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Reading

The Make-Believe by Hannah Murray.

Hannah Murray is normally introduced by her roles in Game of Thrones and Skins. But this memoir isn’t really about that. It is more about wanting to believe in magic, becoming enmeshed in a cult, being sectioned, what happens after being sectioned; ultimately, though, as all good memoirs are, it is about a person’s life.

What The Make-Believe does brilliantly, is to guide the reader from a state of psychic normalcy into one of extreme magical thinking. While there is a kind of bang, a clear psychic break which occurs in a harrowing scene in a bathroom stall, the effect is more of the frog-in-heating-water variety. This, I think, is its most skilful contribution – an illustration of how close the common, seemingly harmless forms of mystical/magical/wishful thought are to something more sinister.

Take this sentence, for example, which relates to a woman called Jodi, whom Murray has met during an energy healing course and become friends with:

‘I felt, in that moment, that we were sisters, and how important it was for us to have found each other on this path.’

This is the kind of sentence we could find in Proust, or any impressionistic novel. If we found it there, we wouldn’t blink at it. This, presumably, is because we would understand the idea of a ‘path’ only as an expression. We forgive mystical claims all the time in ordinary conversation – that something was simply ‘meant to happen,’ that someone behaves a certain way because they are a ‘Libra’ or a ‘Capricorn.’ (Incidentally, one of the funniest things about The Make-Beleive, is that even in its most extreme moments, Murray still finds the Zodiac silly).

But reflections like the one about the path read very differently when they are attributed to a real person, in the context of actually believing in magic.

What the writing illustrates is that ‘madness,’ or what we call ‘madness,’ is not the intrusion of some foreign capacity into minds, but the extreme enlargement of a capacity that is already there. It is taking the faculty which sees a rare bird as a ‘sign,’ that expects something to happen because it has come up in a tarot reading, that believes ‘everything happens for a reason’ – and doing this to the nth degree.

Madness, The Make-Believe suggests, is not experienced as an erosion of meaning in the world, as might be assumed, but as excessive meaning:

‘Every gesture I make is part of a complex code. Everything is part of the ritual. I am leaning against the wall of the room and my head touching the wall is part of the ritual. My shoulders touching the wall is part of the ritual. My hands touching the wall is part of the ritual, my fingers tracing a secret pattern only I could know.’

In reading passages like this, I found I was often thinking about Gerard de Nerval’s strange novella Aurélia, in which he puts it thus:

‘Here began for me what I shall call the overflow of dream into real life. From this point on, everything at times took on a double aspect – without, however, my reasoning powers thereby ever lacking in logic and without my memory losing the least detail of what was happening to me. It was simply that my actions, to all appearances insane, were subject to what human reason chooses to deem illusion.’

This is what The Make-Believe is like. Except, unlike in Aurélia, we come to understand how it could become like that for us, the readers, by a structure which is largely progressive instead of episodic.

I should say also that The Make-Believe is beautifully written and pretty addictive. You should read it.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy.

I have less lofty things to say about this one.

Migrations is set in a world where the majority of the worlds’ species are extinct. Franny Stone, an ornithologist, is obsessed with Arctic terns. Her mission is to follow what may be their last migration, from the Arctic circle to Antarctica. In order to do so, she negotiates her way onto a fishing vessel in Greenland and convinces the crew to take her to Antarctica, by arguing that the flock of terns (technically the collective is ‘colony’) will help them find fish.

I really wanted to like this because it is about Arctic terns and the Arctic and the Antarctic. But I found it frustrating. Mainly because of the characters. The author just lays it on so thick with regards to Franny.

For example, one day, when Franny was a child, she ran away from home for one day. When she came back, her mother was gone. Her father had obviously left long before that. Also, her husband has left her. Also, this husband was her university professor. Also, her children are dead. Also, she’s suicidal and sometimes tries to sleep walk herself off the ship.

I suppose this is all in trying to justify why Franny would be crazy enough to chase birds across the world on a boat. But it’s a bit much.

So, if you want to something about the Antarctic, you should instead read The Ice Diares by Jean McNeil, which is stellar. There’s also a Booktrack version on Audible which has lovely ambient nature sounds.

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Question

What’s the real status of Christopher Nolan’s Odessey?

I haven’t watched yet, but I did read Emily Wilson’s review, which I think is a lot more reasonable than some outlets have made out.

The most quoted passage is this one:

‘Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.’

But it seems no one is quoting her final paragraph, which reads:

‘Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the “death of the humanities,” translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year “foundational text” – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.’

I’m broadly inclined to agree with Wilson – who’s a lot smarter than Nolan and obviously knows a lot more about the Odessey – that both points are true; that the film, probably – like all of Nolan’s – is a spectacle of action, not much more of that, but that it will result in more people reading things, which is very good.

Reflection

Options.

Last week, I said some things about the Zen concept of beginner’s mind, or shoshin, about which the most famous quote is possibly Suzuki’s:

‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’

I find it interesting that our intuition here is to take this claim normatively, as opposed to positively; that it is good to have many possibilities and bad to have few.

In economics, it is supposed that additional options are always better, since they represent potential utility, and, even if they are not exercised, the simple fact of having them is a source of utility in itself. This is sometimes true – the example that comes to mind is of those former cigarette smokers who always make sure to have a pack in their drawer.

But, it seems to me that this is more often untrue.

There’s a nice discussion about this point in an interview with Richard H. Taler, a Nobel Economics Laureate. His example comes from a dinner he gave as a grad student. There was a roast in the oven, which was taking some time, and so he put out a bowl of cashew nuts for his guests. They began to eat the nuts. He realised that their appetites were in danger of being spoiled, and so he removed the nuts. He was surprised to find that everyone thanked him – though, because they were all economics grads, they weren’t allowed to be happy about this. This is exactly the sort of thing ‘homo economicus’ thing which is mocked by Kate Raworth in her book, Doughnut Economics.

Except the goodness of options is broadly accepted. I think our society really is obsessed with options – the options of Netflix and Prime Video and Disney+ and Spotify and Apple Music and Deliveroo and Ubereats; the idea of ‘keeping our options open’ whether in career or romance or just about anything.

What we really want, always, is one perfect choice; but failing that, the economy’s solution seems to be practically infinite sub-optimal choices.

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See you in two weeks,
Blake