Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

This morning a letter from —commanded me to lunch with her at the Hasta Mañana, because she had information the book she thinks I am writing needs. The worst lunch of my life. She began by asking what extraordinary rendition meant. I did not know. She said, “It is American jargon for disappearing people — the C.I.A. secretly kidnap them, usually on foreign soil, with or without the secret connivance of the local police, because they are suspected of being or knowing active terrorists. They are then taken into U.S.A.-run jails in other countries like Guantanamo in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq (there are plenty of others), and there they are questioned — which means tortured — and sometimes killed without a trial.” She went on to say that trials held in public according to U.S.A. and European laws prove most folk arrested on mere suspicion are innocent, and when Nazi or Russian dictatorships did these things U.S.A. and British newspapers denounced them as evil. But though Amnesty International and other decent organisations say extraordinary rendition had disappeared hundreds, maybe thousands since Bush announced his War on Terror, the fact that R.A.F. bases in Scotland are being used in these illegal abductions is not mentioned by British newspapers or broadcasting — “which is why you must write about it!” I said I would think about that and tried to leave, which stimulated an even longer diatribe about what she called global money and the international arms trade which she said was responsible for World War 1, the 1930s Depression, the Nazi Party, World War 2 and every war since. She said that after Britain started the industrial arms-race in 1890 every leading politician from Lloyd George to Thatcher and Blair have been secretly enriched by policies whose result in human deaths they openly regret or denounce. “So you believe world history is controlled by a conspiracy?” I managed to interject: she replied, “Of course! An obvious, undisguised conspiracy! Britain has now only seven highly profitable industries and they all sell armaments! Every prosperous bastard has investments in them!” Not me, I told her, because my accountant had invested my savings ethically. She cried, “That’s what the Corporation of London and Manchester and half the other local authorities say and they’re lying, deliberately or through ignorance. The universities, successful trade unions and so-called charities have all invested in them! So has Cancer Research, Care for the Handicapped, Co-operative Insurance, the Boys Brigade. The arms industries produce several things with peaceful uses so brokers and accountants fool folk like you into thinking your money only helps these, but they’re lying. For over a century the names of politicians, newspaper owners, clergymen etcetera enriched by the arms trade have been recorded in stock exchange reports, but the only folk who try to publicise the fact are denounced as Loony Leftists by the media.” She also said Britain’s secret police force has been part of this open conspiracy since 1993 when its headquarters shifted from a drab, inconspicuous building off the Euston Road to a swaggeringly huge structure in the Postmodern or revived Art Deco style, which is now as conspicuous a part of 2004 London as Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984. When she was a student it was an open secret that the head of the Extra-mural department was Glasgow University’s spy for the Ministry of Information. Everyone found that comic. That Ministry is now inviting staff in every British university department to apply for the job of spying for it. Those who apply successfully will not be made known: their extra source of income will not be taxed, and they will earn it by reporting on every student or colleague who questions the wisdom of what our increasingly right-wing government does. An American celebrity law professor is now arguing that the Geneva Conventions are out of date and the U.S.A. government should legalise torture and the assassination of its enemies, even if this causes the death of innocent people in the vicinity. Lawyers who want such things legalised know their government has already started doing them. I said, “How can I put all that into a book?” She said, “It’s your job to find out — you’re the historian.” I told her I would think about it and rushed off leaving her to pay the bill, for she insists on doing that anyway. As a child I saw Viva Zapata in the Hillhead Salon, and since I left her something said in it has been echoing in my head: “Jesus Christ! I’m not the world’s conscience.”

I love the twelfth floor of this library. It allows views across Glasgow in every direction. Instead of reading today I strolled, just looking, from one glass wall to another. Recent strong winds had swept away clouds and haze so eastward I saw the Victorian terraces of Park Circus and tops of 1960s tower-blocks. Between a couple I saw the cathedral spire. The Cathkin Braes summit above Rutherglen has a line of trees with sky visible between the trunks — near there in 1820 Purly Wilson raised the red flag to start the Great Scottish Insurrection — that never happened. Further east was the dim Fuji Yama-like cone of Tinto, the ancient volcanic centre of Scotland round which the Clyde flows from the border country. I looked down on the Gothic-revival pinnacles and quadrangles of the university, with the red sandstone minarets of Kelvingrove museum and gallery beyond, and beyond them, then grey tenements and the long white wall of Yorkhill Hospital, and the tops of some big cranes to remind me Glasgow is still a port. Through a gap between facades a ship’s funnel slid past. 43 The slender pencil of the research tower building reminded me how modern technology can get things wrong. South of the river were the wooded hills of Queen’s Park and Bellahouston Park, with white farmhouses, fields and lines of hedge on hills beyond rising to Neilston Padd, that queer, steep-sided plateau beside Fenwick Moor. Further west were the Gleniffer Braes of which poor Tannahill sang, and the dim but distinct summit of Goat Fell on Arran. On a summer holiday in my teens I climbed that mountain with Gordon MacLean. Why not climb it again with Zoe? It is a Munro, but the gradient is easy.

Yes, today I feel so happy that I no longer want to show how Scotland, Britain and the world is being messed about, probably destroyed by get-rich-quick financiers and corrupted politicians. Scotland is now exactly where I want to be and I refuse to worry about it.

Suddenly the story of Belovéd Henry James Prince dawned on me like a holiday excursion. The information needed to write it is in this library. Abandoning all other research notes crossed to the office of the Special Collection with its view to the North of the Campsie Fells, Kilpatrick Hills and Ben Lomond. Here I ordered Br. Prince’s Journal and volume one of Hepworth Dixon’s Spiritual Wives. They were brought.

Having immersed myself again in these familiar pages I will now write Prince’s tale as briskly as if singing love’s old sweet song — tell how a terribly conscientious Christian so loathed his evil Self (which Freud calls the Ego) that he cast it out, becoming nothing but a mad imagination with a penis — a Super-ego and Id in such harmony that he created a New Jerusalem in England’s Green and Pleasant Land where he was the only cock in a coop of crinolined hens, and enjoyed his Zoe for Ever and Ever Amen! I will enjoy writing this.