Grave thoughts

When, years ago, I visited the Sapanta cemetery in Maramures, I could appreciate only the aesthetics - the beautiful blue and red of the carved wooden carvings with their naif small paintings and (generally) humorous celebration of the lives (and sometime the deaths) of the villagers who lay below. Now, thanks to the bookfare and a Baie Mare publisher, I am able to study the artefacts at my leisure – eg the one with a painting of a guy at a still and the lines -

Here I am Husar Ion
Lying under this cold stone
In life all knew me handy
With my still and good plum brandy
Come on men and raise a cheer
Come and fill your flasks right here
Drink it now and be so merry
Girls have brandy from the cherry
I’ll not see you, share your mirth
From my bed deep in the earth

I was reminded of the medieval inscriptions I admired decades ago in the churchyards in North-East Scotland. I googled – and was delighted to come across various googlebooks – this one printed in 1704 whose opening inscription is -

remember man, as thou goes by
as thou art, so once was I
as I am now, so shalt thou be
remember man that thou must die

Also an 1806 Collection of Epitaphs and Monumental Inscriptions with a preface by Dr Johnson and a delightful „Advertisement” (as the introduction is called) with the careful grammatical construction they had in those days.

The editor has preferred the melange to that of a classification of subjects, and, if he shall thereby occasionally beguile the serious of a smile or the volatile of a few moments’serious reflection, who, otherwise, would have restricted their reading to the department most in unison with their sentiments, his object will be fully accomplished.

The guy anticipated the critique of the internet – all of 200 years ago! The entire book can actually be downloaded here.
While in maudlin mood, let me mention an idea I had as I was musing on Boffy’s latest blog. As might be guessed from his long posts, Boffy is retired. Like me, he presumably devotes a fair amount of his time to his reading and writing. Those of us who have successfully reached and passed the magic milestone; and have an over-developed sense of injustice might benefit from combining our time, energies and resources. Someone must surely already have tried to put this into practice? I remember drafting a note about this more than 10 years ago!

Finally some thoughts from John Lanchester in London Review of Books (who combined some time ago to give helpful explanation of the global meltdown) about the UK coalition government’s economic policy -

To the historian, especially of the 1931 crisis, the whole thing is sadly familiar. There is the same paralysis on the part of the Labour Party (which might now wonder whether a four-month leadership election was really a good thing) and everywhere the same ramped-up rhetoric: the country is on the edge, going bankrupt, capital will flee, and it is all Labour’s fault. And this time, as in 1931, there is much that is spurious. The country is not on the verge of bankruptcy. There is no evidence that the bond market was reacting against British debt, despite the best efforts of the Conservative Party to encourage it to do so. Our fiscal position was never like that of Greece, which had cooked the books and was struggling to cope with short-term government debt, though Osborne et al insisted it was. Why was it necessary to take such drastic action at all? Our debt ratio was much higher after the Second World War and neither Attlee nor Churchill felt any obligation to do what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne have done.

The importance of the cuts is not economic but political and ideological. First, they restore an apparently coherent, specifically Conservative and politically useful identity to the Conservative Party, distinguishing it from Labour. For the last 20 years or so the Tories have not had such an identity. They tried a traditional law-and-order Toryism for a few years, but the electorate found it unattractive. Then under Cameron they committed themselves to a form of New Labourism, a commitment that ended willy-nilly with the financial crisis. And, unlike Brown, who did eventually devise a fairly ordered response to that crisis, the Conservatives were all at sea. Neither Cameron nor Osborne came out of it with an enhanced reputation. But the ‘deficit’ gave them an opportunity; and the bigger the cuts the bigger the opportunity.
The cuts have to be big in order to confirm the Conservative explanation of what happened. That they saved the country from the brink, from disaster, from national bankruptcy – in other words from Labour’s incompetence and profligacy – is a line the Conservatives use well and often. And it is an explanation which historically the electorate has found acceptable. The notion that the state should conduct its own finances in the manner of a prudent household has always been thought plain common sense by many voters (though no one in the Treasury would agree), even if in the last 20 years the electorate has conducted its affairs anything but prudently. Thus from the point of view of a rather rudderless Tory Party the very hugeness of the cuts is an advantage: they magnify the crisis and Labour’s recklessness in causing it. Further, they restore a sense of authority to the Conservative Party and to its interpretation of British politics and society, something it has lacked for a long time. That the cuts are promoted by a coalition government including the soft-hearted Lib Dems is an added advantage. It shrouds the Thatcherism of the exercise in a cloak of fairness.
Second, the crisis allowed the Conservatives to transform a crisis of the banks into a crisis of the welfare state. This, they hope, will enable them to restructure government and ‘shrink’ the state and its welfare systems once and for all, something they have been trying to do for the last 30 years.

Identity

I’ve always had great difficulty answering the simple question “What do you do?” “Student” was easy but, after graduation, I had a quick succession of jobs in what could be called generally the “planning” field - and “planner” is as vague a term as “manager” and enjoyed a rather limited vogue.
In 1968 I joined a polytechnic and was also elected to a town council – so “lecturer” was as good a description as what I did as any.

Using my voice was what I was paid for – whether to transmit information or opinions. I read widely – so “reader” was also a pertinent word. I became heavily involved in community development – managing to straddle the worlds of community action and political bureaucracy (for 20 years I was the Secretary of ruling Labour groups in municipal and regional Councils and also a sponsor of community action) and figured in a book about “reticulists” (networkers) – but imagine putting that word in a passport application!

For a few years I was Director of a so-called “Research Unit” which was more like a Think Tank in its proselytising workshops and publications celebrating the new rationalism of corporate management and community development. At age 43 my default activity became full-time (regional) politics – with a leader role but of a rather maverick nature who never aspired to the top job but was content to be at the interstices of bureaucracy, politics and academia. I remember my reception at an OECD function in central Sweden as someone with a proclivity to challenge.

All this paved the way for the “consultancy” which I have apparently practised for the past 20 years in Central Europe and Central Asia. But “consultant” is not only a vague but a (rightly) increasingly insulting term – so I was tempted for a period to enter the word “writer” on my Visa application forms since this was as good a description of what I actually did as any.

At one stage indeed, my despairing secretary in the Region had actually given me the nickname “Paperback writer”. Except that this was seen by many border guards in central Asia as a threatening activity! Robert Reich’s “symbolic analyst” briefly tempted – but was perhaps too close to the term “spy”!
When I did the Belbin test on team roles to which I was subjecting my teams, I had expected to come out as a leader – but was not altogether surprised to discover that my stronger role was a “resource person” – someone who surfed information and knowledge widely and shared it. What some people saw as the utopian streak in my writing gave me the idea of using the term “poet” at the airport guiches – but I have a poor memory for verse.

This morning, as I looked around at the various artefacts in the house, a new label came to me – “collector”! I collect beautiful objects – not only books and paintings but pottery, pens, pencils, laquered cases, miniatures, carpets, Uzbek wall-hangings, Kyrgyz and Iranian table coverings, glassware, terrace cotta figurines, plates, Chinese screens, wooden carvings et al. Of very little - except sentimental - value I hasten to add!

But, of course, I have these things simply because I have been an “explorer” – first of ideas (desperately searching for the holy grail) and then of countries – in the 1980s Western Europe, the 1990s central Europe – finally central Asia and beyond.

Some 25 years ago, when I was going through some difficult times, my sister-in-law tried to help me by encouraging me to explore the various roles I had – father,son, husband, politician, writer, activist etc. I didn’t understand what she was driving at. Now I do! Lecturer, reticulist, politician, maverick, leader, writer, explorer, consultant, resource person, collector – I have indeed played all these roles (and more too intimate for this blog!).

Makes me wonder what tombstone I should have carved for myself in the marvellous Sapanta cemetery in Maramures where people are remembered humourously in verse and pictures for their work or way they died!!

And it was TS Eliot who wrote that

old men ought to be explorers

Daniela tells me that TV is full today of the funeral obsequies of Adrian Panescu (see yesterday's blog). Particularly sickening in the light of the recent loss of Ion Olteanu.
As I've been blogging here for more than a year, I thought it would be useful to start looking at what I was chuntering on about a year ago.