Man of the Year, 2010

The calendar is close enough to its terminal date to make the announcement of the first annual Being Manly Man of the Year. The decision process has been entirely personal and wholly undemocratic, but still it is more reliable than FIFA. The award, which conveys as much honour as its recipient would care to mention, comes with no formal prize. Nevertheless, the winner’s name will adorn this website for as long as it lasts, and I trust that the links to his endeavours will do him, and his causes, some good.

So, without further ado, the Being Manly Man of the Year is Australia’s own crazy runner, Tristan Miller, or ‘T-Bone’, if you will. Mr. Miller was implicitly introduced to you back in September, after I had met him on the Montreal Marathon course. I have followed his exploits on an almost daily basis since then, and can safely say that his is a rare spirit. A man of character if ever there was one, Mr. Miller is, at this moment, on the southern tip of Chile, preparing for a flight to Antarctica to run his 51st marathon this year, with one more to complete the set following shortly afterwards in Melbourne, Australia. 52 marathons in 52 weeks! The feat is superhuman, and has taken him to races on every continent. From a physical point of view alone, this is extraordinary, as anyone who has run 26 miles once will tell you. Then there is the mental factor : to remain focused and motivated, and to put mind over matter, through pain and illness, day after day, week after week, all in the name of seeing the extent of human possibilities – all this makes me believe Mr. Miller to be a man of singular strength of mind.

You will not need to know ‘T-Bone’ for long to catch his infectious humanity. I shared a meagre eight miles with the man, and can safely say it was the easiest eight miles of that race. Thereafter he sped away, as is his wont. Mr. Miller runs his marathons generally in the range of three to three-and-a-half hours. Sometimes he does that on consecutive days. With flu. If one wasn’t convinced, through personal association, of his flesh-and-blood constitution and his vivacious spirit, one might suspect him of being mechanical.

Although so much of Mr. Miller’s endeavour has been personal – a voyage into his own unknown – and a deeply moving individual story, he has never lost sight of things bigger than himself. In his mining of the limits of what it is to be a human being, he has helped us all to an understanding of our collective humanity, and of the social injustices that abide in this world. He has never stopped campaigning for those of us inspired by his exploits to donate to one of two charities – Facing Africa and Unicef – and he gives a very good account of why we should.

There is a nobility in his cause, and an old-fashioned sense of adventure in his swashbuckling run around the globe. Join me in wishing him well for the last two races, and salute your Being Manly Man of the Year 2010!



Mr. Miller’s website: Run Like Crazy
Mr. Miller on Facebook

Revenge, Justice and Forgiveness

Dear Hilton has asked for my thoughts on forgiveness, and I am happy to oblige. But first I feel it necessary to disentangle the quest for revenge from the concept of justice. There is some confusion out there in the ether, that a man who seeks justice is a man seeking revenge, and that justice should be foregone so that we do not surrender ourselves to the cold-heartedness and self-imprisonment of vengeance. ‘An eye for an eye’ is a brutal notion, and it is just as well for us that we live in civilisation, where the institutional structure of society is designed to give us access to justice. Where this fails, we must not take the law into our own hands, but rather, fight to make the law, and our communities, work.

Revenge is a cold, considered insanity. It cannot claim that impulsive, momentary quality exemplified by the bar-room drunkard. Through cultivated anger, the vengeful man surrenders his soul to that which is most monstrous. We all are capable of this, and must watch vigilantly over our inner demon. For so long as vengeance remains only a thought, it can be defeated. Once it becomes an act, all is lost. Take Ahab, who enacts his vengeance over the longue durée, at every moment ready to immolate himself for the sake of it:

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. (Moby Dick, 1851).

Vengeance is pouring injustice upon injustice. It does not even the scale, but merely adds further weight to the one side. We all learnt, as children, that two wrongs do not make a right, and though for an instant we may feel gratified by the settling of a score, we subsequently sink into despair at the lowering of our nature to that of our offender. Society as a whole suffers by the example, for as the keeper of justice it must now serve justice against both parties. The example of vengeance strikes fear into the hearts of men, for they know that a society in which vengeance occurs is a place where justice has failed. We are all laid open to the possibility of being the victim.

When we are wronged we must have justice, but we must know what it means to be wronged. To have one’s house swept away by a tornado, or to have one’s dog struck by lightning – these things are not unjust; they are unfortunate. We may feel aggrieved, but we must simply dust ourselves down and rebuild. We may be ruined, but we are not wronged. In such cases, insurance companies come under scrutiny when they fail to follow contractual obligations to pay. And where there is injustice here, there are courts in which to fight. It is no use waging war against the heavens, for injustice is a human contrivance.

To be clear: to seek justice is not to be confused with seeking revenge. To that end, the quest for justice is not incompatible with forgiveness. Indeed, when we are wronged we must let go of the hurt that drives us into malice and contempt – into unjust acts of our own – and, especially if we are met with contrition, we must forgive. If we seek justice in the appropriate way, we may feel it better to see justice served before we forgive, but that already implies a will to relent our ill-feelings. And ultimately we must, for no good comes of hate; no right comes from a will to do wrong; no humanity was ever wrought from a hardened heart.

We may rue our lot, but we must not let the injustice done to us define us. To be human, and to prosper, we must let go and look forward. Those who trespass against us may not be the worse off for that, but we shall be the better.

Love Thy Neighbour?

It is festive season, and we shall all be drawing together our disparate lives and attending parties and obligations-flying-under-the-banner-of-parties for the next few weeks. I say disparate lives because the Christmas party tends to be an Event that has little to do with conviviality, or spirituality, but rather more to do with an official letting-down of the collective hair of people who normally only see each other at work. One’s colleagues usually have precisely one thing in common with oneself, namely, they work at the same place as one. And to get over the awkwardness of it all, enormous amounts of alcohol are consumed and nefarious activities take place in the vicinity of the photocopier. It is altogether not particularly charming.

Anonymous photocopier Christmas art

And there are the parties with friends and family, which are much more congenial, but these days no less representative of our disparateness. In the age of Facebook, who can say anymore that all their friends and family live close by? Mine don’t, and I shall be making the 4,000 mile trip to see some of them, while leaving others behind. Even then, people will be dispersed across the vast metropolis, and will come together only through Planning, Organising, and the tool that works at any distance, Facebook: in short, through Contrivance. One can never escape the feeling on such reunions that water has passed under the bridge. It is not so much a catching up, as a patching up; re-building ties undone by distance.

Isn't everyone's family gathering like this?

Who here knows their neighbours anymore? I’m afraid to say that over the years I have not known mine, and when I have tried I have found them either unresponsive or transitory. People don’t sit still for long enough, and where they do, the hatches are battened down. This is a shame, but I sense a glimmer of hope in my current abode. I always thought it was a matter of politeness to invite one’s neighbours to a party, since the best way to avoid disturbing them is to include them. I am pleased to report that the slightly eccentric man above us included us in his annual gathering – wine, whiskey, spätzle and a lot of cigarette smoke. It wasn’t our scene at all, but these were neighbours, offering a hand of friendship and hospitality, and we were most gracious. And strangely enough, everyone learnt something in the process: I learnt that even the most ‘ordinary’ of Germans – bad knitwear, leather trousers and the mandatory mullet – value politeness and tend to be decently read. We tiptoed around each other for a while, but soon the language barrier began to melt away. I spent a long time talking to a young man, eager to learn but with little worldly experience, about why one cannot claim multiculturalism to be an utter failure if one hasn’t actually tried it. I think I also successfully introduced this youth to the finer points of single-malt whiskey. The scotch-drinking part of the evening involved the removal of those with a robust palate to a separate room, where history and social policy became the topic of the night. I inferred from our host that those with a taste for fine spirits were more likely to have refined minds, and on the evidence of the evening I cannot argue. It finished with two complete strangers offering me the long-term loan of a guitar and amplifier. I was pleased as punch.

We had made a priori plans to stay an hour and politely take our leave. We left at 1 a.m. The sense of community was unlike the standard fare of the Christmas season, and although I am not known for being a literalist, I began to see the most obvious advantage of the phrase, ‘Love thy neighbour’.

Shutting Up, Shutting Down

You’re all well aware of my penchant for conversation. I appreciate the art of it: the playful exchanges of delightful folk are, at one and the same time, of no consequence whatever and yet supply the tenuous threads by which civility hangs. Moreover, anyone who habitually sends his soliloquies out into the ether in the hope of finding interlocutors can hardly be thought reticent to engage. I am a thinker-talker – an embodiment of logos, if I may be so bold – and rather like it that way.

There are times, however, when one must shut down (or up) one or both of the features of logos. It has struck me before that one doesn’t need fully to understand a language to know that a particular speaker of it is an idiot. Any thinker-talker of the slightest capacity ought to know when to look before leaping and when to hold his peace. The broadcasting of opinions is not for every forum and every occasion, and the loose tongue is oft the symptom of an empty mind. We could perhaps all use a reminder that some of our most pointed and devastating sentences were better never said. To the sartorially inclined, think of it as buttoning one’s lip.

Devastating WWII public warning

That said, there are times when thinking ought to be suspended too. Rushing heroically into the clichéd house on fire would be one of those occasions, but there are many moments when a thorough unplugging of brain is just the order of the day. A man never yet hit a golf ball sweetly who was thinking how it might be done while making the attempt; a sportsman never yet brought down his moving quarry while wondering about how it would later taste; a driver never yet swerved to avoid an errant child while contemplating the value of the child’s life. We are instinctive beings. That which was not provided at birth we acquire through learning as skills, the execution of which has nothing to do with thinking. Where we think, in these circumstances, we surely fail.

Do or do not; there is no try.

The best of us, as talkers and thinkers, sometimes should shut up and shut down.

Crying Game: A Vignette

‘The winter is hard in England’, thought McDuff, as he looked in on his players warming up before the big match. There wasn’t a great deal of stretching, or indeed any physical activity of any kind, but gloves and scarves (or snoods, so he’d heard) were being donned uniformly. He thought back on his youth in Aberdeen and reflected that the dark months must have been much warmer then.

Each player scrupulously adjusted himself in his personal mirror, making sure that the Nike logo on his snood faced the front, and that his earrings weren’t obscured by the deliciously synthetic fabric. Wantona Bandon, the £15m striker from Ivory Coast, turned to his Brazilian teammate, Preeno, and asked if he thought his eyebrows were evenly groomed. ‘These tweezers will never do’, he said, waving the twenty-four carat diamond encrusted implement in the Brazilian’s face. Preeno grunted – a masculine show of irreverence – and continued to fuss over his tights, which he’d laddered in the processing of putting on. He cursed his fingernails to the room at large, and made a mental note to fire his manicurist after the game.

McDuff called order in the room. The players sat down on cushioned benches, while the young and willing youth squad silently attended to the laces of the stars’ personalised pink football boots. The only sound was the oily slurping of hair gel as it was liberally applied to the players’ heads by the team coach, Sean Itall, a Yorkshire man who no longer understood his life. As McDuff glared at his players he reflected that he didn’t shout as much as he used to do. A sharp glance seemed to bring tears to their eyes and, for all his accomplishments, he knew not how to handle snivelling.

‘This will be a hard game’, he said. The European Champions had drawn non-league side Bighoof United in the cup – a pub side from Barnsley – and McDuff wasn’t sure that his players understood the task at hand. ‘They know only how to kick, punch, and tackle’, he went on, ‘and they won’t much care if you’ve got the ball or not. They’re impervious to cold – they don’t even wear shirts when they’re out on the town – and they will mince you and make you into pies if they sense weakness.’

Anxious looks ensued. A rustle of paper from just outside the door alerted McDuff to the presence of the players’ agents, who were flicking through their clients’ contracts to see if there was any way that they could be weaselled out of the game. They need not have worried. An epidemiological singularity occurred at that moment, as each of the star players was suddenly struck with an acute virus, the symptoms of which included hyperventilation, vomiting and syncope. Like so many Victorian ladies, their constitutions failed them at the eleventh hour. One after the other they expressed their wish to lie – to lie down.

McDuff had seen it before. He clicked his fingers at the bewildered youth squad. ‘Boots on lads,’ he said. ‘You’re going on’.