bricks and walls

 

ANOTHER BRICK IN … SOMETHING

It was an epiphany of sorts, and about as unsettling as they usually are. There I was, driving along, somewhere south of the last town, and Pink Floyd shuffled their way into my consciousness. I never really got into The Wall. Perhaps there comes a time when angsty anti-establishmentism becomes a bit sort of pubescent, really. Maybe. 

Unless you’re Roger Waters. He stayed angsty, writing songs against the establishment. Good songs, too. But for most of us the fire goes out, somewhere around that moment when our first child comes along, and well, mouths to feed, houses to roof.

Still, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” is one of those songs I couldn’t ignore, even if like most people I ignored the album. Dark Side of the Moon, yeah. The Wall? Yeah nah. Life’s too short. But the song? Margaret Thatcher hated it, so that sold it to me. I’ve loved it ever since.

On this occasion it broke through something of a dwaal. That’s a lovely Afrikaans word that will have to be translated by the weaker “daydream” I guess.  But you know … as the kids from Islington Green School chanted the chorus, “Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone” I came back from my dwaal and heard the tail of the song as if for the first time, somewhere south of the last town.

“Wrong, do it again!” yells a teacher, exemplifying, with the slight sneer in his voice, the “dark sarcasm” berated in the body of the song. I winced a little. I didn’t hear those sneers too often, but they were there in the psyches of the Masters of my childhood. “Wrong. Do it again,” and the thwack of whatever weapon came to hand across my butt remains a sound indelibly etched in my consciousness. Wrong. Do it again. Thwack. Hockey stick, sandal, slipper, coal shovel, whatever.

But it was as the voice started expanding its owner’s logic in naked fury that I realized my own footprints in the story. “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.” It was an order I recalled from those hard days in a bleak boarding school – though it was more likely to be the limp, dead silver beet that I was being forced to eat. “If you don’t eat your vegetables you can’t eat your pudding” doesn’t scan so well, and I don’t recall the abbreviation “veggies” doing the rounds back then. Not proper, you know.

But the harsh cry of the dislocated, spaceless, timeless voice doesn’t stop there. “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

It is the cry of a man whose universe is crumbling. For him there was an indisputable logic in his summation of the situation. No meat, no pud. How could it be otherwise? No water, no swim. No air, no breathe.

But to the kids his frantic cry was nonsense. He was just another brick in the wall, holding them captive, incarcerated in old dreams that had died a long overdue death. “Screw your meat” – or veggies, whatever. And I had been one of them (not in Islington, admittedly). I had hated what I saw to be the phony values of the generation before me. No marriage no sex. No military service no citizenship. No bombs no peace. How can you have any peace if you don’t manufacture your bombs?

The man’s voice faded away. His eternal truths were crumbling. If the song had been Lord of the Flies the kids would have overthrown him, torn him limb from limb. And I was a shit of a kid. I would have mocked him mercilessly as the crowd advanced and the wall began to crumble. All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

It was wrong and it was right. Perhaps now I’d try to find the compassion to love the poor man whose world was crumbling. But I doubt it. I fear I would have been a part of the fickle, angry, hate-fuelled crowd. I still recall with horror a geography teacher fleeing our class in tears. Another brick in the wall.

Perhaps I might even have been Alt-Right. I hope not. But I wonder: my psyche dwelt in furious places. I was never brave; even now when I hope I’ve found something like compassion I’m not sure I would exercise it when push came to shove, and the realities of yesterday’s hero began to crumble. All have sinned and fall short. Welcome to Lent.