caracterizare partinitoare (divortul e descris si el), insa destul de precisa, a tipului de roman de prin universitatile americane. Pe mine m-a distrat, mai ales ca m-am saturat sa citesc despre criminalii din Italia si Spania.
Si la final, documentarul lui Adam Curtis din 2007, "The Trap", descrie interventia specialistilor in economie educati la Harvard in Rusia si Iraq. Ideea centrala e aplicarea "teoriei jocului", cea care i-a adus premiul Nobel lui Nash ("A beautiful mind"), adica: elimina controalele si economia se va organiza de la sine prin interactiunea indivizilor care-si urmeaza exclusiv interesele personale. Interesanta explicatie si pentru haosul din tara.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Lenin lived, lives and will live. So does El Che.
Fragmente din opera unui mare viitor celebru romancier roman. O fi deja celebru da-i anonim.
Si un Kafka dinspre Gotham City.
Si un Kafka dinspre Gotham City.
Monday, August 13, 2007
George, Patty&Eric
Pattie Boyd: 'My hellish love triangle with George and Eric'
George Harrison wrote the love song Something for his wife Pattie Boyd. Eric Clapton wrote Layla for her. Theirs was the most extraordinary love triangle in rock history.
Now, after four decades of silence, the woman who drove two music legends wild tells the raw, unexpurgated story of her life...
We met secretly at a flat in South Kensington. Eric Clapton had asked me to come because he wanted me to listen to a new number he had written.
He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard. It was Layla, about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable.
He played it to me two or three times, all the while watching my face intently for my reaction. My first thought was: 'Oh God, everyone's going to know this is about me.'
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High minds: George and Pattie pictured shortly before they broke up
I was married to Eric's close friend, George Harrison, but Eric had been making his desire for me clear for months. I felt uncomfortable that he was pushing me in a direction in which I wasn't certain I wanted to go.
Scroll down to view an exclusive video interview with Pattie...
But with the realisation that I had inspired such passion and creativity, the song got the better of me. I could resist no longer.
That evening I was going to the theatre to see Oh! Calcutta! with a friend and then on to a party at the home of pop impresario Robert Stigwood. George didn't want to go to the show or the party.
After the interval at Oh!Calcutta! I came back to find Eric in the next seat, having persuaded a stranger to swap places with him. Afterwards we went to Robert's house separately but we were soon together. It was a great party and I felt elated by what had happened earlier in the day but also deeply guilty.
During the early hours, George appeared. He was morose and his mood was not improved by walking into a party that had been going on for several hours and where most of the guests were high on drugs.
He kept asking 'Where's Pattie?' but no one seemed to know. He was about to leave when he spotted me in the garden with Eric. It was just getting light, and very misty. George came over and demanded: 'What's going on?' To my horror, Eric said: 'I have to tell you, man, that I'm in love with your wife.'
I wanted to die. George was furious. He turned to me and said: 'Well, are you going with him or coming with me?'
I had met George six years previously, in 1964, when he was filming A Hard Day's Night. Britain and most of Europe was in the grip of Beatlemania.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were mobbed everywhere they went, and at their concerts thousands of hysterical teenagers cried and screamed so loudly that no one could hear the music.
Shortly before they started shooting A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles took America by storm. In February 1964 they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, one of America's most prestigious programmes, and attracted an audience of 73million.
I was a model, working with some of the most successful photographers in London, including David Bailey and Terence Donovan. I was appearing in newspapers and magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue, but in March my agent sent me along to a casting session for a film.
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She called later to tell me I had been offered the part of a schoolgirl fan in a Beatles film. On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute and George, with velvet-brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I had ever seen. At a break for lunch I found myself sitting next to him. Being close to him was electrifying.
Almost the first thing he said to me was: 'Will you marry me?' He was joking but there was a hint of seriousness. We got together soon after that and married two years later on January 21, 1966. I was 21, he was 22. I was so happy and so much in love. I thought we would be together and happy for ever.
Honeymoon: Pattie and George in Barbados
Three years later, in 1969, George wrote a song called Something. He told me in a matter-of-fact way that he had written it for me. I thought it was beautiful and it turned out to be the most successful song he ever wrote, with more than 150 cover versions.
Frank Sinatra said he thought it was the best love song ever written. George's favourite version was the one by James Brown. Mine was the one by George Harrison, which he played to me in our kitchen.
But, in fact, by then our relationship was in trouble. Since a trip to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India in 1968, George had become obsessive about meditation. He was also sometimes withdrawn and depressed.
My moods started to mirror his and at times I felt almost suicidal. I don't think I was ever in any real danger of killing myself but I got as far as working out how I would do it: put on a diaphanous Ossie Clark dress and throw myself off Beachy Head.
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And there were other women, which really hurt me. George was fascinated by the god Krishna who was always surrounded by young maidens. He came back from India wanting to be some kind of Krishna figure, a spiritual being with lots of concubines. He actually said so.
No woman was out of bounds. I was friendly with a French girl who was going out with Eric Clapton. When she and Eric broke up, she came to stay with us at our house, Kinfauns, in Esher, Surrey.
She didn't seem remotely upset about Eric and was uncomfortably close to George. Something was going on between them but when I questioned George he told me my imagination was running away with me, that I was paranoid.
I left to stay with friends and within days George phoned to say the girl had gone. I returned home but I was shocked that he could do such a thing to me. I felt unloved and miserable.
Chilled: George relaxes in India in 1968
It was around this time that Eric began to come over to our house. He and George had become close friends, writing and recording music together.
Eric's guitar playing was held in awe by his fellow musicians. Graffiti declaring 'Clapton is God' had been scrawled on the London Underground, and he was an incredibly exciting performer to watch. He looked wonderful on stage, very sexy.
But when I met him he didn't behave like a rock star – he was surprisingly shy and reticent. I was aware that Eric found me attractive and I enjoyed the attention he paid me.
It was hard not to be flattered when I caught him staring at me or when he chose to sit beside me. He complimented me on what I was wearing and the food I had cooked, and he said things he knew would make me laugh. Those were all things that George no longer did.
One night in December 1969 I took my 17-year-old sister Paula to see Eric play in Liverpool. Paula was very pretty and a bit of a wild child, and that night Eric fell for her. After the show we all went to a restaurant and everyone was quite drunk and raucous. When the rest of us went back to the hotel, we left Eric and Paula dancing.
The next night Eric was playing in Croydon and again Paula and I went to watch, and again there was a wild after-show party, this time at Eric's Italianate manor house, Hurtwood Edge in Ewhurst, Surrey. Soon after, Paula moved in with Eric.
In March 1970, George and I moved into a new house. Friar Park was a magnificent Victorian Gothic pile near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, with 25 bedrooms, a ballroom, a library, a formal garden of 12 acres and a further 20 acres of land.
Relaxed: Eric drinks in the garden of Pattie and George's Friar Park home
One morning shortly after moving in, a letter arrived for me with the words 'express' and 'urgent' written on the envelope. Inside I found a small piece of paper. In small, immaculate writing, with no capital letters, I read: 'dearest l,'as you have probably gathered, my own home affairs are a galloping farce, which is rapidly degenerating day by intolerable day . . . it seems like an eternity since i last saw or spoke to you!'
He needed to ascertain my feelings: id I still love my husband or did I have another lover? More crucially, did I still have feelings in my heart for him? He had to know, and urged me to write. 'please do this, whatever it may say, my mind will be at rest . . .'all my love, e.'
I assumed it was from some weirdo.
I got fan mail occasionally – when I wasn't getting hate mail from George's fans. I showed it to George and others who were at the house. They laughed and dismissed it, as I had.
That evening the phone rang. It was Eric. 'Did you get my letter?' he asked.
Letter?' I said. 'I don't think so. What letter are you talking about?'
Then the penny dropped. 'Was that from you? I had no idea you felt that way.' It was the most passionate letter anyone had ever written to me and it put our relationship on a different footing. It made the flirtation all the more exciting and dangerous. But as far as I was concerned, it was just flirtation.
From time to time during the spring and summer of 1970, Eric and I saw each other. One day, walking down Oxford Street, he asked: 'Do you like me, then, or are you seeing me because I'm famous?'
'Oh, I thought you were seeing me because I'm famous,' I said. We laughed.
He always found it difficult to talk about his feelings, instead pouring them into his music and writing.
Once we met under the clock in Guildford High Street. He had just come back from Miami and had a pair of bell-bottom trousers for me – hence the track Bell Bottom Blues. He was tanned and looked gorgeous and irresistible – but I managed to resist him.
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Dream girl: Pattie modelling in 1964
Read more...
* Pattie Boyd: George had to ask Brian Epstein for permission to marry me
* Pattie Boyd: The dentist who spiked my coffee with LSD
* Pattie Boyd: 'My hellish love triangle with George and Eric' - Part One
On another occasion I drove to Ewhurst and we met in the woods nearby. Eric was wearing a wolf coat and looked very sexy. We didn't go to his house because someone would have been there. A lot of people lived at Hurtwood Edge: his band, the Dominos, Paula and Alice Ormsby-Gore, another of Eric's girlfriends.
The convent girl in me found the situation uncomfortable but strangely exciting, and so it was later that year after Eric had played me Layla in the South Kensington flat that I succumbed to his advances.
After George and Eric's confrontation at Robert Stigwood's party, I went home with my husband. Back at the house I went to bed and George disappeared into his recording studio.
The next time I saw Eric, he turned up unexpectedly at Friar Park. George was away – I don't know whether Eric knew that in advance – and I was on my own. He said he wanted me to go away with him: he was desperately in love with me and couldn't live without me. I had to leave George right now and be with him.
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Happy days: Pattie's own photo of Paul, Ringo and John in 1968
'Eric, are you mad?' I asked. 'I can't possibly. I'm married to George.'
He said: 'No, no, no. I love you. I have to have you in my life.'
'No,' I said.
He produced a small packet from his pocket and held it out towards me.
'Well, if you're not going to come away with me, I'm going to take this.'
'What is it?'
'Heroin.'
'Don't be so stupid.' I tried to grab it from him but he clenched his fist and hid it in his pocket.
'If you're not going to come with me,' he said, 'that's it. I'm off.'
And he went. I hardly saw him for three years.
He did as he threatened. He took the heroin and quickly became addicted. And he took Alice Ormsby-Gore with him.
Eric already did a lot of drugs, the ones we all used – marijuana, uppers, downers and cocaine – and he drank quite heavily too. But his dealer had been insisting recently he bought heroin when he supplied him with cocaine.
Eric had been using it infrequently for about a year and had amassed a big pile. He now set about using it. He and Alice retreated into Hurtwood Edge and pulled up the drawbridge. He didn't leave the house, he didn't see friends, he didn't answer the door or the telephone, and the two of them sank into virtual oblivion.
By this time Paula had gone. She had been with Eric in Miami when he was recording Layla and knew instantly it was about me. She had always had a suspicion he was with her only because she was the next best thing to me and I was unobtainable. Hearing Layla confirmed it.
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Love rivals: (Left to right) Eric and George
She had been seriously in love with Eric, but he destroyed her pride, her self-esteem and her confidence, which were already fragile.
On top of that, her big sister was the last person to whom she could turn for comfort. I tried to telephone Eric but Alice always answered, so I hung up.
I turned my attention to my husband and to renovating Friar Park. For a brief period the project united us but the house was so enormous, and there were always so many people living in it, that we never had any intimacy. Most of the time, even when George was in the house, I didn't know where he was.
At meal times, too many other people were at the table for us to have any real conversation. And even though we shared a bed, he was often in his recording studio or meditating half the night in the octagonal room at the top of the house that had become his sanctuary.
I felt more and more alienated. I didn't feel included in George's thinking or his plans. I wasn't his partner in anything any longer. He was surrounded by yes-men. When I challenged him about it he said: 'Well I'd hate to be surrounded by no-men.'
I heard from Eric again in January 1971, two months after he had walked out vowing to take the heroin. He wrote to me from a cottage in Wales.
On the title page of a copy of Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, he had written: 'dear layla, for nothing more than the pleasures past i would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move. i am at the end of my mind, i cannot go back and there is nothing in tomorrow (save you) that can attract me beyond today. i have listened to the wind, i have watched the dark brooding clouds, i have felt the earth beneath me for a sign, a gesture, but there is only silence. why do you hesitate, am i a poor lover, am i ugly, am i too weak, too strong, do you know why? if you want me, take me, i am yours . . . 'if you don't want me, please break the spell that binds me. 'to cage a wild animal is a sin, to tame him is divine. 'my love is yours.'
It was signed with a heart. That one short note stirred up feelings I had spent two months suppressing. I wrote and told him what he wanted to hear.
'How are you? I hope the Welsh air has been soothing your mind and warming your heart. Oh, I so long to spend some time with you there . . . it would be beautiful to be together, just for a while.
'If the stars should suddenly change their course and I can come to Wales I'll send a telegram. Please take care of yourself. 'Moons full of love 'L'
As soon as I had posted the letter I had terrible doubts and immediately wrote a postcard. It simply said: 'Hullo, Please forgive and forget my bold suggestion.'Love L'
His reply came by return of post on the dust jacket of a book of Scottish ballads and was written in green ink.
'it was rather significant that i received both communications on the same morning. something like watching a boomerang in flight.'
He said he understood my situation and didn't know what to recommend.
'i love you even though you're chicken.'
Nothing came of our fantasies and I didn't see or speak to him again until August 1971. George had persuaded him to come out of Hurtwood Edge briefly to perform at a charity event, Concert For Bangladesh, in New York.
Eric was in a bad way but George thought that if he got him on stage, even propped up with drugs, his addiction would become an open secret and maybe he would open the door a little to his friends, who might be able to help.
Everyone knew that if Eric was to have a chance of getting through two performances – one in the afternoon and another that evening – he would need a supply of heroin when he arrived in New York.
I remember discussions about finding a really good one, called White Elephant, for him. It had to be very pure because he never injected – he was terrified of needles – but snorted it instead, as if it was cocaine, from a gold spoon he wore round his neck. Alice found it – she always did the scoring.
While they were living at Hurtwood Edge, she went to London to do the sordid business of getting supplies while Eric stayed at home. If ever they ran short, she would give him her share and take something else. She was drinking at least two bottles of vodka a day so he could have the heroin.
That day he and I scarcely spoke. He was surrounded by people, then on stage, and he was very out of it; I'm not sure he really saw me. It was a shock to think that he had done this to himself because of me. At first I felt guilty, then my feelings would swing violently the other way and I was angry that he should have asked me to choose between him and my husband.
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Still standing: Pattie Boyd as she is today
When the concert was over, Eric and Alice went back to the horrors of their self-imposed prison at Hurtwood Edge. Pete Townshend of The Who was the only friend who refused to take no for an answer and went to the house so often that eventually Eric had to see him.
Pete persuaded him to perform at another charity concert, this time at Finsbury Park, North London.
The show in 1973, billed as Eric's comeback, was a triumph. I was sitting in the audience with George, Ringo, Elton John, Joe Cocker and Jimmy Page. Eric didn't look well – his addict's diet of junk food and chocolate had made him put on weight.
As I heard the opening wail of Layla, the first number of the evening, then the lyrics, my blood ran cold. He might have been wrecked for the previous three years but he hadn't forgotten how to tear at the heart-strings with his guitar.
All the emotion I had felt for him when he disappeared from my life welled up inside me.
The show reminded Eric there was an alternative to his life as an addict and eventually he agreed to accept treatment. He got off the heroin – and went straight on to alcohol.
He became a regular visitor to Friar Park and professed his love for me with increasing vigour. Letters arrived almost daily in which he pleaded with me to leave George and be with him.
Meanwhile, things between George and me were going from bad to worse. I don't know what his feelings were about Eric when he reappeared in our lives.
We had been so stoned on the night of Robert Stigwood's party that he might have forgotten about the confrontation in the mist, but I don't think so. George never spoke about it but after that night I think he felt he could be as blatant as he liked in his pursuit of other women.
In spring 1973 we were supposed to go on holiday together. The day before we were due to leave, George said he wasn't feeling well and couldn't go. He ended up going to Spain, supposedly to see Salvador Dali, with Ronnie Wood's wife, Krissie.
Ronnie, then bass guitarist with The Faces, and Krissie were friends of ours who often came to stay at Friar Park. I was desperately hurt: another of my friends was sleeping with George.
When I challenged him he denied it.
I went to the Bahamas instead with my sister Paula, who was battling her own heroin addiction. While there we had a call from Ronnie Wood. He was on tour and said he might come to see us for a few days. He didn't seem upset that his wife was with George – he just thought it was funny they had gone to see Dali.
Ronnie is the most adorable man, and maybe at that moment some fun, laughter and a pair of comforting arms were what I needed.
The final straw for George and me was his affair with Ringo's wife, Maureen. She was the last person I would have expected to stab me in the back.
I discovered from some photos that she had been staying in the house with George while I had visited my mother in Devon. He had given her a beautiful necklace, which she wore in front of me.
Then I found them locked in a bedroom at Friar Park. I stood outside banging on the door yelling: 'What are you doing? Maureen's in there, isn't she? I know she is!' George just laughed.
Eventually he opened the door and said: 'Oh, she's just a bit tired so she's lying down.'
I went straight to the top of the house and lowered the flag bearing the om symbol that George had been flying from the roof and hoisted a skull and crossbones instead. That made me feel much better.
Maureen wasn't even prepared to be subtle. She would turn up at Friar Park at midnight and I would say: 'What the hell are you doing here?' 'I've come to listen to George playing in the studio.' 'Well, I'm going to bed.' 'Ah, well, I'm going to the studio.'
The next morning, she'd still be there, and I'd say: 'Have you thought about your children? What are you up to? I don't like it.'
'Tough,' was her response.
Ringo didn't have a clue what was going on until I rang him one day and said: 'Have you ever thought about why your wife doesn't come home at night? It's because she's here!' He flew into a rage.
George continued to pretend that nothing was going on and would leave me feeling as though I was becoming paranoid.
I felt undermined and unloved and George was so terribly difficult to talk to. He had become worse in the last year, maybe because Eric kept coming around and making it obvious that he wanted to see me. George must have sensed we were having an affair but he never said so.
One evening the actor John Hurt was with us. Eric was due to come over too and George decided to have it out with him. John wanted to make himself scarce but George insisted he stay.
John remembers George coming downstairs with two guitars and two small amplifiers, laying them down in the hall, then pacing restlessly until Eric arrived – full of brandy, as usual.
As Eric walked through the door George handed him a guitar and amp – as an 18th Century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword – and for two hours, without a word, they duelled. The air was electric and the music exciting.
At the end, nothing was said but the general feeling was that Eric had won. He hadn't allowed himself to get riled or to go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar-playing was unbeatable.
That whole period was insane. Friar Park was a madhouse. Our lives were fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, and so it was with everyone who came into our sphere. We were all as drunk, stoned and single-minded as each other. Nobody seemed to have appointments, deadlines or anything pressing in their lives, no structure and no responsibilities.
Cocaine is a seductive drug because it makes you feel euphoric and good about yourself. It takes away your inhibitions and makes even the shyest, most insecure person feel confident.
And we had so much energy – everyone would talk nonsense for twice as long and drink twice as much because the cocaine made us feel sober. George used cocaine excessively and I think it changed him.
Marijuana wasn't destructive. Dope in the Sixties – a very different drug from the skunk kids smoke today – was about peace, love and increasing awareness. Cocaine was different and I think it froze George's emotions and hardened his heart.
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On New Year's Eve in 1973, Ringo held a party at his home. George went ahead of me and when I arrived he said: 'Let's have a divorce this year.'
In 1974 George told Ringo that he was in love with his wife. Ringo worked himself up into a terrible state and went about saying: 'Nothing is real, nothing is real.'
I was furious. I went straight out and dyed my hair red.
In June that year, I returned home one evening to find Eric, Pete Townshend and Graham Bell, another musician, larking around at our house.
I made them dinner, which we ate amid forced jollity, then Eric took me aside and pleaded with me again to leave George. We were alone together for what felt like hours, and he was so passionate, desperate and compelling that I felt swamped, lost and confused.
I had to make a choice. Would I go to Eric, who had written the most beautiful song for me, who had been to hell and back in the last three years because of me and who had worn me down with his protestations of love?
Or would I choose George, my husband, whom I had loved but who had been cold and indifferent towards me for so long that I could barely remember the last time he'd shown me any affection or told me he loved me?
That night Eric left and went off almost immediately to America on tour. On July 3 I told George I was leaving him. It was late at night and I went into the studio and explained that we were leading a ludicrous and hateful life, and that I was going to America. When he came to bed, I could feel his sadness as he lay beside me. 'Don't go,' he said.
Half of me wanted to stay and to believe him when he said he would make it better, but I was at the end of my tether.
The next day, with a great sadness in my heart, I packed some things, said a tearful goodbye to Friar Park and flew to America. What I had felt for George was a great, deep love. What Eric and I had was an intoxicating, overpowering passion.
It was so intense, so urgent, so heady, I felt almost out of control. Having made the decision to leave my marriage, I knew I had to be with him, go everywhere with him, do everything he did, keep up with him in every way. Which, on that tour of America in 1974, meant drinking.
Wonderful Today, by Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor, is published by Headline Review on August 23, priced £20.
George Harrison wrote the love song Something for his wife Pattie Boyd. Eric Clapton wrote Layla for her. Theirs was the most extraordinary love triangle in rock history.
Now, after four decades of silence, the woman who drove two music legends wild tells the raw, unexpurgated story of her life...
We met secretly at a flat in South Kensington. Eric Clapton had asked me to come because he wanted me to listen to a new number he had written.
He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard. It was Layla, about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable.
He played it to me two or three times, all the while watching my face intently for my reaction. My first thought was: 'Oh God, everyone's going to know this is about me.'
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High minds: George and Pattie pictured shortly before they broke up
I was married to Eric's close friend, George Harrison, but Eric had been making his desire for me clear for months. I felt uncomfortable that he was pushing me in a direction in which I wasn't certain I wanted to go.
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But with the realisation that I had inspired such passion and creativity, the song got the better of me. I could resist no longer.
That evening I was going to the theatre to see Oh! Calcutta! with a friend and then on to a party at the home of pop impresario Robert Stigwood. George didn't want to go to the show or the party.
After the interval at Oh!Calcutta! I came back to find Eric in the next seat, having persuaded a stranger to swap places with him. Afterwards we went to Robert's house separately but we were soon together. It was a great party and I felt elated by what had happened earlier in the day but also deeply guilty.
During the early hours, George appeared. He was morose and his mood was not improved by walking into a party that had been going on for several hours and where most of the guests were high on drugs.
He kept asking 'Where's Pattie?' but no one seemed to know. He was about to leave when he spotted me in the garden with Eric. It was just getting light, and very misty. George came over and demanded: 'What's going on?' To my horror, Eric said: 'I have to tell you, man, that I'm in love with your wife.'
I wanted to die. George was furious. He turned to me and said: 'Well, are you going with him or coming with me?'
I had met George six years previously, in 1964, when he was filming A Hard Day's Night. Britain and most of Europe was in the grip of Beatlemania.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were mobbed everywhere they went, and at their concerts thousands of hysterical teenagers cried and screamed so loudly that no one could hear the music.
Shortly before they started shooting A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles took America by storm. In February 1964 they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, one of America's most prestigious programmes, and attracted an audience of 73million.
I was a model, working with some of the most successful photographers in London, including David Bailey and Terence Donovan. I was appearing in newspapers and magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue, but in March my agent sent me along to a casting session for a film.
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She called later to tell me I had been offered the part of a schoolgirl fan in a Beatles film. On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute and George, with velvet-brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I had ever seen. At a break for lunch I found myself sitting next to him. Being close to him was electrifying.
Almost the first thing he said to me was: 'Will you marry me?' He was joking but there was a hint of seriousness. We got together soon after that and married two years later on January 21, 1966. I was 21, he was 22. I was so happy and so much in love. I thought we would be together and happy for ever.
Honeymoon: Pattie and George in Barbados
Three years later, in 1969, George wrote a song called Something. He told me in a matter-of-fact way that he had written it for me. I thought it was beautiful and it turned out to be the most successful song he ever wrote, with more than 150 cover versions.
Frank Sinatra said he thought it was the best love song ever written. George's favourite version was the one by James Brown. Mine was the one by George Harrison, which he played to me in our kitchen.
But, in fact, by then our relationship was in trouble. Since a trip to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India in 1968, George had become obsessive about meditation. He was also sometimes withdrawn and depressed.
My moods started to mirror his and at times I felt almost suicidal. I don't think I was ever in any real danger of killing myself but I got as far as working out how I would do it: put on a diaphanous Ossie Clark dress and throw myself off Beachy Head.
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And there were other women, which really hurt me. George was fascinated by the god Krishna who was always surrounded by young maidens. He came back from India wanting to be some kind of Krishna figure, a spiritual being with lots of concubines. He actually said so.
No woman was out of bounds. I was friendly with a French girl who was going out with Eric Clapton. When she and Eric broke up, she came to stay with us at our house, Kinfauns, in Esher, Surrey.
She didn't seem remotely upset about Eric and was uncomfortably close to George. Something was going on between them but when I questioned George he told me my imagination was running away with me, that I was paranoid.
I left to stay with friends and within days George phoned to say the girl had gone. I returned home but I was shocked that he could do such a thing to me. I felt unloved and miserable.
Chilled: George relaxes in India in 1968
It was around this time that Eric began to come over to our house. He and George had become close friends, writing and recording music together.
Eric's guitar playing was held in awe by his fellow musicians. Graffiti declaring 'Clapton is God' had been scrawled on the London Underground, and he was an incredibly exciting performer to watch. He looked wonderful on stage, very sexy.
But when I met him he didn't behave like a rock star – he was surprisingly shy and reticent. I was aware that Eric found me attractive and I enjoyed the attention he paid me.
It was hard not to be flattered when I caught him staring at me or when he chose to sit beside me. He complimented me on what I was wearing and the food I had cooked, and he said things he knew would make me laugh. Those were all things that George no longer did.
One night in December 1969 I took my 17-year-old sister Paula to see Eric play in Liverpool. Paula was very pretty and a bit of a wild child, and that night Eric fell for her. After the show we all went to a restaurant and everyone was quite drunk and raucous. When the rest of us went back to the hotel, we left Eric and Paula dancing.
The next night Eric was playing in Croydon and again Paula and I went to watch, and again there was a wild after-show party, this time at Eric's Italianate manor house, Hurtwood Edge in Ewhurst, Surrey. Soon after, Paula moved in with Eric.
In March 1970, George and I moved into a new house. Friar Park was a magnificent Victorian Gothic pile near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, with 25 bedrooms, a ballroom, a library, a formal garden of 12 acres and a further 20 acres of land.
Relaxed: Eric drinks in the garden of Pattie and George's Friar Park home
One morning shortly after moving in, a letter arrived for me with the words 'express' and 'urgent' written on the envelope. Inside I found a small piece of paper. In small, immaculate writing, with no capital letters, I read: 'dearest l,'as you have probably gathered, my own home affairs are a galloping farce, which is rapidly degenerating day by intolerable day . . . it seems like an eternity since i last saw or spoke to you!'
He needed to ascertain my feelings: id I still love my husband or did I have another lover? More crucially, did I still have feelings in my heart for him? He had to know, and urged me to write. 'please do this, whatever it may say, my mind will be at rest . . .'all my love, e.'
I assumed it was from some weirdo.
I got fan mail occasionally – when I wasn't getting hate mail from George's fans. I showed it to George and others who were at the house. They laughed and dismissed it, as I had.
That evening the phone rang. It was Eric. 'Did you get my letter?' he asked.
Letter?' I said. 'I don't think so. What letter are you talking about?'
Then the penny dropped. 'Was that from you? I had no idea you felt that way.' It was the most passionate letter anyone had ever written to me and it put our relationship on a different footing. It made the flirtation all the more exciting and dangerous. But as far as I was concerned, it was just flirtation.
From time to time during the spring and summer of 1970, Eric and I saw each other. One day, walking down Oxford Street, he asked: 'Do you like me, then, or are you seeing me because I'm famous?'
'Oh, I thought you were seeing me because I'm famous,' I said. We laughed.
He always found it difficult to talk about his feelings, instead pouring them into his music and writing.
Once we met under the clock in Guildford High Street. He had just come back from Miami and had a pair of bell-bottom trousers for me – hence the track Bell Bottom Blues. He was tanned and looked gorgeous and irresistible – but I managed to resist him.
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Dream girl: Pattie modelling in 1964
Read more...
* Pattie Boyd: George had to ask Brian Epstein for permission to marry me
* Pattie Boyd: The dentist who spiked my coffee with LSD
* Pattie Boyd: 'My hellish love triangle with George and Eric' - Part One
On another occasion I drove to Ewhurst and we met in the woods nearby. Eric was wearing a wolf coat and looked very sexy. We didn't go to his house because someone would have been there. A lot of people lived at Hurtwood Edge: his band, the Dominos, Paula and Alice Ormsby-Gore, another of Eric's girlfriends.
The convent girl in me found the situation uncomfortable but strangely exciting, and so it was later that year after Eric had played me Layla in the South Kensington flat that I succumbed to his advances.
After George and Eric's confrontation at Robert Stigwood's party, I went home with my husband. Back at the house I went to bed and George disappeared into his recording studio.
The next time I saw Eric, he turned up unexpectedly at Friar Park. George was away – I don't know whether Eric knew that in advance – and I was on my own. He said he wanted me to go away with him: he was desperately in love with me and couldn't live without me. I had to leave George right now and be with him.
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Happy days: Pattie's own photo of Paul, Ringo and John in 1968
'Eric, are you mad?' I asked. 'I can't possibly. I'm married to George.'
He said: 'No, no, no. I love you. I have to have you in my life.'
'No,' I said.
He produced a small packet from his pocket and held it out towards me.
'Well, if you're not going to come away with me, I'm going to take this.'
'What is it?'
'Heroin.'
'Don't be so stupid.' I tried to grab it from him but he clenched his fist and hid it in his pocket.
'If you're not going to come with me,' he said, 'that's it. I'm off.'
And he went. I hardly saw him for three years.
He did as he threatened. He took the heroin and quickly became addicted. And he took Alice Ormsby-Gore with him.
Eric already did a lot of drugs, the ones we all used – marijuana, uppers, downers and cocaine – and he drank quite heavily too. But his dealer had been insisting recently he bought heroin when he supplied him with cocaine.
Eric had been using it infrequently for about a year and had amassed a big pile. He now set about using it. He and Alice retreated into Hurtwood Edge and pulled up the drawbridge. He didn't leave the house, he didn't see friends, he didn't answer the door or the telephone, and the two of them sank into virtual oblivion.
By this time Paula had gone. She had been with Eric in Miami when he was recording Layla and knew instantly it was about me. She had always had a suspicion he was with her only because she was the next best thing to me and I was unobtainable. Hearing Layla confirmed it.
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Love rivals: (Left to right) Eric and George
She had been seriously in love with Eric, but he destroyed her pride, her self-esteem and her confidence, which were already fragile.
On top of that, her big sister was the last person to whom she could turn for comfort. I tried to telephone Eric but Alice always answered, so I hung up.
I turned my attention to my husband and to renovating Friar Park. For a brief period the project united us but the house was so enormous, and there were always so many people living in it, that we never had any intimacy. Most of the time, even when George was in the house, I didn't know where he was.
At meal times, too many other people were at the table for us to have any real conversation. And even though we shared a bed, he was often in his recording studio or meditating half the night in the octagonal room at the top of the house that had become his sanctuary.
I felt more and more alienated. I didn't feel included in George's thinking or his plans. I wasn't his partner in anything any longer. He was surrounded by yes-men. When I challenged him about it he said: 'Well I'd hate to be surrounded by no-men.'
I heard from Eric again in January 1971, two months after he had walked out vowing to take the heroin. He wrote to me from a cottage in Wales.
On the title page of a copy of Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, he had written: 'dear layla, for nothing more than the pleasures past i would sacrifice my family, my god, and my own existence, and still you will not move. i am at the end of my mind, i cannot go back and there is nothing in tomorrow (save you) that can attract me beyond today. i have listened to the wind, i have watched the dark brooding clouds, i have felt the earth beneath me for a sign, a gesture, but there is only silence. why do you hesitate, am i a poor lover, am i ugly, am i too weak, too strong, do you know why? if you want me, take me, i am yours . . . 'if you don't want me, please break the spell that binds me. 'to cage a wild animal is a sin, to tame him is divine. 'my love is yours.'
It was signed with a heart. That one short note stirred up feelings I had spent two months suppressing. I wrote and told him what he wanted to hear.
'How are you? I hope the Welsh air has been soothing your mind and warming your heart. Oh, I so long to spend some time with you there . . . it would be beautiful to be together, just for a while.
'If the stars should suddenly change their course and I can come to Wales I'll send a telegram. Please take care of yourself. 'Moons full of love 'L'
As soon as I had posted the letter I had terrible doubts and immediately wrote a postcard. It simply said: 'Hullo, Please forgive and forget my bold suggestion.'Love L'
His reply came by return of post on the dust jacket of a book of Scottish ballads and was written in green ink.
'it was rather significant that i received both communications on the same morning. something like watching a boomerang in flight.'
He said he understood my situation and didn't know what to recommend.
'i love you even though you're chicken.'
Nothing came of our fantasies and I didn't see or speak to him again until August 1971. George had persuaded him to come out of Hurtwood Edge briefly to perform at a charity event, Concert For Bangladesh, in New York.
Eric was in a bad way but George thought that if he got him on stage, even propped up with drugs, his addiction would become an open secret and maybe he would open the door a little to his friends, who might be able to help.
Everyone knew that if Eric was to have a chance of getting through two performances – one in the afternoon and another that evening – he would need a supply of heroin when he arrived in New York.
I remember discussions about finding a really good one, called White Elephant, for him. It had to be very pure because he never injected – he was terrified of needles – but snorted it instead, as if it was cocaine, from a gold spoon he wore round his neck. Alice found it – she always did the scoring.
While they were living at Hurtwood Edge, she went to London to do the sordid business of getting supplies while Eric stayed at home. If ever they ran short, she would give him her share and take something else. She was drinking at least two bottles of vodka a day so he could have the heroin.
That day he and I scarcely spoke. He was surrounded by people, then on stage, and he was very out of it; I'm not sure he really saw me. It was a shock to think that he had done this to himself because of me. At first I felt guilty, then my feelings would swing violently the other way and I was angry that he should have asked me to choose between him and my husband.
Scroll down to view an exclusive video interview with Pattie...
Still standing: Pattie Boyd as she is today
When the concert was over, Eric and Alice went back to the horrors of their self-imposed prison at Hurtwood Edge. Pete Townshend of The Who was the only friend who refused to take no for an answer and went to the house so often that eventually Eric had to see him.
Pete persuaded him to perform at another charity concert, this time at Finsbury Park, North London.
The show in 1973, billed as Eric's comeback, was a triumph. I was sitting in the audience with George, Ringo, Elton John, Joe Cocker and Jimmy Page. Eric didn't look well – his addict's diet of junk food and chocolate had made him put on weight.
As I heard the opening wail of Layla, the first number of the evening, then the lyrics, my blood ran cold. He might have been wrecked for the previous three years but he hadn't forgotten how to tear at the heart-strings with his guitar.
All the emotion I had felt for him when he disappeared from my life welled up inside me.
The show reminded Eric there was an alternative to his life as an addict and eventually he agreed to accept treatment. He got off the heroin – and went straight on to alcohol.
He became a regular visitor to Friar Park and professed his love for me with increasing vigour. Letters arrived almost daily in which he pleaded with me to leave George and be with him.
Meanwhile, things between George and me were going from bad to worse. I don't know what his feelings were about Eric when he reappeared in our lives.
We had been so stoned on the night of Robert Stigwood's party that he might have forgotten about the confrontation in the mist, but I don't think so. George never spoke about it but after that night I think he felt he could be as blatant as he liked in his pursuit of other women.
In spring 1973 we were supposed to go on holiday together. The day before we were due to leave, George said he wasn't feeling well and couldn't go. He ended up going to Spain, supposedly to see Salvador Dali, with Ronnie Wood's wife, Krissie.
Ronnie, then bass guitarist with The Faces, and Krissie were friends of ours who often came to stay at Friar Park. I was desperately hurt: another of my friends was sleeping with George.
When I challenged him he denied it.
I went to the Bahamas instead with my sister Paula, who was battling her own heroin addiction. While there we had a call from Ronnie Wood. He was on tour and said he might come to see us for a few days. He didn't seem upset that his wife was with George – he just thought it was funny they had gone to see Dali.
Ronnie is the most adorable man, and maybe at that moment some fun, laughter and a pair of comforting arms were what I needed.
The final straw for George and me was his affair with Ringo's wife, Maureen. She was the last person I would have expected to stab me in the back.
I discovered from some photos that she had been staying in the house with George while I had visited my mother in Devon. He had given her a beautiful necklace, which she wore in front of me.
Then I found them locked in a bedroom at Friar Park. I stood outside banging on the door yelling: 'What are you doing? Maureen's in there, isn't she? I know she is!' George just laughed.
Eventually he opened the door and said: 'Oh, she's just a bit tired so she's lying down.'
I went straight to the top of the house and lowered the flag bearing the om symbol that George had been flying from the roof and hoisted a skull and crossbones instead. That made me feel much better.
Maureen wasn't even prepared to be subtle. She would turn up at Friar Park at midnight and I would say: 'What the hell are you doing here?' 'I've come to listen to George playing in the studio.' 'Well, I'm going to bed.' 'Ah, well, I'm going to the studio.'
The next morning, she'd still be there, and I'd say: 'Have you thought about your children? What are you up to? I don't like it.'
'Tough,' was her response.
Ringo didn't have a clue what was going on until I rang him one day and said: 'Have you ever thought about why your wife doesn't come home at night? It's because she's here!' He flew into a rage.
George continued to pretend that nothing was going on and would leave me feeling as though I was becoming paranoid.
I felt undermined and unloved and George was so terribly difficult to talk to. He had become worse in the last year, maybe because Eric kept coming around and making it obvious that he wanted to see me. George must have sensed we were having an affair but he never said so.
One evening the actor John Hurt was with us. Eric was due to come over too and George decided to have it out with him. John wanted to make himself scarce but George insisted he stay.
John remembers George coming downstairs with two guitars and two small amplifiers, laying them down in the hall, then pacing restlessly until Eric arrived – full of brandy, as usual.
As Eric walked through the door George handed him a guitar and amp – as an 18th Century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword – and for two hours, without a word, they duelled. The air was electric and the music exciting.
At the end, nothing was said but the general feeling was that Eric had won. He hadn't allowed himself to get riled or to go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar-playing was unbeatable.
That whole period was insane. Friar Park was a madhouse. Our lives were fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, and so it was with everyone who came into our sphere. We were all as drunk, stoned and single-minded as each other. Nobody seemed to have appointments, deadlines or anything pressing in their lives, no structure and no responsibilities.
Cocaine is a seductive drug because it makes you feel euphoric and good about yourself. It takes away your inhibitions and makes even the shyest, most insecure person feel confident.
And we had so much energy – everyone would talk nonsense for twice as long and drink twice as much because the cocaine made us feel sober. George used cocaine excessively and I think it changed him.
Marijuana wasn't destructive. Dope in the Sixties – a very different drug from the skunk kids smoke today – was about peace, love and increasing awareness. Cocaine was different and I think it froze George's emotions and hardened his heart.
Scroll down to view an exclusive video interview with Pattie...
On New Year's Eve in 1973, Ringo held a party at his home. George went ahead of me and when I arrived he said: 'Let's have a divorce this year.'
In 1974 George told Ringo that he was in love with his wife. Ringo worked himself up into a terrible state and went about saying: 'Nothing is real, nothing is real.'
I was furious. I went straight out and dyed my hair red.
In June that year, I returned home one evening to find Eric, Pete Townshend and Graham Bell, another musician, larking around at our house.
I made them dinner, which we ate amid forced jollity, then Eric took me aside and pleaded with me again to leave George. We were alone together for what felt like hours, and he was so passionate, desperate and compelling that I felt swamped, lost and confused.
I had to make a choice. Would I go to Eric, who had written the most beautiful song for me, who had been to hell and back in the last three years because of me and who had worn me down with his protestations of love?
Or would I choose George, my husband, whom I had loved but who had been cold and indifferent towards me for so long that I could barely remember the last time he'd shown me any affection or told me he loved me?
That night Eric left and went off almost immediately to America on tour. On July 3 I told George I was leaving him. It was late at night and I went into the studio and explained that we were leading a ludicrous and hateful life, and that I was going to America. When he came to bed, I could feel his sadness as he lay beside me. 'Don't go,' he said.
Half of me wanted to stay and to believe him when he said he would make it better, but I was at the end of my tether.
The next day, with a great sadness in my heart, I packed some things, said a tearful goodbye to Friar Park and flew to America. What I had felt for George was a great, deep love. What Eric and I had was an intoxicating, overpowering passion.
It was so intense, so urgent, so heady, I felt almost out of control. Having made the decision to leave my marriage, I knew I had to be with him, go everywhere with him, do everything he did, keep up with him in every way. Which, on that tour of America in 1974, meant drinking.
Wonderful Today, by Pattie Boyd with Penny Junor, is published by Headline Review on August 23, priced £20.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Thursday, August 9, 2007
"Pfuu, mais c'est une Starbucks cite" (des touristes in vizita la Yale)
De vazut inaintea discutiilor aprinse despre care-i mai tare, masonii, KGB sau CIA, pe la carciumi sau cafenele. Ca veni vorba, in "Dilema veche" (5 August 2007) se gaseste prima reclama romaneasca pentru Starbucks. Dupa o prezentare entuziasta a cofetariilor ante- si post, aflam cum ca
"Starbucks coffee este unul dintre lanţurile internaţionale de calitate în domeniu care, din fericire, s-a hotărît să vină şi în România. Cafeaua lor e cea mai aproape de ceea ce ne-am dori să fie şi prăjiturile, căci există şi ele, sînt gustoase. În cele trei regiuni din lume în care Starbucks au contracte cu producătorii (America Latină, Africa – Arabia şi Asia – Pacific) încearcă să păstreze calitatea ultrafină a boabelor şi aromele lor naturale (există, de pildă, cafele care preiau din mediul lor natural o serie de arome deosebite, unele de citrice, altele de flori de cîmp...). De altfel, fiecare cafea se potriveşte cu cîte o prăjitură. Printre prăjiturile lor faimoase se numără tortul de ciocolată, raspberry cheese cake, sau cea fără zahăr, cu ghimbir." (Iaromira Popovici).
O fi primit tarisoara si niste (micro)softuri la pachet cu mai sus-metionatul lant cafetier, asa, sa aiba cu ce se brandui frumos.
Si ca sa nu uit, se povesteste ca Starbucks studiaza orasele tinta, alege cafenelele cele mai populare si hop si ei vis-a-vis. Intr-un an-doi concurenta e falita si inlocuita. Oare la noi sa fie Capsa?
De ce sarim noi mereu peste vremile cat de cat placute (acum in miticism, hai in comunism, si acum in globalism), drept e?
"Starbucks coffee este unul dintre lanţurile internaţionale de calitate în domeniu care, din fericire, s-a hotărît să vină şi în România. Cafeaua lor e cea mai aproape de ceea ce ne-am dori să fie şi prăjiturile, căci există şi ele, sînt gustoase. În cele trei regiuni din lume în care Starbucks au contracte cu producătorii (America Latină, Africa – Arabia şi Asia – Pacific) încearcă să păstreze calitatea ultrafină a boabelor şi aromele lor naturale (există, de pildă, cafele care preiau din mediul lor natural o serie de arome deosebite, unele de citrice, altele de flori de cîmp...). De altfel, fiecare cafea se potriveşte cu cîte o prăjitură. Printre prăjiturile lor faimoase se numără tortul de ciocolată, raspberry cheese cake, sau cea fără zahăr, cu ghimbir." (Iaromira Popovici).
O fi primit tarisoara si niste (micro)softuri la pachet cu mai sus-metionatul lant cafetier, asa, sa aiba cu ce se brandui frumos.
Si ca sa nu uit, se povesteste ca Starbucks studiaza orasele tinta, alege cafenelele cele mai populare si hop si ei vis-a-vis. Intr-un an-doi concurenta e falita si inlocuita. Oare la noi sa fie Capsa?
De ce sarim noi mereu peste vremile cat de cat placute (acum in miticism, hai in comunism, si acum in globalism), drept e?
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
When I paint my master piece
Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series Watercolor and Gouache Paintings Exhibition 28 October 2007 - 3 February 2008
NEW YORK, Aug. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Bob Dylan has agreed to allow the
first-ever exhibition of his work at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, beginning 28
October 2007. Although Dylan has been a committed visual artist for more
than four decades, this three-month event -- titled "The Drawn Blank
Series" -- will mark the first museum showing of his work.
Exclusively for this exhibition, Bob Dylan has produced more than 200
remarkably intense color variations on pictorial motifs from a book of
drawings and sketches done from 1989 to 1992, which were published in 1994
under the title Drawn Blank by Random House.
In the book's preface, Dylan explained that these works were intended
as sketches for paintings that he eventually planned to complete. These now
fully realized works -- photo-lithographs transferred to deckle-edged paper
-- have been stunningly reworked by the artist in watercolor and gouache
and will be displayed for the first time in Chemnitz.
When asked how Chemnitz came to be the venue for "The Drawn Blank
Series" exhibition, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz Director Ingrid Moessinger
explained, "I first came across Bob Dylan's book of drawings at an
historical exhibition about Bob Dylan at The Morgan Library & Museum in New
York. I went straight out and bought my own copy and immediately began to
track down the originals."
Bob Dylan commented, "I was fascinated to learn of Ingrid's interest in
my work, and it gave me the impetus to realize the vision I had for these
drawings many years ago." He added, "If not for this interest, I don't know
if I even would have revisited them."
An extensive catalogue (in German and English) with numerous color and
black-and-white reproductions will be published by Prestel Munich, New
York, and London to mark the exhibition. The catalogue will be edited by
Ingrid Moessinger and Kerstin Drechsel and will contain essays by Prof. Dr.
Frank Zoellner, Leipzig; Diana Widmaier-Picasso, Paris; and Dr. Jens
Rosteck, Nice.
KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN CHEMNITZ
Collection
The museum has a collection of 65,000 art works, including 25,000
drawings and prints (Honore Daumier, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Picasso, et
al), and paintings, sculptures and drawings mainly from the end of 18th to
the end of 20th century (C.D. Friedrich, German Expressionists, Edvard
Munch, et al). The museum, on purpose-built premises, was inaugurated in
1909.
NEW YORK, Aug. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Bob Dylan has agreed to allow the
first-ever exhibition of his work at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, beginning 28
October 2007. Although Dylan has been a committed visual artist for more
than four decades, this three-month event -- titled "The Drawn Blank
Series" -- will mark the first museum showing of his work.
Exclusively for this exhibition, Bob Dylan has produced more than 200
remarkably intense color variations on pictorial motifs from a book of
drawings and sketches done from 1989 to 1992, which were published in 1994
under the title Drawn Blank by Random House.
In the book's preface, Dylan explained that these works were intended
as sketches for paintings that he eventually planned to complete. These now
fully realized works -- photo-lithographs transferred to deckle-edged paper
-- have been stunningly reworked by the artist in watercolor and gouache
and will be displayed for the first time in Chemnitz.
When asked how Chemnitz came to be the venue for "The Drawn Blank
Series" exhibition, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz Director Ingrid Moessinger
explained, "I first came across Bob Dylan's book of drawings at an
historical exhibition about Bob Dylan at The Morgan Library & Museum in New
York. I went straight out and bought my own copy and immediately began to
track down the originals."
Bob Dylan commented, "I was fascinated to learn of Ingrid's interest in
my work, and it gave me the impetus to realize the vision I had for these
drawings many years ago." He added, "If not for this interest, I don't know
if I even would have revisited them."
An extensive catalogue (in German and English) with numerous color and
black-and-white reproductions will be published by Prestel Munich, New
York, and London to mark the exhibition. The catalogue will be edited by
Ingrid Moessinger and Kerstin Drechsel and will contain essays by Prof. Dr.
Frank Zoellner, Leipzig; Diana Widmaier-Picasso, Paris; and Dr. Jens
Rosteck, Nice.
KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN CHEMNITZ
Collection
The museum has a collection of 65,000 art works, including 25,000
drawings and prints (Honore Daumier, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Picasso, et
al), and paintings, sculptures and drawings mainly from the end of 18th to
the end of 20th century (C.D. Friedrich, German Expressionists, Edvard
Munch, et al). The museum, on purpose-built premises, was inaugurated in
1909.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Queen star hands in science PhD
Queen guitarist Brian May has handed in his astronomy PhD thesis - 36 years after abandoning it to join the band.
May recently carried out observational work in Tenerife, where he studied the formation of "zodiacal dust clouds".
The subject forms the basis of a 48,000-word thesis for Imperial College, London, where 60-year-old May studied before becoming a rock star.
"It's been the longest gap year ever," May said. "It was a tough decision back then to leave my studies for music."
But the star said that at the time, his "passion for music was stronger".
"I'm so proud to be here today," he told BBC London. "Astronomy has always interested me. I used to love sitting at home and watching Sir Patrick Moore on the Sky at Night."
If I fail I will fail big time - it will be a very public failure with all this press
Brian May
May handed in the thesis, called Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, to Imperial's head of astrophysics Professor Paul Nandra.
The guitarist is scheduled to discuss his thesis with the examining board on 23 August, his spokesman said. The results should be known some time shortly after that date.
"If I fail I will fail big time," May said. "It will be a very public failure with all this press."
The rock star is also preparing a concert to mark the inauguration of a telescope at the Observatory of the Roque de Los Muchachos in La Palma, Tenerife, where he completed his studies last month.
"I have no doubt that Brian May would have had a brilliant career in science had he completed his PhD in 1971," said astrophysicist Dr Garik Israelian, who worked with May in La Palma.
"Nevertheless, as a fan of Queen, I am glad that he left science temporarily," he added.
May made his first astronomical observations for his thesis at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife in 1971, before his rock career took off.
He recently published a book on astronomy with The Sky at Night presenter Sir Patrick Moore.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/6929290.stm
May recently carried out observational work in Tenerife, where he studied the formation of "zodiacal dust clouds".
The subject forms the basis of a 48,000-word thesis for Imperial College, London, where 60-year-old May studied before becoming a rock star.
"It's been the longest gap year ever," May said. "It was a tough decision back then to leave my studies for music."
But the star said that at the time, his "passion for music was stronger".
"I'm so proud to be here today," he told BBC London. "Astronomy has always interested me. I used to love sitting at home and watching Sir Patrick Moore on the Sky at Night."
If I fail I will fail big time - it will be a very public failure with all this press
Brian May
May handed in the thesis, called Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, to Imperial's head of astrophysics Professor Paul Nandra.
The guitarist is scheduled to discuss his thesis with the examining board on 23 August, his spokesman said. The results should be known some time shortly after that date.
"If I fail I will fail big time," May said. "It will be a very public failure with all this press."
The rock star is also preparing a concert to mark the inauguration of a telescope at the Observatory of the Roque de Los Muchachos in La Palma, Tenerife, where he completed his studies last month.
"I have no doubt that Brian May would have had a brilliant career in science had he completed his PhD in 1971," said astrophysicist Dr Garik Israelian, who worked with May in La Palma.
"Nevertheless, as a fan of Queen, I am glad that he left science temporarily," he added.
May made his first astronomical observations for his thesis at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife in 1971, before his rock career took off.
He recently published a book on astronomy with The Sky at Night presenter Sir Patrick Moore.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/6929290.stm
Friday, August 3, 2007
Au fost odata Baile Herculane ...
"Jolika at the Herkulesbad spa. If it was good enough for Franz Joseph and his Bessy, it should be good enough for us, I thought. And damn suitable for a honeymoon, I realized while poring over the map, located as it was at the intersection of 45° 52' latitude north and 23° 52' longitude east, thus happily lying on the same parallel as Venice. So by going to Herkulesbad, you also symbolically go to Venice. I like symbols and coincidences. It is in the valley of the Cerna River that the loveliest spa of the continent can be found, said Franz Joseph. And it is here, in the valley of the Cerna River, that the loveliest Jolika of the continent can be found. Said I." (Zsófia Bán
"A box of photos" in Magyar Lettres)
"A box of photos" in Magyar Lettres)
Tranzitie
Elemér Hankiss
Transition or transitions?
The transformation of eastern central Europe 1989-2007
"Incomplete regime change", "interrupted revolution", "geo-political paradigm shift"... Accounts of the transition in eastern central Europe have tended to be fragmentary, with particular features emphasised to the exclusion of others. In the first section of this encyclopaedic essay, Hungarian political scientist Elemér Hankiss pieces together a mosaic of interpretations of transition. Going further, Hankiss checks contemporary Hungarian society against Victor Turner's description of the "liminal society" – one caught between states of "normality". While there is much in Hungary today that supports the "liminality" theory – the predominance of tricksters, the calls for restoration of order – there is also much that departs from Turner's eulogy of change. Indeed, a "great regression" is taking place in the minds of members of transition societies, argues Hankiss, one that will take more than grand economic programmes to reverse.
By way of an introduction
A sign of the complexity of historical processes is the surprising diversity of ways in which, for example, the course of the events during the past decade and a half in Hungary and (with some divergences) other countries in eastern central Europe can be described and interpreted. No single interpretation gives a fully rounded explanation, but most point out important motifs. Bearing in mind that multiplicity of motifs, it seems fair to assume that when taken together as a mosaic, they trace a fairly faithful picture of that tangled and contradictory evolution.Beyond any considerations of systematic research, an examination and determination of these attempted interpretations is important because they circulate unrestrainedly and ramble perilously in the general consciousness and public discourse. Since most only highlight a single partial motif from the history of the past decade and a half, they are highly amenable, on the one hand, to various political forces seeking to justify their own ambitions. On the other hand, by excluding all other interpretations, they distort them into misconceptions and make them sources of political passion.
In what follows I shall only be able to list the best-known attempts very sketchily, with the proviso that each calls for more thorough further analysis, and that it is necessary to work on a complex interpretation that gives appropriate weight and duly systematises the factors revealed by the partial analyses. The particular focus of this critique will be Hungary, but I believe that many of the observations made here will also, in many respects, throw light on what has happened in the other countries of eastern central Europe over the last fifteen years or so.
Attempts at an interpretation
Independence and new dependence
Hungary's rise from colonial or semi-colonial status to became an independent state once again was an important aspect of the last decade and a half. Important as that change was, though, it has relatively little explanatory power. For one thing, although the country did indeed regain de facto state sovereignty and broke loose from its dependency on the USSR, it is also true that the country's independence has been severely restricted by new factors: a combination of the European Union, the superpower status of the US in world politics, and the forces of the global economy. One limited sovereignty was exchanged for another. The dependence/independence dichotomy therefore has to be treated warily as an explanatory principle. One needs to define what has been lost on the swings and made up on the roundabouts; where Hungary has grown more independent and where the new dependencies have arisen, and how they are best handled.
Geopolitical paradigm shift
In an explanation that is somewhat allied to the preceding one, Hungary moved from one set of spheres of interest (the Soviet empire, Warsaw Pact, Comecon) to another (the American-European "empire", Nato, World Bank, IMF). It has been struggling with the socio-economic, political, and cultural problems of that realignment ever since.
These two successive spheres of interest were qualitatively different, but they resembled one another to the extent that it was as hard to deal with the former as with its successor. The Soviet economic sphere functioned badly, so relatively little benefit could be derived from that to offset the severe damage it inflicted. The Western system of dependency is far more efficient and offers greater opportunities, but the balance of powers is a good deal more complex and the competition is keener. Hungary started well enough but more recently it has slipped badly in its competitiveness. True, the huge gains that have been achieved in respect of non-economic goods – for example the exponential growth in personal freedom – have tipped the scales very much in the positive direction (particularly if one disregards the million-strong mass of people who have been the so-called losers of regime change).
Regime change
In part through internal prompting, in part under strong external pressure, Hungary in 1989 set about transforming its system of state socialism and crumbling planned economy into a democratic political system and open market economy. In the process of joining the global economy, Hungary suffered virtually every possible difficulty and misery, as well as exploiting a not insignificant fraction of the opportunities that opened up. Many people justly interpret this as a success story.
Incomplete regime change
Others acknowledge that regime change progressed rapidly at the institutional level. Basic democratic political and market economic institutions were established, and after a prolonged delay, sooner or later, a transformation of the institutional systems for health, education and government may also get under way. All the same, if transformation not only of institutions but also of the ownership of socio-economic and political power that operates those institutions, as well as transformation of the nexuses of interest, are seen as organic parts of genuine regime change, then the process has not yet been completed, and in that sense probably never will be completed. A peculiar, messy mix of ancien regime and nouveau regime came about, which, on the one hand, made a peaceful transition possible, but, on the other, became a source of unhelpful disorders and conflicts. Or to put it in other terms:
Concordat/pact
The waning of Soviet pressure and the Hungarian Communist Party's loss of nerve made it possible for the circles of the ruling elite of state socialism to do a deal with a strange "coalition" of opposition intellectuals or professional people, reform-minded economists, management groups, and potential entrepreneurs who had previously belonged to the Party's sphere of interest but were becoming ever more critical of the Party. It may not have been as well thought through as, for instance, comparable deals in Spain, Portugal, or Ireland, but they entered a pact among themselves. Today the country is ruled by the alliance, the enmities, and the latent (as some would have it: complicit) co-operation of the old socialist ruling class and an upwardly mobile new middle class. Or in yet other terms:
The interrupted revolution
In truth, regime change that impinged upon the whole spectrum of ownership relations, the established spheres of power and interests, networks and privileges, as well as society's distortions and injustices, never took place. Some people accept that, arguing that even the successful revolutions of European history were not "complete". Others do not accept this and speak about a consolidation of power: not only was there no revolution, but there was not even a genuine regime change, because the former state socialist ruling class, by converting their political power to economic power, preserved and, to a great extent, reinforced that economic and later also political power.
"Revolution from above"
The term is an oxymoron, of course, but the concept still has some currency and implies that that the ruling strata instigate and control processes that do indeed resemble genuine revolutions and lead to radical socio-political transformation. This explanation is more than a bit lame, though, because a true revolution – above and beyond politico-economic changes – in all likelihood would have transformed the structure of Hungarian society and its power relations to a far greater extent than it did. In Poland, the broad masses of society played a much larger part in preparing for the change (even though there, too, it was élite groups that in the end entered into the pact), and perhaps that accounts for why the party structure in Poland today is much more diverse and unstable than it is in Hungary.
Bourgeois revolution
What has been enacted in Hungary over the past fifteen years has been a middle-class rather than a civil revolution. Diverse external and internal forces smashed and blew up the state socialist regime and very speedily in its wake there formed an "upper middle class", which comprised the leading apparatchiks of the socialist regime, the red and green powerbrokers and their hangers-on, and other nouveaux riches, political parvenus and their hangers-on, who emerged from other areas to rise to prominence in political and economic life. This new middle class behaves in much the same way as their nineteenth-century predecessor did: it strives for swift acquisition of wealth and maximal profits, and in doing so has distorted society's structure into something that is extraordinarily unjust, and – with due respect to the amazing exceptions – in a pretty heartless manner, socially speaking. Its rampaging has only been kept within bounds, to some degree, by the norms of human rights and the welfare-state spirit that had emerged by the second half of the twentieth century, along with those Western democracies that still stand for those norms.
Counter-revolution
Even more extreme is the interpretation which portrays the majority of those individuals who were in suitable positions after 1989, or who succeeded to such positions – as happened in Slovenia, for instance – as choosing the route of building up a non-welfare state and, by depriving society of all means of self-defence, delivering the country up (in the name of a politically neoconservative and economically neoliberal ideology) to the forces of international economic finance and their own greed. As beneficiaries of this, they assisted the country's "recolonisation" (this is also the point at which theories of global conspiracy come in). Admittedly, they did thereby kick-start a phase of rapid economic growth, and on the basis of the Reaganite "trickle-down" phenomenon, the middle class too gained a share of the goodies; but society's bottom third were pushed back again into a position of hopeless proletarian impoverishment. Hungary's current "restrictive measures" – maybe not intentionally but in effect – only further reinforce the process.
The rise and fall of democracy
Hungary began as a success story. Already adumbrated with the National Roundtable talks held in June-September 1989, a system of pluralistic, democratic institutions was outlined and from then on quickly implemented as a number of separate, autonomous authorities with a fairly good interplay of checks and balances, were built up. By the middle of the 1990s, however, the still very fragile democratic order was showing signs of strain: (a) it had not proved possible to move on from a parliamentary electoral democracy into a more widely based social democracy, and especially not into an interactive, "postmodern" democracy; (b) due to sharp splits in the political field the pluralistic democracy had increasingly degenerated into an "alternating single-party system"; (c) the political parties had become oligarchies and were significantly adrift from their bases in society; (d) the process of embourgeoisement, with the emergence of an enlightened citizenry conscious of its responsibilities, had slowed down.
Today, the hostility that is fanned between the political parties has poisoned, and is still poisoning, society's consciousness, intensifying latent aggressions, and reinforcing the hankerings of subordinates for a strong central authority and a charismatic leader; a segment of the political class and the administrative arm of government is corrupt, as a result of which domestic and foreign economic groups have been able to exert undue influence on the country's direction; as a result of the intensification of electoral contests, a populism that is a caricature of democracy has won ground on both sides of the political divide; the present economic crisis has dangerously strengthened the inclinations for a "reformed dictatorship"; the "branch of stewardship" that has been established around the government is already eroding belief and confidence in democracy.
Seen in this light, and taking all the factors together, a very gloomy picture emerges, and the utmost should be done to reverse the trends. However, prophecies of the crisis and even collapse of Hungarian democracy are very exaggerated and, moreover, damaging. For one thing, Hungary's membership of the European Union is guarantee of the inviolability of a system of democratic institutions (they may be damaged or strained, but not done away with). Moreover, one positive effect of the present crisis may be that there is an acceleration of society's self-organisation, with a shift to a more responsible civil society.
Triple objective, success, crisis
Some people accentuate the point that during the last decade and a half Hungary had to, or needed to, solve three extremely difficult problems simultaneously. First, the state socialist system needed to be rebuilt into a democracy and market economy; second, the country had to become integrated with the European Union's system of political, economic and social institutions; third, it had to become integrated with the global economy. By the late 1990s, it looked as if the country was successfully meeting all three objectives, but in the last six or seven years Hungary has unexpectedly started to slide back, squandering part of the earlier gains and gradually becoming sucked into a serious crisis.
Evolution, a process of trial and error
Others have pointed out that there is no need for grand theories, and the fuss that has been made about the problems of the last decade and a half is unjustified. Societies are constantly changing and in a process of formation. While some stages of this process can be described as an evolution, or development, a great many problems crop up, some of which are successfully solved, some not. Therefore it is often necessary to start anew a search for other solutions. Democratic systems in most developed countries are likewise processes of struggle and conflict, which have their crises and upswings, their lulls and their restarts. The last fifteen years in eastern central Europe should be regarded as a similar trial-and-error process; at most all one can dispute, and is justified in disputing, without any big fuss, is the extent to which, on average, the attempted solutions were successful.
During the 1990s it looked as if in the sphere of economic development Hungary, in the context of East Central Europe, was coming close to the optimum, though the dangers and destructive forces inherent in the extreme version of the free-market model were present and discernible already then. In the last six to eight years, as a result of a series of mistaken political and economic policies, the country has fallen a long way behind the optimum, until it become bogged down in serious crisis that exists today. Politically speaking, too, Hungary made a good start, with the rapid establishment of a democratic system of institutions; but the "tribal" warfare that has been going on for more than a decade now has thrust that political achievement into a state of something close to pessimism. As I mentioned above, the transformation was, from the outset, slower than was required and that was possible. In greater detail:
Uneven development
The past decade and a half in Hungary has been characterised by the relative speed of politico-economic change and, by contrast, the sluggishness of social renewal. Strong external pressure and the suctional force of opportunities that opened up radically transformed the country's political and economic system. Social renewal, by contrast, failed to come about, or at least trailed, and still trails, far behind those processes. Admittedly, some significant social groups and strata were set in motion and accommodated to the situation by exploiting the new opportunities. The majority of the population, however, landing in tricky conditions, were unsettled and lost their sense of direction. People retreated into short-term survival strategies, put up with the changes, but did not, and still do not, have the strength, or perhaps even the chance, to grow up into a cohort of responsible citizens. The self-organisation of society, without which democracy can hardly function properly, has as barely got under way yet. As a result of all this, people became easy prey for the party magicians, who held out vain hopes and, by scaring people with terrifying images of the enemy, kept, and still keep, them on a tight leash.
Harmful continuity (Kádár redivivus)
A growing number of experts consider that many elements of the Kádár regime's economic practises, political mechanisms and forms of behaviour have survived what have otherwise been the major changes of the last decade and a half. The political regime that has emerged is taking on ever more the character of an "alternating single-party system"; the use of a cabal to drive politics has become standard practice; decision-making processes continue to be murky and the chance that society at large will have any part in decisions is minimal; the checking and balancing interaction of autonomous institutions is weakening; equality is deteriorating rather than improving; the feather-bedding of clienteles is growing; "Easy there! everything is fine, trust us!", the siren song of Kádárism sounds from beyond the grave, "though admittedly, every leap year or so, we'll have to lovingly tighten your trouser belt a wee bit, but everything will soon work out just fine, just keep quiet, keep your head down, and remember: anyone not against us is for us..."
Drifting versus planning
A debate is in progress about the extent to which, over the last decade and a half, the countries of eastern Europe have kept a hold on and directed socio-economic and political processes, or the extent to which the transition has been one of drift. There is no denying the strength of the undertow of external forces, the Western powers and global processes. Other countries have rafted in these waters with varying success, with the Slovenes being the canniest at withstanding the backwash, but Hungary, then later the Baltic states and Slovakia, have made the most of any favourable headway. However, over the last five or six years, as a result of distorted political fighting, the irresponsibility of the political class, and a series of bad economic decisions, Hungary has drifted into a side channel that is dotted with shallows.
Some people consider that over the past decade and a half, long-range processes have been of greater importance than all the above factors.
Backwardness
A strong dampening and complicating factor over the past decade and a half is that Hungary (like most other countries in eastern central Europe) is still caught in the trap of a century or mire of backwardness, an urgent need to catch up, and a general neurosis; it is still grappling with the legacy of East Europe's delayed and distorted modernisation (excessive centralisation, a bloated state, shortage of capital, overly hierarchic structures, snobbery, a cowed and passive society, pro forma democrats that lack a democratic society, etc.). In the absence of exposure, acknowledgement, and intensive treatment of these processes and problems, the leadership of the country will continue to be unpredictable and its feverish activity, always preoccupied with whatever problems happen to be uppermost at the moment, necessarily of low efficiency.
Fitful embourgeoisement
The slowness and discontinuity of embourgeoisement are also a major source of Hungary's current problems, a brake on its development. It is a fact that a process of embourgeoisement began among Hungary's lesser nobles, its gentry, back in the 1820 and blossomed more widely after 1867, with the emergence of a thriving peasant middle class. Between the two world wars, hundreds of thousands of fixed-income families, and, during the 1970s and 1980s, working-class and peasant families, made the transition to a lower-middle or middle-class standard of living, from which came a first-generation white-collar intelligentsia; after 1989 there then emerged a new bourgeoisie. Despite this, there was a decade and a half after the 1848-49 war of independence when that embourgeoisement of the lesser nobility came to a standstill, and then, after 1867, partly veered off in the direction of gentrification. After the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary lost the bulk of the towns that were the redoubts of its middle classes; then, in 1944-45, it lost a considerable proportion of its two most middle-class communities, its Jews and ethnic Germans; finally, after 1989, the Kádár-era lower-middle class was hit by economic crisis and began to re-proletarianise. Add to all that the fact that some feudal structures and subordination lived on until as late as 1945, and that a full one third of the country's population until the 1970s lived a lowly proletarian existence, then it is no wonder that the emergence (to the extent that it has emerged) of a self-sufficient, responsible civil outlook and comportment over the past decade and a half, without which no country can count itself truly European, has been so slow and difficult.
Globalisation
Some scholars have argued that globalisation is Hungary's main challenge, and the chief source of its problems today. Numerous internal problems also have to be addressed, but the real contest, whether people are aware of it or not, is going on with the inexorable forces and impacts of globalisation. Still weak fledgling economies such as Hungary's are especially susceptible to such destructive-constructive blizzards. The danger is further increased by the fact that eastern central Europeans have become unduly caught up in their own problems; they fail to see the wood for the trees, and in this case the wood is historical change on a worldwide scale – in economies, in political systems, in the international balance of power and relations, culturally and in day-to-day life. People may not see this, or at least they may fail to take it seriously enough (or at best use it as an alibi from time to time). However Western countries are also struggling with problems of sovereignty, the faltering of their system of democratic institutions, with the transformation of their own economies and the world economy, with the slashing of social safety nets, the growth of social inequalities, the emergence of a global proletariat, and the rapid alteration of their cultures. There is much, though, to be learnt from international examples, and through examples of willingness to address one's own problems with less hysteria and more know-how.
Continuity
There is no need to have recourse to various philosophies or scientific theories (Bergson, quantum physics, string theory, etc.) to assert that history is not a series of states but a continuous intertwining and disentwining of processes, and although these processes bring into being constellations, mobile structures, gestalts that have a certain permanence about them (e.g. tribes, towns, states, eras, civilisations) these in themselves are subject to continual change, become absorbed into the flow of history, turn into other forms. If that is so (and it may well be), then in point of fact we are being arbitrary to speak about a transitional period between 1989 and, say, 2010, the transition between a configuration termed "state socialism" and a configuration termed the "democratic market economy". Hungarian society and the Hungarian state have been in a state of continuous change for centuries, shaped now and in the past by a thousand and one sub-processes, and even with such a striking event as, say, the declaration of the Republic of Hungary on 23 October 1989, time and the process of change move forward without a moment's hesitation. Such a "transition" does not have a fixed starting or end point, and we cannot say dogmatically that the process "began" in 1956, or the 1960s, the 1970s, or the 1980s, nor can we determine a presumable "end point", because the target notion of a Western-style "democratic market economy" is itself continually subject to change, changing as it dances ahead of us.
A great many things follow from this. Among other things, that it is indeed necessary for us to examine this era as part of a long-term, complex process. Possibly, taking "state socialism" and "democratic market economy" as the two end points of analysis was a poor framework and did not direct attention to the most important processes of change; it may be that looking back, a half century hence, this "transition" will not been seen as the dominant determinant of the era but rather, for instance – and it has already been referred to – the tidal wave of globalisation or the earthquake-like transformation wrought by Western civilisation on an unprepared, fragile country like Hungary. Or perhaps something entirely different that we are as yet unable to perceive or formulate.
Most analyses of the transition, as can be seen, rely primarily on economic historical, political scientific, and sociological methods. I could go on but I would rather present a less familiar approach to try and show how the theory of liminality of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner can be adopted to analyse the process of change in which Hungarian society has been both subject and also actor over the past decade and a half. The reason why I have chosen this model is that Turner explicitly analyses the options and procedures of renewal for individuals and groups of individuals. Given that the real question in Hungary is the extent to which Hungarian society, alongside its political and economic institutions, has managed to renew itself, what the options are and what needs to be done in this area in years to come (an analysis which will in due course also draw on aspects from the history of ideas, psychology and social psychology).
Transition as "liminality"
In his book The Ritual Process,[1] Victor Turner asserted that there are periods of transition – "liminal" situations and processes – in the life of human communities and societies during which the now rigid social-lifestyle-attitudinal structures that evolved previously slacken or break up and a process of destruction and creation starts: differences of social status and wealth or private interest disappear, and it becomes possible for a puritanical community that is full of creative energy to arise which, in a kind of creative burst, produces new forms, approaches and systems of human relations (Turner also refers to the liminal state as an "anti-structure). In Turner's view, it is primarily human groups that are living on the periphery of a larger human society, or are isolated within it, who are capable of this peculiar state of existing in the creative chaos of liminality. Examples of "marginal societies" include those supporting bygone tribal initiation ceremonies, participants in Dionysian celebrations or a modern-day carnival, and religious communities; among those who may live in a condition of permanent liminality are monastic orders, hippie communes, subcultures, prophets, "alternative" artists, and so on. These communities and liminal periods, according to Turner, are often extremely rich in symbols, myths, innovatory thinking, and new visions of the world, and they can become sources for the renewal of the existing social order, the structures that have evolved and rigidified, casts of mind, and systems of human relationships.
It is on these alternative communities that Turner concentrates his attention.[2] Though he does not exclude the possibility that entire societies might pass through such liminal periods, for example, following a sudden change in the environment of a given society, a war, or a great natural disaster, he does not look more closely at such cases and so does not differentiate the two types of liminality. Yet there may be highly significant differences between them. In the case of the distinctive, and in part marginal, closed communities that Turner mentions liminality does indeed often promote, or can help to promote, the growth of a communal spirit, human solidarity, new thinking, creative energies. Transitional periods that affect the whole of society, often attended by profound crisis, often work out in another way altogether. Collapse of the original socio-politico-economic structure and the extraordinary difficulty of establishing a new structure may place such a great burden on the society in question as to splinter it and distort the apprehensions and actions of members of that society. No communitas comes into being, social differences, far from disappearing, are aggravated, conflicts become sharper, creative energies do not truly gush forth, society is not permeated by a communal spirit but by the hullabaloo of private interests. The country or society in question may sink into a crisis so deep that for a long time it is unable to extricate itself at all, and even later only with great difficulty and without genuinely regenerating, without being able to bring into being a qualitatively better and better-functioning structure than it had before. To put it another way, there can be an overall negative as well as an overall positive version of liminality and liminal transition.
In my view, the past decade and a half in the history of the countries of eastern central Europe can be located somewhere between these two types of liminality. They are currently in a transitional state. Despite all the problems, they are progressing towards construction of a model that is positive rather than negative. But many elements of true socio-politico-economic renewal are still missing, and it is likely that they will be missing, for a fair time yet, from the process in every country of the region. That is precisely why it can be instructive to compare the contradictory process of east central Europe's transition with a few elements of Turner's model of positive liminality. This is what I shall be undertaking in what follows. In order to make the problems that are to be addressed stand out more clearly, I may utilise contrasts that are somewhat darker and sharper than is justified.
Transition between structures
During their transition, the countries of eastern Europe passed into a "liminal situation" in the classical sense, as proposed by Turner. They tumbled out of the "structure" of the socialist system and set off towards a new structure, that of the democratic-capitalist system. They had to shatter the institutions of state socialism then set about constructing a new set of institutions; then, after picking their way through the ruins and chaos, they had to adapt to the new structure. A perilous enterprise. To fall back on a metaphor, they had to leap off from the solid, albeit fairly precarious ground and jump into an unfamiliar, swirling river, and now, in the years to come, they have to clamber out onto the far bank. Not every country will make it at the same time and equally well. Hungary's chances, at the moment, are not looking particularly good.
Chaos
Turner presented numerous examples in which liminality is regularly attended by transitional chaos. The old institutions and networks are smashed and it takes time for new ones to emerge. To extend the previous metaphor, the new member states of the EU are trying to hoist themselves out of the slightly boggy disorder; like one of those herds of African wildlife that can be seen in TV documentaries, they have swum across a river and are trying to clamber onto the steep far bank. The Slovene gnu have managed to do so already, while the Estonian antelope have just about climbed out, with the Slovaks and Lithuanians pushing close behind. But the Hungarian buffalo has just slithered back on the slippery bank into the swirling current in which alligators are still lying in wait. It is cold comfort that the Romanian and Bulgarians are still flailing in midstream.
The initiators
"Initiators" play an important role in the transitional state of liminality; in the present case, not the elders and medicine men of tribal society that Turner describes, but those bearing no less power (magical and non-magical) in the European Commission in Brussels, the IMF, the World Bank, Wall Street, and a few other such institutions. They do, indeed, behave like the initiators of old: they are strict, at times ruthless, secretive, they chant eternal verities, will not be gainsaid, will put one to shame or threaten castration when necessary, they bind one hand and foot – all this in the firm belief, or on the excuse, that this is all in one's best interest: when the initiation rite is finished one will be able to step as an adult into the world of grown-ups. The process may be successful in the majority of cases, though the official initiators at many points around the globe have already ruined and permanently crippled a good many countries, societies and groups of people. Hungary, though, might come off better than that.
Shamans and prophets
It is common in transitional, liminal periods for irrational propensities to gain strength in society, for rational analytical and critical faculties to weaken. In such an atmosphere it is not uncommon to see the appearance of shamans, who cast a spell on their flock, or prophets, who preach about apocalypse and a new Jerusalem to come. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán and Ferenc Gyurcsány possess such gifts, though from time to time they seem rather to cut the figure of a sorcerer's apprentice, and one can only hope that the magic word which will stop the floodwaters will spring to their mind in time.
Tricksters
The confusion of the transitional period also tends to favour the appearance of "tricksters", those clever and cunning hobgoblins who played, and still play, an important role in the mythologies of innumerable civilisations, destroying and creating, playing the innocent and resorting to trickery, cheating or assisting, turning the world upside down and putting it to rights again; there is no way of knowing whether they are for us or against us, they can drive us to distraction or dazzle us with their tricks, make us miserable or happy.[3] Even such an outstanding politician as Tony Blair has something of the air of a trickster about him: a charming, smiling trickster. On the far side of the ocean is Arnold Schwarzenegger as the giant trickster in the seven-league boots. In Europe Milosevic, Meciar, the Kaczynski brothers, Berlusconi and Putin would also stand good chances of bidding for that label, while in Hungary, too, several specimens of the type have cropped up, though out of prudence I shall leave it to the reader's imagination whom I have in mind.
Restorers of order
For Turner, restorers of order appear outside liminal communities and within official society. In Hungary, given that right here and now it is a matter of a transformation, a transition, of society as a whole throughout eastern Europe, people within society are raising their heads and believe that in the necessarily complex and chaotic process of the transition it is possible, indeed necessary, to create order at all costs, with strict ordinances, by administrative means and even, if need be, by force. "There must be order", and once there is order it means we have reached the far bank, the delightful environs of proper European countries. Naturally, order is required, but only order that does not strangle the spontaneous creative forces of the liminal era; to say nothing of the fact that restoration of order in itself will not solve a country's troubles. After all, a country that has been brought to heel can still be poor, can be marking time, or it may be sinking, standing to attention, in the marshlands on the periphery of Europe.
Communitas
Here the Turnerian comparison does not hold together, because what he writes in his exposition is that as long as people were living in their original, "normal" world they acted primarily as individuals, on the basis of their personal interests. When they find their place in the new structure, the new world, they again turn into individuals, become "individualists". In the chaotic, danger-ridden world of the intermediate, liminal period, however, people are dependant on one another; they join forces, become a communitas, and the spirit of interdependence and concerted action is reinforced. Turner intones a veritable paean for communitas. However there is little or no trace of such community-formation in Hungary over the last decade and a half, during the great transition period; quite the reverse, even today Hungarian society is still characterised, to a considerable degree, by an almost complete lack of communal spirit and collaboration, of communal solidarity. We watched with glassy eyes in the early 1990s as a million and a half fellow citizens took to the streets, and even today we still look on with indifference, caught up in our own anxieties, as tens or hundreds of thousands of others lose their jobs, barely lift so much as a finger to help them.
Not only is this morally repellent, it is also alarming with regard to Hungary's future, because what it suggests is that from this standpoint the "initiation", the growing up into the new world, has failed. That is especially problematic because there is really no place for an atomised society – one in which life has become a free-for-all – in the community of European societies. Social solidarity, trust in one another, is just as much an indispensable element of a European society as a balanced budget or clean, flash, lightning-fast trains that are dead on time. And perhaps more important than even the rapid introduction of the euro.
Creativity and its absence
I have mentioned Turner's assertion that the creative energies of individuals and human communities bubble up during a period of liminality, with new thoughts, initiatives and experiments that enrich the age, make it exciting, and that fructify, or are capable of fructifying, society as a whole. The renewed faith of those who live in alternative religious communities, the new values of hippie communes, flower power and New Age adherents, the new songs, harmonies, and forms of pop music are obvious examples of this. From that point of view, the transition in eastern Europe has been very disappointing – or at least its Hungarian version, to stick to our own patch. People in Hungary were embarrassed when an outstanding expert from abroad declared – somewhat condescendingly, but with good reason – that the transitions in East Europe had created nothing, they had not come up with anything, they had not devised any new models or institutions, had brought no new perceptions, no new answers: everything had been copied from the West. Admittedly, one cannot expect a renaissance of film, music and the visual arts every two or three decades, but as far as new thinking, attempts to reinterpret the world or even the level of public discourse go, the desolation of the past two decades is distressing, especially as compared with the intellectual buzz of the 1980s.
Mute society
Turner describes communitas as being a community that is lively, humming, and rich in the exchange of ideas. Hungarian society today, by contrast – at least as far as public life is concerned – would more accurately described as mute, or precisely the reverse: moaning, cursing, and shouting, as if people had forgotten how to speak to or argue with one another mildly, quietly, soberly. Or not even learned how to in the first place, since there have been few opportunities for learning how to conduct a civilised public discourse. For a century and more, leaders have been bantering one another, turning "Magyars" against Romanians, ethnic Germans, Roma, Slovaks and Serbs, Christians against Jews, Roman Catholics against Protestants, so-called "leftwingers" against "rightwingers". Undeniably, interests and beliefs are going to set people against one another, but it would be possible to discuss those interests and beliefs in a rational and considered manner if party politicking were interested in rational discourse and not uproar.
Identity and loss of identity
When a given world and social structure collapse, a substantial proportion, if not the majority, of the population will suffer from an unsettling of, if not an insult to, their sense of identity. Changes of social setting, disruption of networks, crises of confidence, loss of work, the devaluation of skills, the necessity to relocate – all these things can weaken and destroy people's sense of themselves, their self-identity. This process went ahead with dramatic force in Hungary over the past decade and a half.
True, a start has also been on the hunt for new identities; however, nowadays this is a slow and extremely laborious process and for many it has not succeeded as yet. They have become bogged down in a distressing and paralysing state of identity confusion or loss, while others, in their agony, have worked out partial identities for themselves and hang on to these tooth and nail. Such a partial identity might be an as yet ill-defined leftism or rightism, a religious affiliation or a pronounced nationalism. One's occupation or the position one has reached might equally be a source of identity. An occupation, if it is coupled with a true sense of vocation, can become a rich source of an enduring identity, but identities that are tied purely to a position usually carry a hollow ring. It is hard to forge a new, European identity, because that has to be reconciled with one's sense of nationality and, these days, citizenship of the world – something that is no easy matter, even for those who live in Western societies.
With the indigenous peoples described by Turner and others, at the end of an initiation rite a ready-made identity would be awaiting those who were being initiated: they were given a new name and acquired the rights, duties, self-awareness, and sense of identity of becoming adult members of the tribe. Those who conduct initiation ceremonies nowadays, however, in Brussels and elsewhere, do not concern themselves at all with the identity problems of the societies of eastern central Europe, helping them either not at all or at best only indirectly, for the most part by drilling them in the rules of the market economy game or democratic procedures. More problematic, though, is quite the reverse phenomenon: the way that the domestic political class, with the backing of much of the intelligentsia and press, are overly concerned, to a warped degree, with identity. Over the past decade and a half, issues of identity have found themselves, in a sad and distorted manner, at the centre of politics, or what passes for political discourse. Politicians, male and female, along with their swordbearers in the intelligentsia and press, argue about who is a good or a bad Hungarian rather than straining with every nerve and by all possible means that Hungary and Hungarian society should become a true European country and society with as little delay as possible.
Vision and blindness
In Turner's scheme, it is generally the case that communities that pass into a liminal state – and this is not limited to early Christian or Hassidic Jewish communities, for example – have genuine great perceptions, visions, about the past and present, the universe, the profundity of human existence. Today's Hungarian society, to draw a crude comparison, is characterised more by blindness – blindness because when it turns its back on the present and looks to the past, all it sees is darkness, or at best a murky jumble. It either does not know, or does not really know, what has happened to it over the decades that have gone by: a century of world wars, the treaties of Trianon and Yalta, the death camps and Gulags; a century of revolutions and counterrevolutions, bloody and sun-kissed Kádár regimes, and military treaties that yanked the country this way then that; a world of socialism, both inhuman and with a human face, of global capitalism, both inhuman with a human face; periods of poverty, growth and renewed impoverishment; a century of regime changes that were successfully negotiated and others that were muffed; an era of rights and illegalities, of hopes and losses of hope; a twentieth and early twenty-first century of not belonging and then belonging to Europe, of a radiant and a dark future. Nobody has explained to Hungary what happened to it and to Hungarian society in the course of the last decade and a half, let alone the last century and a half.
Progression and regression
Turner terms transitions "progressions"; that is, processes in the course of which a person or group moves ahead and upwards, leaves childhood to become an adult, finds a place in the world, gets ahead in a career, becomes more mature, wiser, livelier. This was seen in Hungary as in the transitions of other East Central European countries. In next to no time, Hungary switched from becoming a sickly state socialist regime into being a functional democracy (albeit one struggling with serious problems) and a tolerably well-running market economy. The country has become part of the Western world, a member of the European Union and of Nato, entered a diverse range of international networks, and, following decades of stagnation, set off energetically on a path of economic development, greater protection of human rights, and so on. Admittedly, there are some areas where the country has not managed to move ahead – indeed, it may have slid back. Thus, the socialist version of the welfare state is broken; the distribution of wealth has become more uneven; corruption, far from diminishing, has merely changed its spots and may even have increased; public finances have slipped further into debt, and so on. I choose not to go any further into these particular shortcomings and backslidings, but rather about the wide-ranging and dangerous regression that has occurred in the consciousness and attitudes of Hungarian society in recent years. It is possibly one of the most striking symptoms of the transition through which the country has passed during the last decade and a half – an element that has a big explanatory power. It is therefore worth closing the Turnerian view of the transition to take a separate closer look at this regression.
The big regression
Psychologists speak about regression as being a pathological process, so I am informed, when people are unable to cope with themselves or the world, and as a defence they revert to a chronologically earlier (e.g. childlike) state of mind or behaviour. This is exactly what happened over the past decade and a half with Hungarian society, or at least a substantial fraction of its population. In a world that has become ever more complicated, they have been incapable of taking care of the tasks that have been piling up in front of them; they have come to a standstill, recoiled and drawn back.Numerous forms of this mass regression can be observed in today's Hungarian society, but before I list some of them, I ought to stress that most of them are not specifically Hungarian phenomena: they are present in other societies, including developed Western societies. There are two factors that make them particularly dangerous in Hungary, however. For one thing, for many decades, if not centuries, the country has been in a socio-economic and political situation in which most people had hardly any chance to grow into free, self-sufficient, responsible citizens. On the other hand, the country is right in the middle of a complicated transitional process in which it is particularly important – almost more important than in an already well-established developed country – that people behave in a very deliberate, grown-up and purposeful manner. The population cannot allow itself the luxury of regression, but – sadly – that is precisely what it is doing.
The symptoms of regression that are listed below are, therefore, fairly widespread in human societies, but they will be analysed here specifically in regard to Hungary. To begin, then:
Regression to a larval reflex
Many Hungarians, in their state of alarm, have shut themselves up, crawled into their shell, clammed up; they have no wish to see or hear what is going on around them, and having dismissed the outside world, even dismiss their own thoughts. The snail reflex is a somewhat milder form of this type of regression. Many of our fellow citizens have become supersensitive, cautiously sticking their heads out of their shells only every now and again, only to pull back in alarm, touchily and huffily, into the dark, steamy warmth of the shell.
Depression
"Now is the winter of our discontent," one might say with Shakespeare's Richard III. Both he and we have plenty enough reason for discontent. Nowadays it is customary to express this much less poetically, with "depression" having become a veritable national disease in Hungary (and, though perhaps to a lesser extent, elsewhere as well). In many cases the depression is truly an illness, but nowadays there are many who choose of their own accord to withdraw into this refuge of discontented torpor.
Panic
"I lost my head" denotes losing an ability to control one's life that human beings have striven for millennia to build up. One thereby regresses into an earlier, more defenceless, more helpless state, flapping and dashing around like a terrified horde of monkeys.
Paranoia
Paranoia is a particularly common form of regression: a retreat into mistrustfulness, a state of everyone being everyone else's enemy. Hobbes described it as being the fearful primitive state that held sway prior to the acceptance of the "social contract"; it is perhaps no accident that Hungary has yet to agree a social contract.
There are also many who have moved back into the jungle, or at least into a belief that they are living in a jungle – a world in which there is no law, there are no rights or duties, only force. A world in which he who is the stronger is the master. This belief is reinforced, day after day, by news items that incessantly drum home the triumphs of the strong and more aggressive – a message that is further reinforced by countless films and TV series in which, night after night, muscle-bound titans pummel, kick and rip one another to bits in the noblest (or vilest) Stone Age traditions. Most of us Hungarians, like many others the world over, watch this with near-ecstatic thrill.
Intellectual blindness
The process of regression is also accompanied by intellectual blindness. Some people make reference, in this connection, to the "closed mind" syndrome; or in other words, a person's loss of mental flexibility. People feel themselves to be weak and uncertain in the present confused period of transition. Instead of excitedly searching for new thoughts and solutions, as Turner's model would suggest, they cling on tenaciously to the predigested "truths" that have served them up till now, to their increasingly anachronistic beliefs and misconceptions. They dare not let go of their reference points, have no wish to listen to new thinking; they are incapable of changing and hold for dear life to their convictions. It is everybody else who is mistaken, or else deliberately, with malice aforethought, falsifies the facts.
Retreat into the family
Withdrawal into the family is one of the commonest forms of regression (throughout the world, but perhaps particularly in Hungary in its present situation). For many people today "[his] frontier is the garden wall, the chicken coop, the cellar door...," to quote a phrase from the poet Dezsö Kosztolányi, and they do not see, nor wish to see, beyond that, beyond their back yard, and do not concern themselves with, do not know or wish or dare to concern themselves with, the world. They busy themselves diligently with and around the family in order not, even for a second, to have to look out into a "foreign world".
Retreat into the herd
More dangerous still is regression into the herd – an Ionescu-style herd of rhino. This was the greatest, most shameful and most destructive regression of the twentieth century. Hundreds of millions felt they were weak, or even nothing at all, so they made a compact with the "mob", found refuge in the warmth of the herd, compensating for their non-existent personality with their herd mentality and becoming, willy-nilly, accomplices to murderous powers. After 1989, there was a faint chance that Hungary would advance from crawling around on all fours and stand on its own two feet, shouldering the risks and precarious joys of independent, self-sufficient, grown-up human existence. It was disappointed, however. New terrors of a disintegrating world, and the hatreds that sprang from those terrors, very soon herded Hungarians – at least very many of them – into the corral of some newfangled eastern herd, movement, party and world view. Their – our – personality, independence and civil dignity lamentably shrivelled up.
Retreat into the past
One can retreat to the past as well, and in various ways at that. The past may be, for example, a never-never "golden age", such as the Kádár regime or the Horthy era, or some other glorious national past, shrouded in the golden mists of time. If the reason that people were immersed in the past was to gather strength for the future, then that would not be a bad tactic; but it is usually about nothing more than empty nostalgia, a clinging-on to the wreckage of the past that is hindering the building of a future.
Regression into childhood is akin to this, a sinking back into infantile irresponsibility, peevishness and sulking. During the Sixties and Seventies I wrote about the mandatory infantilisation of Hungarian society, the atrophy (or concealment) of a responsible, self-sufficient civil conduct of life. In 1989 I thought that we had, at long last, managed to get over that crawling around on hands and knees, babbling and bib-wearing. I was wrong: there are many signs that a new infantilism is flourishing in Hungary.
Among such infantile traits are grousing and sulking. Many people in Hungary seem to spend their lives eternally grumbling and moping, instead of acting like a grown-up should and having a go at changing the world. Some have chosen a more comfortable form of regression in becoming couch potatoes and dampening their distress with pot noodles, mountains of pasta and chocolate. Or think of the doltish burbling that goes on in a multitude of TV shows, the all pervading fashion for games, parlour games, sports games, and quizzes (there has never before been an age in the history of Western civilisation when adults played as much, day after day after day). One might also point to hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, that other defining feature of consumer culture; the pleasure principle, the compulsion for instant gratification of desires, at any cost, once used to be a form of behaviour that was typical of children only. These are all global phenomena, but in Hungary, as I have already said, they tend to play a more negative role than they do in civilised, developed countries.
Flight into the instinctual world
One can also flee into the instinctual world. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, for instance, was undoubtedly a liberation, a breaking through of the barriers behind which Western civilisation had inordinately repressed sexual desire. From another standpoint, though, it had, and still has, an element of regression about it, of regression to a pre-civilised state, because it is common knowledge that the concept of civilisation is inseparable from an element of regulation, of limiting or "curbing". In consequence, it is a "civilisation" that round the clock proclaims the possibility of finding, even makes it an injunction to find, near unlimited satisfaction of desires, or in this respect at least questions its own civilising nature. Of course every civilisation has had its longer or shorter periods – weeks, days, months (Dionysian revelries, "carnivals", etc.) – when instincts were given release from this controlling order, but the "never-ending carnival" of the modern-day consumer society is now starting to pry apart any frame of civilisation. I could not say if the element of regression is more strongly present, for example, in the sexual cult in Hungary than in the West, but sexual freedom certainly must have come (and comes) at an opportune moment for those who are seeking a refuge from life's troubles and cares.
Flight from oneself
People also have the option, if they feel themselves to be tortured by life's problems, of freeing themselves from their self, their personality. It is simplest to recede into such an ego-less condition by the means of alcohol. Indeed, the high level of alcoholism in Hungary is no doubt a symptom of the Great Regression that is being examined here, though here we are more concerned with the centuries-old practice of regression, as older eras also had reason enough for people to retreat into an unconscious stupor from the multitude of the world's miseries and strife. There are, of course, other, milder but no less effective methods, and then again one can obtain release from one's personality by relinquishing it, dismantling or, so to say, "dissipating" it. One way of achieving the latter, for instance – if one does not wish to face life, or the problems and opportunities that life offers, as an adult person – is literally to dissipate one's life and oneself, "fritter" them away. This is particularly easy nowadays, because modern-day civilisation, consumer culture, is urging us non-stop to do just this: forget yourself and the world. Don't you worry about a thing: enjoy life, have fun, dissipate yourself in life's colourful whirl.
Flight into irrationality
For many people, both in Hungary and elsewhere, the world has become so snarled-up, so complex and incomprehensible, that after several centuries of the unfolding of enlightened reason and understanding we are increasingly prone to flee back into the twilight of irrationality. The tremendous fashions for parapsychology, astrology, myths, New Age "thinking" and so on are just one sign of how much adult rationality is now on the ebb. If I may refer to just one example of this, a search for the keyword "occult" on Amazon's internet merchandising website will offer the following subjects: astral rays, aura and colours, crop circles, cults and demonism, ESP, extraterrestrial beings, kabbalism, magic, magic potions, metaphysical phenomena, occultism, parapsychology, Rosicrucianism, Satanism, shamanism, spiritualism, the supernatural, UFOs, unexplained mysteries, witchcraft.[4]
It is clear, then, that the fashion for the irrational is not a Hungarian speciality (Hungarians are also consumers of the products of international irrationality industry). But in view of the country's difficult position, it would be particularly important that its citizens display a measure of self-constraint, because now, more than ever, there is a need for every sound thought, for reason, for sensible, sober-minded collective assessment.
Regression to an aggressive state
The more dangerous course, if not for their own sake, then for everyone else, is for people to regress to the aggressive state and to break, smash and ruin, to take out the pain of their powerlessness and frustrations on others. This stepping-back into a world of Stone-Age rage is one of the most widespread forms of regression in Hungary today, one that almost all of us suffer from, to a smaller or larger degree. We clatter noisily by in the crowd, like our ancestors once did in the bush, charging almost like enraged rhinoceroses at the cars that are inching along in front of us, "hitting the ceiling" if something does not happen at once to our liking, exploding with murderous passions if anyone happens to cross us.
Blindness to the future
Blindness to the future is also a symptom of regression. We cover our eyes, not wishing or daring to look into an uncertain, unknown future. One can always retreat into indifference, into hopelessness. If no way out is seen, no option, then one can counter the pain of futile hoping by muffling oneself in a voluntarily accepted creed of hopelessness. "There's no hope," we can lament with the poet, and that in itself lessens the pain; and if we are able to ennoble this muffled hopelessness into philosophical resignation, then we may even be proud of ourselves.
Cynicism
It is also possible to retire behind the bastions of cynicism. If we manage to convince ourselves that there is not, and cannot be, anything of value, nothing good, no integrity, no humanity in the world, and everybody steals, cheats and lies, then the lack of values and valuable people does not hurt so badly. This cynic's attempt at self-therapy can, in any event, be regarded as a regression, if one believes those philosophers – and no small number of philosophers fall into this category – who take the view that an honourable, free, dignified life is nevertheless still possible.
Martyrdom
Another pleasant refuge is a sense of martyrdom. One may still recall the many individuals, both in Hungary and elsewhere in the region, who accepted the role of martyr in the 1950s and 1960s, sacrificing their lives, their safety, their careers in the fight for some holy cause. These days, though, holy causes have either faded or vanished altogether, and nowadays even evil powers have pulled on velvet gloves over their claws, presenting themselves as so smooth and polite that it is hard to get any purchase on them. Although there is very little chance or call for true martyrdom, many people withdraw into this pose, into the role of the unjustly suffering, high-minded individual whose lot it is to suffer. There was a time when the acceptance of martyrdom was a brave protest that sought to build a new world over against a wicked and culpable world; now the role of the individual who takes flight from the world is that of someone who is seeking a halo as some kind of indemnification for their failures.
Self-handicapping
The English-language literature speaks of "self-handicapping" as a strategy of regression. One should think of a sportsman or woman who has not trained properly for their next race. That inadequate training may lessen the chances of winning, but at the same time it is an obvious excuse in the event of failure. Self-handicapping, or to put it another way: a failure-avoiding (as opposed to success-driven) mentality typified many Hungarians (and probably populations right across eastern Europe) in the 1970s and 1980s, for perfectly understandable reasons, too, as on the one hand there were few opportunities for genuine success, and on the other, success, or standing out from the crowd, had its own dangers. In many cases, then, failure-avoidance was a wise tactic.
During the last decade and a half, a multitude of opportunities have opened up. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, because, for on the one hand, the chances of success are increased and its risks are reduced, but then on the other hand, there are no excuses (or less room for them), which means that people have to search for the reasons for failure in themselves. In order to avoid such a painful humiliation, many people are inclined to self-handicapping: instead of giving their all in the interests of success, they prefer to retreat into a condition of the helpless, unfortunate individual who has been stricken by circumstances.
Retirement into one's own backyard
Retiring into one's own backyard, among the beanstalks, the snapdragons and apple trees, is another option. It was a masterstroke of the Kádár regime to hand out small allotments (though not plough land), for nothing, or next to nothing, to many hundreds of thousands of families. This was not land reform but, in reality, something more like a masterly "brain reform". Virtually at a stroke, it managed to turn cantankerous, bitter, malcontent, unpredictable, vocal, argumentative and unhappy proletarians, who were demanding change and arguing as much in the street and bar rooms, into peaceful, predictable and contented petty-bourgeois citizens. The big truth was grasped that anyone who owns a garden is not going to have any spare time to spend in the street or the bar arguing the toss about politics, being discontented and vilifying the regime; he will not be an erratic, quarrelsome element, but a reliable gardener, if only because one can predict, for example, when apple trees have to be pruned or pesticide sprayed (and those things cannot be put off for any rowdy demonstration) – indeed, people won't have time anyway, what with having to chase around for the materials needed to build a tool shed or a shack in which to spend one's weekends. A proprietor of an allotment is no longer waiting for political change but for rain or sunshine; he has no time for "rallies" – at most just the odd minute or two to lean on his spade and exchange a few words with his neighbour, and even then not in order to argue over politics but which weed-killer is best; he is not going to curse the regime but the weevils and the moles; he drinks his own home-brewed drink under a walnut tree rather than going to a smoke-filled, raucous bar. In short, self-respecting, belligerent, politically opinionated working- or middle-class citizens voluntarily and peacefully relapsed into the pristine condition of an idyllic garden of Eden. (I shall say nothing about the fact that this is regression purely from the standpoint of public life, because from another point of view the allotment is an excellent proving ground for an adult, responsible, reflective personality.)
To draw this to an end, one may conclude that Hungary's citizens, academics, and leaders most certainly ought to concern themselves with regression at the society level as being a severe pathological sign and an important sequela, symptom and etiological principle of the past decade and a half of transition. Grandiose economic programmes are not going to be enough in themselves, after the winter of our discontent, to bring on the spring of our contentment.
I have listed in the foregoing many of the phenomena, constituent elements, tendencies and, at the same time, explanatory principles that characterise the decade and a half of transition in Hungary (and to some degree central eastern Europe more generally). It is more than likely that all of them, intertwined and to differing degrees, have played a part in shaping this complex process. Different researchers emphasise now one, now another as being the primary factor; I, on the other hand, take the view that they all require close study, much closer than hitherto, but that a concerted analysis may succeed in delineating a genuinely nuanced picture of this complex transitional period.
* [1] Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; 2nd ed. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
* [2] Van Gennep in his standard work – Arnold van Gennep: Les rites de passage; étude systématique des rites de la porte et du seuil, de l'hospitalité, de l'adoption, de la grossesse et de l'accouchement, de la naissance, de l'enfance, de la puberté, de l'initiation, de l'ordination, du couronnement des fiancailles et du mariage, des funérailles, des saisons, etc. Paris: É. Nourry, 1909 and its English translation: The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960 – confined himself to an analysis of ancient initiation ceremonies.
* [3] In a superb essay, Ágnes Horváth has analysed the role of the trickster in East European politics. Based on the speeches he made in Hungary, she allocates to Mátyás Rákosi the role of a trickster of the extreme negative type.
* [4] Just to list (in no particular order) the titles of a few of the edifying volumes on the shelves of American bookshops: Advanced Candle Magic, Talking to Heaven, The Hidden Truth of Your Name, Numerology, Tarot Basics, How to Stir a Magic Cauldron, Green Witchcraft, The 21 Lessons of Merlin, Celtic Wisdom, Everyday Karma, The New Revelations, The Art of Shen Ku, The New Chinese Astrology, Astrology for the Soul, Technology of Gods, Atlantis, The Secret Doctrine.
Published 2007-07-26
Original in Hungarian
Translation by Tim Wilkinson
First published in 2000 2/2007
Contributed by 2000
© Elemér Hankiss/2000
© Eurozine
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