Part Three
And I sometimes wonder if 1 ever came
back, from that voyage. For if I see myself putting
to sea, and the long hours without landfall, I do not see the return, the tossing on the
reakers, and I do not
hear the frail keel grating on the shore.
CHAPTER TEN
Plato did not believe in the realm of pure forms. That much is clear from any reading of The Republic. Nobody saw more plainly than he that the world was a place of change and betrayal, and if he chose to deny that place any ultimate reality and spoke insistently of an ideal, more real realm beyond, it was perhaps his way of expressing his outrage, expressing a mental space, a place of yearning that is in all of us. For things to be still. Like my wife, like the foreign lectors at the University of Milan, like the visionary architects of our United Europe, he longed for the world to declare its final form and be still, or at least for all motion to be neutralized in repetition, in ritual, as the rigidly ordered world of his philosopher-kings must reflect the eternal harmony of the cosmos. He longed for each man to assume his definitive station, forever, each role to be exactly defined and assigned, forever, authority imposed, balance achieved, justice done. Thus Europe. Thus our final home. Our permanent job. The end of conflict. The end of poverty. The end of history The shape of an apple, defined. The ingredients of an ice-cream, defined. Pure form. Ultimate solidarity in a world where perfected technique will remove all suffering. All wrongs righted. By the effective agency of the Petitions Committee …
The entrance to the European Parliament in Strasbourg presents a row of flags commanding a large area of green below and offering a tangent to the curve of a concrete structure behind, which, despite its imposing scale and the monumentality conferred by wide expanses of paving and long flights of shallow steps, might well have drawn its inspiration from a study of the Chambersee Service Station. There is a flaunting of technical know-how in such a building, of mechanical savoir faire. A fan of radiating external buttresses supports the whole. Tall panels of glass reveal curves and floors within, ramps and stairs, and, more in general, that combination of polished wood, stone and stuccoed mural which expresses at once power and luxury and ideals. For the themes are those of fraternity, of peace among all men, and the building is circular, of course, so that no nation should feel they have been pushed into a corner, so that the parliamentary hall itself should not display the harsh geometry of the rectangle with its symbolic freight of opposites, its hints, as the Italians like to say, of muro contro muro.
The students milled on the grey esplanade taking photographs of each other and of the flags twitched by a damp breeze. It had stopped raining but clouds were constantly forming and breaking in a liquid sky and the light was shattered everywhere by steaming puddles and gleams and sudden sunshine stabbing in the shadows of concrete and glass. The Parliament is isolated from the rest of the town, as well it might be, set apart on an artificial mound in its own abstract space, and the flags, I noticed, through a haze of bromazepam, as the students photographed each other, joking and laughing and standing on one leg, embracing and pulling faces, were studiously arranged in the random abstraction of alphabetical order, this to avoid, one presumes, any offence of hierarchy. And staring at their bright colours — the Belgian flag, the Danish flag, the German flag (Deutschland), the Irish flag (Eire), the Greek flag (Ellas), the Spanish flag (España), the French flag, the Dutch flag (Holland), the Italian flag, the Luxembourg (ish?) flag, the Portuguese flag, the Union Jack (UK) — it occurred to me how notoriously difficult it is to arrange objects in space without generating meaning. Without causing offence. Since all meaning, so-called, causes offence to somebody, I reflected. As my wife always objected to my objecting to her keeping all the wedding photos so prominently displayed along the piano-top. As I threw a tantrum when I saw she had inserted The Age of the Courtesan alongside all the books we had read together: Chateaubriand and Sophocles and the Satyricon of Petronius. The arrangement of the flags outside this Parliament building must be entirely meaningless, I told myself. Otherwise it would give offence. Or rather, any meaning here expressed must lie in the absence of meaning, in the absence of any hierarchy in the relation of these flags the one to the other. Here arrangement must point away from arrangement, I thought through a fog of bromazepam, must point to that ideal of perfect indistinction and equality which can only come, perhaps, in the absence of any real relationship, only exist for people, countries, thousands of miles apart. Or with death, I told myself. The indistinction of death. The cemetery is the only level playing-field, I told myself. Where Chateaubriand and Robespierre and Eulogius Schneider are equal at last. And I recall now, sitting as I am at present in this not unattractive space which forms the Meditation Room, so-called, of the European Parliament, that it was looking at the flags, or rather the arrangement of the flags, with the Avvocato Malerba getting himself photographed, by Plottie, in double-breasted suit and European tie, then returning the compliment (close enough to get all the signatures on her plaster-cast braced against a flagpole), and with a general atmosphere amongst students and lectors alike of self-congratulation, and also of awe, as of pilgrims newly arrived at a shrine, it was milling about the esplanade in the damp breeze as we waited for entry passes to be made up so that we could penetrate this shrine, this sanctum, as supplicants, and present our petition to those appointed to set right whatever wrongs had been done to us, that I observed that there was no Welsh flag, for of course Wiles does not constitute a nation-state, and I set off to find Vikram Griffiths and to mention this fact to him, in jest. That there was no Welsh flag. That he wasn’t properly represented, didn’t even turn up, as the Scottish and Irish did, as decorative elements, trophies really, within the British flag, the Union Jack, which anyway Europeans notoriously refer to as English. How could he sing, Freedom in the flag is flying, when there wasn’t one? Not to mention the absence of Empire. I looked for Vikram, thinking this was the kind of provocative if banal reflection that might elicit some wit and sparks from a man who claimed to have been the first, perhaps the only, non-white to have been a card-carrying member of Plaid Cymru. Might cheer him up. In the way that old enmities can be heartening, galvanizing, as I myself in my bromazepam haze had felt galvanized earlier this morning seeing the numbers 4/5 on the cheap flap-down calendar in the hotel reception, galvanized (so far as the bromazepam would allow) and somewhat ridiculous for having ever given any importance to something that could hardly be more significant than the arrangement of the flags outside the European Parliament, or indeed any mere arrangement of numbers and letters. But I couldn’t find Vikram Griffiths.