The Impossibility of Words

I’ve often wondered how it’s possible for non musicians to write about music. Indeed, writing about music can be pretty tough because words don’t convey sound, only an approximation and then only in the very best poetry.

When I was young and cool (HA…not sure the ‘cool’ bit ever happened but, hey, I can dream!) I used to read the British music weekly New Musical Express (NME for short) a publication covering the then popular genre of rock and roll. I always found the ability of journalists to describe what they heard to be remarkably limited. The, then really popular, BBC Radio 1 show Steve Wright in the Afternoon used to feature a comedy character called The Music Journalist who would describe everything as a remarkable ‘sonic cathedral of sound’. Which wasn’t too far from the NME.

The great Roddy Doyle novel, ‘The Commitments’, about a soul band forming and breaking up in the Irish capital, Dublin, of all places, is equally unable to describe the music it’s trying to depict. You’re left to your own knowledge and memories of Wilson Pickett, James Brown and others.

This is why Alan Parker’s movie of ‘The Commitments’ is so much better than the novel; you see and hear the real sound of the music; even if Doyle’s writing is witty, full of life and gives you a good grounding in a moment of the lives of some ‘typical’ Dubliners.

The Commitments, Try a Little Tenderness…So cool, there are icicles on the ceiling

1991, the year ‘The Commitments’ movie appeared, I saw Bertrand Blier’s ‘Trop Belle Pour Toi’ (Too Beautiful for You) for the first time. It’s a slightly strange telling of the manager of a car dealership (Gerard Depardieu) falling out of love with his beautiful wife (Carole Bouquet) and into love with his plain, frumpy secretary (Josiane Balasko).

Trop Belle Pour Toi…A waking dream that isn’t a nightmare

We see dream sequences in which Balasko tells the car salesman how she thinks he will leave her; dinner parties thrown by Depardieu and Bouquet in which the tension and pressure to stay with such an accomplished, beautiful woman is palpable.

The whole film feels like a dream. At the centre of it is a piece of music, Franz Schubert’s ‘Piano Impromptu No. 3’. At one point, Depardieu is listening to this whilst his family are asleep, he simply says “this music, it shatters me”. When I heard it and saw this, I was helpless. If ever there was music to fall in love to, this is it.

Now that I’ve thrown up my hands at the difficulty of describing music with words, I’m going to attempt to tell you why this music reduces me to a misty eyed jelly. There is a problem, I can’t read or write music, my descriptive abilities in musical theory are non-existent. So this is going to be difficult.

But here goes.

This is a work meant for piano, you don’t hear any other instrument. The first couple of bars are wonderfully delicate, tender and tentative as if beginning is something to be shy of. As the main motif moves on, a fluttering as if in a gentle breeze picks up underneath it.

What’s that about, you might wonder? The main sound gives you an aching, yearning of the kind you feel when what you need is in sight but only a fingers length out of reach. The piano breeze tells you what’s going on in the heart, the gentle emotion rising to near fever, calming and building again; whilst the main tune (how inadequate that word is here) keeps up a front of ‘should I, shouldn’t I?’ At the half way point, the keys are struck so gently it’s hard to believe they’ve been touched, more they’ve been breathed on to produce the lightest of chimes.

I’ve always had a sense of two people coming close, moving away, raising their hands in a half gesture before pulling back. All the while, what they’re thinking, the pounding of the heart remains private and unspoken, without needing to be spoken.

Sometimes the couple is faced with the storm of circumstance trying to pull them apart; be it personality, family, work, whatever. If they’re meant for each other, the couple might be inviolable regardless of what happens, like a lighthouse on the edge of an ocean hurricane.

It finishes with the same heartbreaking ache that began it, if maybe more knowing and understanding than before. All achieved without words, without touch; only through the most delicate, intricate of sounds barely registering but doing so powerfully.

This is what’s going on in this piano impromptu. No other music moves and touches me in quite the way this does.

Israel and Gaza: the more things stay the same, the more they change

So another ceasefire has ended in Gaza.   A minor interruption to an offensive (offensive, in its truest sense) designed, we’re told, to destroy tunnels constructed by Hamas to bring in supplies under the Egyptian border, or to take Hamas fighters under the border and into Israel.

For all that, the most vivid images coming out of that small territory involve the destruction of schools, hospitals and the killing of civilians.

The other day I read a comment that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Israel to deny that it is targeting infrastructure.  Because, self evidently, it has been attacking infrastructure.

Smoke rises from a building in Gaza.

Firstly, I want to say that I think Israel clearly has and must have a right to exist.  That’s a statement of first principles.  What it does not have is a right to do what it has done in Gaza.

Secondly, Hamas is a militant Islamist grouping that is not averse to hiding itself within the civilian population or using foreign journalists for cover.  It is not an organization with a democratic vision, being more akin to Saudi Arabia or the Muslim Brotherhood in outlook (if not loyalty).  I would not want to live in a society dominated by Hamas.

What has Israel done in Gaza?

Prior to the siege, Gaza was a nightmare for the IDF.  A place that exacted a disproportionate toll on its soldiers; out of all keeping with the number of settlers, who lived there and its geographical size.  The occupation had failed in a way the West Bank occupation hadn’t.

The withdrawal and removal of settlements in 2005 made the siege a possible next move.

Now after 8 years of siege Israel has a problem.  Gaza still hasn’t collapsed.  The siege has taken a lot of diplomatic, military and political resources out of the country, with very little palpable result.

After all, life still goes on there.  Palestinians, still live there.  It is not a safe space for Israel to claim for itself…yet.  After all this time it this siege risks becoming some kind of Trojan war, on a giant scale.

As miserable as the lives of Gazans must be, they still get access to health care, albeit under highly stressed, marginal conditions.  Their children still get education, again under highly stressed marginal conditions.  Ditto, the power supply.

This Operation Protective Edge is about removing all that.  Gazans get health care?  Destroy the hospitals.  That kills the professionals who cannot be replaced.  It destroys equipment, medicine and the built facilities to house it.  It destroys medical records and things such as blood banks.

The patients don’t matter, in fact if they die, that’s all to the better because it creates misery and fear.  Meanwhile, foreigners may be horrified, but they will be too afraid to work there if they think Israel will not spare them.

Similarly, education.  Education provides hope for the future, a way out of poverty, squalor and tyranny.  That’s why tyrants hate it, why theocracies and ‘democracies’ alike interfere and divert it.  No or poor access to it means that people are without the intellectual tools to question, challenge then change their circumstances.

A wrecked building

Schools, therefore, must also become a target.

Remove energy generation, education and health care and you tear apart the ability of a society to sustain itself, to create even a semblance of normality even under highly abnormal circumstances.

Talking of energy, Israel itself is facing an energy crisis.  It’s a net importer of energy and would like to end this whilst opening gas exports to Europe and the Middle East. 

It just so happens that there’s also gas in Gaza.  Not quite, but offshore, in the Mediterranean.  It turns out there’s rather a lot of gas in the eastern Mediterranean.  The difficulty is that the largest field, the Leviathan field straddles waters where border disputes impede Israel’s ability to exploit it – disputes with Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.  Whilst Gaza has an offshore gas field; two wells worth $4billion.

When this operation ends, as it eventually must, what will Gazans have?  Will the UN and the EU build more schools and hospitals only for Israel to smash them later?  Who will work in them with teachers, doctors, patients and students dead or scattered and the ever present danger of death?

The reality is that this operation is about tightening the siege of Gaza and not about touching Hamas.  Israel needs Hamas.  Just as Hamas (like Hezbollah) needs Israel.  Both sides use the other to cohere around.

Hamas, before this operation, was dying.  Starved of funds, fallen out with Iran and Hezbollah over Syria, increasingly lacking direction.  Israel invades

Rubble and wreckage, Gaza

and Hamas is suddenly energized again.

Israel uses Hamas as a bogeyman to terrify its people, to remove debate about economic injustice and to keep Israelis terrified for their future; to justify all kinds of criminality – from petty corruption and the vilification of liberal politics to murderous atrocities to open, legally enforced apartheid.  It creates the conditions under which the whole Israeli population has a hand in these crimes, by ensuring every family has members who belong to the military and security forces that enforce the Gaza Seige or the Occupation of the West Bank; the killings, routine humiliations, deprivation and apartheid that goes with so called National Security.  Nobody is innocent, everybody has to continue with it or face a reckoning.

And, it is slowly becoming less democratic, the very reason given by the Wet to support Israel.

Israel has many reasons for attacking Gaza.  None of them involve ‘rooting out terror’.  These days the ‘terror’ is mostly, not by any means exclusively’ one way.  All the cards appear to be in Israel’s favour; military, technological, economic and diplomatic power appear to favour Israel.

However, the sands are shifting.  US power in the Middle East (as in Europe) is waning whilst it shifts its focus to China and the Pacific.  Consequently there is an ongoing reordering of the status quo in the region and nobody knows how things will look when that process is complete.  The old borders imposed by the French and British in 1918 are breaking down.  New powers will arise, the question to ask is ‘what will be the nature of those powers?’

The danger for Israel is that they will look like the so called Islamic State group, now attempting to solidify its gains in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. Well financed through oil sales from captured oil and gas facilities, with funds also coming from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.  It is battle hardened and well equipped with Russian and US equipment captured on the battlefield.  Curing that poison will not be as easy a removing the Taliban or Islamist militants in Mali.

From the West, a more militantly nationalist Egypt could pose a growing threat.  Plus, Iran’s power and influence has been growing since the overthrow of Saddam by US forces in 2003.

Even US President Obama has questioned the Gaza blockade (a symbolic change signaling nothing practical).

Meanwhile the arrival of social media has made it harder for Israel and its supporters to dominate the news and information agenda.  Israel finds itself questioned like never before in countries that traditionally supported it.  The World is not as supportive as it was (also here and here).  Conservative politicians in the UK ( here, here and here) and Australia are wondering about the Gaza operation, not least because ordinary people open Facebook and Twitter and find unfiltered accounts of journalists on the ground describing death and destruction, bombing from the air, shelling on the ground and the killing of civilians.

Protests in London against Israeli actions in Gaza

Nobody believes the ‘rooting out terror’ argument anymore.  The Iraq War and Israel’s subsequent wars in Lebanon and Gaza have undermined any belief in the official narrative.  Now social media is giving that disbelief a solidity it lacked (paywall).  Even the British Broadcasting  Corporation is quietly shifting its ground.

The risks and stakes for Israel are growing and its ability to control its destiny through the use of sheer violence – imposing so called solutions through ‘changing facts on the ground’ – is slowly diminishing.

Meanwhile, as ever with modern warfare, it’s the civilians who continue to suffer and die; caught between sets of fanatic politicians who even whilst they compete with each other in their viciousness, actually have more in common with each other than they have with the people they claim to represent.

Water, water…not more bloody water

The monsoon is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  When the monsoon strikes, each storm has a ferocity, an energy and volatility that is exhilarating, visceral.  This is no genteel storm that announces itself and stays at a distance for you to watch in the stadium without getting wet.  These are up front, in your face storms that force themselves on you.

When the lightning comes, it covers the sky in a tree of power, energy and light – from east to west.  Or put another way, it cascades like a waterfall of pure energy from one side of the compass to the other.

For a brief moment, you watch a waterfall of electricity in its purest, rawest, uncontained and dangerous form.  If storm chasing is thunderstorm as snowboarding or base jumping, then watching these storms is thunder and lightning as close in spectator sport.

A downpour shot with a flash, so everything lights up like a diamond. No, it wasn’t deliberate.

British storms can be small scale, almost polite in comparison.  I say this because the thunder storms, the rain storms I’ve seen with my own eyes don’t compare to anything I’ve seen here in Lahore, Pakistan, northern Subcontinent.  What in Britain is a heavy, torrential downpour of the sort that makes us say ‘the heavens opened’ is, in Pakistan, a moderate, middling storm.  The truly torrential downpours are what it must be like to live inside a washing machine during the rinse cycle.

To get an idea of what it’s like, take a middling size bucket of water and fill it to the top.  Get the largest household sieve you can find.  Maybe a colander, anything that has lots of holes and can hold water, even if only for half a second.  But it has to be fairly large.  Then you pour the water from the bucket into the sieve or colander (how you hold the sieve / colander whilst pouring the water is up to you).  What you’re seeing as the water rushes through each hole is an approximation of a northern Pakistani rain storm.  If you can film it with your mobile phone, you can even watch it later and get a better idea of what I’m trying to describe.

The streets flood in minutes.  It’s then that you realize the roads here double as dry river or canal beds. Cars and trucks double as motorboats.  The only form of transport that can negotiate this torrent as if it isn’t there is the ‘humble’ donkey cart.  Donkeys and horses can wade through the water, find their footing in a way that even a 4×4 cannot.  And the cart itself, like a sailing ship, can get soaked without the engine burning out.

Pakistanis love the rain, they run, play and dance when it arrives.

The streets flood during this deluge because the drainage system simply cannot cope; either because it’s lousy or non-existent.  If you know your history, you’ll know that public drainage and sanitation, indeed the planned city, was invented here in Pakistan by the ‘Indus Valley civilisation’ .  You can see the remains of drainage channels and public baths at Harrapa and Mohenjo Daro.

What you’ll see there is channels on either side of the street that carry away waste water.  Unfortunately, whilst the rest of the world has (or maybe has not) improved on this, Pakistan by and large hasn’t.  Not really.  And so the streets flood with rainwater mixed with sewage.

Then there’s all that dust.  If the monsoon was all you ever saw of the Subcontinent, you would think you’ve arrived in a real life Atlantis where the city is doomed to drown.  If you never saw the monsoon and only saw the Subcontinent during the long dry spells, you would think you seeing a desert in action and wonder at the existence of any greenery at all.

The dryness creates dust.  Mountains of dust.  Dust that is so ubiquitous that if you left it alone, you’d quickly lose sight of your floor, the roads and buildings would be buried in months or perhaps a few years.

The rain turns this into a mudbath.  The floodwaters turn a muddy brown and when they melt away, roads resemble dried river beds with the tell tale patterns left by running water.  Each surface open to the skies resembles a carefully disguised concrete and tarmacked beach.

I grew up on the coast near a tidal salt marsh.  When it rained or merely threatened to rain, the scent in the air was pungent with salt and dank, musty growth.  It wasn’t an unpleasant smell but it would clear my nostrils.  In Lahore, during and after the rain or maybe even before the rain, the air itself is thick with the perfume of the soil.

I only noticed this after a former work colleague quoted E M Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’; a female character says the smell of the monsoon is like nothing she’s ever experienced.  Forster was right.  It’s not a sweet smell but it’s not pungent either.  It isn’t rotten with decay or seasoned with salt and undergrowth.  It’s the odour of all that dust and dirt.  ‘Mitti’ is the local Urdu word for soil and clay.  Sometimes people will say to each other ‘Kees mitti ke bunni ho’…’what clay are you made from?’  The dust and soil are also called ‘mitti’.

The roads don’t take long to dry off, especially under that merciless sun.  Sometimes they’re helped along by tankers sucking the water from the road; so the water becomes merely hazardous rather than impassable.  Once it’s vanished into the air the water must go somewhere.

That’s where the humidity kicks in.  The Pakistani writer Tariq Ali once described Punjab after the rains as like living in a sauna.  I didn’t realize how right he was until my second  summer here.

In 2010 the monsoon seemed to dump the Indian Ocean on northern Pakistan.  In its eagerness to obey the laws of gravity and return to the Indian Ocean, the water forced its way through and past everything in its path.  The destruction was breathtaking, even if I only saw the video footage on TV.  Towns and villages looked as though they’d been trashed by a retreating army caught in a rout.

Then came the humidity.

After taking a shower, the atmosphere in anyone’s washroom would be filled with water droplets gently breezing and swirling in the air currents before settling on the wals and windows to resemble perspiration.  After the rain, especially the monsoon, the whole city, indeed the whole province of Punjab, is one open air washroom with all that water floating around in aerosol form, looking for any surface to collect on.  It might be the cold glass of air conditioned rooms or cars.  More likely it’ll be your clothes and skin.

In five minutes you might feel that familiar, clammy sensation you get when you walk into a house that’s not been properly dried out.  After ten minutes you notice the beads of sweat and water on your forehead.  After fifteen minutes your clothes need drying out.  Later, the humidity was overpowering.  If my clothes and my skin had become flecked with black  mould, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I notice it goes in cycles.  My first monsoon was nearly bone dry.  ‘Don’t tell me, THIS is the famous monsoon?!!?’  I wondered what all the fuss was about.  That was in 2009.  2010 isthe closest I’ve been to living like a fish since I arrived here.  The atmosphere was filled with water.  In fact, the rains brought with them the widest spread single natural disaster ever when floods destroyed the homes and villages, crops and livelihoods of 20 million people in one go.

The next couple of years were not as wet.  2013 was another washout.  The humidity had the quality of a solid wall, you could see and almost touch it in a way that you can see and touch a solid object  Even more so than fog.

This year, we’ve had the humidity but not the rain.  Thunderstorms and heavy rain are frequently forecast, but never or rarely materialize.  When the clouds arrive, the rain spits and spots but never deluges.  As though an invasion has failed.

Perhaps next year will be sunnier and the year after will make us all feel that the sea is descending on us, one phase at a time.