Let’s talk cars!
A — Aron. B —
Bernard.
A. Let’s talk cars!
B. I love it, when I’m lying in bed going to
sleep, and I hear the distant hum of midnight vehicles, growing louder, dying
away... Where to, who knows? I am too sleepy, my eyes are shut... the traffic
drifts and ebbs like low tide, like the petulant night squabbles of gulls by
the seaside, like faint shouting in the streets when you can’t make out the
words. Ignorant, restful... sleep now...
A. This is not what I mean by talking cars.
B. Have you noticed how, in rainy weather, the
tail-lights and headlights cast glowing lines on the tarmac, which shimmer
beneath the lights themselves? Cars show us things in nature we never could see
before: varieties of frost and ice on the windscreens, the different ways they
freeze and melt. Who ever heard of black ice before cars were invented? Who
experienced the tricks of sight in fog as a motorist does? Did we ever really
see that marvellous, rare and deadly thing freezing rain? We even sense the
wind in a different aspect, when it tweaks the steering wheel at 60 mph. And in
very hot weather I like to watch for when the road ahead is level with my eye
and I catch a glimpse of the bottom of the car ahead reflected upside-down in
the trembling air.
A. This isn’t what I meant.
B. The wheel and the suspension separate people
from the earth and put them in an insulated space where they can zoom along
faster. I should have said “cruise”. What a quintessentially modern word that
is! But there is a loss of intelligence entailed by this comfy velocity — it is
accurately reflected in our too-smooth music — we can still say “five miles”
but we can’t feel it any more. Our hands and feet (personally, I like to think
with my whole body, you see) are cossetted, in cotton-wool — upholstered, you
might almost say. This loss of intelligence is first anticipated, I think, in
bad writing about water in the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. You
know how they love their “tinkling rills”.
The wand’ring streams that shine
between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling
rills...
That’s Pope in
“Eloïsa to Abelard”. And then there’s Scott:
And silver Lune, from Stanmore wild,
And fairy Thorsgill’s murmuring child,
And last and least, but loveliest
still,
Romantic Deepdale’s slender rill.
Who in that dim-wood glen hath
stray’d,
Yet long’d for Roslin’s magic glade?
and so on and
so forth. I don’t know — maybe it isn’t bad writing. It’s lovely. It’s a dream
of suspension. Oh! — I’ve made a joke.
A. Have you?
B. They like the word “mingled”, too.
Scott is always using that.
A. Mingled?
B. Mingled, mixed, contending... “He looked on
it with disgust, mingled not indeed with fear, but that sort of awe which the
presence of a supernatural creature” etc. “’No,’ said Argyle, pride contending
with irresolution, ‘it shall never be said that’” etc. “’I could,’ said Sir Duncan,
his voice struggling between the emotions of doubt, hatred, and anxiety — ‘I
could —‘” etc. “His mixture of surprise, joy, and anxiety, did not deprive him
of the presence of mind” etc. etc. Oh! it saddens me to present Scott when he
is writing in his sleep. No-one reads Scott any more, do they?
A. My Dad tried once. I don’t think he
could get on with it.
B. Scott is one of my favourite authors, you
know. He was a progressive man, he had gaslights at Abbotsford. And every
novelist is to some extent a scientist, we can agree with Zola about that! This
up-to-date scientific, rational side of Scott is the one that analyses,
enumerates, splits things up into “surprise, joy and anxiety” and so on. But
then the other side, the romantic side, knows that the human spirit is like a
tinkling rill, something that can’t be analysed or split up, something
“mingled” beyond our capacities. The thought of it refreshes him. Already, in
his time, people were tired and pestered and repelled by the jawing of
mechanics and scientists, the dryness of analysis, the ugliness of the works.
They feared obscurely that everything that really mattered, our souls and
values and love and beauty and nature itself were being steamrollered and
poisoned by the clever people. I think they were quite right. But they couldn’t
keep up with George Stephenson or Humphrey Davy, so they gave up their
intelligence and went into a dream — of romantic Deepdale’s slender rill. And
now we dream of cruising down a lost highway, with Marlboro-country mountains
in the distance. It’s the same dream! What was once a romantic solace from
science and mechanics has become, horribly, what science and mechanics have
turned out for the millions. “You no longer want to feel or live”, they say.
“OK. You don’t have to. Here is a product for you – a dream machine. Expensive,
sure, but you won’t mind that. You can’t resist the sense of flowing power that
comes from driving. You go where you want!” But no-one that I know ever does
get to the Alps or the Rockies. They are bubble people sitting in cars in
queues, enraged and bewildered, trying to get to work so they can earn enough
to pay for their cars. Those... romantics!
A. That’s very fine, but let me try and tell
you —
B. I was behind a car yesterday — it was a Daewoo
— and it had “Dual Air Bags” blazoned across the rear windscreen. Dual Air
Bags! That is what I mean by loss of intelligence. It’s OK to dream, but not to sell your life to
brutish forces in order to dream.
A. This is merely scornful. Do you know what a
roll-cage is? Or a decklid spoiler or a live rear axle? I’m not convinced you
even really know what torque means. Or coupé. I think I heard you singing
“Little Deuce Coupe” once. But what is that?
B. Well, I certainly don’t respond to this sort
of stuff (picks up a motoring magazine and reads) “Those 321 horses not only kick hard, they
also produce a full spectrum of noises. The idling soundtrack is a low-key
triad of hum, gurgle and boom, but as the needle of the rev counter flicks
skyward, the burble turns into a rumble, the rumble into a roar and the roar
into an amplified thunder."
A. What’s the use of pornography for those
who can’t feel?
B. I think I can feel instantly when there’s
something different about my car’s engine, same as you can. I just curse and
take it to the garage.
A. You’re missing so much. It’s good when your
car is more than just something functional. Everything in our lives should be
more than just functional. Which after all, your pockmarked 2CV is. – or is it
less? There has to be some reason why you’re driving all winter with your feet
in water, and knowing you’re in for £600 of welding at the next MOT. It’s the
Dream of an open roof, I suppose.
B. I think it’s the waving. I feel part of my
community. I feel stronger.
A. Even when I have to give you a lift home
because the engine won’t start?
B. Yes, in that big silver Audi that is like a
ghost. Who ever notices a car like that, unless the tyres chuck mud over a
pushchair? In an airport car-park you’d never find it.
A. Well – I notice it. Not the engine, not the
burble and roar and all that crap. It’s a 2 litre, it goes OK, smooth as butter
but it’s damned heavy, it’s not for having fun with. It’s eighteen years old,
plus it drinks petrol, oil and brake fluid. But God do I love that car. When I
appreciate it is when I’m washing it. It’s so beautiful, all the lines so
straight and unfussy, not a gimmick in sight. You walk alongside it and it goes
on for ever. The hatch is like a slice of cake, one layer of beautiful engineering
after another. When you wash it you appreciate all the deft little runnels, all
the thinking that went into subtleties like cleaning behind the mudguards or
under the bumper. And the toughness of every component. Damn all I care about
being waved at. My community is being out there, on a winter afternoon, and
being busy round the car while the sky changes and greys, and people come and
go to the bins. Then I’m alive.
B. Oh, that’s
just a substitute for real spirit.
A. I know you
think that’s conventional – like what are you? That idiot Hemingway or
something? How he loves measuring his own balls. Well, I think that if anyone’s
a “real man” it’s someone who is up for taking his place in our society. A real
man has a garage and he has his own gear so he doesn’t leave the washing-up
bowl smeared with motor-oil.
B. Whatever.
A. Anyhow –
it’s dusk, I’ve come back out after ten minutes of telly, and it’s just a quick
wipe over with the shammy. And in that moment, which is the reward of the whole
labour, something changes. I’m stroking it. I flick over its headlights,
like brushing sleep out of a child’s eyes. In the dusk I know that it’s
something I care for. Not alive, no, not quite. But I know that the car is on
the way to being an animal. It’s man’s best attempt yet at making a new
creature – boats were a start, but this is the template for where we’re
going to go in the next couple of centuries.
And it’s good.
B. (struck by self-doubt) I’m impressed.
A. (pushing home the advantage) And this
association you make between motoring and loss of intelligence — Isn’t it the truth that to break free from
the frictions and effort of walking on the ground is something that should
precisely suit our intellectual natures? “For nimble thought can JUMP both sea
and land!”, as Shakespeare says. In a car your body can aspire to that free
mobility the earthbound never enjoy. Maybe you have forgotten how stupefying a
long walk can be? Your mind gets numbed by slow progress. But in a car, I am
alert, I’m interacting with a hundred things, finger-dancing with the wheel,
listening to the radio, reading a line of meshing traffic in an instant,
reacting and thinking ― thinking brightly and sharply. It’s the best time
for thinking I get.
B. “But ah! Thought kills me that I am not
thought...” – isn’t that Shakespeare’s point? When you’re behind the wheel
there’s something that’s not right, you’re too disengaged. When oxen hauled the
plough we knew their strength. Our muscles twitched sympathetically with theirs.
We couldn’t haul the plough ourselves, but we could just about envisage what it
took to do it. I think the limit of my muscular sympathies is a stump-grinder
chewing out the root of a beech. A stump-grinder is really an incredible thing.
I have hacked at beech-roots myself. A hand-axe just clangs off. But whose
muscles can sympathise with the power of a car, or a jet plane? The wings and
wheels make everything dreamlike, detached from any experience you can call
your own.
A. If I was dangerously sick, and you rushed me
to hospital by oxen, I should have a very poignant sense of their ―
strength...
B. I’ll tell how to get a poignant sense of
what cars do our world. I’m not getting moral here, I mean I was driving
myself. I always botanize when I drive, I can’t help it. Roadsides are very
good places for plants because no-one goes there. I can think out every route
in terms of its flowers and trees. Look, I head north out of town and there’s
the honesty on that dark bank just past the college. Under sycamore, I think.
Cut up through Beckington – white mullein on the left, a rarish plant. Take the
road for Norton at Woolverton. At the right time in spring it’s lined with the
chestnut stubs of great horsetail. It’s meant to indicate a spring. Then there’s
(counting off on his fingers) greater spearwort at Hinton, woolly
thistle, Bath asparagus, ploughman’s-spikenard...
A. OK I get it.
B. All right. It was early summer and I was
coming down the bypass. Something caught my eye on the bank so I pulled into
the lay-by. I can’t remember what it was now, just something common that made
an unusual impression. You still have to check it out. I didn’t care that this
time it was nothing, because it was a glorious afternoon and I was in a
glorious place, full of insects and new leaves and with all the green valley
before me. But there was nobody else here. And you know why? I felt like I was
in a wind-tunnel. Everyone goes up and down that hill at top speed, and the
power and noise of those engines was indescribable. No – I will describe it. It
was jack-hammer loud, and it was furious. Those humdrum journeys were barking
hate at the world, the countryside, anything that got in their road or made a
pink-ass commie jew-boy performance about choking on their fumes. The people in
the cars hadn’t the slightest control over what was happening, they were just
being shuttled from maternity-ward to hospice. The 2CV was parked by the
carriageway rocking back and forth. I lasted five minutes, went back, climbed
in, and squeezed back into that shitstream.
A. Which can’t
have been easy.
B. (ignoring
the joke) So that’s what your smooth-as-butter Audi really sounds like. But
I must stop there again one day. I must admit, in a way I found that roaring
exciting.
*
A. But now, since I am disappointed of being able to talk about a subject I’m really into... ― because you know that with such a subject a new and different conversation can happen ― warm, tactful, social. Oh! I remember how Karl’s face lit up at the office when I mentioned trainers to him, just casually ― and I’d forgotten how Karl was such a keen runner, and it was as if a bottle-top had been eased, and he fizzed! “If you want to talk TRAINERS...!” he said. We were knee-deep in technicalities before I could blink: triangular lugs, gait cycles, overactive feet. That’s a very important kind of talk. I felt I knew him better after that. I liked him better. When he chose the admin password it was “Saucony”. He said to me, I suppose he was quoting it, but he said: the most difficult part of running is the first ten yards. He meant, getting off your arse.
B. Certainly. And I feel his relief. I may go to my grave with all my fervour for the Scandinavian poets bottled up inside. Probably never, in all my life, will I run across someone I can have that conversation with.
A. ... Oh.
B. Yes, it’s almost a joke. When will I ever find anyone with whom I can share the beauty of a Tranströmer poem in exchange for some insight into Mirjam Tuominen? Someone with whom I can really talk about Karin Boye or Edith Södergran?
Dyningar, lysande långa,
sköljar i våg på våg genom nattblå evighet.
Du! Du! Du!
A. I feel these things are very private to you. I wonder how deeply you really want to have that conversation. It’s an unusual interest, true, but in so populous an age I can’t believe there is no channel for discussion. You could subscribe to something, or join something, if that was what you really wanted. The Internet has everything, doesn’t it?
B. (shakes head impatiently) A baby, a kitten, is more help to me than the Internet!
A. I’m not sure. I think you sense that you have made a private kind of icon from writers and poems that, perhaps, you do not even understand very well. A public encounter might prove too indelicate ― you might find that the Karin Boye you have allowed yourself to lean on is fractured beyond repair by some matter-of-fact fool like me appraising Boye’s work like a buyer at a cheese fair ― as if it was just poetry, an everyday thing, good in this way and bad in that way. For you, it is more than poetry – it is more than Poetry, even! The remoteness helps. It is all mixed up with your memories of the lakes and the pines. You could never feel that way about a British writer ― someone published in the weekly papers...
B. I’m afraid you’re right, Aron. In Sweden I have never grown up. In Sweden, where I don’t live, I’m still an innocent. For example, in English I think that it is impossible to ever “explain” something, so when I see someone “explaining”, I respond to it as a political act – they are lying, they are trying to put something over on you, they are trying to mould you, suppress your feelings, shut you up... Or else they are just gabbling what they have had put over on them by someone else. But in Swedish it’s a different matter! In Swedish I think the word “förklara”, which just means “explain”, is so grave and beautiful. “Kan du förklara för mig...?”, I ask my mother, and I think that this “förklara” is something wonderful that big folk do, like planting up gardens, so that little folk can play among the currant bushes...