The
story so far. Some anxious truth-seekers have made contact with
a restless spirit called Nil who has promised to answer their
questions about the meaning of life, the universe and Haile Selassie's
socks.
So
what do you want to know? Or shall I give you my usual spiel about
the higher planes and the journey through the levels of consciousness?
For some reason that always seems to go down well...
If
we’ve had to pass a test to prove our intellectual ability
why should you get away with your ‘usual spiel’?
Fair
enough. So what’s it to be?
Start
with the big one. What is the purpose of life?
Now
you’ve got chutzpah, I’ll say that for you. You think
you can just roll up, tickle my engine, ask a couple of questions
and be immediately rewarded with what you call The Big One. Gautama
Buddha had to wander around for years with barely a blanket on
his back working his way slowly and painfully towards enlightenment.
St Francis had to do the same and charm the birds off the trees
to boot. Even Dan Quayle had to work hard to strip everything
away and reach his current levels of simplicity. But you just
pull out a bottle of South Australian chardonnay and think ‘shall
we turn on the news or shall we clean the kitchen floor? Oh no,
let’s just get Nil to tell us the meaning of it all.’
We
thought you already offered us a trailer for this wisdom of the
ages you were going to be peddling.
And
so I did. But have a bit of patience. All will in the end be revealed.
In the mean time, set your sights a little lower. You could ask
me about Clark Gable, for example.
Why
would we want to do that?
You
might want to know how he’s getting on out here. Or Marilyn
Monroe. Or Gina Lollobrigida.
She’s
still alive.
And
has designed a fountain pen in honour of UNICEF – you can’t
beat me on Hollywood trivia. These are just examples.
These
are just religious icons produced by the dream department of global
capitalism to keep the Western masses’ minds off their misery.
Ah,
we could have done with you in the Bolsheviks back in July 1917
when we still seemed a long way from power.
You
took part in the Russian Revolution?
Of
course. Lenin took the credit for a lot of my best ideas. I don’t
begrudge it him, mind – he was, after all, before his time
in so many ways. He’s been a blueprint for socialist leaders
throughout the century – he turned his back on socialist
economics and embraced capitalism with his New Economics Programme
in 1921. You might say he had class.
Nil
isn’t a scrambled version of Leon, by any chance?
No,
unfortunately you won’t find me in any of the official textbooks:
Trotsky may have been exiled and bumped off but I was the first
person to be written out of history and airbrushed out of photos
with a totalitarian sweep of the pen.
What
about Stalin – did you know him?
Sure
– boring guy with big eyebrows who never said anything, just
did the shit work for us while we wittered on about changing the
world. Next thing we knew, of course, the big eyebrows were staring
down from every hoarding in town. There’s no personality
cult worse than the cult of someone with no personality at all.
Stalin just didn’t like my jokes – and that was the
end of that life.
Next
month: the ethereal tour takes you from ancient Hindu scripture
to Bill Clinton’s murky insides in one fell swoop.
New
Internationalist 323
