Leaving aside all other aspects that will now be the subject of empassioned debate and media coverage for some time to come, who, speaking in Bruges on 20 September 1988, said the following? ‘The European Community is a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people in a world in which there are many other powerful nations and groups.’ ‘We Europeans cannot afford to waste our energies on internal disputes or arcane institutional debates.’ ‘I am the first to say that on many great issues the countries of Europe should try to speak with a single voice. I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone. Europe is stronger when we do so, whether it be in trade, defence or in our relations with the rest of the world.’ ‘Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose.’ ‘I believe it is not enough just to talk in general terms about a European vision or ideal. If we believe in it, we must chart the way ahead and identify the next steps.’ Lastly – my favourite – ‘Utopia never comes, because we know we should not like it if it did.’

This evening I caught up over a beer with my friend, Nigel Clarke, on an exciting music-and-words collaborative project that is nearing completion. There’ll be more about that on this blog when it is completed on 27 April. As always, Nigel fountained musical references and ideas. We are already looking to the future. Maybe, just maybe, our next project will be on a bigger scale. In the meantime, we have both been referring to inspirational music-and-words adventures. I, for example, have developed a particular soft spot for John Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. But Nigel, as always, broadened my musical knowledge by leading me to Leonard Bernstein’s 1971 MASS and it has been growing on me ever since I first heard it. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy (to form part of the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington), it set out as a traditional mass, but Bernstein later digressed into Latin and Hebrew and all sorts of different styles, roping in Paul Simon, among others, to write the lyrics. Controversial in its time, and not a success with the concert-going public (though it sold strongly as a recording), MASS faded unfairly from popular consciousness but it really does deserve to be better known. Sadly, it is infrequently performed professionally, has rarely been recorded and is almost impossible to find on the internet. It reminded me a little of such 1970s works as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. Curious, I looked them all up on the internet and discovered that there was no coincidence. Godspell opened off Broadway on 17 May 1971. MASS premiered in Washington on 8 September 1971. And Jesus Christ Superstar opened on Broadway on 12 October 1971. The lyrics get a little mangled in this version but I defy anybody not to tap their foot to God said, to give just one example.

BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme this morning carried a report about the large-scale arrival of the Huguenots in England, particularly following the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, and about the economic and cultural consquences of such a large presence (some 50,000 Protestant Walloons and Huguenots altogether). Among other things, they gave the English language the word ‘refugee’, which came from the French refugié, a noun use of the past participle of refugier “to take shelter, protect,” from the Old French refuge. The word continued to mean “one seeking asylum,” until 1914, when it evolved to mean “one fleeing home”, being first applied in this sense to Belgian civilians heading west to escape fighting in World War I (Europe’s first modern refugee crisis). Of course, the concept of asylum and the de facto status of being somebody recognised as fleeing persecution long predated the Huguenots, but they gave us the word to embody the concept. The Belgian refugee crisis of 1914 was swiftly followed by the consequences of the Russian civil war (about 800,000 Russian refugees had become stateless when Lenin revoked citizenship for all Russian expatriates in 1921) and the creation of the so-called Nansen passports for refugees (issued by the League of Nations and broadened in 1933 to also include Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean and Turkish refugees). And then of course came the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which, it is now forgotten, was initially limited to protecting European refugees caused by World War II and the Cold War (a 1967 Protocol removed the geographical and time limits). Large scale floods of refugees in Europe may now be a thing of the past, but we shouldn’t forget that the origins of the concept and the noble principles embodied in the Geneva Convention were pretty much a European creation, from both a positive and a negative point of view.

Another excellent counter-intuitive thesis is advanced by Gillian Tett in this morning’s Financial Times (on counter-intuitive theses, see this previous post). Now a celebrated economic journalist but originally a cultural anthropologist, Tett spent time living with, and observing, remote Tibetan communities in Tibet and Tajikistan, where ‘Each night, piles of people would all sleep in the same room, or tent. If somebody was not sleeping or eating well, it became a matter of wider knowledge and debate.’ Personally, Tett found that extremely intrusive, being used to Western-style ‘privacy’. Until recently, she writes ‘I vaguely assumed that societies tended to shed this group pattern when they got richer. After all, the broad sweep of history suggests that most cultures have become more individualistic over time, as wealth gives people more freedom to break away from the group.’ But now Tett wonders whether the digital revolution isn’t undermining such assumed trends. Over and beyond the way young people think little nowadays of posting a great deal of private information on such social networks as Twitter and Facebook, she cites a new trend in New York, whereby young professionals have started wearing monitoring devices that share information about such intimate aspects of their lives as sleeping patterns, exercise and eating habits. One can see the competitive logic and the use of peer group pressure to maintain self-discipline but, still, Tett sees this development as ‘one more sign of the degree to which most of us want to remain inside a social group.’ We are never too far, it seems, from that communal sleeping space.

Hmmm….. Somebody clearly thought this film was a good idea. Take eight top drawer actors and actresses (including stars like Judi Dench and Maggie Smith), make them show just how brilliant they are by giving them a pretty pedestrian plot reminiscent of the Carry On era, and set the whole thing in India. And it worked – at least, in the UK, from where most of this film’s gross earnings apparently came. The plot’s central device is the ‘outsourcing’ of ageing British singles and couples to a cheaper, but more anarchic and colourful, India. Cue an on form Dev Patel, hot from Slumdog Millionaire, as the eager young manager of the hotel in question, the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Why it should have been a surprise box-office hit in the UK is almost certainly down to the real star of the film: India, especially Rajasthan and Jaipur, and the magnificent swirl of colours and people and buildings. The Wiki entry cites one Liza Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, who opined that the film achieved what it set out to do: ‘Sell something safe and sweet, in a vivid foreign setting, to an under-served share of the moviegoing market.’ That just about summed it up for us on this, our last film evening before the return to the crush. And, if I may cite one of the better lines from the script, ‘when I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.’

One of the great treats of sitting by a lake in the early spring is to watch the water birds’ courtship dances. This morning I have watched a couple of great crested grebes and then a pair of swans. In both species the dances are elaborate and the neck is the primary means of expression and, yes, sometimes they inadvertently form a heart shape, as in the illustration. These species share something else in common. They both carry their young around on their backs between their wings, and I only regret that I won’t be by the lake to see this next beautiful step as spring advances.

In late April 2008 it was reported that a 73 year-old Austrian man and locally respected pater familias, Josef Fritzl, had been arrested on suspicion of having kidnapped and imprisoned his 18 year-old daughter, Elisabeth, and of having held her captive in an underground cellar complex for twenty-four years. Josef Fritzl was accused of incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment, enslavement and negligent homicide and was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. He had begun abusing Elisabeth, born in 1966, when she was eleven. Somehow resenting her independent spirit, he had clearly planned for her imprisonment. Once he had trapped her, he subjected her to continuous abuse and physical violence. His constant incestuous rape led to the birth of seven children (one of whom died shortly after birth) and one miscarriage. In the end, this monster’s monstrosities were uncovered when Elisabeth’s oldest daughter, Kerstin, suffered a life-threatening illness and had to be taken above ground to hospital for treatment (although, incredibly, already Fritzl had, in his manipulative madness, been planning for a ‘miraculous’ unification of his ‘underground’ and above-ground families). I have just finished reading The Crimes of Jozef Fritzl  Uncovering the Truth, co-authored by a Brussels-based journalist acquaintance, Bojan Pancevski (together with Stefanie Marsh). It is a thoroughly researched and very well written study of the origin and development of this human evil. How did a monster like Jozef Fritzl come into being? What made him behave in the way he did? Why did the society around him not suspect something sooner, given his past record and the strange events that repeatedly occurred? Marsh and Pancevski seek the answers in his own horribly abusive childhood (he later turned the tables on the mother who had beaten him so mercilessly by locking her up in the attic with a bricked-up window for twenty years), the simultaneous claustrophobia and comfort of Amstetten’s wartime tunnel air raid shelters and the mores of Austria’s post-war provincial society (Fritzl, for example, was sentenced to just eighteen months in prison for a cold-blooded rape). It is page 118 (of a 294-page book) before Elisabeth is imprisoned, and the next third of the book is largely an account of his daughter’s extraordinary fortitude. Though she was frequently in despair, her spirit never broke. Her profound humanity and maternal instincts somehow reconcile the reader a little.  But the last third of the book, devoted to psychiatric analyses and the trial, is perhaps the most depressing. Neighbours above the cellar prison had for many years heard all sorts of suspicious noises. But for collective incompetence, Elisabeth’s plight could and should have been brought to an end long before. As Marsh and Pancevski conclude: “Everything pointed to the fact that Jozef Fritzl was not in fact the brilliant operator that the authorities and the media had painted him. He was clumsy. He was a bad liar. He had left clues all over the place. But he had an unshakeable belief in his own fantasies, and he had been lucky. Even when everything had pointed to the fact that something very wrong was happening in the house in Ybbsstrasse, nobody had looked.”

Taking a spot of lunch in a mountain refuge today we came across this photograph on the cabin wall. The mysterious thing was found, still alive, under the ice at about 1,000 metres altitude. It was not, the lady insisted, a ramaro (local dialect for a green lizard, I think). It was distinctively blue, about half a metre long and had never been seen before. They had sent it off to the University of Florence for ‘tests’, but the local theory is that it is a mutant, caused by the latent radiation, still in the soil around here, caused by the Tchernobyl dust cloud. (There are rumoured to be an abnormal number of radiation-linked tumours among people living in the Alto Lario region.) It was a sort of reminder that even in remote spots man’s deprivations of his environment are not far away. She gave another example. The beautiful Lago di Darengo, high up in the mountains at the foot of a natural rock circus, where we bathed only  last summer, was found to be completely sterile and stagnant some ten years ago and had to be treated with large quantities of lime and bicarbonate of soda. The local rumour was that a civilian airliner in trouble had had to dump its fuel and most of it had ended up in the lake.

This evening we watched a golden oldie, John Huston’s 1985 penultimate film, Prizzi’s Honour, in which his daughter, Anjelica, won an Oscar for best supporting actress. Jack Nicholson’s eyebrows play Charley Partanna, a contract killer and heir apparent to Brooklyn-based mafia family, the Prizzis. The (and his) padrino, Corrado, sends him East to ‘clip’ a gangster who has stolen from a Prizzi antennae operation in Las Vegas. Spurning the advances of his longtime sweetheart, Maerose Prizzi (played by Anjelica), Charley inadvertently falls in love with a fellow, West coast-based, contract killer, Irene (played by Kathleen Turner), whose true calling and role in the Las Vegas heist is only gradually revealed to him. He decides to marry rather than kill her and, at first, there is honour, as well as love, among thieves. But a kidnap operation for the Prizzis goes wrong and Irene shoots a cop’s wife, bringing unwanted complications to the Prizzi family’s operations. Charley and Irene hide away their kidnap victim (a banker) to extort a deal from the Prizzis and buy Irene’s protection. Meanwhile, Maerose goads her father, Dominic, Charley’s jealous rival within the Prizzi clan, into putting out a contract on Charley, and the killer he contacts is … Irene. The padrino has already decided that his godson, Charley, rather than his son, Dominic, should become the Boss. When another Family kills Dominic, the padrino accelerates his plans, which means Charley must come back into the fold, let the banker go and kill Irene. Hence the film’s central twist: two contract killers simultaneously in love with each other and with contracts to kill one another. Since the Family always comes first, there can only be one winner: Maerose!

This afternoon I at last finished Alan Watts’s 1966 The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,  which has been by my bedside for several months. A British-born, later American, philosopher, Watts played a central role in introducing Eastern philosophical and religious thought to Western readers, having become a Buddhist as a teenager. This is a small book but a delightfully rich read. Watts wore his learning lightly, but his analyses were based on a wide reading of Western as well as Eastern texts together with an eclectic knowledge of different cultural, linguistic, philosophical and theological traditions, frequently leading to fascinating digressions. At one point, for example, he rails against the use of nouns and adjectives in science, pointing to the Amerindian Nootka language, which consists only of verbs and adverbs. “Thus, in the Nootka language a church is ‘housing religiously,’ a shop is ‘housing tradingly’… Everything labelled with a noun is demonstrably a process or action, but language is full of spooks, like the ‘it’ in ‘It is raining,’ which are the supposed causes of action. ” Addressing the decline in the ‘paternalistic state’, Watts tellingly points out that “the home in an industrial society is chiefly a dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that wife and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character who brings in money, and after working hours he is supposed to forget about his job and have fun.” I could go on but there are, of course, websites devoted to Watts quotations, observations and aphorisms. The central purpose of the book is to examine the illusion that the self is a separate entity confronting a universe of physical objects rather than being an integral part of such a universe. Watts thus offers a different understanding of personal identity and an alternative to the feelings of alienation (also, but not only, in the Marxist sense) that have become prevalent in Western society. This is also an early ecological tract, since Watts argues that the separation of the self from the physical world leads inexorably to the misuse of technology and attempts to subjugate the natural environment. (It’s another digression but I think, through this book, that I have also found the probable origin of the first line in John Lennon’s (The Beatles’s) I am the Walrus: ‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.’ In his text, Watts cites James Broughton’s 1965 rendering of a Chinese Zen master: ‘This is It/and I am It/and you are It/and so is That/and He is It/and She is It/and It is It/and That is That.’) Written almost half a century ago, the analyses in this book remain entirely pertinent.