Human Rights

David Marmet, Alistaire Cooke Memorial Lecture 2008

I was traveling between Larne and Banbridge on Tuesday night and had the priviledge to listen to David Marmet presenting the Alistair Cooke Memorial lecture for 2008 on BBC Radio 4.

Below is my attempt at a transcription of the opening minutes of the lecture.

The Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture 2008
9:30 pm Tuesday, 18th November, BBC Radio 4
David Marmet, at the newly opened Broad Stage in Santa Monica California

A Culture pre-dates society and it evolves before consciousness. A culture of a country, of a family, a religion, or a region, is a compendium of unwritten laws worked out over time through the preconscious adaptations of its members through trial and error.

Culture is in its totality the way we do things here. And it is born out of the necessity of people getting along. It does not come into being because of the inspiration, nor because of the guidance of any individual or group, but it evolves naturally. Those things which work are adopted, those which do not are discarded. Culture is what we actually do. It is the sum of uncountable transactions every day. And the implementation of our unspoken unconscious and shared assumptions about the nature of the world. In a family in a country it is the priceless essential gift, the instruction the assurance that this is the way we do things here.

Civilisation is preceded by culture which is worked out by innumerable interactions over ages. Culture may be obliterated by force ie. war or revolution. But it can and will naturally evolve at its own speed, neither at response to individual or communal will, but through interaction to an unknowable end.

The life of a human culture rests on inherited assumptions about the nature of the world. As such it is essentially religious. That is to say: Our culture is founded upon certainties, unprovable, but recognisable as the truest of things. “We hold these truths to be self evident” is a statement of politics only secondarily. Primarily and essentially it is a statement about the nature God: that God endows God 's creations with a certain inalienable rights. It's a profession of faith.

The arts are the day-to-day functional connection between a culture and its understanding of the world. That is, the arts reveal, restate, affirm, reform, or reinforce those things the culture understands as true. Originally part of religious observance, the arts remain religious even in the most secular of cultures and periods, for they affirm the nature of the world. Attempts have been made in our meet to force the arts to serve a social and political purpose, that is to rehearse and present the perceptions of the individual or group mind about the way things should be and thus enshrine the mind of man as the ultimate arbiter. But art, and language especially, as one of the arts, does not concern itself with the way things should be, but rather with the way they are.
Language, it seems to me, always and only has two uses, poetry – which is the attempt to understand, or obfuscation. For having spent my entire life as a dramatist, I observe that we as human speak not to express ourselves, but to get something that we want. That is why we started speaking in the first place. And nothing tens and thousands years later has changed.

In the process, however, we have also engaged our sense of play. In poetry, which is play with language, which we enjoy in its own right, as surely as we enjoy sports, irrespective of the muscles which those sports may strengthen. The cat bats a ball of yarn because its wrists work that way. It enjoys its differentiation. And we write poetry to enjoy and celebrate our ability to think and speak, to experiment with our understanding of the world. Poetry is an attempt to clarify which is to say, to take two disjointed concepts and by their juxtaposition give rise to a clearer idea of the world. ....

As I engage with this fascinating new part of the world, I hope that my attempt to engage with this society and this culture will be playeful, poetic, and creative.

Name

I certainly have the wrong name for this part of the world.

People have no idea how to pronounce Weiers or how to write Coetser.

Oildirect just delivered 500 litres of oil and the invoice is made out to Mr Cuestor.

I wonder if that means I don't have to pay for the oil.

Impact

My move to Northern Ireland has definitely increased my carbon footprint.

Not only do I now use two-ply (or more accurately - multi-ply) toilet paper. I drive much more. My work requires it of me. Last month I drove approximately 1200 miles. Petrol costs anything from £1.14 - £1.22 per litre here. In South Africa it cost about 80p per litre (I think that is what it cost when I left). I drove on average 400 miles per month in South Africa (I think).

I also do not pay for plastic bags in the shops anymore. TESCO (one of the local supermarket chains.... Yes I know it is a weird name. So is Sainsburys and LIDL. Is it just me, or do the shop names not have the same ring as Pick&Pay or Checkers or Shoprite or OK? But a person gets used to it after a while. If I understand things right, Sainsbury's is related to Wallmart in a similar way that ABSA is related to Barclays. I'd say that Marks and Spencers is a reasonably decent name for a shop... that is the South African Equivalent to Woolworths and far too expensive for commoners like me to shop at)... Anyway... how is that for a
poorly constructed sentence.... TESCO gives you points if you re-use your bags and we try to do that.

Right now I have Oranges from South Africa, Plums from Spain, Grapes from Greece, Bananas from a Central/South American country, Tomatoes from Holland, and Fresh Peas from Kenya in my fridge. I find it difficult to figure out which fruits are "In Season" so that I do not have to pay too much. I think at the moment, the Oranges from South Africa will be in season because I bought a packet of 5 or 6 oranges for 69p on Friday. That was the cheapest fruit. I think 500 grams of grapes cost in the vicinity of 89p. I don't want to convert that to Rand, because the same amount in South Africa would have bought me a 1.5 kilogram box of grapes.

Everything also comes packed with several layers of plastic and I find myself discarding a lot of the packaging. There is a recycling initiative in Banbridge, but they only take plastic bottles like Milk bottles or Water bottles. They don't accept empty yogurt containers or plastic wrappings. For some reason they also do not accept cardboard milk or juice boxes. So while I recycle more than I did in South Africa, I think I'm also throwing away more than I did in South Africa.

I expect delivery of 500 litres of heating oil today. I called about 6 oil companies to get prices. The highest quote I got was £309. The lowest quote was for £299. This is the first time that I do something like this and I have no idea if I am paying a lot or if the price is reasonable. I was lying in bed last night wondering if the price will suddenly drop to £280 pounds next week. But it will be delivered today and I'm going to have to hand over about 20% (or more) of my disposable salary for this opportunity to increase my carbon footprint further. I have no idea how long this oil will last. I wish it would last the whole winter, but some people say it should last 6-7 weeks. I will just resist putting the boiler on until icicles begin to form under our noses.

Toilet paper in a public toilet in Derrygonnelly, County Fermanagh. Sunday, 31 August 2008.

Others like me?

So I did a search for blogs with a toilet paper theme and I am yet to find one.

The topic of conversation most prominently displayed in the search results seems to be single posts on somebody who chose a toilet paper wedding dress to get married in.

A few blogs have the occasional post that proclaims the merits of 2-ply toilet paper over and above the single-ply varieties. And of course there are several that deal with bathroom hygiene. It was one of these that drew a comment that got me thinking:

I honestly don't think the publication of a blog about toilet-related things has significantly improved this world to any degree. Ack.

I guess she is right and I will try not to debate this concern much further in this blog.