Bryan Appleyard

Jacobean Blood

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:39:58 +0000

On the London streets at the end of the 16th century, the men were shorter and younger than they are today. The median age was 22; the average height was four inches shorter. Beards, curiously, grew much later. “Men look more like boys,” writes Ian Mortimer in the recently published The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, “and behave more like reckless youths, with the greater energy, violence, eagerness and selfishness that you would expect.” It was youth, he says, that gave this world its “arrogance and determination”. Life was short — the highest estimate for life expectancy was 41 — and uncertain, but also vivid, dramatic. You could see a man being hanged, drawn and quartered, and watch Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, on the same day.

With a population of 200,000, London was the third largest city, in Europe, after Paris and Naples, but to our eyes it was a cesspit. In 1603, there were 30,000 plague deaths. The streets were filthy and the people, convinced it was most hygienic never to get wet or to take your clothes off, stank.

“We all think about Walter Raleigh putting his cloak over that puddle for the queen,” says Emma Smith, an Oxford English don, “but we don’t think about what was in the puddle. That’s a really interesting image of how we glamorise this great gesture, but what it speaks of is filth and ordure and awfulness.”

There was also uncertainty, a terrible life-and-death kind of uncertainty. Elizabeth I died in March 1603 and was succeeded by James I, a Scot, a foreigner, of doubtful religious affiliations. The Catholics and Puritans were at each other’s throats. Who knew what strife might ensue? James was never to earn the affection or trust of the English, and to this day lives in the shadow of his predecessor.

The streets were filthy and the people, convinced it was most hygienic never to get wet or to take your clothes off, stank

“There is no standard biography of James,” says the writer James Shapiro. “This was an in-between period. Everybody loves the Tudors, and everybody loves the civil war. James fell in the gap between the two. But his first decade was crucial in the creation of modern Britain.”

Shapiro is a professor of literature at Columbia, in New York, and the author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which won the Samuel Johnson prize in 2006. Now he has made a three-part series, The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History, for the BBC. It’s a thrilling exploration of the way Shakespeare, without ever being “crudely topical”, navigated the uncertain world of Jacobean politics. Other playwrights, including Ben Jonson, went too far and found themselves in jail, but old Bill, as you might expect, was much too clever and subtle.

Shapiro draws out the links between Macbeth, especially the famous and chilling Porter’s speech, and the Gunpowder Plot. The Porter, he points out, uses the word “equivocate” once and “equivocator” twice. The Catholic priest Henry Garnet, executed for complicity in the plot, had written A Treatise of Equivocation to tell Catholics how to conceal their faith. Concealment, secrecy and “equivocation” were the signature dishes of the age. Shapiro also finds links between the uncertainties around the accession of James and the complexities of Measure for Measure, and between James himself and King Lear. He ties the politics to locations — the Guildhall and Cheapside, in London, the fields around Stratford where Shakespeare got into a land dispute. “I had never been to a number of these places myself. I was so excited to be a time traveller.”

Shapiro is not alone in finding reasons to rediscover our Jacobean roots. Our fascination with the period’s dramatists has been oddly intensified in the past six months, with high-profile stagings of its key plays. Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, with a sensational performance by Eve Best, at the Old Vic; Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling at the Young Vic (it returns in the autumn by popular demand); and Cheek by Jowl’s production of Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which has been to New York and London, and is still touring. They are the three most famous and most typically bloody Jacobean plays. In The Duchess, the heroine’s secret marriage to her steward leads to an orgy of family violence. The Changeling is a complex and violent double plot of love and betrayal, with, of course, many corpses. ’Tis Pity most horrified the Victorians because of its central incestuous relationship between a brother and sister; Ford, in best Jacobean style, presents the brother as a rather admirable man. The usual massacre concludes.

What is it about this extraordinary period that grabs us? The answer is two things: violence and uncertainty. Apart from Shakespeare, these dramatists were virtually ignored throughout the 19th century. It was just too horrible, not to mention too sexy. That all changed with the cataclysm of the first world war. Suddenly, the typical Jacobean spectacle of lust, blood, gore and corpses did not look so absurd. In the wake of the slaughter in the trenches, T S Eliot led the way with his hugely influential essays on the plays.

“It’s Eliot who gets away from the sensational aspect of the plays and gets into the language,” Smith says. “And Rupert Brooke wrote his doctorate on Webster. These playwrights of terrible depravity and inhumanity started to speak to a post-first-world-war generation in a way they hadn’t to the Victorians.”

What is it about this extraordinary period that grabs us? The answer is two things: violence and uncertainty

The second world war further encouraged our obsession. One of the most celebrated productions of The Duchess of Malfi, at the Haymarket theatre, appeared three weeks before the German surrender in 1945, just as the pictures of the concentration camps were appearing in the papers. “This time,” wrote the critic Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, “when audiences saw the ‘heap of corpses on which the final curtain falls’, they did not laugh as pre-war audiences frequently had: art had imitated life with horrifying visual clarity.”

We still live with the corpses of two world wars, but also with 24-hour television coverage of current conflicts and a popular cinema that revels in gore with as much enthusiasm, though seldom as much literacy, as Webster or Ford. No wonder Shakespeare’s more bloody contemporaries remain entrenched in the repertoire.

Declan Donnellan, co-founder of Cheek by Jowl, a company that regularly stages Jacobean drama, argues that our comfortable lives may make the corpse piles necessary. “I’ve got nothing against civilisation, but we pay a terrible price. We are repressed. It’s one of the reasons why murder stories in newspapers sell well, and a good reason why there is a lot of violence, or why we want to gossip about other people’s sex lives. It’s because there are dark places in ourselves that we don’t want to go to. But it actually keeps us sane to go to those places occasionally.”

The director of the Old Vic’s Duchess of Malfi, Jamie Lloyd, agrees. “As long as people behave badly towards each other, there will always be some relevance in these plays.” In the pure romantic, aspiring character of the Duchess, Lloyd sees the moral light amid the carnage. She keeps demanding to be heard, imploring the other characters to rise above their primitive urges — and here again he finds a contemporary resonance. “When she says ‘Death hath ten thousand several doors/For men to take their exits’, she is challenging the situation and saying there is something to make life worthwhile. She wants a voice, and that is what is happening all over the world right now. People want a voice against tyranny.”

There’s another, deeper link between then and now — the human body as sacred, as a target of lust, but also as a random tub of mortal guts. Anatomy was big in Jacobean times, thanks to the drawings of the great Vesalius, and it is big now thanks to ever more powerful scanners showing us what lies beneath.

“Look at that exhibition at the Wellcome about brains,” Smith says. “It’s about new ways of understanding the body, both aesthetically and existentially. The Jacobeans had Vesalius and the barber surgeons, developing anatomy and debating with the authorities how many bodies they could take from the gallows.”

We have Marc Quinn’s head made from his frozen blood and Damien Hirst’s endless memento moris; we devour the serial-killer hero Dexter on TV and slasher movies in cinemas. But we also have gyms and the idealised bodies of advertising. For us, as for the Jacobean playwrights and their contemporaries the metaphysical poets, the body is the site of the ultimate encounter between the sacred and the profane.

There’s another, deeper link between then and now — the human body as sacred, as a target of lust, but also as a random tub of mortal guts

And, finally, there is politics. The death of Elizabeth was a political chasm that opened at the feet of the age. Shapiro is insistent on what an enormous change it represented for Shakespeare in particular. He points out that we tend to think of him as an Elizabethan playwright who simply progressed from triumph to triumph. But James’s accession punctuated that progress. Look, says Shapiro, at the difference between Hamlet (1600) and Measure for Measure (1604). “The distance he travelled… suddenly you have this play of incredible ambiguity and disturbing resolution that has come out of a different world, the world of Measure for Measure. I am struggling as a cultural historian to understand this moment.”

Politics under James, as seen by the playwrights, was a matter of concealment, survival and equivocation. There were no grand causes, no clear dividing lines, no inspirational contact with the leadership, as there had been under Elizabeth. Henry V could no more have been a Jacobean play than could Look Back in Anger.

The end of the cold war is our version of the death of Elizabeth. Politics lost its clear narrative and, under Blair especially, descended into the miasma of concealment, survival and equivocation — spin, as we call it — that we now inhabit. The hermetic, ultimately pointless political dynamics of the Jacobean play are only a slightly exaggerated version of Westminster politics.

So, if you want to find our own Jacobean dramatist, look no further than Armando Iannucci, whose television series The Thick of It was positively Websterian in its grim vision of power without illumination or responsibility. And in the multiple obscenities of Malcolm Tucker, the Alastair Campbell figure played by Peter Capaldi, we hear the voice of self-loathing and disgust that once rocked the wooden theatres of London. Only the blood is missing.

The Soul of Ron Mueck

admin — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:26:28 +0000

Over the summer, hundreds of thousands will travel to new-money Southwark to see the big Damien Hirst exhibition at Tate Modern. Perhaps no more than a few hundred will make the journey to Savile Row in old-money Mayfair to see the Ron Mueck show at Hauser & Wirth. This is a pity, because there’s a lot more to see in Mayfair.

Not, however, numerically. There are just four pieces in the Mueck show; there are 73 at the Hirst. And not financially. Muecks tend to be valued in the hundreds of thousands; Hirsts in the millions. I don’t know what Mueck is worth personally, but everybody knows Hirst sits on well over £200m.

In 1997, however, they started out from the same place — the Royal Academy. It was there that both Mueck and Hirst, as well as most of the movement known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), launched themselves at the Sensation exhibition, a show created by two of the great art impresarios of our time, the collector Charles Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal of the RA.

I don’t know what Mueck is worth personally, but everybody knows Hirst sits on well over £200m

So, by provenance, Mueck, though Australian by birth, was a YBA. But his membership was purely technical: he was the very odd man out. They were mainly avid self-publicists; he avoids interviews like the plague. They were art-school-educated; he was a puppeteer with, among others, Jim Henson of Muppets fame. They were primarily conceptualists — the “idea” of the work was more important than the execution, and skill was downgraded. He was all skill, all execution. The idea emerged from the making or was allowed to form in the imagination of the viewer.

Mueck exhibited only one piece at the Sensation show: Dead Dad, a hyper-realistic sculpture of the corpse of his father. The first shock was that it was little more than half life-size. The second shock was — well, I’ll come back to that. Some years later, Craig Raine, the poet and critic, recalled his reaction to Dead Dad. “And there, on the floor, 3ft long, is one indisputable, obvious masterpiece… a calmly brilliant sculpture which is the contemporary equivalent of, say, Holbein’s subtle portrait of Erasmus, with its engaged intelligence and wryly amused thin mouth.”

Since then, Mueck’s works have emerged painfully slowly. Many will be familiar to you. There is Wild Man, a seated, three-metre-high hairy nude; A Girl, a giant newborn baby; and Man in a Boat, a nude man peering uncertainly forward from the prow of an old wooden boat. Perhaps most famously there is Mask II, a huge image of his own face lying asleep on the floor. All are marked by either small or enormous differences of scale.

“I never made life-sized figures,” Mueck has said, “because it never seemed to be interesting. We meet life-size people every day.”

Confronted with this slowly expanding oeuvre, Raine’s enthusiasm is undimmed. “You can compare him to Holbein or Vermeer,” he tells me. “He stands absolutely next to them — I think great art is bloody obvious when you see it, it’s not difficult.” He describes Hirst’s shark in a tank, entitled glibly The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, “kitsch compared with the actual experience of death in Dead Dad”.

On the other hand, there are some who regard Mueck with derision, if not outright contempt. “His work,” writes the critic Jonathan Jones, “is brainless.” Art, he argues, is “cognitive before it is ‘emotional’ ”, and Mueck’s attack on our gut feelings is bullying. “These are simply people, Mueck’s models declare, with their grey, waxy flesh… But nothing is so simple. Mueck’s art is presumed to work by being eye-fooling, but it fails even on that primitive level. The flesh is too pink, or too yellow — and, always, too still. It’s a parody of people. Mueck’s confused enterprise shrinks on analysis.”

He adds, for anybody tempted to admire Mueck’s work, “I just don’t think… you see enough art.”

Jones is on the side of the market. Since Sensation, Hirst and the other YBAs have been U2, REM or the Stones next to Mueck’s Jayhawks (look them up), the big stadium artists next to the small theatre band. But now, as so many have noted, the Hirst show seems to give off the ominous, decadent air of a bubble about to burst. The power of his early images has faded, and the industrial replication of his few ideas has a stale reek.

“I don’t think I can be bothered to go,” says the novelist Will Self, once a fan of Hirst’s. “I thought some of his early works were really quite significant, but I am not even sure they are any more. That kind of conceptual work, while nominally taking on difficult subject matter, is not attended by any difficult thought or difficult execution, and you really need all three of those to produce high art. And he is corrupted by money, pure and simple.”

So, 15 years after Dead Dad, should we really be heading for Hauser & Wirth rather than Tate Modern?

First, it needs to be said that even Mueckians might be startled by what they see there. The four works are very different from anything he has done before. Still Life is a man-sized plucked chicken hanging from the ceiling. Drift is a middle-aged man on a lilo wearing floral trunks, his arms spread. He is half-sized and he hangs from the wall. Woman with Sticks is a bulky life-sized lady reeling backwards under the weight of a mass of wood. Youth is a black boy in jeans and blood-stained white T-shirt. He is raising the latter to reveal the wound in his side.

Drift and Youth, in particular, make explicit something that has always been implicit in Mueck’s world — religion. The drifter’s outstretched arms suggest a crucifixion, and the wound in the boy’s side evokes the mark of the centurion’s spear in the side of Christ. Marina Warner, academic and historian, has noted this theme in Mueck’s work from the beginning. “I think that Ron is a sacred artist working in a secular way,” she has said. “He does somehow define the holy, and his work often extends into the idea of love itself, which is a hard subject in our tarnished times. When he works small, the intimacy and intensity of feeling he achieves is quite rare and all the more powerful for that.”

During the counter-reformation, she tells me, “the Catholic church used similarly hyper-real images to excite the feeling of piety, the feeling of encountering the thing itself. And the one thing Mueck’s works do is give this uncanny feeling of presence”.

This is where we come to the matter of that second shock people felt on seeing Dead Dad. Mueck’s works are, indeed, uncanny. You cannot be in a room with one and ever feel you are quite alone. This is not just because they look real — otherwise the crowds at Madame Tussauds would not be giggling, they would be prostrated with existential angst — it is because of the infinite subtlety with which Mueck uses pose and distortions of scale to tip the viewer into an awareness of what can only be described as a soul. His Ghost, for example, shows a gawky adolescent girl in a swimsuit. She is large-footed and 7ft tall, and just these two distortions — combined, of course, with Mueck’s formidable sculptural skill — give us that sensation of something beyond or beneath that we only normally have with very close human encounters.

None of which would work if it weren’t for the fact that, technically, Mueck is out there on his own

The point about such an experience is that it is the exact opposite of the conceptualism that is the orthodoxy of the YBAs, and of Hirst in particular, and it requires a different and more open way of seeing. Conceptualism implies that the work of art is an idea that can be stated or analysed in words. The great critic Susan Sontag saw the dangers of this as long as ago as 1964. “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” she wrote in 1967. In other words, instead of verbal rationality, of ideas, or arguments, visual arts demand primarily a sensual engagement. This is exactly what Self sees in Mueck’s works. “They are all about emotion,” he says. He adds that they possess what the critic Walter Benjamin called “an aura”. They are unique artefacts that can only be seen in a given place at a given time; they are not subject to mechanical reproduction. The uncanniness of presence detected by Warner turns them into standing rebukes to the machine age of art, the casual delegation of production that Hirst and Andy Warhol before him celebrated with such glee.

None of which would work if it weren’t for the fact that, technically, Mueck is out there on his own. He is a craftsman of the first order and a phenomenally skilful portraitist. Sometimes he works from models, sometimes he doesn’t, but either way, far from being a slavish copier of reality, he is able to remake reality into something replete with expressive power.

“He has such skill,” Raine says. “People like Jonathan Jones think art isn’t about skill, but it’s all about skill and… there has to be something else. But skill has definitely got to be there.”

It is pointless trying to say much about Mueck the man — he keeps, as they say, himself to himself. A few bare facts should suffice. He is married to the scriptwriter Caroline Willing, which makes him the son-in-law of the artist Paula Rego. They have two daughters. He made his way into art via Australian children’s television and then as a model-maker and puppeteer for Henson and the film Labyrinth. Soon after Dead Dad, his gigantic Boy was a feature in the ill-fated Millennium Dome. For two years from 2000 he was associate artist at the National Gallery, a post that perhaps convinced the hardened conceptualist YBAs that he was not really a proper contemporary artist at all.

But you don’t need more than that. It’s all out there in the work. It is time for the conceptualists to stand aside and make way for the uncanny. Head for the soul of Savile Row, not the salesman of Southwark.

Extremophiles: Life on the Edge

admin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:34:51 +0000

Russian scientists have now poured sixty tons of freon and kerosene down the 4 kilometre bore hole that plunges though the ice above Lake Vostok in Antarctica. This will stop the hole freezing up during the long Antarctic winter. When summer comes, the Russian team will return to drill the last 100 metres and expose the surface of a lake that has been buried beneath the ice for at least 15 million years. Eventually they intend to explore this lost world, a place unseen by human eyes, with a robot submarine.

The temperature of the lake is about -3 degrees C, but the water remains liquid because of the pressure exerted by the ice sheet. The pressure should also have kept the water super-saturated with oxygen and nitrogen. Once we would have assumed that this cold, lost lake would be no more than a geological curiosity, a dead relic of the time when Antarctica separated from Africa and drifted south. Now we can be almost certain that it is full of life. Most of these creatures will be tiny single-celled organisms, microbes, visible only under a microscope. But they will have novel genetic structures, they will use previously undiscovered enzymes and they will have evolved unique survival strategies. They will be a class of creature now known as extremophiles, lovers of extreme conditions.

This is a biological category that was only discovered forty years ago. Now we know that the earth is teeming with these hyper-resilient microbes, organisms that can survive levels of heat, cold, pressure, radiation and salt or acid concentrations that previously would have been thought fatal to all living things. The study of these creatures is still in its infancy, but they have already broadened our conception of life on earth and raised hopes of detecting life in space. The surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example, is an ocean of ice, beneath which could be inhabited lakes like Vostok. Extremophiles also offer a cornucopia of new medical compounds, primarily antiobiotics, as well as almost indestructible enzymes that could transform chemistry both at the domestic and industrial scales

Almost daily now, new extremophile species are discovered. Also in Antarctica, outside the prefabricated hut erected by Robert Falcon Scott at the start of his doomed expedition in 1911, there are drums containing diesel oil. The site has been preserved as a historic monument so the drums remained intact until, in the last few years, they started leaking. Professor Michael Danson, director of the Centre for Extremophile Research at the University of Bath, seized the opportunity to dig into the soil beneath these leakages.“Behold! We isolated organisms that were living off the diesel oil.” Such organisms could be used to consume oil spills like BP’s Deepwater Horizon disastrous gusher in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Now we know that the earth is teeming with these hyper-resilient microbes, organisms that can survive levels of heat, cold, pressure, radiation and salt or acid concentrations that previously would have been thought fatal to all living things

Back in the eighties, Karl Stetter couldn’t get funding from his university, Regensburg in Bavaria, to pursue his obsessive search for organisms that lived in temperatures higher than 60 degrees C. The authorities just didn’t believe such creatures existed. So he took a holiday in the island of Vulcano off Sicily. First, he used his hotel shower to accustom his hands to very hot water. Then he dived off a rubber boat manned by his wife and daughter and he took samples from the hot vents on the seabed. He returned the samples back to his lab and discovered an organism that reproduced happily at 100 degrees C. The world record for thermophiles – heat lovers – is now just above 120 degrees C.

In the early Nineties, undeterred by the prevailing microbiological wisdom that the biosphere ended 7.5 metres beneath the seabed, John Parkes, now head of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff, began to look for life in deep ocean cores. These were obtained by specialised drilling ships. Of the cores he acquired from around the world, two stood out. These were to make him one of the leading extremophile researchers in the world.The first came from just off the Peruvian coast, the other from near Newfoundland, the point where the continents first tore apart to form the Atlantic Ocean. Off Peru he immediately found life at 80 metres, overthrowing the orthodoxy. Later, off Newfoundland, he found life at 1.6 kilometres beneath the seabed.

“That’s the record so far,” he says, “but we think we might be able to get down to 4 kilometres.”

Deep in Mexican caves where the air is poisonously saturated with hydrogen sulphide, Diana Northup, a biology professor at the University of New Mexico, found the walls covered with slime which she calls “snot”. There are even “snottites” hanging from the cave ceiling and “snot” balls – cities of bacteria. These creatures excrete concentrated sulphuric acid that eats away the cave walls. In fact, it now looks as though the caves were largely built by the corrosive effect of bacterial excretions.

“Yes, we were pretty narrow in our thinking,” she says, “that’s what extremophiles have done for biology. They’ve opened our eyes… if you only think about life in terms of your condition, you can miss a lot of what’s going on in the planet.”

To get some idea of how revolutionary these findings are, it is necessary to go back to the biological preconceptions of the fifties and sixties. Then it was thought that life was the supreme cosmic rarity, only possible within the narrowest of environmental conditions. The microbiologist Claude Zobell, for example, laid down the doctrine that life ended at a depth of 7.5 metres below the seabed, this was the immoveable line at which the biosphere was thought to encounter the geosphere. Beyond that point there was simply insufficient energy to sustain living processes.

And then, in 1968, some sandwiches, an apple and a submarine named Alvin seemed to prove beyond doubt that life at extreme cold and high pressure was impossible. Alvin was (and still is) a deep-sea submersible belonging to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. While being transported, it was accidentally dropped with its hatches open and three crewmembers on board into 1500 metres of water. The crew escaped but their lunch went down with its ship. About ten months later Alvin was retrieved and the lunch was found to be damp but entirely edible, proving to the satisfaction of many that there was no microbial action on the sea floor.

John Parkes now laughs about this: “It was just that at that depth the bugs had never seen a bologna sandwich before, or an apple.” More prosaically, Michael Danson points out that we can be sure that, on earth, where there is water there is life, however extreme the conditions.

Danson likes to point out that, strictly speaking, extremophiles were first recorded in the Old Testament when the Moabites noticed a red bloom on the Dead Sea, wrongly concluded that it was blood and that the Israelites were fighting among themselves. In fact, the bloom was a mass of halophiles – salt-loving bacteria – and the deluded Moabites descended only to be slaughtered by the Israelites.

And then, in 1968, some sandwiches, an apple and a submarine named Alvin seemed to prove beyond doubt that life at extreme cold and high pressure was impossible

In our time, those who drew those initial conclusions from the Alvin sandwiches were, like the Moabites, mistaken because they accepted the conventional view of survivable environments. And yet, only the year before, 1967, an article appeared that had formally established the existence of extremophiles. It was by an American microbiologist named Thomas Brock and was published in the journal Science. In the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, Brock had discovered a microbe which he christened Thermus aquaticus, a creature that could survive at temperatures as high as 80 degrees C. At once, our sense of the life-sustaining zone on earth expanded.

“It was Brock who set the ball rolling,” says Michael Danson, “what has happened since is that the temperature has been set higher and higher. The highest temperature record at which growth has been observed is 121 degrees.”

Thermus aquaticus was also, serendipitously, the organism that established the enormous potential practical importance of these newly discovered life forms. The point about a thermophilic bacterium is that it needs some very tough enzymes, the catalysts of living processes. Our own enzymes break down very quickly at high temperatures, which is another reason that life outside what we consider a normal temperature range was thought impossible. An enzyme in Thermus aquaticus is now known as Taq DNA polymerase and it has become one of the most important enzymes in microbiology. It made possible the polymerase chain-reaction (PCR) technique for amplifying DNA samples. This led to the uses of DNA in forensic science and, in fact, to much of what we now know about DNA. PCR is a molecular photocopier, it makes it possible to take very small samples of DNA and repeatedly reproduce them. So now murderers have to be obsessively clean if they are to escape the attentions of the forensic scientist.

In the decades after Brock’s discovery, an entire menagerie of extremophiles emerged. We now have acidophiles (acid lovers), salt lovers (halophiles), piezophiles (pressure lovers), xerophiles (dryness lovers) and many others. One category, the radioresistants, contains Deinoccocus radiodurans which the environmentalist James Lovelock says is his favourite creature and which has been listed at the toughest bacterium in the world in “Guinness World Records”. It can survive 1000 times the level of radiation that would kill a human and has been found to exist in the cores of nuclear-power stations. As such levels are not found on the earth’s surface, why it should have such a system is unknown. DR has a system for constantly repairing its own DNA which, if we understood it, could have extraordinary medical implications. Cancer, for example, starts as a DNA mutation in a single cell. If we could use this bug’s repair system, then perhaps we could stop cancer before it takes hold.

Once biologists routinely said there were 10 million distinct species on the planet; now nobody really knows how many there are, but it is certainly a lot more than 10 million. The rate of new discoveries suggests that we have still as yet barely scratched the surface of extremophile numbers. This proliferation has even led to an entirely new division of life on earth. Before extremophiles there were thought to be two types of life – prokaryotes, mostly single-cell organisms that lack a cell nucleus – and eukaryotes, mostly multi-cell organisms, including us, that have complex structures inside the cell, including a nucleus. But it was soon found that many extremophiles, though they appeared to be prokaryotes, had such a different evolutionary history that they were an entirely new form of life. In 1977 Carl Woese, an American biologist and physicist, separated these out and christened them archea, the third domain of life.

“That was one of the great landmarks,” says Karl Stetter, “this was a very, very important finding. At the time, of course, nobody believed Woese.”

Extremophile researchers have one thing in common: they are constantly being told that what they are seeking is impossible. This gives them a quixotic determination to seek anyway. What drives them, I think is the sudden realisation that, thanks to extremophiles, microbiology can, once again, be a science of discovery. In an age when people had begun to think there nothing left to discover on earth, they have becomne explorers in a new and exotic landscape of life.

It was Woese who inspired Stetter to study extremophiles. A theatrical, constantly excited and brilliant man, Stetter went on to become the effective godfather of the discipline. He’s not exactly sure how many new creatures he has discovered, but it is in the region of 50 or 60. They include some of the smallest microbes ever found, which he called nano-archea. They life by hot deep sea vents and are thought to resemble the earliest forms of life on earth and they live on larger host bacteria. Stetter also solved a problem for BP. They were puzzled to find hydrogen sulphide in their oil and wanted to find out where it was coming from. Their own microbiologists could find no signs of life. On a drilling rig in Alaska, Stetter realised that this was because they had installed a “splitter” that separated oil, water and gas. Turn off the splitter and the H2S-producing organisms, which were in the water, immediately appeared on the surface.

Extremophile researchers have one thing in common: they are constantly being told that what they are seeking is impossible. This gives them a quixotic determination to seek anyway

But perhaps, thanks to television, the big extremophile break-through that most people know about was the black smoker. More formally known as hydrothermal vents, black smokers are deep-ocean chimney-like formations from which geothermally heated water pours and, as the hot water meets the cold water of the sea, the dissolved minerals blacken the plume. These are, for the extremophile scientists, sacred locations; some speculate that they may, in fact, be where life on earth began. By the old definitions of suitable environments, no more inhospitable location could be found, and yet the black smokers turn out to be crawling with life, from strange shrimps and crabs to the most bizarrely adapted extremophiles. One black smoker bacterium is phototrophic, it depends on light, yet it lives at 2500 metres beneath the sea surface where there is none. It survives, incredibly, on the glow from the smoker. There may well be black smokers deep beneath the ice on Europa, the Jovian moon.

So dynamic and so new is this whole area of science that, mostly, it is still in the research rather than the application phase. It has, however, already inspired the growth of another discipline, astrobiology. Unique among sciences, astrobiology has no object of study since we have not yet found any life beyond the earth. But the discovery of extremophiles has proved that life can sustain itself in many more environments than was previously thought possible. So, for example, we now know that digging up regolith (surface soil) is no way to find life on Mars. Rather, we have to drill deep beneath the surface. Furthermore, extremophiles have given new life to the theory of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe and is disseminated on meteorites or asteroids. The problem with this was always that it seemed impossible that life could survive the journey. Now we know it could; indeed, bacteria have been shown to be able to survive. In 2010 bacteria from cliffs in the village of Beer in Devon were found to lasted 553 days on the exterior of the Space Station. Extremophiles have convinced astrobiologists that alien life is now much more likely.

But two big applications here on earth are, first, the polymerase chain reaction, developed in 1983, mentioned above, and, secondly, the preservation of the colour of your favourite jumper. With the development of more powerful and fully automatic washing machines in the seventies and eighties, ever-more demanding consumers grew restless because they noticed colours had begun to fade in the wash. Manufacturers worked out that invisible and colourless hairs were being raised from the fabric by the washing process. If they could cut these hairs, colour would be restored. Japanese extremphile researcher Koki Horikoshi worked out that the best way to cut them was to use enzymes from extremophiles that could survive the highly alkaline conditions found in washing machines and either very hot or quite cold water. Their first attempts failed because they overdosed the wash with an enzyme which ate all the clothes. Finally, they got it right and the world and developed the washing powders we call “biological”.

Stetter, meanwhile, has co-founded Verenium, a San Diego company which specialises in the use of extremophiles. Their primary products are currently enzymes that split cellulose to make sugar. On the whole, extremophile scientists admit they are pure researchers rather than applications experts. The potential, however, is enormous, especially for the pharmaceutical industry. Most of Diana Northup’s cave slime bacteria, for example, contain hitherto unknown antibiotics. It is not yet certain how these creatures use them, but a popular hypothesis is that they form signalling and sensing systems which the bacteria use to detect and communicate with each other or possibly even as weapons agasint competing bacteria and predators. There are many potential human uses – “New drugs,” says Northup, “are entirely possible. A few years ago people seemed to give up on the idea that it was worth looking for new compounds in nature. But I don’t believe in giving up when you have environments like these.”

John Parkes is excited about the possibilities of immortality, in bacteria at least. We are used to the slightly sinister spectacle revealed by microscopy of bugs dividing – ie reproducing – every few minutes. But the creatures Parkes has found deep in the ocean sediment divide very slowly indeed, perhaps only once in several thousand years or even, in some cases, once every hundred thousand years. Even more astounding are the bugs found in fluid inclusions. These are microscopic bubbles of liquid of gas that are trapped within crystals. They form, for example, within salt crystals and, almost inevitably, extremophiles have been found in these bubbles. The point about fluid inclusions is that they are very long-lasting, some are known to be 50 million years old. The creatures that inhabit them don’t appear to divide at all.

Ever since the geological and biological insights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, life on earth had usually been seen as a poignantly fragile membrane spread across the surface of an unremarkable planet orbiting an average-sized star

“Why should they?” says Parkes, “there are no predators. They may be viruses but, if so, division is a very bad strategy as it will help the viruses to reproduce.”

This means we may have discovered 50-million-year-old life forms. Are they, therefore, immortal?

“Aha!” says Parkes, an exclamation he often uses. It seems to mean “Maybe, but we don’t yet know”, with the further subtext “I hope so”.

“On the surface of the earth the best strategy is ‘live fast, die young’. Down there the best strategy seems to be ‘live slow, die old’.”

But, for the moment, the most spectacular effect of extremophiles has been not on the human body but on the human imagination. This effect is humbling. Ever since the geological and biological insights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, life on earth had usually been seen as a poignantly fragile membrane spread across the surface of an unremarkable planet orbiting an average-sized star.

“On this crust,” wrote the great and gloomy philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in 1818 “a mouldy film had produced living and knowing beings; this is empirical truth, the realm, the world.”

Extremophiles have revealed that the film is much thicker, more resilient and infinitely more ingenious than Schopenhauer could ever have imagined. Some estimates suggest that the biomass beneath the seabed is greater than that above. They have also encouraged a new confidence in the idea that we are not alone in the universe. The bandwidth of possible survivable environments – and, therefore, forms of life - has broadened enormously. There may only be bacteria out there but, after Deinococcus radiodurans and Thermus aquaticus, there would seem to be almost no limit to what these creatures can do.

More importantly, extremophiles have changed our view of ourselves. We are, ultimately, their offspring. Anaerobes, organisms that do not use oxygen, were the original forms of life on earth before they were almost extinguished by the appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere. But they persist and flourish deep beneath the ocean floor. Furthermore, it was the invasion of bacterial cells by other bacteria that created the more complex cells of the eukaryotes. Numerically, we remain only 10% human, the remaining 90% of our cells being the bacteria in our guts. We are born of infection.

Finally, we cannot observe these organisms without feeling a vertiginous shift of perspective. Anthropocentrically, we define the limits of our environment as “normal”, but far more common in the biosphere are much higher and lower temperatures, extreme pressures, intense acidity or alkalinity and phenomenally long lifespans. The shift comes when we realise that it is not the creatures living in such environments that are the oddities, it is the creatures that are thinking about them. In the depths of Lake Vostok, four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, those Russian scientists will find the ordinary life of earth and further evidence, if it were needed, that is perhaps we, the humans, who are the true extremophiles.

The Opposite of Faith is not Doubt, it is Certainty

admin — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:23:25 +0000

On July 9, 2009, Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, stood weeping in a graveyard in Nottinghamshire. His daughter, Annie, phoned him from America; it was her birthday. Alarmed at her father’s state, she then called his wife, Jean. “She called her mother,” he recalls, “and said, ‘You’d better get in touch with Dad, he’s standing in a graveyard crying.’ But Jeannie knew what I had gone down there to do …I was looking at those gravestones. I remember those old guys more vividly than almost anything else in my life and I decided to find out what was going on by writing this book.”

The graves were those of the men who had trained him for the priesthood. The book is Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, published last month to great acclaim. It is a beautifully written and often funny emotional and intellectual self-exploration by one of the most extraordinary churchmen of our time.

Once known by the tabloids as “the Barmy Bishop” for his views on God and gay marriage, he has become in old age — he is 78 — a man who has lost his belief in God but gained a rare kind of spiritual genius. “The opposite of faith,” he says with piercing insight, “is not doubt, it is certainty.”

He is now agnostic, which, for him, is the acceptance of ignorance and uncertainty as the inevitable basis of the human condition. He simply laughs at the idea that the human mind can ever be capable of grasping ultimate reality. But mostly he weeps — he chokes up five times during our conversation — when he thinks of the past, of poetry, of suffering, of his old churches and of the world’s need for “redemptive pity”. “Man, man,” he says, quoting Dostoevsky, “one cannot live quite without pity.”

When we meet, his wife is in London looking after their two grandchildren and he is alone with his dog, a delirious border terrier named Daisy, in the cosy confines of his stone terraced house in Edinburgh’s Morningside. A lean, fit man — he walks the Pentland Hills with Daisy — his almost hairless head is that of a prophet or, perhaps, of the saint he wanted to be. His accent is genteel east coast with its overtones of mischief and irony, though more often of grief.

He is now agnostic, which, for him, is the acceptance of ignorance and uncertainty as the inevitable basis of the human condition

That graveyard was by Kelham Hall, just outside Newark. It used to be the home of the Society of the Sacred Mission, an Anglican order that trained Holloway in the priesthood. The son of a poor and not very religious Glasgow family, he gravitated towards the faith only, at Kelham, to find himself in conflict with its austere demands. Notably he felt guilt about his own perfectly ordinary sexual urges.

Now he blames St Paul and St Augustine for Christianity’s morbid obsession with sex. “It’s not doctrinal but it became the tail that wags the whole dog …When you think of dear old lusty St Jerome, who was obsessed with sex himself, who said the only good thing about marriage was that it breeds virgins. They want the human race to die out by stopping breeding.”

As a priest, he was happy to conduct marriage services for divorcees. He empathised with the pain they had been through and their determination to try again. “We are all sexual convalescents of one sort or another.”

In his book he tells the story of a close, loving yet celibate friendship with another Kelham trainee. One review linked this with his support as a bishop of gay marriage and resulted, much to his amusement, in emails from friends asking, “You’re not gay, are you?” He laughs it off. “I think if I were gay I’d know it by now and, being the kind of person I am, I would have tried it.”

In 1999 he published a book called Godless Morality and that, combined with his own admitted institutional disloyalty, led to his resignation from the Edinburgh bishopric. “I disappointed many people,” he says. In his book he writes of that time. “I felt glutted with the verbal promiscuity of religion and the absolute confidence with which it talks about what was beyond our knowing.”

“We are all sexual convalescents of one sort or another.”

He had to “find his soul” and so he launched himself on a host of public jobs — chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, for example — and a series of books, which reaches a personal and spiritual climax with Leaving Alexandria. (Alexandria was the resonantly named town where he grew up.)

I’m depressed by the way the church has responded to gay marriage because they have shown no generosity or magnanimityHe still loves the church and watched with sorrow as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was forced by church politics to come out against gay marriage. He admires Williams as “one of the most profound theologians there has ever been”, but describes his job as impossible.

“I’m depressed by the way the church has responded to gay marriage because they have shown no generosity or magnanimity …They claim the right to define words and they define marriage in a way that excludes the possibility of people of the same sex doing it. They once defined ‘priest’ in a way that excluded the possibility of women doing it. But we change the definition of words as the social reality of our lives change. I am saddened by the sheer philosophical illiteracy of it all.”

He is ambivalent about Williams’s impending resignation.

“I feel a little bit sad on his behalf because I think it’s been a tough 10 years. But I feel joy for him because I hope he gets back to the good times and writes some great stuff now that this thing has been taken off his back.

“His tragedy is that he was a good man trying to hold an institution together that is incredibly divided. There’s a sadness in my heart for him but I am glad that he has got out from what was an impossible job.”

The rules required by institutions are what drove Holloway to resign. Living by fixed, institutional codes, he says, makes people do the opposite of what they know in their hearts to be right. This has left the Church of England “profoundly compromised”. He points to the contrast between the magnificence of St Paul’s Cathedral and the ragged tents of the Occupy protesters that until recently filled its forecourt. Occupy was engaging in a prophetic act, he says, and, in their hearts, the priests knew it.

“We are all profoundly compromised. We try to follow this mad revolutionary who believed in a kind of mad, bringable-in commonwealth of love, forgiveness, compassion and mercy. The church carries that memory and yet it’s all dressed up, it’s in big houses, and it knows in its heart if Jesus came in, he’d be sad before he was angry.

“The dean who resigned [Graham Knowles], he was a lovely man, I bet he knew that the system meant he couldn’t actually identify what is the true reality.”

And yet Holloway’s fondness for the Church of England seems undiminished. He fears an evangelical takeover is currently “draining a lot of the old liberalism of the church”, but, on the whole, it has been “a very benign way of being religious”.

He has been surprised and encouraged by the responses to his book from the clergy. “There have been no angry letters. It seems to have touched a reality nerve in people. They are still struggling to hold on to Christianity but they feel more and more ill at ease with a lot of structural confines institutional religion imposes on its followers.”

He still attends his old church — Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh — and even preaches there but, as an agnostic, he has to stick to “a very narrow bandwidth” for fear of offending the believers.

He will be there today. “The resurrection has always meant the constant need to affirm hope over despair in a purely natural sense. I don’t mind people giving it a supernatural meaning. It’s a symbol of the struggle we all have to bring good out of evil, joy out of sorrow, and accept the reality of dying. I’ll be there and I’ll be happy to be there.”

The two big points about Holloway are his open eagerness and his sensitivity. He is always experimenting, most hilariously when he once got an American to help him “speak in tongues”. He started babbling so wildly that he had to hide in the lavatory on the train home. By the time he got to Edinburgh he was convinced he was speaking perfect Mandarin and terrified a “wee Chinese lassie” by babbling incomprehensibly at her.

The resurrection has always meant the constant need to affirm hope over despair in a purely natural sense

It is his sensitivity, however, that endows him with his own peculiar greatness. His regular tears are not of self-pity or sentimentality but of empathy. “I love that bit in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory when he says that hatred is a failure of the imagination. Even in the brute, even in the tyrant, there is a pitiful humanity. Unless we can get in touch with that in ourselves we cannot empathise with others.”

Now he faces death without expectation. He wants to be cremated and his ashes scattered by his three children on top of Scald Law, the highest of his beloved Pentlands. He does not expect to meet his maker but, in case he does, be warned, God. This man has a few perfectly reasonable complaints and, believe me, he is serious.

David Hare’s Rattigan

admin — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:17:26 +0000

Sir David Hare sent Sir Tom Stoppard his new play. Hare explained that he didn’t actually write it, the whole thing came to him ‘sub-consciously’. As if possessed, he had been waking up at 3am to get it down on paper.

“If you’re a real professional writer,” he says, “that happens about once every twenty-five years. This play was given to me because at last I got to say what I wanted to say.”

Stoppard admired the play but, with typical deflationary wit, he added that somebody must have written it, “so you might as well take the credit.” In fact, some of the credit should go to Sir Terence Rattigan (sorry, this story is absurdly knight-infested). Hare’s South Downs is a thematic mirror image of Rattigan’s The Browning Version. In the latter an anguished teacher in a public school is given a gift of kindness by a pupil; in the former a tortured pupil receives a similar gift from a parent.

The problem with The Browning Version is that it is a one acter lasting only an hour or so which, by the time you’ve bought dinner for two, tickets and taxis, probably works out at about £3 or £4 a minute. Yet it is, Hare believes, one of two Rattigan masterpieces, the other being The Deep Blue Sea. Traditionally the Browning evening has been filled out with another short Rattigan, Harlequinade, a dull farce. But the Rattigan Estate asked Hare to write a new companion piece and South Downs is the result.

Very positive reviews greeted this double-header’s pre-West End run, but there was one stinker for Hare’s play which objected to its treatment of the tricky but vital concept of transubstantiation – the changing of communion bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The reviewer was the man who had been the chaplain at the high Anglican Lancing College when Hare was a pupil there and it appeared in the school paper. The play, you see, makes fun of the difficulty of explaining the doctrine.

The problem with The Browning Version is that it is a one acter lasting only an hour or so which, by the time you’ve bought dinner for two, tickets and taxis, probably works out at about £3 or £4 a minute.

“He insisted that he had explained it perfectly clearly and had just had a letter from a former pupil thanking him for his clarity in the subject. He did admit the play was very well written, though highly misleading.”

Anyway, here we are, chortling about the chaplain, in some Southwark rehearsal rooms where the plays are being prepared for their London run. Hare looks young for 64 with long, romantically wavy, dyed hair and immaculately casual clothes. I imagine him being vetted every morning by his wife, the fashion designer Nicole Farhi, before he can be allowed out of the environs of Hampstead. He talks quickly and fluently but with a slightly paranoid edge; his eyes keep fixing me as if checking my responses. He knows he is often seen in a less than flattering light.

“There’s a popular fantasy of who I am – that I know exactly what I am doing and I am very arrogant and certain about everything and I am very sure of my own mind. But everything I ever say is probably the result of spending an awful lot of time thinking about something, it’s not off the top my head.”

He is normally a slow writer. The BBC recently asked him for six more episodes of his MI5 TV play Page Eight, but he pointed out that would take him six years so he’s agreed to do two.

“I don’t know how people like Abi Morgan [writer of The Iron Lady] do it.”

But South Downs came so quickly because it seems to have unleashed a pent-up autobiographical impulse. It is set at the same time as The Browning Version – late forties – and Hare, born in 1947, was at Lancing not long after that. The play is about something that plainly obsesses him, the concept of “not getting it”. The hero is 14-year-old John Blakemore who simply does not get the rules by which life at Lancing is conducted. Surrounded by the suave and confident who do get it, he is lonely and isolated. This is at least half of Hare’s own experience; the other half was his delight at being a a scholarship boy and away from home.

“I was born in Bexhill-on-Sea, one of the most boring places in England, and so going to Lancing was completely wonderful. I met poets and musicians and artists and had a wonderful liberal education. And it was a religious education which is terribly good for you because it does at least make you think about the big questions.”

Has he discussed this with Richard Dawkins? He smiles.

“I’ve talked to Dawkins about very little.”

In fact, though an atheist himself, he has limitless admiration for Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. He gets quite angry about his treatment.

“The church has wasted him, I want you to say that. A spiritual organisation finds this deeply spiritual man and they waste him!… Curiosity is a great virtue for me and there is this basic curisoity in Rowan, he is interested in everything.”

When he wasn’t being delighted at Lancing, he was, like Blakemore, stuck in his condition of not understanding the social dynamics of the place. Scroll forward fifty years and he finds himself in exactly the same position with the Cameron-Osborne-Clegg troika.

“They don’t suffer from the ‘I don’t get it’ syndrome, they profoundly get it. One of the interesting things about this government is they are talking about things in secret they don’t talk to us about – we’re going to sell our roads to China, make alcohol 40 p a unit, read all our emails. Nobody else is talking about that stuff!

“They are having this confident discourse among themselves, they believe they are right about all sorts of things they can’t present to the nation. It’s the Bullingdon Club, the people who get it, you and I aren’t invited.”

When he wasn’t being delighted at Lancing, he was, like Blakemore, stuck in his condition of not understanding the social dynamics of the place

This the more familiar voice of Hare, the topical, politically-engaged playwright who can turn out plays about railway nationalisation (The Permanent Way), the inner working sof the Labour Party (The Absence of War) and the Iraq War (Stuff Happens). But here he is writing about his public school life, MI5 and a film script he won’t tell me about.

The problem is he really can’t get the hang of 2012. Once again, he doesn’t get it, in fact the age baffles him as much as the late seventies. Then he was expecting anarchy or a swerve to the left; instead we elected Thatcher. Equally, after the 2008 crash he expected the left to take over; instead we have the toffs and the banks back on top.

“I really don’t understand how they’ve done it. It is the most bewildering piece of political prestidigitation that’s happened in my lifetime. The very people responsible for the financial calamity have somehow managed a second act of blackmail. Having blackmailed the state by saying you need to support us or we will drag you down, they now say you have to reinforce our values or we won’t drag you out of this crisis.”

He wouldn’t know how to write a topical play about all this, but, then, he thinks, neither does anybody else.

It is the most bewildering piece of political prestidigitation that’s happened in my lifetime. The very people responsible for the financial calamity have somehow managed a second act of blackmail

“I’m always interested in new plays that catch on and leave the ghetto of regular theatre. I suppose there is Jerusalem [by Jez Butterworth] and One Man and Two Guvnors [Richard Bean], though that’s more of an entertainment. But there hasn’t been a play that spoke to now and caught on with the public for some time and the reason is it’s a very hard time to write about.”

Television seems to be taking up the burden. Hare thinks the two Danish series Borgen and The Killing caught on because they do feel like now.

“They feel contemporary and what is contemporary about them is this freedom to move up and down society. People respond to those series by thinking, ‘Oh, yeah I recognise this, it is something like life now.”

He’s become a tremendous box-setter, consuming Borgen and The Killing but also the French thriller Spiral and, of course, Mad Men, The Wire and, now, Homeland. He contrasts the urgency of these shows with what he calls ‘The Festival of Reaction’ going on elsewhere with toff-friendly series like Downton Abbey.

He was also angered by the way the success of last year’s Rattigan centenary was written about as a return to traditional theatrical values and a rejection of the Osborne-Pinter revolution as well as all the ensuing wave of experimental drama. It was all, for him, a reactionary rewriting of history. In fact, he says, Rattigan was most upset by the Look Back in Anger generation mainly because he was writing so badly at the time, not because he was being overthrown.

“But I love his best work. It has a certain musical note which is unfailingly moving like certain British music – Elgar or Vaughan Williams. It’s a quiet, desolate tone of resignation and loss and sadness. It’s all about the impossibility of living the life you want to live, it’s usually about sex. Once he hits that particular musical tone I’m very vulnerable to it.”

He drifts into describing Rattigan as ‘minor’ but then pulls back.

In fact, he says, Rattigan was most upset by the Look Back in Anger generation mainly because he was writing so badly at the time, not because he was being overthrown

“Oh I’d better not say that. I think he’s a major artist when he is in that tone, outside he is very uncertain and I haven’t been convinced by the case made for his less celebrated plays. In Praise of Love is a terrible play.”

Anyway, here he is, slowly writing his way to two more television plays and a screenplay he won’t describe. He is probably nervous about that. He had been contracted to write the screenplay from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, but, after three years, and 23 drafts, it was dropped in favour of an HBO season scripted by Franzen. It was, he says, “pretty agonising.” Now, he says, he will only take on films he is reasonably sure will be made.

What he really wants to get back to is the theatre with a big, all round, topical play. He is still not getting it just yet, though there is one glimpse of a suggestion of what ‘it’ might be.

“What we are facing now is helplessness which is often a sort of willed helplessness. … It is still possible for countries to exert some degree of control over their own culture and say this is what defines us. But, for some reason, our politicians have given up on that job completely and we now ascribe virtue only to private things we all say our friends are wonderful and our children – God knows our children – are completely wonderful and everyone we know is wonderful. Everyone we don’t know is horrible, everyone who runs anything is despicable.”

‘It’ might be private virtue, public vice. That’s ‘it’! The Coalition by David Hare – it will run and run.

Planet Hunting

admin — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 06:11:02 +0000

There was a party in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in January. It was, admittedly, a bit of a geeky do by the standards of Puerto Rican hospitality. “It was not exactly that kind of ‘party’,” Abel Mendez tells me.

There was live music, but no dancing, and excellent food at a restaurant on the beach. Abel, my Puerto Rican pal, says: “It was a good time. Cheers.”

The gig was a bit specialised for your average party animal. It was, in fact, the climax of a four-day conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the discovery of some oddities in the “millisecond pulsar PSR1257+12”, a coldly christened, rapidly spinning star 2,000 light years from Earth. These oddities were the biggest thing to happen in the lives of those non-dancing partygoers and, in truth, they may turn out to be the biggest thing in all our lives. You see, it was on January 9, 1992, that it really began to look as though we are not alone. What happened on that date was that a letter appeared in the science journal Nature, containing the momentous words “the pulsar is orbited by two or more planet-sized bodies”.

Thanks to some spectacular astronomy conducted at Arecibo’s giant radio telescope, we had, for the first time, detected planets outside our own solar system. The writers of the Nature letter spoke of the “tantalising possibility” that there could be more planets out there. They weren’t wrong. Current estimates suggest there are 160 billion planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and we have even detected a planet in Andromeda, our closest spiral galactic neighbour. Meanwhile, an international team led by the French studying red dwarf — small, cool — stars has estimated there may be 100 Earth-like planets no more than 30 light years from ours and, therefore, billions of potentially life-bearing planets in the Milky Way. But, of course, the really tantalising possibility is that lots of planets may mean lots of life, maybe intelligent life, and that really does set astronomical hearts pounding. In fact, many now believe that it’s not a matter of if we are to meet ET, but when.

You see, it was on January 9, 1992, that it really began to look as though we are not alone

“Since my childhood,” says Geoff Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley, “my big question has evolved from ‘is there intelligent life in the universe?’ to ‘how common is it?’…We’re trying to ascertain whether there is a galactic country club of civilisations that interact, and have combined their knowledge to arrive at a higher level of understanding of what life is about. I would love to know the answer before I die.”

Marcy and many other astronomers can talk like this because, since 1992, they have collected 760 confirmed “exoplanets”, the name given to planets outside our solar system. We also know of another 2,300 “candidates”, most of which almost certainly are planets, but will not be confirmed until the scientists are 100% sure. The closest known exoplanet to Earth is Epsilon Eridani b, which is only 10 light years away — but don’t get too excited, because one light year is 5.88 trillion miles and, without a Star Trekian faster-than-light warp drive, no human will ever get as far as Epsilon Eridani.

Nor will they ever get to the furthest exoplanets so far discovered in our galaxy: Sweeps-04 and Sweeps-11, both 30,000 light years away, one third of the way across the Milky Way. You are allowed, however, to get excited about four confirmed exoplanets, which have been classified as “potential habitable worlds”. The closest of these is Gliese 581d, which is 20 light years way. “Habitable” means they’re all a bit like Earth and could, therefore, be suitable for life. Terrestrial (Earth-like) planet finding (TPF) is now the hottest game in town; the Holy Grail of the exoplanetary explorers.

In fact, Gliese 581d, though almost six times as big as the Earth, has turned out to be more promisingly like it than expected. In May last year, a French simulation of the planet’s climate found that it was stable and could sustain liquid water on the surface. This made it the first planet to be found in the “habitable zone”. “Searching for Earth-like planets,” Marcy says, “around nearby stars and assessing their habitability is one of the great scientific questions in human history. It reminds me of seeking the origins of human genetics, of the transoceanic voyages of the 1400s and 1500s.”

Finally, and again excitingly, within our own solar system many now think not only Mars but also the Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede and the Saturn moons Titan and Enceladus could contain microbial life. Enceladus is the favourite; it is certainly the most beautiful. Great plumes of cold, pure water ice leap into space from its frozen surface. On Earth, where there is water, there is life.

The idea of exoplanets has been around for a long time. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated about alien worlds and, in the 16th century, an Italian monk named Giordano Bruno suggested the Earth was just one inhabited planet among many. He was burnt at the stake for this heresy. The point was that, for the Catholic Church, the Earth must be the centre of the universe. Copernicus and Galileo proved this wrong and, ever after, we have had to adjust to the fact that Earth is merely a tiny speck in a cosmos full of tiny specks.

So, to the modern scientific imagination, exoplanets seemed inevitable, but, for almost four centuries after Galileo, none could be seen. Perhaps the Earth was special after all; exoplanets were rare, or even nonexistent, and we were just the one freakish case of life in the cosmos. But now, in only 20 years, the scientific consensus has moved from a bleak, empty universe to one that may be teeming with life.

Don Pollacco is an exoplanetary star. Outspoken, funny and very smart, he is a professor of astrophysics at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is also one of the brains behind SuperWasp, which, believe it or not, holds the world record for exoplanet discovery. SuperWasp telescopes are conceived and built in Britain, but have to be located in clearer, higher sites abroad. Their relative cheapness and the way they are put together out of available parts, such as Canon lenses, puts them in the British-boffin tradition of independent technological innovation, usually conducted in the garden shed.

“We’ve got 80 of them now,” he says proudly, “all confirmed.” Pollacco, a gleefully subversive character, doesn’t believe in most claims for confirmed planets and reckons there are only 170, not 760, which means he has found almost half. The reason is, most were found by spectroscopy — the measurement of radiation — as opposed to his preferred “transit method” (see below) and Pollacco thinks transit is much more reliable.

Their relative cheapness and the way they are put together out of available parts, such as Canon lenses, puts them in the British-boffin tradition of independent technological innovation, usually conducted in the garden shed

The current runner-up in the race to find more planets is the Hungarian Automated Telescope Network, which, inexplicably, is not Hungarian but American. Anyway, there are two Wasps — which stands for “wide angle search for planets”: one in South Africa and one in the Canaries. Basically, they’re just big versions of your digital camera and cost £500,000 each. They consist of eight paparazzi lenses (Canon 200mm f1.8s) and a super-pure silicon sensor and, er, that’s it. Unfortunately, the Americans are catching up, thanks to a similarly basic system that has the advantage of being in orbit. But first, some science.

Finding a planet next to a star is fiendishly difficult. Stars are big and bright; planets tend to be smaller and darker. Stars, other than our own sun, are also a long way away. The closest is Proxima Centauri, and that is 4.2 light years (around 25 trillion miles) away. Ever more refined technologies have been devised to conquer these problems, but, so far, the simplest is still the best.

What Pollacco’s Wasps do is photograph the stars as clearly as possible so that any variations of luminosity can be detected. Regular, though tiny, dips in the light coming from the star indicates a planet is passing across the disc of light. This is known as the transit method and, when combined with the radial velocity or Doppler method, it can yield a startling amount of information about the planet, including size, mass and the orbital distance from the star.

There are, potentially, more exotic ways of getting better information. These range from infrared spectroscopy, through vector vortex coronagraphy, to the super-weird gravitational microlensing that uses Einstein’s discovery that light bends round stars in ways that neither I nor, I suspect, you will understand. Gravitational microlensing is good at finding very distant planets — it was used to find that planet in Andromeda. Unfortunately you can’t use this method to confirm a finding because the conditions under which it works only happen once. On the other hand, microlensing does produce many candidates.

If 1992 was the first slow start of all this, 1995 was the year exoplanetary exploration really took off. A planet was confirmed orbiting a “main sequence” star — a normal one like our sun, rather than a pulsar — and it became clear that exoplanets were going to be the next big thing in astronomy, if not human history. Scientists then went into a huddle to discuss the best way of putting something in orbit to detect more planets. All the different technologies were discussed. All would be expensive — done properly the project could cost $10 billion — so ESA (the European Space Agency) and Nasa made a deal to do it together. Then it all went horribly wrong.

Incandescent with rage, Marcy says it was “a diplomatic failure, a technical failure and a scientific failure”. He primarily blames Nasa and gives angry lectures about the agency’s indecision and profligate ineptitude. Cowed Nasa attendees can only agree. Basically Nasa kept changing its mind about the right technology, effectively broke the ESA deal, and the whole thing descended into funding squabbles and technical uncertainties.

“We lost one decade,” says Marcy, “now we’re going to lose two. There is no chance of a new mission before 2020.”

Except that, in the meantime, we have Nasa’s surprise package, Kepler. Stung by accusations that, in effect, it was an organisation whose primary goal was to find the most expensive ways of getting into space, and by the threat of cheaper private-sector competition, Nasa had started a programme of “quick and dirty” — ie, cheap — missions. So, instead of pursuing the multibillion-dollar exoplanetary exotica, it came up with a $300m plan to put a big digital camera in space. The Kepler telescope — named after Johannes Kepler, probably the greatest of all astronomers — was launched in 2009. Of course, this being Nasa, it actually cost $600m and another $30m a year to run. But the big thing, the huge thing, about Kepler is that it works far better then even the most rabid exoplanet hunter could have imagined.

“Kepler came in under the radar,” says Marcy, “and obviously it has been a spectacular success. It is utterly simple, a wide-angle camera with a 95-megapixel detector, it is literally no different from a home digital camera.”

“I suspect Kepler will get close to tens of thousands of planets,” says Duncan Forgan, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh. “We’re going through a seismic change in the field.”

Kepler has yet to pass Pollacco’s number of confirmed exoplanets, but it soon will because of its 2,300 candidates, almost all of which are expected to be confirmed. The main problem is the fact that stars have starspots, just as the sun has sunspots, and these dim the light in the same way as a passing planet. But, once this possibility is eliminated, astronomers can usually be sure they have found a planet.

So now the cosmologists have a vast and growing catalogue of exoplanets to browse. Obviously the most interesting are those that might contain life. My Puerto Rican friend Abel Mendez, a professor of astrophysics, maintains the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog online, which currently lists four habitable planets and 30 potentially habitable exomoons.

Unfortunately it is not clear how far we can take this without spending billions. Scientists are lobbying Nasa to extend the working life of Kepler. It was intended to be operational for three and a half years, but it could be extended by another two years. This will produce thousands more planets, but Kepler is not the right machine to detect life. For that, some very expensive kit has to be placed in orbit.

What would we find? Some years ago the great environmentalist James Lovelock, while working for Nasa, worked out that the best way to look for life on other planets was to test the atmosphere. Life, he pointed out, does not just passively adapt to environments, it changes them. So life constantly modifies the Earth’s atmosphere. We don’t have to fly to distant planets to see if they harbour life, we can just observe their atmospheres.

Such observations might reveal microbial life. Over the past 40 years we have discovered microbes known as extremophiles in ever more difficult conditions on Earth — deep beneath the ocean floor, in the cores of nuclear power stations and so on — and this suggests such bugs could survive in a much wider range of planetary environments. But, in the off-the-record words of one exoplanet hunter: “Would you be happy with that? Would anybody? Who’s going to get excited about a few bugs?”

Much more exciting would be intelligent life or, failing that, plants and animals. But these are several thousand times more unlikely than microbes. “There are,” says Duncan Forgan, “good reasons to be sceptical about finding large-scale, complex life as we do on Earth. Extremophiles are very hardy bacteria, but they are not more than one cell or a handful of cells. So going to a planet and finding alien cows in a field of grass is much less likely than finding alien rocks with layers of scum clinging on to them for dear life.”

The further problem is that alien life may not just be lost in the vastness of space, it may also be lost in time

Forgan explains that the big thing we would be looking for if we ever put up Kepler’s successors will be a phenomenon with the glorious science-fiction name of red edge. Plants eat light and cause changes in the way light is reflected from the Earth. It is “red-shifted”. If we found another planet with the same red shift then we could be pretty sure it contained plant life.

There is, however, a gaping logical hole in the centre of this entire project. This is technically known as the “drunk-under-the-lamppost-problem”. A drunk has lost his keys and is searching for them in the pool of light beneath a lamppost. “Why are you looking there?” asks a passer-by. “Only place I could see them,” replies the drunk.

We only have one example of a life-bearing planet, Earth, so, like the drunk, when we look for life elsewhere, we look in the only places where we think we can find it.

Yet it is entirely possible that other forms of life could be utterly different; it could be something as weird as “a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue”, an invention of the author Douglas Adams. Even on Earth we’ve discovered bugs that eat iron and excrete rust, so we already know that life can be very weird indeed. Some think we should take Adams’s imagined exotica to heart. At the University of St Andrews, Martin Dominik, who seeks exoplanets using gravitational microlensing, is so much in favour of looking for super-strange life forms, he’s not particularly interested in finding another Earth. “We’ve already got one,” he says. “I don’t want to just find another.”

The further problem is that alien life may not just be lost in the vastness of space, it may also be lost in time. We have only been technologically advanced enough to communicate to the universe for about 150 years, since the harnessing of electricity and radio waves. We know perfectly well we are capable of destroying ourselves or being destroyed by, for example, a collision with an asteroid. “Maybe there’s a 0.1% chance we will be wiped out every year,” says Geoff Marcy. “That means we might only last 1,000 years.”

Other communicating civilisations may have come and gone for the same reasons. The universe may have been intelligently alive in the past and it may be in the future, but it may not, apart from us, be alive now.

“The Earth is four billion years old,” says Don Pollacco. “The universe is 13 billion years old. The human race has been around for 1m years and we’ve been technically capable for 150 years. What’s the likelihood ofmeeting a race similar to ours? They might be millions of years more advanced or less advanced. Would we recognise them? Would they want to talk to us? Maybe they’ve already been here and just regarded us like cave men.”

Though the odds may be against them, the enthusiasm of the exoplanetary explorers burns more brightly than ever, however. They scan Kepler’s regular downloads of thousands of candidates hoping for the Holy Grail — an Earth-sized planet orbiting just far enough from a medium-sized star so that its surface temperature hovers between 0 and 100C, allowing water to remain liquid. Add to that a life-altered atmosphere with a red edge and, well, that would be some party and, I bet, this time there would be dancing.

The Once and Future Tee-Mo

admin — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 07:02:07 +0000

Timothy Mo points at his chin. “Look at this face. This is the face of the future, Bryan. Everybody will look like this in 100 years’ time.”

I lean closer to the screen to study his features; he, you see, is on a hotel veranda in Manila, and I am in my kitchen in London, so we are communicating via Apple’s FaceTime. Closer study reveals the Anglo-Chinese face of a fit 61-year-old.

“Actually, I look terribly chinky. When I was a boy, I looked quite western, but as the fat has left my face with age… I mean, I really look like Fu Manchu.”

The reason Mo thinks his is the face of the future is the Chinese government’s one-child-per-family policy. Because the Chinese prefer boys, this has led to significantly more males than females: “All these randy Chinamen will have to go overseas to find wives and produce mixed-race children like me.”

Funny — but there’s a poignant subtext to this. Mo wants his face to endure into the future for literary, more than demographic, reasons. “There are authors whose reputation is highest in their lifetime, like Iris Murdoch. She’s declining now. I’m not well thought of now, but, you know, when Tee-Mo is dead… What do you think?”

All these randy Chinamen will have to go overseas to find wives and produce mixed-race children like me.

What do I think? Let me start from the beginning. In the 1970s and 1980s, the British novel was taken over by the non- or not-quite-English. Salman Rushdie, Caryl Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro and Mo conducted an operation that Rushdie called “the empire strikes back” and Mo described as “a coup in the sleepy little kingdom of English fiction”. The “Subcontinental fabulists”, he wrote in The New York Times in 1988, “rose up and slaughtered the Kitchen Realists in a Night of Long Pens”.

The leaders of the coup — Martin Amis and Julian Barnes are honorary members — are now, mostly, grand late-middle-aged men of letters, with publishers, agents, adoring fans, all the usual paraphernalia. But not Mo; oh, no, not Mo. Tee-Mo is that generation’s wild card or, if you prefer, fly in the ointment. Having produced four highly acclaimed novels, winning numerous awards and generally surfing the post-imperial wave, he went rogue. But I will come back to that in a moment. The range of the novels was breathtaking. The Monkey King was a comedy of manners set in Hong Kong; Sour Sweet was about the trials of a deracinated Chinese family in London; An Insular Possession was an epic fictionalised history of Hong Kong; The Redundancy of Courage took on the story of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.

Mo’s first memory is of Easter 1952 in Hong Kong, when his father, a Chinese lawyer, and his English mother were having a row in which little Tim’s egg had got trampled. He was crawling between their legs, trying to pick up the pieces. Soon after, his parents divorced and his mother married an ex-navy Englishman — “the great father figure of my life”.

He spent a lot of time in the servants’ quarters and picked up low-class rural Cantonese, which embarrassed his Chinese grandmother. When he was 10, the family left Hong Kong for Britain, and by the time the P&O ship reached Suez, three weeks later, he had forgotten the language completely. “The words wouldn’t come, English had replaced it. It’s a language that’s easy to lose, and I had never learnt to read or write it. I went to a Chinese Catholic school called the Convent of the Precious Blood, and I refused to learn Chinese characters. I hated the culture so much, so they put me in an English school, I learnt to read the alphabet and it was wonderful.”

He hated the “rigid obedience” of Chinese culture. Every Chinese new year, he was dressed in a little mandarin suit with a black bobble hat when he just wanted to wear jeans and baseball boots. So he cut up the mandarin suit and got punished for it. Punishment seems to have happened a lot. In the convent, he was put in the corner with a dunce’s cap on and tape over his mouth because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, write “four” in Cantonese.

Not that England was much better: “It was absolute hell, like Lord of the Flies. I went to a particularly ghastly prep school.” But at least he had found his calling. He knew he was going to be a novelist from the age of 12. He had read The Pickwick Papers and Don Quixote by the time he was nine. He absorbed the tradition of the English novel, but with certain gaps. “As far as I am concerned, you can keep EM Forster and Jane Austen. I don’t see what the fuss is about. A Passage to India is a really pathetic attempt to understand another culture. And that bloody cave. What happened? Did he get his dick out and wave it at her?”

Mo the loner never belonged to London literary life — “I am antisocial and I never enjoyed meeting other writers” — and neither did he feel, except in the vaguest post-imperial sense, part of any movement. Indeed, he was perhaps the hardest of that group to define. “That’s the problem with me. Publishers were paying me a lot of money, but I am a cerebral author and not everybody can read me. I have a slightly unconventional view of the world, so my market is very small and I have no constituency.”

Nevertheless, he was branded part of the new wave and was receiving big advances for his books — advances not strictly justified by his sales. “The moment couldn’t last. They can sell 20,000 in hardback and 60,000 in paperback, but it is not enough to recoup the money.”

A Passage to India is a really pathetic attempt to understand another culture. And that bloody cave. What happened? Did he get his dick out and wave it at her?

Then he tells me a story that seems to have been the last straw. He was in the office of some big man in publishing, discussing business, when a man came in carrying a manuscript. The big man told him just to put it “over there”, then waved him out. Mo asked who it was, and it turned out to be a distinguished novelist delivering his latest book. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, I’ve read this person’s books.’ This guy was what they call a mid-list author. He doesn’t sell many copies, so they don’t take much trouble. ‘Christ,’ I thought, ‘nobody is ever going to treat me like that.’ ”

Having started out being looked after by two great editors — Diana Athill and Carmen Callil — Mo now found himself at the mercy of a much more corporatised industry that judged authors solely in cash terms. “What Diana and Carmen had in common was that they liked books and respected authors. So many publishers now despise authors, partly because most good authors are such inadequate human beings, they wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”

He came to loathe and mistrust the industry, even believing royalty payments were fiddled. So he went rogue and decided to self-publish. It was a move that inspired derision. “What surprised me was that people took the side of the publishers against me. There was a flood of venom about me in the papers. I was really startled. I thought people wouldn’t be interested or would take my side.”

His next two novels — Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard and Renegade or Halo2 — were self-published. He found it a lot easier. Unfortunately, neither book did too well, and, as a result, attracted charges that he couldn’t manage without an editor. Happily, his new one, Pure, blows that theory out of the water. It is a fantastic read.

It is not, however, self-published. Mo is currently broke, because he paid out $100,000 in medical bills for an in-law in America, so he got Turnaround, a sales and distribution company, to publish Pure. This keeps him pure as far as London publishing is concerned.

It comes 12 years after Renegade, and it couldn’t be more different, not least because the star of Pure is a Thai ladyboy called Snooky, not a character with whom he could easily identify. “The narrator of my last book had an IQ of 170, he was 6ft 3in tall, he was a tremendous athlete and he had a 10-inch dick. I liked being him, but I don’t like being a drug-taking transvestite.” Pure is also a complex assembly of intertwined plots told by unreliable narrators. Mo has never used unreliable narration and has always been anti-plot: “I think of plot as the enemy of character. But I was lucky. In Pure, the characters drove the plot.”

It is about, among many other things, Islamic terrorism, and it goes very deeply into the mind-set of the terrorists. Mo fears he will be accused of glamorising them, and he certainly likes some of the jihadists, but there can be no doubt about his horror at what they do. The book is set primarily in southern Thailand, a place, he says, that has been “festering away” since 1998. He hated going there for his research, but he has always been committed to accuracy in his books. He positively despises books that he feels do not get local colour right. He wrote an excoriating review of John Lanchester’s Hong Kong novel Fragrant Harbour — “an exercise in total futility” — primarily because of its inaccuracies. “I’m usually quite tolerant of other books, but I feel the novel is such an important form — it tries to change other people for the better. So I am intolerant of bad novels.”

While writing the book, he developed the habit of saying paragraph-long chunks out loud in the street or at home. It is, he says, a habit that was partly responsible for the departure of his girlfriend. In fact, she really seems to have gone because she found a job in America. So now he lives alone in Hong Kong, travelling around Southeast Asia on budget airlines (“They keep bouncing me,” he complains) to research his next two books, both of which are nonfiction. He almost never comes back to England — he left years ago, when he started Pure — though he had to several times recently, when his mother was dying.

I’m usually quite tolerant of other books, but I feel the novel is such an important form — it tries to change other people for the better. So I am intolerant of bad novels.

“I miss the stability and security of life in England. I think what I was struck by when I went back was how many foreigners there were in London. I was on a bus, and I noticed there wasn’t a single Anglo. And I thought, ‘Crikey, what has happened in the past 10 years?’ ”

He is a touch edgy about his personal life. When I ask him whether he has children, the Fu Manchu face contorts — “Children? Er, yeah, er, mmmmm… I’ll say yes.” But, otherwise, he just wants to talk and talk, perhaps because he recently emerged from the long silence of writing a novel, but also because, I can detect, he really does want to know what I — and everybody else — think of his writing.

So, when Tee-Mo is dead, what do I think? No-brainer. Those Anglo-Chinese faces will be poring over his books for decades to come, for two reasons: he was the heroic pioneer of the coming age of universal self-publishing, and he’s a wonderful writer.

The Truth of Islam

admin — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 06:57:50 +0000

Before a drop of his blood touched the ground, Mohamed Merah found himself in Paradise. Having killed three French soldiers and four Jews and, having been dispatched himself by a single shot to the head from a special forces rifle, he was a shahid, a martyr, one of the elect who had died for his faith.

Or so he would have been told by the men that claim to be his sponsors, Jund al-Khilafah, the Soldiers of the Caliphate, a group based on the Afghan-Pakistani border and linked to both Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani network, the most resilient anti-Nato force in Afghanistan.

Such groups have their political ends in this world, which they pursue by sustaining young men in a permanent rage. But these ends are underpinned by an absolute certainty about the next world, a place that can be entered only by the pure, those who have faith in the Koran as the words of God transmitted to his prophet, Muhammad, and in the exact details of the life and sayings of the prophet as laid down by Islamic tradition since the 9th century.

Non-Muslims may not share this certainty but they fear its power. In what is only the latest sign that the West’s liberal values have been compromised by the jihadists’ homicidal rage, a few days ago The New York Times refused to carry a full-page ad critical of Islam. What was shocking was that the paper had just carried a full-page anti-Catholic ad.

In London the National Theatre is staging a play about the deathly silence that often falls when talk turns to Islam. Can We Talk about This?, by Lloyd Newson, investigates the way Islamism collides with western free speech. In total contrast, the British Museum’s Hajj exhibition celebrates the beauty of the faith. That it has been made possible by Saudi money infuriated the columnist Nick Cohen, who claimed it was a whitewash of the violence and oppression that lie behind Saudi management of the great Muslim pilgrimage. Islam is everywhere accompanied by anxiety and controversy.

But what if it’s not true? None of it? An average western non-believer may think it is not true that “martyrs” go straight to heaven or that the Koran is the literal word of God, but will probably accept the narrative laid down by Islamic scholars. This is generally thought to be more historically secure than any of the stories told by the other great religions. Even Salman Rushdie, one of Islam’s hate figures, thinks so.

Holland’s book leaves almost no aspect of the traditional story of Islam intact“The degree of authority one can give to the evangelists about the life of Christ is relatively small,” he has written, “whereas for the life of Muhammad we know everything, more or less. We know where he lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socioeconomic circumstances of the time.”

Islam is everywhere accompanied by anxiety and controversy. But what if it’s not true? None of it?

Most western academics would now disagree with every word of this, and their scholarly scepticism is about to explode into the wider world with the publication of a book by the historian Tom Holland — In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World.

In essence, it is Holland’s view that Muhammad’s life and sayings were constructed long after his death in 632 (or, according to some scholars, 634) to support and explain the Koran. He embarked on the project five years ago with the usual assumption that the stories were literally true.

“When I began to write,” he says, “I had no real idea of the minefield I was stepping into. From various books about Muhammad I had assumed the sources were pretty solid and there must be contemporary sources for these stories. It was quite alarming when I discovered this wasn’t the case. I would keep going to the British Library and my jaw would drop at the implications of what I was reading.”

He found that we seem to know next to nothing about the central sacred text of Islam. This holy text, not the prophet, is the core of Islam. It is what Christ is to Christianity. It is the message; Muhammad is only the messenger. Yet Fred Donner, one of America’s greatest Islamic scholars, rounded up his life’s work with a remarkable profession of ignorance.

Donner wrote: “Those of us who study Islam’s origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Koran . . . They include such questions as: how did the Koran originate? Where did it come from and when did it first appear? How was it first written? In what kind of language was — is — it written? What form did it take? Who constituted its first audience? How was it transmitted from one generation to another, especially in its early years? When, how and by whom was it codified?”

The Koran was undoubtedly already around at the time of the prophet, though in what form is not clear. For centuries there were different versions of it. The belief that there was only one text dates from as recently as 1924, when an edition was published in Cairo that, as Holland puts it, “went on to become the global standard”.

In an astonishing discovery 40 years ago, 17 sacks were found by workers in the ceiling of a mosque in Sana’a, now the capital of Yemen but once the capital of the Jewish kingdom of Himyar. They contained parchment fragments of “what are almost certainly the oldest Korans in existence”.

Only two German scholars were allowed to study them, and one, Gerd- Rudiger Puin, concluded that the book, like the Bible, had evolved over time and was a “cocktail of text” — a finding that casts doubt on the belief that it is the final word of God. The Yemeni authorities were furious. The texts have remained unpublished and no western scholar has since been allowed to examine them.

“If, as both Puin and his colleague have argued, these earliest fragments are to be dated to the beginning of the 8th century, it would suggest that their ultimate origins must lie well before that time,” writes Holland.

The texts have remained unpublished and no western scholar has since been allowed to examine them.

Holland also does not think Mecca, revered as the birthplace of Muhammad, can have been where the story of the prophet was based. The multiple references to cattle, which could not be raised in such a dry place, and olive trees, which similarly did not grow there, suggest a location further north. Mecca barely seems to have existed at the time and is never referred to even by the highly organised Romans.

Despite vastly increased western interest in Islam, the fierce controversy over its origins has not reached the public realm. Holland says: “What is interesting about the academic debate is that it is so seismic and yet it has barely been noticed in the world outside academia.”

Seismic is the word. Holland’s book leaves almost no aspect of the traditional story of Islam intact as he charts its rise to global power from the ashes of the Roman and Persian empires.

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the ruler who launched the great phase of Arab imperial growth in the late 7th century, established Muhammad and the Koran as the foundations of this new empire’s faith. Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and inscribed it with passages from the Koran and references to the prophet. “He was like a cross between the emperor Constantine and St Paul,” says Holland.

Both the detailed biography of Muhammad and the enormous list of his sayings — the hadiths — were compiled almost 200 years after his death, supposedly passed down orally from eyewitnesses through the generations. In fact, they were attempts to codify the faith of an empire that was rapidly spreading from India to the Atlantic.

To justify these additions, explanatory links — isnads — back to the time of the prophet were constructed by Islamic scholars. They are easily debunked, however, because “once you tug on one thread, the entire tapestry falls apart”, says Holland.

Hadiths were supposed to contain “timeless and universal” advice. Yet even early on, he points out in his book, “a number of towering Muslim scholars . . . freely acknowledged that innumerable hadiths had been faked; that caliphs, lawyers and heretics had invented them willy-nilly to serve their various purposes; that many hadiths contradicted one another”.

once you tug on one thread, the entire tapestry falls apart

Modern scholars, he adds, have shown that even the most seemingly authentic hadiths reflect controversies that were raging 200 years after Muhammad’s time. “Over and over again, the prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival and often directly antagonistic traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs or the superstitions of infidel peoples.”

If the hadiths were fakes, Holland points out, then so were the isnads that had been deployed to buttress them, “. . . and if the isnads cannot be trusted, then how can we know for sure that the Koran dates from the time of Muhammad? How can we know who compiled it, from what sources and for what motives? Can we even be sure that its origins lie in Arabia? In short, do we really know anything at all about the birth of Islam?”

He finds a clue in the similarity between some hadiths and the Jewish Torah. Both prescribe stoning as the punishment for adulterers, yet the Koran suggests “100 lashes”.

Holland points out that Islam continued the Christian and Jewish tradition of faith in one god. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity — one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?”

Holland knows taking a historical scalpel to the body of faith causes pain, and he regrets that. “On the other hand, if you want to make sense of Islam and you are not a believer, you have no choice.”

Is Holland worried for his own safety after publishing such material? On the contrary, he is remarkably calm. “I can’t imagine that any Muslim would be overly upset because by definition I am not a Muslim so I don’t think the Koran comes from God and everything is predicated on my presumption that the story of Islam must be human. My take is very, very overtly that of someone who is not a Muslim.”

Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Islamist leader who once threatened to give the West a 9/11 “day after day after day”, confirms this on the phone from Lebanon. “People are entitled to write the books they like as long as they do not insult the honour of the prophet. Some have said he is a homosexual or that he had sex with children: these are insults. But he can say he does not believe or even that the prophet does not exist and Muslims will just laugh. It is all in the scriptures.”

The really big question is what effect research into the roots of Islam will have on the faith worldwide. Christianity has already gone through this crisis. In the 19th century biblical scholars examined the Christian stories as history. Their conclusions, combined with discoveries in biology and geology, resulted in a crisis that spread secularism throughout much of the West. Yet the faith survives precisely because it is a faith. Would Islam, if it were subjected to the same critical analysis? Many liberal Muslims say it already has been.

From the beginning Islam has been a pluralist faith and its scholars have engaged in debates about the meaning and truth of all interpretations. Fundamentalists will reject such accounts and debates. They seek an absolute, literal truth to shore up their faith.

Holland compares the Islamists’ search for a core simplicity to the rise of Protestantism in Europe. Hardline Protestants wanted to sweep away the impure accretions of tradition embodied in the Catholic Church. In one sense it worked, but in another it didn’t. Protestants renewed their faith, but their critical methods later undermined the faith of millions.

The hadiths and the Koran were orally recorded by others and the whole tradition was passed on from person to person. They still stand the test of time.

“If fundamentalists of any type attempt to go back to a truth that has been hidden, to get back to the original,” Holland says, “they risk finding out that there is nothing there.”

The violent radicals who back dangerous outcasts such as Merah will dismiss all this as a western plot to crush the faith. But there are many more moderate Muslim voices.

Ed Husain abandoned radical Islam and is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He retains his faith and argues that the gap between the prophet and the written versions of his life and sayings is easily explained.

“Islam was always an oral tradition,” he says. “The hadiths and the Koran were orally recorded by others and the whole tradition was passed on from person to person. They still stand the test of time.”

He says Holland is on much firmer ground when he questions the claim of the fundamentalists that there is one true version of the faith. The radicals ignore the pluralist traditions of Islam when they wave their AK-47s and proclaim their way is the only way.

Maajid Nawaz — one of the founders with Husain of the Quilliam Foundation, which works against extremism — also points out: “Globalisation has allowed previously isolated pockets of parochialism to feel a sense of brotherhood with other extremists who are also isolated, allowing them to connect up and feel they are part of a global community.”

Where once Merah would have been just a criminal outcast, he becomes, online, a global warrior, his squalid death elevated to martyrdom. The rest of the world then finds itself cowering in fear of such people and The New York Times pulls its ad.

Soul Searching

admin — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:44:29 +0000

When she was 16, Nina Sellars had one of the first MRI scans in Australia. It revealed a tumour on the pineal gland at the centre of her brain — the site of the human soul, according to the philosopher Descartes. After an operation, Sellars was blind for 18 months. She had been ready to take up a music scholarship, but, when she recovered her sight, something had changed: “It was disturbing. Some people have a phantom limb — I had phantom eyesight. I didn’t feel comfortable with what I was seeing. Everything had lost its dimensions.”

She is now 40, with normal eyesight and has become an internationally established artist. One of her pictures, Scan, memorialises her MRI and her operation. It shows an empty skull from above. At the back, where a 10cm square panel had been cut in her head by the surgeons, there is a gap in the bone filled by a QR barcode (the square kind you can use to check in at airports). “I replaced the brain with a QR code, which is a body of information. Our bodies are now being translated so much into images that we are becoming more insubstantial as we are becoming more transparent.”

Scan will be shown at Brains: The Mind as Matter, an exhibition opening this month at the Wellcome Collection. The show does exactly what it says on the tin: it looks at the way scientists and, increasingly, artists have explored the brain as a material object. It is about, in the words of its curator, Marius Kwint, “a physical encounter with the brain… We look at it the way we might look at the use of wood in culture — chopping, slicing, freezing”.

Our bodies are now being translated so much into images that we are becoming more insubstantial as we are becoming more transparent

Be warned: Kwint points out that this can get gory. There is, for example, a film of a brain being dissected. “It is quite a powerful thing when the knife goes through the brain. Quite a lot of aspects of culinary technology are used, like breadboards and a big knife. It’s quite a fascinating, low-technology process.”

A knife in the brain is more shocking than, for example, a knife in the liver because we have become acclimatised to the idea that our true being resides in this soft grey and white matter. The idea that we are, in some as yet unknown way, our physical brains has penetrated mass culture in the image of the “brain in the jar”. In the popular sci-fi-inspired imagination, we could continue to exist as mere brains separated from our bodies. It is a theme that reaches its comic climax when Steve Martin falls in love with a brain in a jar, in the film The Man with Two Brains (1983). Disembodied romance is a joke, but, thanks to our modern sense that our souls are made of soft tissue, it is not simply funny.

This anatomistic sense of self inspires artists as well as scientists. Prior to x-rays and MRI scans, anatomy was always a subject that brought together scientists and artists, simply because somebody had to do the drawings. Vesalius, the great 16th-century anatomist, employed Jan Stephen van Calcar, a pupil of Titian, to illustrate his masterpiece On the Fabric of the Human Body. Joseph Town, a 19th-century classical sculptor, also produced astonishing wax skeletons.

Or, almost in our time, there are the exquisite drawings of Audrey Arnott. She was the medical illustrator for the neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns. Her drawings are striking for their anatomical perfection, but also, strangely, for their poignancy. She draws the patients as fully realised characters, a disturbing effect when the brain is almost fully exposed. Then there is the fashion photographer Corinne Day, who, having been diagnosed with a brain tumour, arranged for the ensuing medical processes to be pictured in unflinching detail. The doctors could not save her; Day died of the tumour in August 2010.

And, though it was not intended as art, one of the most sculpturally dramatic images in the Wellcome show is a “corrosion cast” of the brain’s blood vessels. This is made by injecting a rapidly hardening plastic into the veins and arteries, then corroding away the flesh in acid. What is left is an astonishing brilliant-red bush, the armature of the self.

Perhaps the most resonant image seen in London recently was a Leonardo da Vinci drawing at the National Gallery. This showed the interior of a man’s head as almost entirely empty. Leonardo believed that human thought resided in the ventricles — voids — in the brain. The workings of the mind were simply too fleeting to be trapped in ordinary matter. Our modern idea that it must be found in the soft surrounding tissue would have seemed absurd to him.

No subject could be more topical. A few years ago, the most familiar image of science was the double helix of the DNA molecule. Genetics became the hot science of the moment, reaching a climax with the deciphering of the human genome in 2003. Here, it was thought, we would find the physical basis of what it was to be human — our souls would at last be laid bare on the laboratory bench. Thanks to the double helix, it all looked so simple.

At once, there were problems. For a start, there was the shocking discovery that we had only 23,000 genes, 40% fewer than corn. It had been thought that we had at least 100,000. And the entire genome was only 2% as big as that of the flower Paris japonica. How could human complexity be explained by such meagre genetic information? Furthermore, the expected medical benefits did not appear as quickly as promised. The totem pole of the double helix began to look distinctly disappointing.

Then, thanks to rapid improvements in brain-scanning technology and the resulting flood of news from neuroscientists, a new totem of contemporary science at once became available — the human brain, as revealed in livid detail by the MRI scanner. This, surely, must contain the human mind, if not the soul. Now, with scanners and scalpels, we can take man and, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, “lay his brain upon the board/And pick the acrid colours out”. Well, maybe. These are early days. The neuroscientist Colin Blakemore has compared our present scanners to the telescope used by Galileo. “The smart neuroscientists agree,” Kwint says, “that we haven’t really got very far in relating structure to function. Steven Rose [a neurobiologist] says that brain science is data-heavy but theory-light”.

The difficulties — and, perhaps, impossibilities — of finding the mind or the soul in the physical structure of the brain will be discussed (full disclosure) in a series of three conversations I will be conducting with Iain McGilchrist, Matthew Taylor and Raymond Tallis, to run alongside the Wellcome exhibition. The show provides the evidence for the case to be heard, but the jury is expected to be out for some years yet.

As far as science is concerned, the next step is to look at the brain not as a product of the genes, but rather as a product of its trillions of connections. This is the rising science known as “connectomics”, and it seems to suggest that the brain is determined more by nurture than by nature.

Now, with scanners and scalpels, we can take man and, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, “lay his brain upon the board/And pick the acrid colours out”

Whether it will be a soul at all, or just the product of the workings of a phenomenally complex machine consisting of about 1.5kg of, primarily, fat and water, is the big issue. The materialist view is that, of course, it must be. It is this view that, since the 19th century, has defined but also frustrated brain science. The strong materialist conviction is that we can find consciousness and all the other attributes of human beings by looking at the physical structure of the brain. Once this was done crudely by weighing the brain of (dead) prominent figures. Anthropometrists, as they were known, were convinced that lower humans — “the average bushman” — had brains weighing as little as 1kg. When it was found that the brain of the great French statesman Léon Gambetta weighed only 1.16kg, the discipline was on the slide.

More subtle attempts were made to find Lenin’s genius in his brain, but these were discredited, as were similar claims about Einstein’s brain — you can see slices of the latter at the Wellcome show. These also went nowhere, not least because the subjects, being dead, could not report on their thought processes.

The Harvard doctor Harvey Cushing, a star of the Wellcome show and the godfather of modern neurosurgery, had, from the start of the 20th century, begun to change all that by intervening directly in the brains of the living; then, finally, along came scanning, which could show brain activity in real time and therefore correlate brain states with mind states.

To be frank, scanning does not yet really work. As a medical tool, it is unsurpassed — Nina Sellars can testify to that — but as a soul-searching mechanism, it is still outclassed by theologians and artists. I had a 2½-hour scan while researching my book The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky, but most of the results were either anomalous or simply bizarre. Reciting poems I loved or recounting painful memories produced no response in the areas of my brain that are supposed to handle emotions. Some, however, seemed very accurate. My sense of humour was, sadly, pretty much mainstream.

For artists, the issue is to turn this new form of soul-searching into some kind of synthesis of the way we feel now about human identity. The fact that we may — or may not — be poised to discover the roots of our being is cunningly captured by the Wellcome’s use of contemporary art. The primary image, Headache, by Helen Pynor, shows a detailed and very modern picture of the brain combined with some very poor and ancient advice: “Press brown paper soaked in vinegar against the forehead.”

Now we have scanners, soul-searchers, that show us — what, exactly? A mass of grey and white fat and water, illuminated by little electric shocks. If that is us, then Sellars got it exactly right when she said: “We are becoming more insubstantial as we are becoming more transparent.”

Overthrowing Chomsky

admin — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:40:46 +0000

In the Wari’ language of Brazil, the word for “wife” translates as “our vagina”. Your first reaction is probably that this is insultingly reductive, and that the Wari’ men accord very low status to their women. On second thoughts, perhaps the word honours the women as the very source of life and is thus the highest possible compliment the men could pay. Which is it to be?

Daniel Everett, despite having co-authored the only grammar of the Wari’ language, cannot answer that question. In fact, nobody can answer that question without conducting a systematic analysis — a “thick description”, in anthropological terms — of Wari’ culture. And that is the big point: language is, ultimately, the tool of a culture.

Or take the Piraha people deep in the Amazonian jungle. Everett spent a total of 30 years with them and speaks the language fluently. In the early years, he — a white-faced, red-bearded man who plainly was not Piraha — would address them in their own tongue. They stared at him with open-mouthed amazement and did not respond. They regarded him, he realised, as “a big, bipedal parrot”; he was merely mouthing the words — he could not possibly know what they meant. In technical terms, they could not extend their own “theory of mind” to include a non-Piraha. Their language is who they, uniquely, are.

Everett has now emerged from the jungle — he is dean of arts at Bentley University in Massachusetts — to produce a book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. This is an intellectual cri de coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity. After reading it, you will — should — care as much about disappearing languages as you do about the clubbed seal or the harpooned whale. But, first, you need to know about Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky is to linguistics what Freud once was to psychoanalysis: he is the subject itself. But it was Freud’s fate to be overthrown, and that is what is now happening to Chomsky; after this book, it is hard to imagine how he will be resurrected. Irascible Chomsky now regards Everett as a charlatan.

This is an intellectual cri de coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity

The argument is about nature versus nurture. After the evils of Nazi naturism — the Jews, they said, were “naturally” inferior — intellectuals became nurturists, believing that people were made, and could be improved, by society. The pendulum started to swing back in the 1970s and 1980s with the arrival of evolutionary psychology and a new belief in the existence of “human nature”. The orthodoxy since then — propagated by EO Wilson, Steven Pinker and, pre-eminently, Chomsky — has been that we come into the world equipped with a battery of “instincts”, including language, derived from our Darwinian inheritance.

In the case of language, one big argument for this is the speed with which children learn to speak, picking up vocabulary and complex syntax in a few months. Chomsky said this was because we are born with a capacity for a universal grammar, and that, ultimately, all languages could be traced back to this biologically determined form.

Reasonable as this may sound, there is very little — Everett would say there is no — evidence for an inborn universal grammar. There is no “language instinct”, as Pinker calls it, because a language is learnt and an instinct, by definition, is not.

This book is an assembly of empirical evidence against Chomsky and Pinker. Children, for example, do not learn syntax as such, they learn words and sentences as units of meaning. This gives them a feeling for sentences, which becomes, in adult terms, syntax. Similarly, there is no universal grammar that can be detected beneath all the 7,000 languages in the world. The variety is as bewildering in languages as it is in forms of behaviour, because languages are tools of the culture from which they spring; they are, in a sense, the greatest works of art that humans have ever created.

Crucially, this means that human cultures can be opaque to each other. “Different languages and different cultures can,” Everett writes, “produce different thoughts.” Language is a cultural, not a biological, tool, precisely because it gives meaning to the world in which it is formed; it is not some pure Platonic entity that adapts itself to that world, it is a product of the world. So, to know why wives are called vaginas in Wari’, you need, as far as possible, to become a Wari’.

This is to scratch the surface of a very rich but also very readable book. Everett is not the first to challenge the reign of Chomsky, but he is the most accessible, and, thanks to his years in Amazonia, the most intimately informed. But, graduates in linguistics, beware: you may discover you have been horribly mistaught.