Sir John Schorne’s Devil
A Pursuit in Three Acts
Arc 1.1, February 2012
1.
It’s Christmas 2006 and I’m walking beside the creek in Dubai. The
pavements and central reservations teem with tourists and Russian
prostitutes in roughly equal numbers. Tied up at the quay, dhows are
being packed to the gunwales with second-hand Toyota Hiluxes. Piles of
tyres, plucked off wrecked and defunct cars, are being hauled by hand
and dropped into the rusted holds of boats bound for retreading
factories in Navlakhi and Karachi. From China, mattresses. Piles of
flashlights. Chairs, tables, oxytetracycline injections. Chilean
softwoods. Foam mattresses. Drums of sorbitol from Mumbai.
I had
wanted to write about piracy, but piracy turned out to be a
depressingly predictable parasite on a far larger, far stranger
phenomenon: the shipping business. Container shipping serves the great
ports of the earth, but there are few enough of them, and none in north
Africa. With no deep harbours, the region depends on little ships like
these.
The scene fills me with an intense (though false)
nostalgia. It’s a last echo of the way shipping is recorded in the
writings of my literary heroes: Joseph Conrad, James Hanley, Malcolm
Lowry.
Patrick Hamilton: at the end of The Midnight Bell,
Bob, defrauded and betrayed, stares across the Thames. The river flows
beneath him, “flowing out to the sea…
“The sea! The sea! What of the sea?
“The sea!
“The solution – salvation! The sea! Why not? He would go back, like the great river, to the sea!”
This is not suicide. This is a career move.
“He had wasted enough time. He would go down to the docks now, and see what was doing. Now! Now! Now!”
Now, of course, is too late. It used to take days to unload a ship and
a ship’s crewmen could spend most of this time resting and drinking and
whoring themselves silly on shore. Such capers are relegated to the
storybooks now. These days, time in port is measured in hours; junior
officers pull twelve-, even eighteen-hour shifts, and regular seamen
like Bob (these days a Bangladeshi or Malay) are rarely allowed off the
ship. These days, a crew works itself to exhaustion in harbour and
spends the voyage recuperating.
Since April 1956, the shipping
container has been ushering in a more ordered world. No sweat-stench. No
broken limbs. No sores, no sprains. No ham-boned supermen rolling drunk
on Friday night on wages their children never see.
This new,
clean, modular world arrives in boxes. From port to port, big,
square-built ships carry ever bigger quantities of it about the earth.
Great cranes lift it and deposit it on trucks and railway locomotives,
and bear it inland to every town, every settlement. Ships once were
shackled, constipated, squeezing out their goods for weeks on end on the
backs of men made beasts; today they evacuate themselves in hours.
The shipping container was developed by Malcolm McLean, an American
entrepreneur who wanted to stop domestic ship lines undercutting his
trucking business. After the war, you could buy a war-surplus cargo ship
for next to nothing. “Jumboize” it by adding a German-made mid-section,
and you had a craft capable of massively undercutting road and rail
transport. The only drawback, before McLaren, was trying to get your
goods on and off the vessel. That consumed time and labour enough to
represent half your costs – even if you were carting products half-way
round the world.
Standardised containers and the machinery
developed to move them now disgorge ships a fifth of a mile long in
hours. Two hundred-foot-high cranes reach across ships broader than the
Panama Canal. Some of the more powerful commercial computer applications
on the planet ensure that goods are stacked in the right order, in the
right containers, in the right section of the right hold of the right
ship plying the right route to ensure that these goods are delivered at
the right place at the right time. The drive to efficiency has squeezed
schedules to the point where Ford and Walmart and Toyota are wholly
dependent on timely deliveries for their operation. If the boxes don’t
arrive on time, they simply hibernate.
Logistics used to be a
military term. Now it’s a core function of business. Stripping the fat
and inefficiency out of our resource chain, we’ve put ourselves on a
permanent war-footing. The war has gone well. In the developed West. the
variety of goods we consume has increased four-fold, while expanding
markets have brought economic and social benefits, a haphazard but real
way, to the poorest of the earth. (Globalisation, to horribly misquote
Lou Reed, is good, though not fair at all.)
Like the fatuous “War
on Terror”, however, this is an open-ended conflict: we will never know
when we have won. At what point does an industry’s athleticism start
to undermine its health? At what point does a strict diet bloom into
galloping anorexia?
2.
July 2009. Construction in
the Gulf stops altogether in summer, when the skies are white and people
(if they’re outside at all, which is seldom) huddle in pitiful scraps
of shade. Even the more temperate months prove too much for some. The
furnace-light, the dust, the scale of things.
A fence, not much
higher than a man and topped with razor wire, runs rifle-straight beside
the road all the way to a granular horizon. Behind the fence stretch
mile after mile of prefabricated houses. The narrow lanes between them
are slung with clothes lines. Construction workers sit in circles of
shade, knocking pallets together. Here and there mounds of graded gravel
rise in parody of the great ranges to the south. The road has begun to
disintegrate, its surface crazed and sunken under the weight of so many
trucks bound for Dubai with loads of boulders and gravel. The World and
The Palm began life here, as the insides of mountains.
I come to
a roundabout. There is a fountain at its centre: a dry cement tower
clad in blue swimming-pool tile, sterile as a bathroom fitting. There
isn’t a hint of what places the roundabout might one day serve. No
buildings. No traffic. No signs. Just a tarmac sunburst in the sand, its
exits blurred and feathered by encroaching dust. On the horizon there
are whole city blocks that aren’t even on a map yet. New developments,
bankrolled by the Saudis. University cities thrown up at miraculous
speed by Bangladeshi guestworkers. Fawn crenellations hover inches off
the horizon on a carpet of illusory blue.
It’s late afternoon by
the time I find my way back to the city. My hotel room in Dubai has
hyperactive air-conditioning, a view of the Emirates Towers, and Miami
Vice reruns on an endless loop.
In an episode entitled “Tale of
the Goat”, nobody seems to know whether to take the plot seriously or
not. One minute Crocket is joking about voodoo, the next he’s taking
advice on Haitian religious practices from Pepe the janitor.
He’s right to be worried. Papa Legba, a Haitian voodoo priest, has
faked his own death, been buried, disinterred, and shipped in his coffin
to Miami, all to take revenge on a business rival. Clarence Williams
III’s portrayal of Papa – brain-damaged, half-paralysed, sickeningly
malevolent – kicks a hole in the TV big enough for nightmares to spill
out.
People do this kind of thing for real. In 1962 the Haitian
petty speculator Clarvius Narcise was poisoned, buried alive, dug up and
drugged into believing that he was a zombie.
Notoriously,
shipping containers have cleaned up and expanded even the business of
self-burial. Vanishing into a box has never been simpler. According to
figures from the United Nations, in 2007 slave traders made more money
than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined, their global logistics
smoothed by the advent of container shipping.
Incarceration
doesn’t even have to be uncomfortable. Five weeks after 9-11, a
dockworker in the giant Italian container port of Gioia Tauro discovered
a stowaway inside a container appointed for a long voyage. Inside there
was a bed, a heater, a toilet and a satellite phone. The box, bound
for Rotterdam, Canada and Chicago, was chartered by Maersk Sealand’s
Egyptian office and loaded in Port Said onto a German-owned charter ship
flying an Antigua flag. Where the stowaway was bound is anyone’s guess.
Incredibly, he was granted bail and vanished, abandoning his cell
phone, his laptop, airport security passes and an airline mechanic’s
certificate valid for Kennedy and O’Hare.
It’s an old nightmare,
perhaps the oldest: waking up inside a sealed coffin. The strange
voyage of “Container Bob” epitomised its flipside: fear of what leaps
out at you when you prise the lid open. This too is an old anxiety; so
old, the words that express it no longer line up properly. Pandora’s box
was actually a jar (a ritual container for the dead, as it happens, so
the frisson survives the mistranslation.) And the first jack-in-the-box
was a boot. The English prelate Sir John Schorne was supposed to have
cast the devil into a boot some time in the 1200s, saving the village of
North Marston in Buckinghamshire from perdition.
Since then the
“diable en boîte” has matured from a children’s toy in the 1500s to a
pyromanic McGuffin in director Robert Aldrich’s nuclear noir Kiss Me
Deadly, to a headline-grabbing shibboleth of international security
conferences. (The “suitcase nuke” is still a myth, though one creeping
uncomfortably close to reality: backpack nukes have been around since
the 1970s.)
The shipping container is, according to security
experts, Auld Jack’s current mode of transportation. Why would the
world’s whirling axes of evil go to all the trouble of developing an
intercontinental ballistic missile when a container can do the same job,
more accurately and over a greater distance, for under US$5000?
Around 150 companies in the US alone – from giants like IBM to tiny
start-ups – are using technical fixes to plug US Homeland Security’s
very real fear of chemical, biological and nuclear attack by container.
With more than two million containers moving over the earth at any one
time, the scale of the work is Herculean: to fit tamper-proof sensors
providing realtime geolocation data on every can on earth. Meanwhile
America’s megaport Los Angeles/Long Beach unloads its containers in long
parallel rows, like trains. An imaging machine mounted on tall steel
legs trundles over them. The machines are popular, but they’re not
without flaws. Concealed nuclear bombs are not the only sources of
radiation on the dockside. There are ceramic tiles. There are bananas.
Caesium and cobalt are famously hard to distinguish from kitty litter.
And the more sensitive the detectors, the more false positives to port
authority has to handle.
In any open-ended conflict, the enemy we
most have to fear is fear itself: our crippling over-reaction to false
positives. It is more than possible, in a system lean enough to admit no
delay, that the entire world economy can and will hoax itself to a
standstill.
3.
Its 2011 and I’m making a third
and final visit to Dubai; a city the old boys remember as a ramshackle
fort overlooking malarial creek. The city’s “miracle” is more or less
complete. The transformation looks sudden, but it’s been forty years in
the making. In the 1970s, when towns like Abu Dhabi were allowing their
harbours to silt up, confident that all the wealth they could ever need
would well up out of the ground for ever, oil-poor Dubai was dredging
its harbour and encouraging imports. Now Dubai’s a vital entrepot for
former states of the Soviet Union: people hungry for everything, from
plastic plates and toys to polyester clothing, much of it manufactured
in the Far East and India.
The major part of this traffic is
containerised and handled by machines outside the city proper, in Port
Rashid and Jebel Ali. The road out to these deep-water megaports is
lined with private clinics: plastic surgeries catering to city’s
sun-frazzled Jumeira Janes. Dubai maddens people. Never mind the heat.
Since the global recession, the advertisements on Dubai’s innumerable
hoardings and covering entire faces of its complete-but-empty high-rises
have grown even more extreme in their evocation of the city’s
dream-logic.
‘Live the Life.’
‘We’ve set our vision higher.’
Even the white-goods retailers have names like Better Life and New Hope.
Aspiration as an endless Jacob’s ladder. Perfect your car, your phone,
your home, your face. Perfect your labia. Plastic surgeons line the way
to erotically sterile encounters at the Beij al Arab hotel. Then what?
Then where? The elevators only go up. Take a helicopter ride into the
future. Cheat death. Chrome the flesh. Every advert I ride past features
a robot. A perfected man. A smoothly milled thigh or tit. A cyborg sits
at the wheel of a latest-model four wheel drive, limbs webbed
promiscuously around the controls. A mobile phone blinks in a stainless
steel hand.
The shipping business still fascinates me and
researching it continues to swallow the freelance budget. This is going
to have to stop.
For a start, Dubai feeds fantasy. Every once
in a while an attic in the Old Town, Deira, is raided by armed police. A
man is led away, or sometimes shot. Every now and again, a headless
corpse is found slumped in a pool of blood in one of the city’s many
subterranean car parks, and children fishing in the creek watch as a
heron rips beakfuls of hair from the remains of a human head. In Dubai,
everyone is anonymous and significant at the same time. It’s Casablanca.
It’s Buenos Aires. A loser’s paradise.
For another, my
ill-financed pursuit of something richly scary to write about has taken
another twist. Sir John Schorne’s devil has swapped vehicles yet again. I
missed this at the time, but while I was watching Crockett and Tubbs
re-runs, over 75,000 others were waking to one of YouTube’s more
piquing viral crazes: a video of a man opening a box
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxcdcWgp6Ew . Uploaded On 11 November
2006, this video – a so-bland-as-to-be-pornographic record of a 60GB
Japanese PS3 gaming console being removed from its cardboard and
polystyrene packaging – is the earliest extant example we have of
“unboxing”.
The Wall Street Journal rightly picked up on the
genre’s striptease pedigree, but it missed, I think, the greater part of
the video’s appeal. CheapyD Gets His PS3 - Unboxing is, above all, a
comprehensive attempt to disarm the anxieties conjured by Jack’s
unexpected springing from his box. In the video, a carton is opened
slowly and steadily under controlled conditions to reveal exactly what
the packaging said it would contain.
The cardboard carton is the
disposable, end-user-friendly spoor of the shipping industry. Men who
might once have tugged and trawled the world’s plenty about its rumbling
yards with case-hooks now haul internet-ordered goods about our
residential streets: careless and savage they crush our precious parcels
through diminutive letter-boxes: holes whose miniscule dimensions were
clearly cut for a different age.
When people talk about shipping
they talk about goods. They talk about televisions and motorbikes and
cars and toys and clothing and perfumes and whisky. The more informed
discuss screws, pigments, paints, moulded plastics, rolls of leather,
chopped-glass matting, bales of cotton, chemicals, dyes, yeasts, spores,
seeds, acids, and glues. The paranoid occasionally mention waste. The
single biggest worldwide cargo by volume is waste paper, closely
followed by rags and shoes, soft drinks cans, worn tyres, rebars and
copper wire.
The containers themselves escape notice. They are
the walls of our world. In less than a single generation, they have
robbed us of two thirds of the earth’s surface. The sea has been stolen
away by vast corporations, complex algorithms, robot cities, and ships
as big as towns. Everything ends up in a box these days and the world
has become a kind of negative of itself: a trap, rather than an escape.
The real appeal of CheapyD Gets His PS3 - Unboxing is that it doesn’t
just disarm the jack-in-the-box game. It actually reverses it. The
contents of the box are irrelevant: a final bolus of processed matter
for us Jacks to scrabble past in our struggle for birth. We are all
Jacks now, compressed by our own logistics, imprisoned in the rhetoric
of war, crippled with anxiety, our brains rotten with it, and ready to
spring, if only we could find the catch to this lid.
CheapyD’s
next trick – five years, we’ve waited to see this, what is taking him so
long? – will be to escape. To jump into his box, and disappear.
*
