Steve_Bamlett_blog

What are you curious about?

At the beginning of Chapter 2 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we read: ‘”Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot to speak good English); …..’. We forget, at our peril, that, whatever his commitment to nonsense and queer adventures, the eminent logician C.L Dodgson was a stickler for ‘good English’. At their most vulnerable his characters stand out against the convention of lexis, semantics and grammar at their cost, most notably Humpty Dumpty in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass:

‘”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” / “The question is,” said Alice “whether you can make words mean so many difgferent things.” / “”The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”‘

Since I read The Philosopher’s Alice (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL10393234M/The_Philosopher’s_Alice) whilst at university (before which a boy from a council estate stood amazed), I have admired this stand of Humpty’s for the notion that language is merely a convention and for its concomitant, at least for me, notion that such conventions require challenging. But Humpty doesn’t stand – he might have been more stable on top of a wall had he done so: he sits his roly-poly bottom on a high wall, aping the height of dignity, only to be totally reliant on conventional authority when he falls; though, as we know ‘all the king’s horse and all the king’s men / couldn’t put Humpty together again’. This is hardly the bold statement then of a commanding authority, standing against convention, but of a hubristic and fragile shell of a character, broken even before he falls. Carroll’s Toryism wins the war if not the battle against his playful challenges to the systems of the status-quo.

So Alice too. She might, if more collected, have realised that ‘curiouser’ is not an acceptable form in ‘good’ English expression but she might too have come to terms with the fact that no mere character, even a protagonist of her changing stature, can determine to be other than what her authorial authority wants her to be at the very moment he wants her to be it. As she does she displays all the ridiculous conventions herself of adult society that thinks it stands against all nonsense as if in open satire. For instance, in the sentences after stating her curious feelings, she settles into the fact that greater height for her from the ground means, as it does for the adults around her, greater prestige and power – if not to control absolutely, but certainly the capacity to patronise from on high more lowly beings, like her feet: “I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you – but I must be kind to them! … I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas’.

Alice may soon become aware of the ‘great nonsense’ she ‘is talking’, but the point is that the systemic forces we call ‘conventions’ (whether of the social world, ethical behaviour and language) are governed by powerful forces for they represent more than themselves – they represent stability of authority of control and focal active agents of state or other social power that no individual alone may challenge, and the matter of their control is legion – not just a batty old Red Queen shouting ‘Off with their Heads’.

So, for this question: ‘what am I curious about’! I am curious about the fundamental things, but that assumes a curiosity about everything, for what is fundamental is what supports everything in what we call our knowable world and puts it in its place. We get curious about, what happens if we shift something from a certainty that is taken for granted, as it once may have been that God exists or that sex / gender is by nature a binary phenomenon, and try it out in different guises, unsure but yet suspecting that the binary between truth and fiction will dissolve too in the process, and show gradations not only of truth of the real. I sense this with Eddie Izzard’s attempt to become Labour MP for Brighton. Having built a life and a career on a lived notion of a chosen identity, with whatever nuance of genetic or social determinism within it, they choose (I choose, by the way, this pronoun ‘they’ because I cannot find preferred ones on Twitter at least – apologies if misgendering in the process of naming them then) to fight a seat held by the Greens who are fulsome on these points and with a candidate likely to win if he does not stand THERE. This is not about fighting Tories at a general election but fighting the chances of a stronger alliance against the Tories. But it must appear to be otherwise, lest we believe Labour is supporting this move to exploit a strong local LGBTQI+ set of loyalties in favour of an absolute majority. I am curiouser (and curiouser) about how people square such circles in realities and live with themselves in the process.

In the current dogmas of opposition power alone is its own justification and will resolve itself into, they hope we believe, a utopia once power is achieved. Under their breath they will say (of course) more fulsomely,’will be resolved after a few parliaments’ (meaning after 10 years). They must know that when all the king’s horses and all the king’s men arrive (with a few queens in tow we hope), the priority will be to save Labour at the expense of the issues (and the people those issues involve) have needed to be pushed under a bus – Greenpeace, human rights that enshrines trans rights, and so on. Likewise Greta Thunberg is today right to call out the Edinburgh Book Festival for prioritising the rights of sponsors, Baillie Gifford, to invest capital where those leaders of CAPITAL want it to be invested (which means in oil if the returns are right – and they will be right up to global extinction). For the story see: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/04/greta-thunberg-accuses-edinburgh-book-festival-sponsor-of-greenwashing.

The pleas will be the same. Individuals stand up, as no doubt Izzard will and Nick Barley, of the Book Festival, already has to say ‘”When I use a word…, it means just what I choose it to mean”‘. But where I am curious is where the plea for strategy and political cunning in the light of the existence of a Tory establishment in the media, differentiates even its own versions of lies, fictions and truths. I have a feeling it will get ‘Curiouser and curiouser’, yet.

This is really depressing in truth. Some good people call you trolls for making points like this but … fictions require fictional enemies, so ‘troll’ it might have to be till someone sees a light or at least says they are looking for a light and not resumed business as usual in speeding towards the twilight of the Gods.Or perhaps Götterdämmerung – or even a full Ragnarök is round the corner. I sometimes feel it is.

Love

Steve