A Big Let-Down

Home Truths

by David Lodge

There’s a blurb on the back of my Penguin paperback, allegedly from the New Republic: ‘Lodge is pure dazzling style, book after book, in his fusion of form and content.’

Well, that may be true of David Lodge’s other books but it certainly isn’t true of this one, which is pretty transparently adapted from a playscript. Lodge admits this in a foreword, but you don’t need to read that to figure it out. All the action, plot and character in this novella emerge through dialogue. We never get a direct look inside the characters’ minds and the non-dialogue sentences in the text read like stage directions. If that’s a stylistic fusion of form and content, I’m Italo Calvino.

For all that, the book is readable enough, even gripping – stylishly (yes) written, tightly plotted, its four very believable (if rather stock) characters life-changingly affecting one another by their interactions. The excitement and tension rise as one reads on. And then, right at the end, comes the big, big letdown, a huge deus ex machina that dissipates all the carefully cultivated excitement, rendering everything that went before irrelevant and pointless. I really had developed an interest in Lodge’s characters and situation by that point, and the realisation that everyone was going tamely back to Square One without properly working out the consequences of the plot left me disappointed and annoyed.

The big DEM does bear a thematic relation to the action that has gone before, but affects it not a whit except to invalidate it. Chin-stroking readers and reviewers might find something to praise in the symbolic congruence, but not I. This is too much a case of an author painting himself into a corner plot-wise and calling in the cavalry because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Working on the Blockchain Gang

Théâtre D’opéra Spatial: AI-generated artwork by Jason Allen

Some people imagine you can do anything with money. They are, obviously, people with very limited imaginations, but there are so many of them that they manage somehow to keep this absurd idea afloat on the ocean of popular culture.

In the last couple of years, these people have been getting very excited about NFTs – and if you don’t know that stands for ‘non-fungible tokens’, sir or madam, I envy you. A NFT is an image, sound or video file, created either by digitally photographing, recording or filming actual objects or sounds, or else by using one of the many computer programs available to create artificial ones. Whichever the method used, the ultimate product, in ultimate terms, is the same: a string of ones and zeros parked on a server somewhere in cyberspace, or encoded on a passive device like a CD-ROM.

NFTs are putative works of art. In reality, of course, they’re just data, some arrangement of bits and bytes that anyone can copy easily enough, even modify to their taste if they wish. But the original version, though humanly indistinguishable from any copy made of it, is uniquely identified by the data trail it has left behind in cyberspace since its ‘creator’ brought it into being. This purely theoretical uniqueness makes possible the existence of what you might call a digital-art market, which a lot of otherwise intelligent folk are getting awfully excited about.

NFTs appeal to two kinds of people. The first are those who collect art for its investment value, or for the bragging rights that come with ownership of a ‘masterwork’. They may or may not love the work itself; that is secondary. The most important thing about a work of art, for such people, is that they own it. These are the customers who will drive the NFT art market if and when it ever gets going.

The other people to whom NFTs appeal are commercial artists operating at a certain level. They may well be as capable of making ‘fine art’ as the poor fools who toil in hardship and obscurity, driven by their muse to create a thing nobody wants to buy. Their technical prowess may be as great or even greater. But these are bread-and-butter pragmatists who have learnt or come to believe that they do not possess the extraordinary ability (and luck) it takes to impress ordinary people who have never before seen anything like the picture, poem, concerto, movie or whatever it is that they have just produced: that they lack, I mean to say, the genius of a Greco, a Milton, a Rachmaninov or a Kubrick. Still, they know they have more than enough talent to produce something that, while not compellingly original, is still attractive enough to find a buyer. The customer might be someone who likes decoration for its own sake, perhaps, or wants something to hang in their offices or dental surgeries to soothe their clients, or to help sell their brand of vegan sausages or life insurance. Such buyers, too, form a market, even if it isn’t what we snobs normally call the ‘art market’.

Artists operating at this level – known as illustrators, graphic designers, visualizers, copywriters, music suppliers and a plethora of other names, depending on the media they work in – spend most of their time creating art that will pay the rent, put food on the table and so on, rather than the art that they would rather make. Some of them, if they grow prosperous enough to have spare time, will spend that time in self-expression, making art for art’s sake. Most of the time, the works so produced will exhibit no more aesthetic merit than the stuff they churn out during the rest of the week. This, then, is the type of artist – the type that nurses aspirations above his or her creative station – who is most attracted to the concept of NFT art and (in my experience) the first to try to ‘break into the market’ themselves. 

And this leads to a most intriguing paradox, because the type of artist to whom the idea of NFTs most appeals is exactly the kind of artist whose work does not command the kind of interest and reputation that (along with, of course, antiquity) make a work of art valuable. They – we, I suppose, and our name is Legion – are expert fabricators of kitsch, authors of pretty, briefly diverting trifles. Anyone who buys our NFTs is paying good money for something that nobody else is ever going to covet. NFT buyers, remember, aren’t interested in acquiring art for its artistic merit but only for the pecuniary and status value into which that merit can be converted. But if the work – the NFT – has no artistic merit, it has no pecuniary or status value either.

We seem to be in a Catch-22 situation here, folks.

§

To be honest, NFTs and their moneymaking potential fail to enthral me. Like ‘the cloud’, cyberspace, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, they’re just another vaporous scam set up by crooks to part fools from their money by convincing them that something imaginary exists. Pull the other one, pal, is my usual reaction.

But it seems to me that the NFT delusion, peddled and bought into by the blockchain gang, is closely related to something else that’s been exercising the minds of those who make their living out of producing things that aren’t quite ‘art’ but share the same creative processes and aesthetic conventions. They’ve been palpitating about it a lot on social media lately. A few days ago one of my friends (a photographer) posted about some new ‘photographs’ – art images really – that had been created by an artificial intelligence (AI) program. OMG OMG, went the thread of his remarks, we photographers will soon be out of a job. Another photographer weighed in, pointing out that somebody had to take the original photos, so there would still be a human input. He didn’t explain why, in a world of spy satellites, automated webcams, sea turtles fitted with GoPros and robot telescopes photographing the early-morning light of Creation itself, the photos used by the AI still had to be ones taken by a human being. Another person (an architect) then came on the thread to warn, Jonah-like, that architecture and painting would be next to go. 

At this point I butted in to say that both these redoubts of human uniqueness had already fallen, only to be informed that I was wrong: AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator and suchlike still require human input. It didn’t seem to occur to these guys that once you have AutoCAD and Illustrator and stuff like that, you’ve already transferred the creative process out of the real world and are working in an analogical space, manipulating ones and zeros rather than pens, brushes and paper. You’re not painting or taking photos, you’re doing mathematics. And how – you being a mathematical ignoramus – are you able to do that? It is always the machine that processes your ones and zeros into an image, or sound, or text. How long did you expect it to be before the human factor in that operation was eliminated altogether?

Well, now it has. But what is it, really, that the AI is producing in the form of these images, words, sounds et cetera? Is it art? And if it is, what makes it so? And then, of course, the Big Question: is it any good?

For the artists who make art for a living rather than under compulsion from their muse, these are haunting, terrifying questions. The obsession and terror come from the thought that – if AI productions can be art, and are good enough to pass for the ‘real’, i.e. human-made, thing – then we’re all going to be out of a job. And that, I think, is why this is the kind of artist who falls for the lure of NFTs. It sounds like a way to infuse value into work that may soon, otherwise, be worthless. Who is going to pay them for their art if an AI can create something equally acceptable for nothing, or next to nothing? All over the world, people who rely on their creative abilities to make a living are wondering how long they can keep on doing so. NFTs sound like one possible solution, and the concept has the art-market snob value of exclusivity built in, so it’s hardly a surprise that the idea tempts many commercial artists. But – as I pointed out earlier – they’d be foolish to fall for the scheme, because they don’t, by definition, have the talent to swing it.

§

On, then, to those terrifying questions about AI-produced ‘art’. 

Let us try to answer them.

The first two are pretty easy. Unless your definition of art is either proprietorial or snobbish – the kind of definition that excludes children’s drawings or images originally produced for commercial purposes – then yes, AI art is art. What makes it art? Well, what makes anything art? Here’s my working rule: any non-natural object designed to engage the emotions through the senses is art. This includes things like cars, shoes, even that hideous gold toilet-paper dispenser on Putin’s yacht. A thing doesn’t have to be good, nor be useless for any practical purpose, nor command fourteen times its reserve price at Sotheby’s, to make it art; if it just makes you want to look at it, or listen to it, or touch it, or whatever, that will do. It’s art.

This, then, brings up the valid but dicey question of intention. The human artist aims to convey some thought or feeling. The AI, as far as we can tell, is just following instructions. Does that make a difference? But then, the effect of an artwork on its audience is rarely exactly the one its maker intended. Does that make a difference?

Stalemate.

So let’s leave it and move on to the big question. Is art produced by AIs any good?

In my opinion, it varies. Recently, I was sent a New Yorker article about an AI that can write poetry in the style of any famous poet. All you have to do is feed the beast a few examples of the poet’s oeuvre and it will produce reams and reams of the Good Stuff. The writer of the article seemed to think it was pretty good. He included a couple of examples of poetry the AI had written in the style of Philip Larkin. Here’s one.

The Invention

Money is a thing you earn by the sweat of your brow

And that’s how it should be.

Or you can steal it, and go to jail;

Or inherit it, and be set for life;

Or win it on the pools, which is luck;

Or marry it, which is what I did.

And that is how it should be, too.

But now this idea’s come up

Of inventing money, just like that.

I ask you, is nothing sacred?

Now, this isn’t gibberish; far from it. And it contains words that you can imagine Philip Larkin using, and captures some of the oddities of his syntax and punctuation, so good work on that. But the idea it expresses is mundane and trivial. The lines evoke no feeling and certainly none of that throat-catching emotion that grips you when you read a line of verse that the poet has got exactly right. And – fucking hell, as Larkin himself might have said – it doesn’t even rhyme. Larkin only wrote about seven or eight poems, out of the hundreds he published, in free verse; and he was a rhymer with a particular style, too. But even if we give the industrious AI a pass on that, The Invention could never be mistaken for anything by Philip Larkin. It can’t even be mistaken for a poem.

I thought I would demonstrate the difference by reproducing an actual Larkin poem (that doesn’t rhyme). I reckon a good choice is Days: far from his best, but about the same length as the impostor. Hope no-one sues me...

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

If you can’t see any real difference between that and The Invention, gentle reader, maybe NFTs really are for you after all.

But there are other AI-produced works that are a lot more like art in that they evoke, through the senses, real ideas and emotions. Some time ago there appeared, in my Facebook feed, an album of ‘photos’ of what looked like a Gothic horror-fantasy-science-fiction story come to life. Many of the people commenting on the photos weren’t sure whether the images were real or created by some kind of photo-manipulation; quite a few of the commenters seemed convinced of the former. And the images are, indeed, shockingly ‘realistic’, though they depict things that certainly do not exist on Earth. 

The album, which you can view in its original form as an imgur.com portfolio, is called The Curious Journeys of A.I. Midleton and it was produced (as the title hints) by a AI program, called Dall-E-2. It works rather like the poetry AI does: you feed it with words; it uses them to search the internet for image files, which it then combines and manipulates to create ‘art’.

Here, though, there was a difference. The person interacting with the AI didn’t just settle for the first images they got; they modified the words, picked out related images, modified again and selected again, and when they’d got something they were reasonably happy with, they worked on it in PhotoShop (or something like that) to make them even more convincing. So this was, if you like, a human-AI collaboration. If it’s art, it’s art that a human being was closely involved in making.

But then, just a few days ago, I learnt from CNN that in faraway Vail, Colorado, an AI-produced work has won first prize at a state art fair. Sadly, the work was not entered by the AI that created it (real world, you see; difficult) but by a computer-game designer named Jason Allen. He used another open-source AI, Midjourney, to ‘commission’ it from. Apparently he spent eighty hours in consultation with the AI over it, but I don’t think he used any image-manipulation software like Adobe Illustrator or PhotoShop. I’ve fooled about with Midjourney myself, just to see what the fuss was about; it seems to be a bit more ‘realistic’ than Dall-E-2 and to require less post-processing. Anyway, the result is a pretty convincing ‘artwork’ that you, if you didn’t know better, would certainly believe was created by a human being.

The controversy over this little affair is already pretty hot. Some people say Allen cheated, or that the picture isn’t art. I don’t know about that; it looks like a picture to me, and the sight of it certainly evokes some kind of feeling, though – for me, at least – no very strong one. But it seems the whole argument is a bit cockeyed, because, once again, the human involved in the creation of the piece was picking and choosing, and combining, what Midjourney offered him until he got the result he wanted. 

So whether it was AI-generated or not, and whether it was art or not, it was finally a human being who decided how the picture should look. Shouldn’t that be enough to quash the controversy? The AI might have created and presented the original images, but the final result was completely dependent on human judgement.

Let’s take that argument one step further. A work of art is never the sole creation of the artist; it is those who experience it through their senses who ultimately dictate whether it is, or is not, to be regarded as art. So even if a one hundred per cent AI-created work does go on exhibition and win first prize at an American country fair, or even fetches a million pounds at Christie’s, there is still an enormous human input involved: that of the viewers, the listeners, the audience. As long as they accept the thing as art, it is art. 

§

Which brings us back to the very understandable anxiety of those of us who produce ‘creative work’ for a living. If these pesky machines get any smarter, we’ll starve.

Well, you know what. The market for work by commercial artists, writers, composers, filmmakers et al has been shrinking in monetary terms for a long time now. The average value of work (measured by what the creator can charge for it) has crashed. The internet certainly has had a lot to do with this; by removing barriers to entry, it has greatly increased the number of people competing for work in the commercial arts, while at the same time generating business-model changes and economies of scale that have put traditional middlemen and gatekeepers – agents, publishers, A&R departments in the music industry – out of work, too. I see no possibility, for a decade or so at least, of this situation changing. The internet, after all, is here to stay, and with it e-commerce and a legion of other inhuman, soul-destroying innovations. Tough.

I think what we are really seeing is the death of the mass market for human-made art. Art-for-a-purpose – advertising, interior decoration, popular entertainment – will henceforth be produced by machines and the human race, as a whole, may well be none the worse for it. But what about the artists? What will happen to them? 

Perhaps they will find themselves in a situation much like that experienced by practitioners of the arts in the ages before mass media and consumerism came to stay. They will, once again, look to individual rather than corporate patronage or the big money of advertising to sustain them. Their egos and the dignity they stand upon will undergo a salutary deflation as they find themselves reduced, once again, to the status of street performers, courtiers or servants. The vast sums a few big names now command will no longer be paid. The absurd, starvation-level fees upon which many commercial artists and writers subsist will cease to be paid at all. Anyone who is not an artist or author by compulsion will stop trying and go and get a boring office or service-industry job instead. In sum, the population of those who think of themselves as artists will fall to maybe a thousandth of what it is now; the market for human-made fine art will shrink to perhaps a hundredth of its present size; and the average income of those who are still in the game will rise, perhaps, tenfold from what it was before the rise of Amazon and its fellow cyberslavedrivers. A lot of us, artists and non-artists alike, may finally come to look upon this as a good thing. The arts, which are in a state of creative prostration for the most part, may even experience a renaissance.

Or maybe not. Predicting the future is a risky business (something the NFT advocates would do well to remember). As for the rights and wrongs of the case, I abhor making ethical judgements about aesthetic matters. I have my tastes and prejudices, but I don’t really feel the need to explain or justify them to anyone. But then, I am lucky enough to be, for the most part, retired from the world of creative commerce; I have less skin in the game than most of the poor guys and gals who are worrying about the ‘AI takeover’ on social media. My advice to them would be to make up their minds: either follow your own muse and prepare to starve for it as van Gogh did, or give up being ‘creative’ and get whatever job you can – and that you can stand. But whatever you do, don’t fall for the NFT scam, because it combines the worst of both worlds: no money (once the pecuniary worthlessness of NFTs becomes common knowledge) and no artistic satisfaction or fame for you, either.

The Guardian’s Shame

‘
‘The country’s worst violence in decades’, apparently.

The Guardian published an article on my country yesterday morning. It’s called ‘“The Family Took Over”: How a Feuding Ruling Dynasty Drove Sri Lanka to Ruin’. Its perpetrator is someone called Hannah Ellis-Petersen who was, apparently, ‘in Colombo’ when she filed it.

It’s a clueless shambles, just like the events it attempts to describe. The author’s principal sources appear to be discarded Rajapaksa creatures like Dilith Jayaweera and Udaya Gammanpila. I suppose it’s at least creditable that she gets them to talk. Of course, they tell their own versions of the story, in which everything is Basil’s or Mahinda’s fault and they come up smelling of roses. Inevitably, so does Gotabaya Rajapaksa. An ‘austere, devout and straight-talking military man’ if you please, rather than an incompetent, corrupt, death-dealing figure who needed to plunge the nation into debt in order to enable a lakhs-strong military, supersonic bombers and kilotons of ordnance to defeat a guerrilla army of five thousand – murdering thousands of civilians in the process – and sell it as a great victory. 

It was quite amazing to read a Guardian article on Sri Lanka that didn’t mention Mullivaikal even once. That might even have been a relief, frankly, but no, wait a minute: it’s much worse than that! Ms Ellis-Petersen writes, concerning the events of 9 and 10 May, that ‘the country’s worst violence in more than three decades took place.’ Holy smoke! She actually forgot Mullivaikal! She forgot the bloody war! Or else she thinks tear gas at Galle Face and a few kleptocrats’ and drug dealers’ empty houses getting torched are worse than 26 years of armed conflict and the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians on an open beach...

Compared to that solecism, Ms Petersen’s other howlers are trivial. Nivard Cabral, slimeball of the ages, is practically made to sound like a hero. There is not a word about Ranil Wickremasinghe and his efforts to sabotage peaceful regime change and save the Rajapaksas from gaol. All she gets out of him is a single meaningless quote. I suppose that’s all the sorry bugger is good for these days: Ranil ‘Busted Flush’ Wickremasinghe. 

I could go on, but I think you get the picture, so I will end with just one more observation: this story is two months late. It describes the situation in Sri Lanka as it was on, say, May 12. Crap as it is, it might at least have had current-affairs value if it had come out then. Appearing on July 7, it’s a load of worthless arsewipe. The Guardian should be ashamed of itself, and as for the lady who wrote it, she’s in the wrong profession. She should get a job in the public-relations industry with a portfolio of banana-republic governments for clients.

Vaporous

Visitors

Anita Brookner

With that title, and a cover like the one my paperback edition has, it ought to be a ghost story. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be one; the lead character might as well be a ghost, anyway, for all the energy and gumption she shows. 

This is a good novel? Anita Brookner is the modern Jane Austen?

So: widowed lady, seventy or thereabouts, has a houseguest thrust upon her by her rich in-laws. He’s to be the best man at their granddaughter’s wedding. The bride’s father is the family black sheep, largely out of the picture. Her intended is some kind of evangelical Christian pastor, though everyone else in the story appears to be Jewish. The pair of them are the typical uncouth young idiots who are often introduced to spice up a story about boring, rich old people by way of humorous contrast, like the music student and his wife in The Lyre of Orpheus or the rude young hippie couple at a dinner party in Earthly Powers. These two are not nearly as deftly drawn as either of those couples, but they’re being set up for the same kind of comical humiliation as far as I can see. The best man is just a cipher, his only purpose being to cause Boring Old Dear to look back upon, and rue, all the dissatisfactions of her largely colourless life.

Meanwhile there are family quarrels and fits of the vapours, but they’re all shown us through the filtering eyes of our widowed protagonist, whose feelings and reactions are barely animate. There are, of course, a few ‘action scenes’ (parlour set-pieces, really) but most of the novel consists of her inner ruminations.

I don’t know if I’m going to finish this. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and wondering why I’m wasting my time on it when there are so many books I would enjoy reading better. 

Poor Jane Austen. There’s more wit and energy in one of her paragraphs than in this whole novel. A much more appropriate comparison would be Virginia Woolf – whom, needless to say, I thoroughly detest.

The Future

On this last but one day of May, it seems clear to me that Lankans have chosen, or been condemned to suffer, the trauma of state disintegration right to the bitter end, all the way to anarchy and warlordism. Not everyone sees it yet. To me it is patent.

     Even at this late stage of the crisis, everyone is too busy protecting the past to deal with the present, far less prepare for the future. Nobody seems able to abandon their own self-interest or put aside the divisions among us long enough to make an honest, peaceful effort to see us through this calamity. 

      Those in power must surely understand that they have to go before anything can be done. They are standing in the way of Lanka’s recovery. Their last duty should be to ensure that the transition is orderly and peaceful, and with that they should leave, helped on their way, if necessary, by assurances of future safety. But they cling on, exacerbating and prolonging the crisis. In doing so, they guarantee that Sri Lanka will collapse to her very foundations. There will be starvation, violence, warfare, despair. The long-surviving administrative structure of the nation-state will cease to exist. There will be no country at all.

     The collapse is well advanced. For years – no, decades – the institutions of government, administration and public welfare have been hollowed out from within. The current regime completed a job begun in the Fifties. Now public utilities are ceasing to function. Trains and buses run sporadically. Schools and hospitals, too, are barely working. Businesses are doing no trade. The necessities of life are vanishing one by one. 

    The nation-state is dissolving. Whatever state the people of Lanka next create will have to be built from scratch, for there will be nothing left of the elaborate modern polity the British left us. All squandered now.

     There is a part of me that insists it is necessary. The nation-state that had been Ceylon and later became Sri Lanka was tainted with inequality, communalism and injustice from its very conception. The elite quarrels over constitutional reform in the 1920s were already infused with them. Even before Independence, Ceylon’s very first Parliament disenfranchised the ‘Indian’ Tamils. It took less than ten years from the grant of independence to the first ethnic-supremacist government and the beginning of systematic persecution of minorities by the state. Only two years more to the first of many ethnic pogroms. If the state of Sri Lanka has to cease to exist to put an end to all this hatred and violence between the peoples of the island, perhaps that is just. We can build another.

    But surely it could be done with less trauma? Somehow install a caretaker government in which all stakeholders are represented, give it the powers it needs for a strictly limited period, impose the necessary economic reforms and start to solicit foreign help? Institute a truth and reconciliation commission, hold inquiries, bring everything out into the open? Air the dirty linen, but then declare a general amnesty? Call a constituent assembly and build a new country, just as the South Africans did after apartheid?

    I honestly cannot see it happening. Far more likely is an attempt to patch up the current state and keep it going. That attempt will fail, and chaos will ensue.

     Whatever the solution for the people of this country finally turns out to be, it seems obvious to me that we have a long way to go – years, perhaps generations – before we find it. Those whose purposes and agendas the dying state served are doing and will do their best to prolong its life; they cannot see that it is doomed. Because of their grim resistance to the inevitable, the old state will die by violence – maybe in one last bloody paroxysm, more likely in a squalid death by a thousand cuts. In the meantime, inflation, famine, plague, death for Lanka’s people.

    There is no guarantee that things ever will get back to ‘normal’. Normal went away months ago and it isn’t coming back. We may eventually restore some kind of normality – a new normal as people like to say – but it will look nothing like this. I pray it will look better.

Belated Bollocks

If you’ve ever received a birthday greeting from me on social media, chances are it contained a personalized verse, image or video, in addition to (or in place of) the actual words ‘happy birthday’. I do this because I want to show the person I'm greeting that I care enough for them to make a bit of an effort, even though I didn’t remember their birthday till Facebook reminded me.

These days, though, I have begun ignoring that little Facebook reminder: ‘So-and-so’s birthday is today...’ So and so what?

To greet a person on their birthday used to be a sign that they were special to you. Family. Close friends. Childhood friends you never lost touch with, even though they are now far away. Folk for whom the effort of writing and posting a letter or a greeting card, or making a long-distance phone call (expensive), or sending a telegram (even more expensive) was worth it. When you got a birthday wish from someone, in those times, you could be sure it meant something.

(Of course, there have always been the greetings people send to teachers and other gaolers, to bosses, patrons, clients and debtors. Unfelt warmth, extorted felicitation, flattery driven by the fear of a beating, of losing a job, a promotion or a contract. The saddest and most worthless birthday greetings of all, but luckily we don't need to talk about them any more in this post.)

Let’s get back to the twenty-first century, and the practice of private citizens putting their birthdays on Facebook. I never could understand why anybody would do that. Who could be so insecure that they yearn for birthday wishes from strangers and minor acquaintances? ‘Happy birthday’, in some cases, from people they’ve never even met in real life?

Who knows? Anyway, some of us do it. We put our birthdays on Facebook. And FB, which is nothing but a computer program, duly reminds our online ‘friends’ when the date comes round. Then in come the greetings – dutiful, effortless, insincere: sent in the time it takes to type thirteen letters and a space, forgotten before the sender has even scrolled down to the next post.

Pretty pathetic, no? But some of us can’t even manage that. We can’t spare the minimal engagement required to post a two-word greeting on our friends’ actual birthdays. Maybe we don’t visit FB that often. Maybe we have so many online ‘friends’ we can’t keep track. Whatever the reason, we don’t notice the Facebook notification till a day or two have passed. Oopsie.

But wait, there’s a fix! Just wish the person, whom you didn’t care for enough to remember their birthday, a ‘happy belated’. Don’t be shy, everyone does it. Quick, quick – you can still jam yourself into the Elevator of Appreciation before the doors slide shut. Earn a few brownie points for your ‘friendship’, that’s what it’s there for. Hell, it’s probably a bit more sincere than a greeting on the actual day, because there’s at least a drop of feeling involved. No actual affection for the birthday girl or boy – don’t be silly – but fear of looking bad on social media.

That, dear reader, is what ‘happy belated birthday’ means. The grammatical error I complained of in a Facebook post yesterday (and no, it wasn't my birthday) is nothing compared to the hypocrisy and insincerity of a ‘belated’ online birthday wish. All you do, when you send one, is tell the world how little the person you’re greeting actually means to you. And that realization – however belatedly it sinks in – may mean the end of whatever vestigial relationship you two actually had.

‘Big Match Vibe’

 

Image credit: Radhitha Ravihansa Sooriyagoda

Expat pundits, grievance peddlers, farts of the old elite!

This is not your moment; your moment never is.

Take your stinking possets and placebos

Brewed in well-lit comfort far from tear-gas

And neck them down yourselves. I hope you choke.

On the barricades there is no wealth of choices,

Only opportunities to seize as they arise

And only just the single issue, darling: Arseholes Out.

You hate it, don’t you, that your well-worn saddle

No longer fits the hobbyhorse you rode?

Your misanthropy wrapped in worthy causes,

Your social-media fame for being woke,

Now trumped by something not at all suburban –

Something real that’s happening to us –

But not to you, still cozy in your bubble

Telling other people what to do.

 

When the dust has settled and the dead are buried,

All the gas-queue martyrs laid to rest,

You’ll spin your noble part in it on Facebook

Though you were fucking Jonah, pal, at best.

Farewell, Atahualpa

Errol Knower, 1960-2022

Visiting the mortician’s parlour to pay his last respects to the remains of Errol Knower, another former member of the crack athletics squad that St Thomas’s College fielded in the mid-Seventies reminisced to his fellow mourners how, on track days, Errol – always a dedicated truant – would sit with his louche, unathletic cronies at a tea-kiosk up on the Galle Road, smoking and telling funny stories, listening all the while with half a ear to the voice of the meet marshal calling events and results over the PA system on the school grounds below. When they called an event he was in, he would drink up his tea, stub out his ‘fag’ and race down the hill, arriving at the starting-line just in time for the gun. He would then run the race itself without any apparent effort, seeming to float along the track. ‘He didn’t seem to be moving any faster than the others. You knew he was faster when you saw him breast the tape.’ Two Sri Lanka Public Schools track records set by Errol would stand for almost thirty years.

Those records were fated, however, to be the sum total of what might be described, by conventional reckoning, as Errol’s life achievements. Well, perhaps not quite – he once played Atahualpa in a cut-down version of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, which won his house at St Thomas’s first prize at the annual Old Boys’ Day drama competition. This will mean little except to Old Thomians, who know what a big deal the inter-house drama competition is. Errol had only one line in the script, but he looked authentically, regally Inca with that magnificent hooked nose and upright carriage of his, dressed in a stunning costume made up for him by Caryll Ponniah, who loved him only slightly less than she loved her own sons. 

By conventional reckoning, Errol Christopher Lawrence Knower did nothing with his life. He had no ‘career’; most of the time he didn’t even have a job. In spite of his natural gifts he had no real interest in sports, either; he abandoned athletics the day he left school. He never married, never raised a family, never felt the joy of looking into a grandchild’s eyes. For most of his adult life, he had no steady partner. He had no skills apart from a rudimentary ability to cook. He loved music to distraction, but an early attempt to learn the guitar was quickly abandoned. Practising was far too much like work, and Errol was lazy. It probably did not help that his best friend at school and his own elder brother were each masters of the instrument.

He left St Thomas’s without, I believe, taking his O-levels – certainly without passing them. Someone from the Thomian old-boy network gave him a job selling fridges and gas cookers. He loathed it and played truant constantly, just as he had at school. His employer put up with it for a few months for the sake of the old College tie, then sacked him. Next, he did a bit of DJing; it was probably the thing he stuck to longest. He worked at a tourist resort on the south coast for some time, but I never went to hear him.

Multiple tragedies struck him in a cluster during his youth. His mother died. His elder brother and sister emigrated, each to a different country, while he stayed behind, living in a crumbling old Dutch house with his elderly father. His enviably gorgeous girlfriend dumped him, then emigrated too. 

While most of this was happening, I was in England, failing to obtain a physics degree. When I came back in 1981 and began looking up my old friends, Errol had vanished from the scene. It didn’t take long to find out why. Cheap Chinese heroin had hit Colombo while I was abroad, and many of its first victims were members of that tiny, confused band of nonconformists, mostly English-educated middle-class kids, who had taken up the long-haired, peace-sign-flashing hippie lifestyle they’d seen in movies and Life magazine photos. I had been one of those kids myself, listening to and passing round hard-to-obtain rock and soul LPs from abroad, smoking ganja and saying maaan a lot. Errol was one, too. These kids weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they thought they were: when smack came along (greyish brown in colour, smoked off a scrap of tinfoil rather than injected), many had no idea what a danger it posed. They got stuck on it like flies on flybait.

One of the flies, I learnt, had been Errol.

*     *     *

Meanwhile, I was working in the advertising business, finding my own adult circle, dating girls who didn’t really care for me, playing in amateur rock bands and generally building a life, all against the background of the bloody, atrocious civil war into which Lanka’s post-colonial favourite sport of oppressing ethnic and linguistic minorities had finally, inevitably, plunged us. All this time, I never saw Errol. Every now and then, I would hear something about him. The news was rarely good.

Then, in 1988, my own life hit a bit of a speed bump and I found myself regularly visiting a friend called Imtiaz Hamid, a very chilled and gentle man, one of the oldest of Lanka’s hippie generation. At his house a handful of troubled souls would gather to smoke weed, listen to music and talk. We were a kind of mutual therapy group with Imti as the moderator. All of us had suffered reverses in life. Some had had troubles with drugs, some had been dumped by partners or were struggling with their emotional lives, at least one had serious mental-health issues. Amongst these wounded creatures, I was reunited with Errol.

He had got himself off smack some years earlier, going through the terror and misery of cold turkey all alone without help or comfort from anyone. I would add this to the tally of Errol’s life achievements without hesitation; most of the other once-respectable Colombo lads who took up heroin at the same time he did are now either hopeless alcoholics, still on it, or dead. For all that, the years lost to addiction had damaged him badly. He could never really hope to be a normal person after that. 

But he could, and did, return to the world. Imtiaz’s circle extended well beyond his ‘patients’; other interesting people – artists and ad people, filmmakers and former movie stars, rogue academics, old-money eccentrics, the Hindu priest of the Kataragama Maha Devale – would drop in from time to time. Many of these visitors saw something in Errol that they liked. They took him up, invited him to parties, introduced him to their friends. Pretty soon, Errol was moving in the most fashionable circles. Society adored him.

It was not at all clear why. Errol was tall and had a well-muscled, lanky runner’s physique, but you wouldn’t exactly call him handsome. He had decent manners and the social advantages of his Thomian education, but he wasn’t what you would call sophisticated or even, really, a very interesting conversationalist. He was not yet the energetic and hilarious raconteur he would become in later years; this was the period during which he was living the stories he would later tell. He had no claim to fame, no glittering career or trophy to serve as his calling-card, only those long-ago athletic records – which in any case he never mentioned (not in my hearing, anyway, and I was often with him in those days). When he compiled music CDs or DJ’d at parties, people were just as likely to complain as to dig it. As for money, the ultimate passport, Errol was always as poor as a church-mouse. He had his faults, too: his morals were as eccentric as the rest of him and he was fiercely intolerant of those he considered bad hats, occasionally giving vent to embarrassing public tirades against them. He was a terrible, terrible snob. He was dreadful to waiters, taxi-drivers and servitors in general, though he made an exception for his friends’ domestic help. He was unreliable; you learnt never to put any store in his promises, well meant though they were. He was absurdly, disastrously, hilariously unpunctual; if you ever arranged to pick Errol up on your way to a concert or a party, you would surely be late for it and stood a good chance of never getting there at all. He was clumsy. He bumped into things and smashed them. He had a tendency to grumble loud and long when he was peeved. 

All was tolerated, even embraced, for Errol had the gift of making people love him. He made us comfortable. He made us relax. He played us music. He made us happy.

From time to time his friends would give him jobs, mostly in advertising and other service ‘industries’. He would last a month or two, sowing chaos through the office and insulting valued clients, till came the inevitable parting of the ways. After a while it became patent to all who knew him that Errol neither could nor would work. He had problems with relationships, too; after his first girlfriend left him and went to Australia, he would be without a long-term partner for well over twenty years. 

*     *     *

By the time I got married for the first time, Errol had moved up in life. He was now living in jet-set mode, entirely subsidized by his friends. They made a darling of him, showering him with presents, pressing drink and drugs and occasional sexual bonbons upon him. Though still unemployed, still living with his father and largely bereft of income, he lived a rock star’s life – the life, it was not hard to see, that he had always dreamed of. He developed a taste for booze and cocaine. It became normal for him to stay up for several nights in a row, partying with his new set.

Pretty soon, he lost his bearings completely. He ceased to have any interest in self-maintenance. His home became a filthy, cobweb-festooned mess. He began misbehaving in other ways too, which need not concern us here. Being dependent on his rich pals to support his new lifestyle, he was forced to make some urgent adjustments to his moral compass, and the mental acrobatics he performed to justify himself at the time were easily the ugliest thing I ever saw in Errol’s life.

Still, he and I continued to get together (usually when he was coming down after some three-day party), listen to and share music, go to concerts and jam sessions and make weekend jaunts out of the city. For a while he ‘worked’ in the same office as my first wife: she dubbed him the Voice of Colombo because his desk telephone served as an interchange for all the gossip of the city’s bohemian elite. I dubbed him Petronius, because it seemed to me that no-one in that set could do anything – go anywhere, take up a new fashion, serve a new cocktail, start an affair, even go to the bathroom – without Errol’s say-so, any more than the smart set round the Emperor Nero could make a move without the approval of the Arbiter.

I was beginning to wonder whether my friend would meet his end in some Pulp Fiction-type disaster: maybe in a bathtub full of blood and warm water, surrounded by laughing beauties, just like Petronius. He had some terrifying adventures with a few of the women who hang about the white-powder scene – damaged harpies who spread devastation all around them. Eventually he found a real woman, and that was what saved him. 

Jacqui had a job as an ad executive; no doubt her salary kept them both afloat. Perhaps Errol, too, had money to contribute from time to time. The two of them became a couple, moved in together. After his father died, they left the cavernous, crumbling old Knower home for a more affordable place and Errol finally settled into long-overdue domesticity.

The following decade or so may well have been the best years of his life. Jacqui became the relatively still centre he needed (a perfectly still centre would not have worked at all) and though the partying continued, it was with a far less toxic set. He gave up alcohol. He burnished his already growing reputation as a raconteur, reducing his listeners to helpless laughter with stories about the absurd events and people that had comprised his life – the latter including, of course, all of us. Errol was always a master of making people laugh at themselves.

Those halcyon days were never going to last. Errol was not made for domesticity. In the end, coping with his erratic and unpredictable ways while being the sole breadwinner in the household became, I surmise, a bit too much for Jacqui. She left, and started a new life with a man who had once been Errol’s schoolmate (and mine). Generously, the pair continued to look after Errol, paying his rent and helping him survive, often inviting him up to their place in the hills for weekends or whenever they needed someone to take care of their dogs while they were away. Errol loved all dogs just the way he loved people, or maybe even more; I don’t think he really distinguished between one species and the other.

*     *     *

By 2012 or so, despite his ex’s and her partner’s support, Errol was in obvious decline. He was living alone in a low-rent part of Colombo that most of us try to avoid visiting, in a house that looked as though the builders had abandoned it half finished. It was damp and messy and there were rats in the kitchen. Unsavoury-looking characters came and went. His appearance grew distinctly ragged, and the smoker’s cough he’d had for years (he always mixed his weed with tobacco) took on a graveyard echo. He took to keeping his fancy designer clothes – long-ago presents from his jet-set friends – at other people’s houses so that they didn’t get spoiled by the damp and insects at home.

I continued to visit him from time to time, though it was becoming a real trial. I’m fussy and hate messes of all kinds – and Errol, too, was growing ever more eccentric and excitable. Getting to his place from where I lived involved driving through the most traffic-choked and disreputable parts of the city of Colombo. Excuses, excuses… Still, I would visit every month or so, mostly on Sundays, and we would have a smoke together and listen to music and talk about old times. Sometimes he would give me a haircut; it was a skill ‘Aunty Caryll’ had taught him as a teenager, and he’d worked for some time at the most fashionable hairdresser’s in town – another of his short-lived periods of employment. Most of the time we sat and listened to music and reminisced. We were old men now, reflecting on our mad youth.

Around 2016, I stopped visiting regularly. By the time Covid struck I had barely seen Errol for about two years, though we kept in touch, talked on the phone, occasionally met at musical occasions of one kind or another. He could still get in anywhere he wanted to without having to pay for himself, a matter of great pride with him. Right to the end, he was always the same: cheerful, funny, angrily excitable about politics and communalism, unfailingly generous (poverty never stopped him) and always full of music.

Even after I drifted away, there remained, I am glad to say, a handful of people who kept in touch, looked out for and, of course, partied with my friend. They were all dedicated bohemians like him. On the last Saturday in February one of them called me, sobbing so hard I could barely understand what he was saying. At last I made out that Errol was dead. It had had happened the previous night. He’d been up at Jacqui and her partner’s place, alone, dog-sitting while they were away. He’d been receiving treatment for a ‘lung infection’, but he wasn’t actually sick; far from bedridden at any rate, and living what passed for a normal life by his standards. But Jacqui was worried about the cough, so she called in to check on him. He didn’t answer. After trying a few more times she asked a neighbour to go round to their house and take a look. The neighbour found Errol dead.

On the night before his funeral, I visited the parlour. His friends – the loyal few who had loved him – were trying to make a jolly old wake of it but it wasn’t working. Loud rock and funk music in the small, close room, cranked up high against the noise of the traffic outside, made it impossible to talk and everyone was far too sad and tired to pretend to party. The core group of mourners had been there since morning and looked absolutely shattered. I was worried about Covid, too, and left as soon as I decently could.

The funeral was better. Duleep de Chickera, the emeritus Bishop of Colombo who had been our chaplain at St Thomas’s in the Seventies, was speaking over the coffin when I arrived. He’d always been fond of Errol and had been touched to hear that the straying sheep had made a return to the fold, reading the Bible and attending Sunday service, in his last years. As the coffin was lowered, Jerome Speldewinde began a selection of songs, among them Knocking on Heaven’s Door, You’ll Never Walk Alone and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. My wife, who hasn’t really gone out since Covid struck Lanka, was shocked to see how old we’ve all become.

There was another wake, later, in the garden of an expensive nearby restaurant. It worked, unlike the one at the parlour – big crowd, lots of drink and refreshments, music and dancing, people in party clothes and much affectionate talk about the departed. A beautiful woman told me, laughing, that dying had been Errol’s final, desperate strategy to pull his long-scattered friends together and give them one last blast. An improper thought if ever there was one, but loving withal. Though slightly shocked, I endorsed it.

*     *     *

Errol Knower was one of a handful of people who, at different times in my life, have had a profound and lasting effect on me. I would be a different person today if not for him. I can’t explain how he changed me as a person, because I don’t really know; and to explain why we were lifelong friends at all would take a book. Once, long ago, another old acquaintance told me how sorry he felt for Errol and the sad mess he had made of his life. I looked at him in astonishment. Errol, I replied, is one of my great heroes. I don’t envy him or want to live his life, but I have nothing but admiration for his determination to do exactly what he wants and nothing more, for sticking to his erratic but well-defined morals and principles all through life, and for somehow surviving and even, at times, thriving with nothing more to sustain him than a positive outlook and the generosity of his friends. 

Errol became a well-known figure in Colombo society just by existing. He was welcomed and loved by many and, as far as I know, hated by none apart from one or two jealous wives who disapproved of him leading their husbands into trouble. Ladies, I know what you thought. But I was there, and I can assure you that it was always your husbands who led Errol into trouble, never the other way round.

Am I mourning him? I am not sure. The only time a death ever made me cry, my tears were for a hopeless, stupid waste of life rather than for the deceased themselves. It might seem to you, from what I’ve written here, that Errol, too, led a feckless, wasted life. I assure you that he did not. He was dealt a rotten hand and made more of it than most ever do with far better cards. If he was unhappy, it was buried so deep he did not even know it himself. He helped many, harmed no-one and experienced more pleasure (and, I suppose, more complementary pain) than most people will ever know in their lives. 

All in all, he was a remarkably lucky fellow. Despite the crazy life he led and the awful things that from time to time befell him, he never lost his good humour or his hopeful outlook. He did no-one any harm and a great many people, myself included, an incalculable amount of good. He managed successfully to live his whole life without growing up. And by dying at sixty-two, he has neatly avoided the terrible fate that I and many others feared was in store for him: a lonely, destitute and miserable old age.

All I have to mourn, really, is the fact that he isn’t around any more. A selfish minor detail, though of course it means the world to me. Farewell, Atahualpa.

©2022 by Richard Simon. 

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