O glanced across the dying fire at Benn, who was just then
stiffly shifting his sitting position, gone for a moment - like an old, grey
chimpanzee busy plucking fleas from a hairy shoulder with (still) nimble leathery
fingers - as he folded the rough, red and grey zigzag blanket he had pulled across
his shoulder, irritably shaking out the dust of the day from the folds of his Bedouin
cloak, carefully rearranging tired, old legs.
O remembered the first time he had seen Benn. It was in the
early days of the modernisation (as the cavern roof had begun to close and shut out the sunlight): it was
shortly after the appearance of the money god; more particularly, it was the
day the blind, black range rovers pulled up noiselessly outside the photograph
museum – the day the management killers came.
O had been in search of the wisdom of the ancients; in
search of truth, he had become a devotee, a disciple, ready to give his life,
to take lives, to shed blood as a committed, unloved, unwashed vagabond guerrilla
fighter, who would sit with his comrades of ‘36 under cool leaves at dusk,
drinking and laughing and loving and bearded (like Che), and nursing a cold,
heavy, murderous pistol, his machine for killing fascists; and simultaneously, he was Johnny-head-in-the-air tilter
at windmills, he was matinee idol Zorro, circus slim and tumbler in pencil-thin,
rakish Fairbanks moustache, he was the white-hatted outlaw (to live outside the law, you must be honest), masked avenger in
tight powder-blue pants with a silver six-gun and silver spurs (that jingle jangle jingle), and a ‘Hi ho,
Silver – away! Who was that masked man?’; he was the Scholar, the Seeker, exiled
wanderer across Himalayan snows, voyager over oceans, traveller among men, whirlwind Kung Fu fighter with a calm demeanour and a bamboo flute: reading, listening,
watching, desperate to uncover the light, desperate for illumination, for enlightenment:
to save himself from the vague, hectic shadows of cultural relativity, the bogus
compass and threadbare mast of pragmatics (what
works), the phony glamour and tinny tinkle of shiny pennies cascading on
the pier; he needed answers: what was happening to him, what was happening to
his world, to his people; who were they, what were they becoming? He didn’t
know which way was up; his compass was spinning madly; he remembered the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is
loosed on the world; he was driven to gather knowledge of the ways of the
money god, learning what he could of the management killers and their
modernisation plans.
He had already been stunned by words that hit like a hammer,
moved to bitter tears by Dennis (who sat amongst them now in his new,
transfigured, transcendental state, something like Gandalf the White, perhaps), the artist, the prophet, the
soothsayer, the visionary poet; O had been moved to tears by the inspired words
of a venerable man of letters, the last (or so it had seemed) public words of a
true nobleman, a man of integrity, a man of gravitas, visibly and painfully
dying of cancer, right there on the screen in O’s living room; Dennis was a man
speaking the truth of the modernisation, the truth of the coming of the
money-god, the truth of the coming of the management killers; he was a man seizing his last chance, risking all to tell his story, a man desperately,
awkwardly clutching his truth, clutching a cigarette in a twisted, palsied hand,
dosed on morphine and white wine (in the last chance saloon).
It was in the old Guild hall; Benn had risen to speak to the
thickly dressed grandchildren of poor, northern workers. He didn’t appear white-bearded-wise
in a Bedouin cloak and rough Indian blankets in those days; he crossed the wooden
stage in sensible shoes, slacks from Marks, and a large navy-blue anorak; and he carried
a workman’s flask. Former aristocrat, noble old Benn wrapped himself in the
costume, props and gestures of the ordinary working man, in the ragged-trousers of social justice – emerging from the shadows, mysteriously illumined
by the hot red glow of an off-stage brazier, emerging from a huddle of black-stuff
flying pickets, rising up for the sake of the history of the Labour Movement,
for the sake of a proper entrance, for a warm welcome
in the workers’ hearth and hearts, for the sake of the cause of Socialism.
