mercredi 23 avril 2008

Pleasure in the flesh



What to make of the Prescott's 'revelation' that he has suffered from bulimia. It would be easy to stick the boot in like Mark Steel did in the Independent recently. Steele lampoons Prescott's 'linguistically challenged' way of expressing himself, urges that we should no more feel sorry for him than Mugabe if he had piles and half-believes it is all just a publicity stunt, on Prescott's behalf, to promote his biography. Where Steel is more 'serious' his article has weight enough. He writes, "But the real tragedy of this man is that for much of his life he was full of fire and spirit, helping to lead a campaign for better pay and conditions for his fellow seamen and becoming a powerful voice against the bullying of the Conservatives. And he chucked it all in to become a bully himself. . .". In other words he was a 'hero' [see below] who went 'bad'.

It may well be a publicity stunt. In the contemporary context, confessional autobiographies in which the reader is not spared any too personal detail, it may have even been a condition of publication. Still, it is always honourable to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. Besides, if the bulimia is a fiction, Prescott has more to lose in 'revealing' it than in making up something nearly as bad. On cannot make generalisations from one case, since all generalisations are false, of course, but there is the temptation to think of Prescott's (ex?)condition in a more philosophical way than Steele has done (though it is difficult to disagree with what Steel actually does say). Prescott was a working class boy made good. He was born in Wales and had a working class background (his father worked on the railways, his grandfather down the pit), moved around a lot in his early life, failed the eleven plus and became a merchant marine. Yet he moved on up and received some qualifications from Oxford and a degree from Hull.

It is no coincidence, politically, that his problem started in the early eighties. This was the time New Labour was being formed and nutured. The party shuffled off its committment to public ownership and socialism and made its bid for the middle ground. Somebody with an intelligence like Prescott could not have failed to have appreciated the dissonance involved in thinking about the politics he was endorsing and his own personal memories of his working class background. But it was a choice he made. He chose political success over less well paying 'principle' and bit the Blair bullet. Professor of the Obvious speaks: 'Our choices have ramifications of which we are not aware or that we sheild ourselves from'.

A long running consequence of this political decision must have been (and, ok, this is just speculation) a palbable feeling of 'disquietude'. Prescott, after the Labour victory, now rubbed shoulders with some of the richest and most powerful people in the country. He was now as good as them. 'I have fucking well made it my son. I have dragged myself up from the gutter. If I can do it so the bloody hell can you!' he may well have said to someone at some time at some Islington dinner function. But he will have felt the class divide, the condesencion and the patronisation. His political allies were from a different league altogether and they represented constituencies far different from his - he was merely homage to the betrayed roots of the party that had nowhere else to go. The disquietude stuck. He took his anxiety out on himself, in true Nietzschean fashion. The anxiety had its psychological roots in the betrayal he felt he had made in joining Blair's (ill fated) neoliberal crusade. The punch he famously threw during the 2001 election campaign, perhaps, was an expression the psychological violence needed to deal with this absence of peace of mind.

The word bulimia, comes from the Greek with the prefix meaning 'Ox' the suffix, 'hunger'. Yet the etymology does not capture the significance of the 'disease' (here more in the sense of 'not at ease'). It is good to have the hunger of an ox. At breakfast or after a royal walk in the countryside or a mammoth swim in the sea - the condition, though, involves vomiting it all back up again. It is an acceptance then a period of digestion and then a rejection of what you have just eaten, Professor of Obvious Studies at TVU might have added.

Would it be too far fetched to see this symbolically? He took the Blair mediceine but he just couldn't keep it down? He felt that there was something unjust about Blair was doing but he swallowed it anyway and the public side of the disease revealed itself in his inarticulatelessness and the private in throwing up? (Whereas it just made the rest of us sick?). It is too gross to contemplate.

However (and opportunistically on my part) it does have the occassion to bring Epicurus (On Hapiness) closer to our world. On his political choice "No one when he sees evil delibertely chooses it, but is enticed by it as being good in comparison with a greater eveil and so pursues it"Prescott chose Blair and fame rather than political obscurity but ended up damaged by it - "The just man enjoys the greatest peace of mind, while the unjust is full of the utmost disquietude". New Labour politics is ajustice [sic] and, without romanticising too much, we can give Prescott the benefit of the doubt in thinking of him recognising it as such and in a convoluted way reacted to it with his disease. Further, and, er, closer to the bone "Pleasure in the flesh admits no increase when once te aim of want has been removed. . .The limit of pleasure in the mind. . .is reached when we understand the pleasures themselves and their consequences - which cause the mind the greatest alarms." Watch what you eat - but not that much or at least only once.

(Maybe Epicurus with his emphasis on sensory knowledge, his relativism and his belief in a metaphysical freedom is not so far from our own age as I thought [see below]).

Moral? Is there one? Perhaps, 'Don't betray your roots - but if you do, keep away from the biscuit tin'. Besides, with basic food prices up 15% in a year and famine increasing throughout the world, bulimia should be a long way down the list of priorities. Change the bloody subject.