A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

  If we look at nature, do we see where love comes in? Not really. There are occasional species which apparently mate for life (though imagine the opportunities for adultery on all those long-distance migratory swims and night flights); but on the whole we see merely the exercise of power, dominance and sexual convenience. The feminist and the chauvinist interpret Nature differently. The feminist looks for examples of disinterested behaviour in the animal kingdom, sees the male here and there performing tasks which in human society might be characterized as ‘female’. Consider the king penguin: the male is the one that incubates the egg, carrying it around on its feet and protecting it for months from the Antarctic weather with a fold of its lower belly … Yeah, replies the chauvinist, and what about the bull elephant seal? Just lies about on the beach all day and fucks every female in sight. It does regrettably seem true that the seal’s behaviour is more standard than that of the male penguin. And knowing my sex as I do, I’m inclined to doubt the latter’s motivation. The male penguin might just have calculated that if you’re stuck in the Antarctic for years on end then the cleverest thing to do is stay at home minding the egg while you send the female off to catch fish in the freezing waters. He might just have worked things out to his own convenience.

  So where does love come in? It’s not strictly necessary, is it? We can build dams, like the beaver, without love. We can organize complex societies, like the bee, without love. We can travel long distances, like the albatross, without love. We can put our head in the sand, like the ostrich, without love. We can die out as a species, like the dodo, without love.

  Is it a useful mutation that helps the race survive? I can’t see it. Was love implanted, for instance, so that warriors would fight harder for their lives, bearing deep inside them the candlelit memory of the domestic hearth? Hardly: the history of the world teaches us that it is the new form of arrowhead, the canny general, the full stomach and the prospect of plunder that are the decisive factors in war, rather than sentimental minds drooling about home.

  Then is love some luxury that sprang up in peaceful times, like quilt-making? Something pleasant, complex, but inessential? A random development, culturally reinforced, which just happens to be love rather than something else? I sometimes think so. There was once a tribe of Indians in the far north-west of the United States (I’m not inventing them) who lived an extraordinarily easy life. They were protected from enemies by their isolation and the land they cultivated was boundlessly fertile. They only had to drop a wizened bean over their shoulders for a plant to spurt from the ground and rain pods at them. They were healthy, content and had failed to develop any taste for internecine warfare. As a result, they had a lot of time on their hands. No doubt they excelled at things in which indolent societies specialize; no doubt their basketwork became rococo, their erotic skills more gymnastical, their use of crushed leaves to induce stupefying trances increasingly efficient. We don’t know about such aspects of their lives, but we do know what was the main pursuit of their generous leisure hours. They stole from one another. That’s what they liked to do, and that’s what they celebrated. As they staggered out of their tepees and another faultless day came smooching in from the Pacific, they would sniff the honeyed air and ask one another what they’d got up to the previous night. The answer would be a shy confession – or smug boast – of theft. Old Redface had his blanket pilfered again by Little Grey Wolf. Well, did you ever? He’s coming along, that Little Grey Wolf. And what did you get up to? Me? Oh, I just snitched the eyebrows from the top of the totem-pole. Oh, not that one again. Bo-ring.

  Is this how we should think of love? Our love doesn’t help us survive, any more than did the Indians’ thieving. Yet it gives us our individuality, our purpose. Take away their joyful larcenies and those Indians would be able to define themselves less easily. So is it just a rogue mutation? We don’t need it for the expansion of our race; indeed, it’s inimical to orderly civilization. Sexual desire would be much easier if we didn’t have to worry about love. Marriage would be more straightforward – and perhaps most lasting – if we were not itchy for love, exultant on its arrival, fearful of its departure.

  If we look at the history of the world, it seems surprising that love is included. It’s an excrescence, a monstrosity, some tardy addition to the agenda. It reminds me of those half-houses which according to normal criteria of map reading shouldn’t exist. The other week I went to this North American address: 2041½ Yonge Street. The owner of 2041 must at some point have sold off a little plot, and this half-numbered, half-acknowledged house was put up. And yet people can live in it quite comfortably, people call it home … Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it’s unnecessary.

  She is the centre of my world. The Armenians believed that Ararat was the centre of the world; but the mountain was divided between three great empires, and the Armenians ended up with none of it, so I shan’t continue this comparison. I love you. I’m home again, and there’s no mocking echo on the words. Je t’aime. Ti amo (with soda). And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you’d do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It’s just as eloquent as speech. And imagine all the tender modulations that are possible, the subtleties that can be constructed from kissing knuckles, matching palms and playful fingertips whose whorled pads bear the proof of our individuality.

  But matching palms mislead. The heart isn’t heart-shaped, that’s one of our problems. We imagine, don’t we, some neat bivalve whose shape encodes the way in which love fuses two halves, two separatenesses, into a whole? We imagine this crisp symbol scarlet with a powerful blush, scarlet also with the blood of tumescence. A medical textbook doesn’t immediately disenchant us; here the heart is mapped like the London Underground. Aorta, left and right pulmonary arteries and veins, left and right subclavian arteries, left and right coronary arteries, left and right carotid arteries … it looks elegant, purposeful, a confident network of pumping tubes. Here the blood runs on time, you think.

  Reverberent facts:

  – the heart is the first organ to develop in the embryo; when we are no more than the size of a kidney bean, our heart is visible, pumping away;

  – in a child, the heart is proportionately much larger than in an adult: 1/130th of total body weight, as opposed to 1/300th;

  – during life the size, shape and position of the heart are subject to considerable variations;

  – after death the heart assumes the shape of a pyramid.

  The ox heart I bought at Corrigans weighed 2lbs 13oz and cost £2.42p. The biggest available animal specimen; but also one with human application. ‘He had the heart of an ox’: a phrase from the literature of Empire, of adventure, of childhood. Those pith-helmeted cavaliers who despatched rhinos with a single well-placed slug from an army pistol while the colonel’s daughter cowered behind the baobab had simple natures but not, if this ox was anything to go by, simple hearts. The organ was heavy, squat, bloody, clamped tight like a violent fist. Unlike the railway map in the textbook, the real thing proved close and reluctant with its secrets.

  I sliced it up with a radiologist friend. ‘It hadn’t got long to go, this ox,’ she commented. Had the heart belonged to one of her patients, he wouldn’t have pangaed his way through many more jungles. Our own small journey was effected with a Sabatier kitchen knife. We hacked our way into the left atrium and left ventricle, admiring the porterhouse heft of the muscles. We stroked the silky Rue de Rivoli lining, poked our fingers into exit wounds. The veins were stretch elastic, the arteries chunky squid. A post-mortal blood clot lay like a burgundy slug in the left ventricle. We frequently lost our way in this compacted meat. The two halves of the heart did not ease apart as I’d fancifully imagined, but clung desperately round one another like dr
owning lovers. We cut into the same ventricle twice, believing we’d found the other one. We admired the clever valve system, and the chordae tendineae which restrain each valve from opening too far: a tough little parachute harness preventing over-deployment of the canopy.

  After we’d finished with it, the heart lay on a stained bed of newspaper for the rest of the day, reduced to an unpromising dinner. I went through cookbooks to see what I might do with it. I did find one recipe, for stuffed heart served with boiled rice and wedges of lemon, but it didn’t sound very inviting. It certainly didn’t merit the name given it by the Danes, who invented it. They call this dish Passionate Love.

  Do you remember that paradox of love, of the first few weeks and months of Passionate Love (it’s capitalized, like the recipe, to begin with) – the paradox about time? You are in love, at a point where pride and apprehension scuffle within you. Part of you wants time to slow down: for this, you say to yourself, is the best period of your whole life. I am in love, I want to savour it, study it, lie around in languor with it; may today last forever. This is your poetical side. However, there is also your prose side, which urges time not to slow down but hurry up. How do you know this is love, your prose side whispers like a sceptical lawyer, it’s only been around for a few weeks, a few months. You won’t know it’s the real thing unless you (and she) still feel the same in, oh, a year or so at least; that’s the only way to prove you aren’t living a dragonfly mistake. Get through this bit, however much you enjoy it, as fast as possible; then you’ll be able to find out whether or not you’re really in love.

  A photograph develops in a tray of liquid. Previously it’s been just a blank sheet of printing paper shut up in a lightproof envelope; now it has a function, an image, a certainty. We slide the photo quickly into the tray of fixer to secure that clear, vulnerable moment, to make the image harder, unchippable, solid for at least a few years. But what if you plunge it into the fixer and the chemical doesn’t work? This progress, this amorous motion you feel, might refuse to stabilize. Have you seen a picture go on relentlessly developing until its whole surface is black, its celebratory moment obliterated?

  Is it normal, this state of love, or abnormal? Statistically, of course, it’s abnormal. In a wedding photograph, the interesting faces are not those of the bride and groom, but of the encircling guests: the bride’s younger sister (will it happen to me, the tremendous thing?), the groom’s elder brother (will she let him down like that bitch did me?), the bride’s mother (how it takes me back), the groom’s father (if the lad knew what I know now – if only I’d known what I know now), the priest (strange how even the tongue-tied are moved to eloquence by these ancient vows), the scowling adolescent (what do they want to get married for?), and so on. The central couple are in a profoundly abnormal state; yet try telling them that. Their condition feels more normal than it has ever done before. This is normal, they say to one another; all that time before, which we thought was normal, wasn’t normal at all.

  And such conviction of normality, such certainty that their essence has been developed and fixed by love, and is now to be framed forever, gives them a touching arrogance. This is definitely abnormal: when else is arrogance touching? It is here. Look at the photo again: study, beneath the happy dentition, the serious self-satisfaction of the moment. How can you not be moved? Couples noisy with their love (for nobody has ever loved before – not properly – have they?) may irritate, but can’t be mocked. Even when there’s something to make an emotional conformist smirk – some thumping disparity of age, looks, education, pretension – the couple have for this moment a lacquer finish: laughter’s bubbling spittle simply wipes off. The young man on the older woman’s arm, the frump attached to the dandy, the hostess chained to an ascetic: they all feel profoundly normal. And this should move us. They will be feeling indulgent towards us, because we are not so evidently, so rowdily in love; yet we should be discreetly indulgent towards them.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending one form of love over another. I don’t know if prudent or reckless love is the better, monied or penniless love the surer, heterosexual or homosexual love the sexier, married or unmarried love the stronger. I may be tempted towards didacticism, but this isn’t an advice column. I can’t tell you whether or not you’re in love. If you need to ask, then you probably aren’t, that’s my only advice (and even this might be wrong). I can’t tell you who to love, or how to love: those school courses would be how-not-not-to as much as how-to classes (it’s like creative writing – you can’t teach them how to write or what to write, only usefully point out where they’re going wrong and save them time). But I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary. Love won’t change the history of the world (that nonsense about Cleopatra’s nose is strictly for sentimentalists), but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don’t accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don’t impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you’re wearing. Of course, we don’t fall in love to help out with the world’s ego problem; yet this is one of love’s surer effects.

  Love and truth, that’s the vital connection, love and truth. Have you ever told so much truth as when you were first in love? Have you ever seen the world so clearly? Love makes us see the truth, makes it our duty to tell the truth. Lying in bed: listen to the undertow of warning in that phrase. Lying in bed, we tell the truth: it sounds like a paradoxical sentence from a first-year philosophy primer. But it’s more (and less) than that: a description of moral duty. Don’t roll that eyeball, give a flattering groan, fake that orgasm. Tell the truth with your body even if – especially if – that truth is not melodramatic. Bed is one of the prime places where you can lie without getting caught, where you can holler and grunt in the dark and later boast about your ‘performance’. Sex isn’t acting (however much we admire our own script); sex is about truth. How you cuddle in the dark governs how you see the history of the world. It’s as simple as that.

  We get scared by history; we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates.

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-two

  Columbus sailed the ocean blue

  And then what? Everyone became wiser? People stopped building new ghettoes in which to practise the old persecutions? Stopped making the old mistakes, or new mistakes, or new versions of old mistakes? (And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.)

  Dates don’t tell the truth. They bawl at us – left, right, left, right, pick ’em up there you miserable shower. They want to make us think we’re always progressing, always going forward. But what happened after 1492?

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-three

  He sailed right back across the sea

  That’s the sort of date I like. Let’s celebrate 1493, not 1492; the return, not the discovery. What happened in 1493? The predictable glory, of course, the royal flattery, the heraldic promotions on the Columbus scutcheon. But there was also this. Before departure a prize of 10,000 maravedis had been promised to the first man to sight the New World. An ordinary sailor had won this bounty, yet when the expedition returned Columbus claimed it for himself (the dove still elbowing the raven from history). The sailor went off in disappointment to Morocco, where, they say, he became a renegade. It was an interesting year, 1493.

  History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, apian, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the m
arch of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it’s connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it’s more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator’s roller rather than camel-hair brush.

  The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don’t quite know why we’re here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty – are we a voluntary patient? – we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.

  There’s one thing I’ll say for history. It’s very good at finding things. We try to cover them up, but history doesn’t let go. It’s got time on its side, time and science. However ferociously we ink over our first thoughts, history finds a way of reading them. We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer), but history discovers what we did to them. We lost the Titanic, forever it seemed, in the squid-ink depths, but they turned it up. They found the wreck of the Medusa not long ago, off the coast of Mauretania. There wasn’t any hope of treasure, they knew that; and all they salvaged after a hundred and seventy-five years were a few copper nails from the frigate’s hull and a couple of cannon. But they went and found it just the same.