Fuchsia, editorial writer at the Guardian
I remember reading the Whole Earth Catalogue and the writing of feminists in the 70s, as a teen, and loving the idea of a building not as a penis, but a vulva. A scallop shell, a Nautilus following the Fibonacci sequence. Of course it was Theano who discovered the golden mean, more beautiful, even, than Pythagoras's' floating triangles.
Fuchsia's is an editorial in praise of flawed capitalism. Towers that do not fall, but lean, quaintly. And it also speaks of the social class of the writer. Her concern is collapse. Her faith that, for all the talk, 'capitalism' will not collapse.
The towers referred to are old, and she asks us to look at the mercantile roots of capitalism. The beautiful flawed Italian craftsmanship, a by product of human excess, cruelty and of enabling corruption.
On one level the piece is trite, stubby; the shabby product of literal dreaming, not lucidity. You had to wash the dishes, didn't you? And so, at night you dreamed of washing dishes. Articles on Adam Smith are wedged forcibly into an ongoing debate about the viability of our economic system; we write of leaning towers.
The reference to impotence and capitalism is intentional. The problem is the inhabitants of Fuchsia's British Gormanghast, privileged and public schooled, assume that this is normality. They smile at Buckingham Palace and Alice, without defeasement. Instead, imagining diffusing, imagining, like Werner Herzog, that she builds bridges by writing of the symbol of the leaning tower. She thinks her readership is unconscious, and thinks she whispers to them in their 21st century big asleep.
A few years ago, after the financial crisis began a politician said said to me:
'Listen, we don't care if it's right or wrong, we just have to kick start lending again, people's lives depend on it.'
Around the leaning towers of British Gormanghast,is a shanty town. Fuchsia, writing in the Guardian, does not praise shanty towns. In her mind's eye, the people in the British Favella depend on the establishment, on Whitehall, on the City.
Buildings like a scallop shell
How did Peake describe the people who lived in the town around the castle? They were short-lived, violent and followed their own traditions and customs. They suffered in poverty, but understood that their welfare depended on the castle. They were very short and thin, flowered early, aged quickly, were primal, good with their hands, but not intelligent. Mervyn Peake gives the early 20th century middle class view of the ordinary people. Fuchsia's view of ordinary people.
There is nothing so much denies the humanity and equality of another human being as charity. The charity of a white European, for example, for a poor African. It embeds paternalism and a sense of superiority. The acceptance of dancing gratitude - revolting! The people of the town say thank you to the people in Gormanghast.
Nothing so unseemly as the attitude of a British bourgeois towards a working class handyman, the embarrassment of false camaraderie between classes. How that must have tottered after 1917.
It comes down to this:
Cameron and Osbourne will put the market at the centre of education and health. They will restructure the state so that the private sector controls almost all of it. The tower will seem to totter. But then along will come Ed Miliband. He will pour in the social cement. He will work out a hundred ways to make the Tory changes, that seemed so threatening initially, palatable.
Ed Miliband will cement the leaning tower in place. He will conserve all the deeply reactionary policies and marketization of education and health. He will do so just as Blair did so with Thatcher. Ameliorating here. Subsidizing here.
That is the political meaning of the editorial written by Fuchsia, an editorial on the subject of leaning towers.
After all, humanity came from the caves, the most feminine dwellings of all.