I want to build something, announces Anaya.
Okay, I say.
With you, she says.
Sure, I say.
And we get to building. She puts one magnetic tile on another, surrounds it from the sides, making a square, then building higher, and higher, and higher still, and at some point she has a fairly impressive structure, the light slicing through the differently coloured tiles. It reminds me of a cathedral with stained glass windows.
I admire it awhile. Wow, I say. It’s so beautiful. And it actually is. And the different colours! Amazing. She goes through the colours. Here is yellow. Then green. Red. Red. Blue. Yellow. She goes on till she is done, maybe 30 tiles in all, and each time I nod enthusiastically, my eyes wide, saying things like wow and cool.
When she’s finished, I ask her, what do you want to do now?
She stops and looks at me, eyes crinkling up in the anticipation of delight, but shy too, as if she knows she is proposing something so outrageously joyful that it shouldn’t be allowed, and I smile with her because her delight is infectious, well what, I ask again, both of us grinning at each other.
Kaputt machen, she says, and her little body shakes with delight.
-
She loves breaking things, does Anaya.
Her older brother loves building them. He builds these intricate, enormous structures out of all kinds of materials, building projects that take days and take over rooms - cities, cable cars going up mountains, a network of roads and train tracks, ornate gothic cathedrals that he calls parking houses.
And then along comes Anaya and goes: smash.
Rahi is devastated, full of grief and rage. Annika and I are angry too. Why, we ask Anaya. Why do you do it?
I don’t know, she says.
And she grins.
-
In a glade, the grass slick with dew and rain. At one end of the glade sits a princess on a throne. Green-eyed and red-haired, frozen under ice. She is screaming, her mouth twisted into strange shapes of pain, but the ice renders her dumb.
I approach, and on the grass next to her is a hammer which I pick up in my stride.
I smash the ice, over and over again, breaking it up, shattering it into little pieces, freeing the girl.
But still she sits there, frozen.
-
Beware! The time approaches when human beings no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir!
I say to you: one must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos in you.
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
-
The ancient Romans had a festival called Saturnalia, which at its peak ran for a week in December. It was a festival of license and debauchery, with the strict order of the year overturned - gambling, usually strictly prohibited, was encouraged, and masters provided table service to the slaves.
Saturnalia is not anomalous. Throughout the world, throughout history, cultures have had their own versions of this - rites and festivals that were riotous orgies of debauchery and immorality. In India, for example, we have Holi, the festival that falls at the turn of the year, where the old year is burned in fire and on the next day hierarchies are reversed and structures are destroyed, where women beat men with sticks, low-caste villagers drench their landlords, where bhang flows like water and obscenity is licensed.
In the West the most obvious example is probably Carnival. As Charles Taylor says, the fests of Carnival were “were periods in which the ordinary order of things was inverted, or “the world was turned upside down”. For a while, there was a ludic interval, in which people played out a condition of reversal of the usual order. Boys wore the mitre, or fools were made kings for a day; what was ordinarily revered was mocked, people permitted themselves various forms of licence, not just sexually but also in close-to-violent acts, and the like.”
This is extremely weird. We spend our lives trying to create order; in a sense, civilisation is simply the effort to stop the jungle from taking over the city. And alongside, like some strange parallel life, a Jungian shadow existence, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but on a universal social scale, we have this - intentional, deliberate destructions of the planned order.
-
I go the girl and I pick her up from the cracked ice. I cradle her in my arms and kiss her lips.
What do you want, I whisper?
To live, she says.
How? What do you need to live?
You, she says.
And then suddenly she is cackling and she floats into the air, high into the sky, an eagle-crow-hag cackling and screeching.
I wait.
I’m here, I say. How do I give you life?
-
Why did human beings feel the need to create things like Saturnalia and Carnival and Holi?
One theory, often attributed to the Romanian theologian Mircia Eliade, goes thus:
“Order binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order. The binding has to capture that energy, and in the supreme moments of founding it does this. But the years of routine crush this force and drain it; so that order itself can only survive through periodic renewal, in which the forces of chaos are first unleashed anew, and then brought into a new founding of order. As though the effort to maintain order against chaos could not but in the end weaken, tire, unless this order were replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength.”
To put it in prosaic terms - I have a friend who would go on week-long benders, spending thousands of pounds and doing things that are better left unspecified. Nowadays, he has a dedicated drawer for his car insurance. Eliade is saying that at some point he will need to burn that drawer down and take some cocaine.
You don’t have to take cocaine. But I wonder: is there enough chaos in your life? I don’t think there’s enough in mine.
-
Kaputt machen, says Anaya, and we grin and set to it, arms lifted high so they can smash down onto the beautiful structure, over and over again, reducing the cathedral to rubble, and as we smash Anaya squeals and I laugh, and fucking hell this feels fantastic and when it is done, when the tiles are scattered everywhere across the floor, she says, Again!
-
I was going to end on that scene. But suddenly that seems too glib. Yes, we need the riotous energy of Carnival - but Carnival only makes sense in the context of an orderly world. Chaos and Order serve each other, and too much of one is the world out of joint. Anaya needs to break things, and Rahi needs to make them.
-
It's the second innings, Neil Carter is bowling. It looked pretty quick watching, but everything looks quick watching. My heart's beating hard, I take extra long to scratch my guard, trying to buy time, to get used to where I am. He thunders one down, around the wicket, must have been going for a yorker but he gets it wrong, it's too high, and it hits my bat around thigh height. My bat judders in my hands, I can feel the vibrations through my arm. I definitely didn't hit that one, it hit me.
My heart's really going now, this is faster than anything I've faced. Carter must notice something, or maybe this is just his style, but he walks down towards me, snarling. "That's the last fucking one you get in your half," he says. I put my head down, walk towards square leg, refusing all eye contact. He comes in again, and yep, it's a short one. I get bat on it and it goes through the slips for four. I'm calling it a late cut, he's calling it something with lots of fuck and cunt in it. He switches to over the wicket and announces his intention to bounce the shit out of me.
Which, briefly, he does. And then something amazing happens. Time slows down. I'm so wound up, all systems go, that my senses go to a level I never knew I had. I can see the seam on the ball. I can see the beads of sweat glistening on his face. I can see the stubble on his cheeks. My body moves without thinking about it. I don't take him on, I don't dominate, I simply survive, but it's the happiest, most serene feeling I've ever had on a cricket pitch.
Or perhaps anywhere.