George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I don’t read books as quickly as I seem to be writing posts about them.  I work with a couple of students who for various reasons can’t attend regular school, and one in particular is very bright and curious.  At our first meeting I pointed out that for her English credit we could either read from the regular English textbook or choose novels.  She thankfully chose to read a novel.  It turns out she, as a high school freshman, had read both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and had Down and Out in Paris and London on her shelf ready to read.  I’d never read it, so I agreed happily to read it as well.

I haven’t read much Orwell, and as an adult had only read “Shooting an Elephant,” which I taught for a few years.  I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school, but that was long enough ago that I can’t think that I have anything intelligent to say about them.  “Shooting an Elephant” impressed, though I know well that its perspective is limited and that regardless of Orwell’s intent it is, even if polemically anti-imperialist, ontologically imperialist.  One imagines, or hopes at least, that Orwell would own up to that.  Regardless, it impressed, and not just for its prose style.  Orwell was a proper socialist, fundamentally humane, and himself aware of his coming-to-awareness of the absolute awfulness of capitalism, in this case in its colonialist manifestation.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a semi-autobiography or autobiographical novel, for lack of a better term.  More important is that the writing has a palpable authenticity to it.  Orwell did indeed know poverty, the analytical subject of the text, first-hand.  He comments here and there, a few times at length, that those who don’t know poverty or poor people directly are more or less inevitably prone to misunderstand the matter.  It’s very true.

The book jibed very well with the Marx we’re currently engaged with in my reading group.  In particular–and I have this sense that this is more applicable to London than Paris, and possibly more to the United States than England–one sees how poverty and therefore class is, regardless of all the rhetoric about social mobility, a closed system.  There is nothing in a capitalist economy that exists to faciliate social mobility upward, only down.  One sees this again and again in Orwell, in concrete situations.

I came to the realization a while ago that while I get a lot out of reading history, and while therefore I’ve read a lot of it, I do well to balance historical or theoretical writings with novels.  One gets a feel for things with novels that one does not get with any work of history or theory.  This isn’t an original observation, but I’ve re-learned that it’s true in the last six months, when I’ve spent a lot of time with novels.

Last: I don’t need to say too much about the anti-semitism and homophobia that pop into the book every now and again.  It’s a problem.

“Body & Soul”

“Body & Soul” (1997) from The Bathroom Mirror.

“Body & Soul (live)” (2005) from Live at Keith Danner’s House.

I smell my pillow and I hear a sound.
My eyelids open and I’m earthward bound.
Pretty soon the sisters wheel me around.
“Body & Soul.”

It’s Tuesday morning so they wash my hair.
The interns greet me as I pass the stair.
I start to mumble and the sisters hear a prayer.
“Body & Soul.”

I hear the Father‘s footsteps up and down the hall.
He’ll take all morning but he’ll see us all.
I hear him whisper and I hear him call.
“Body & Soul.”

The dishes break and then a rolling train goes by.
My head jerks backward and I shut my eye.
My head sees Heaven and the swirling angels sigh.
“Body & Soul.”

The sunburnt courtyard.  The dusty hill.
The metal grating on my windowsill.
The wooden beads and all these crushed-up pills.
“Body & Soul.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tune lately, as I’m going to perform it in a couple weeks and I believe I will be able to convince my harmonica-playing pal, Colin, to up and join me on this one and likely a few others.  He and I played for the first time in 20 years last spring, noted in a previous post on “Full Tank of Gas,” and when I went to his pad one afternoon about a month later this was one of the things we did.  Predictably, it worked well.

One could argue these things, but I don’t think I’ve written a better tune that would fall into the “blues” category than “’Body & Soul.’”  Interestingly, I’ve also not written a tune that I can recall that so completely resists orchestration of any sort.  The House Carpenters recorded this one evening as we taped our rehearsal, and while I was fairly pleased with the results, nobody else liked it.  Most likely, it was the tune I was happy with, not the arrangement.

More than one person, in praising my tunes, has pointed out that I give a sense of place in them, and I’ve always felt I couldn’t get a higher compliment.  I read Vine Deloria’s God is Red a couple years ago, and it really had an impact on me, aside from being a pure pleasure to read because of his prose.  Contrasting Christianity as it is practiced in North America with a generalized Indian—that is, North American Indigenous—religious practice, the fundamental distinction is that North American Christianity has totally abstracted itself from any sense of place while Indian practice is entirely predicated on the specificity of place.  I’ve thought a lot about that, and it really seems to me that things would improve a lot in this country if we (collectively) started to deal with the specificity of place as well as deal with dreams, as in dreaming consciousness.

The place in the tune is specific, if imagined.  There is not to my knowledge any Catholic hospital in Riverside, CA that offers the kind of care described in the tune.  I don’t even think there’s a Catholic hospital.  That said, the land is absolutely there.  The “dusty hills” are the same as in “The Man From Manila”:

These hills rise above me, devoid of all plant life.

The live version of the tune, above, was recorded at a house concert just below those hills as I imagine them in both of these tunes.

I have at times introduced this tune as a blues number about mind/body dualism.  I don’t actually buy into the concept, I’d state clearly, but I imagine that someone who is quadriplegic would find great meaning in it even if one rejected the idea ultimately.  It would seem to reflect one’s life.  It’s interesting to me that some people are placed by circumstance to live in a totally existential sense, certain philosophical or religious concepts that I learned about in school or read in books.  I saw this a lot in Senegal, where I knew some deeply spiritual people, in a very true sense, but also who at some level had so little materially that it seemed that they almost–I know how problematic it is putting this way, but the sense is still there–had no choice but to detach from material things.

I’d read in the few years before I wrote this tune a lot of William Blake, as well as some critical literature on him and his work alongside a biography.  So, Blake had visions.  Of interest to me was a contrast between people who placed his visions into scientific categories–he suffered from some sort of mental illness which may or may not have played a role in his economic difficulties–and those who simply reported that he had visions.  E.P. Thompson, whom I’d discovered in grad school and really liked, wrote what was for him a short book on Blake, and placed him in his very specific religious context, that of radical London religious dissent, that is to say, Protestant but not Church of England, and very much in tune with notions of individual revelation, rather than ecclesiastical authority.  Not only Blake had visions, but lots of people in the fair number or small churches he attended did.  It’s just what you did when you were a radical English religious dissenter in the eighteenth century.

It’s really troubling to me when I look, from the outside, at Christianity in the United States, though by no means is the following characterization applicable to individual Christians or all churches.  It seems as secular a phenomenon as I could dream up, because it seems more of a social network or social identity then a means to some actual, experiential spiritual or religious anything.  The social network aspect of it can manifest in very good and important ways, as in for example The Catholic Worker movement, or in the business cards I’d find on my door in Riverside for gardeners offering their services, cards with the Christian fish symbol on it.  I imagine that putting that symbol on the card actually worked to drum up business.  The social aspect of modern American Christianity can be seen of course in its most negative aspects as well in some of the hatred people spew in the name of religion, and though I’m well aware that this is a virulent minority I also know that it’s very important to pay close attention to these people.

The tune, to bring the digression above back to the song, contrasts the nuns and priest, who obviously do good work but who are going about their day in a world that seems to them to be exactly as it appears, with the main figure in the tune, who has ecstatic visions.  I suppose that in my life that the satisfactions I’ve found become fewer and fewer as I go up the chain of any hierarchy.  I appreciate Blake more than I do any Christian leaders, and I appreciate that Hui Neng was an illiterate woodcutter.  I had a professor at Pitzer who taught the Tao Te Ching, and when going over the passage that reads something like, “the Tao is like water: it seeks the low places that men disdain,” he asked, “isn’t this a loser philosophy?”  He then added, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”