On whimsy....

Whimsy:
1. An odd or fanciful idea; a whim.
2. A quaint or fanciful quality

This piece started with me exploring the meaning of whimsy and how it might be important. It has become something of a statement of policy for The View from Cullingworth. So let’s get that out of the way before we discuss whimsy…

I can’t categorise all the blogs there are or ever will be but looking at what I’ve blogged on The View from Cullingworth it seems to me that:

The world doesn’t need another shouty political blog – for those who share much of my crossness there are blogs that do the anger so much better than me like Constantly Furious, there are blogs so much ruder than I would ever dare such as dear old Obnoxio, and there are cynical & worldly-wise blogs so much better written than I can manage such as Al Jahom’s Final Word.

There’s plenty of good, solid commentary out there – my ramblings add very little to the contributions from Iain Dale, Charlotte Gore and Hopi Sen. Or for that matter from hundreds of other interesting bloggers with “something to say”

And I don’t do gossip – much though I love to read the political gossip mongers; Tory Bear, Parlez_me_nTory and the daddy of them all Guido Fawkes, I lack the necessary chutzpah to do such tale-telling

This leaves very little space for a political blogger so I have decided to focus on whimsy – those odd, fanciful ideas that never get mentioned because…well, because they’re just too strange! I’ve written in praise of idiots, have questioned the rule of experts and would like to discuss sortition, citizen juries and models for participatory democracy. I love the idea of the little man kicking against the system and succeeding against all the odds.

The conceit we see in my favourite film, "It’s a Wonderful Life", where the achievements of one man in one place ripple – like something from chaos theory – through the world and touch many more than that man thinks. That is whimsy – glorious whimsy. And staying with films, the idea in "Field of Dreams" that we should 'build it and they will come' – the triumph of the better mousetrap and a hymn to passion. That is whimsy – personal, private and dreamlike

Don’t we all love too the sweet other worlds of literature – whether Shakespeare’s “Midsummer’s Night Dream”, Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” or John Crowley’s incomparable “Little Big”. These are not mere dreams – lifeless inconsequential things – but places of meaning where the stories tell of private victory and loss, of how our personal mores affect the entire world not just those we can see and above all that good will win over evil in the end - but not necessarily in the way we think. That is whimsy – dreamlike, almost insubstantial yet full of meaning.

I shall borrow the words of the greatest writer of political whimsy, Giovanni Guareschi – creator of Don Camillo:

“…I want you to understand that, in the Little World between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs have souls. If you keep this in mind, you will easily come to know the village priest, Don Camillo, and his adversary, Peppone, the Communist Mayor. You will no be surprised that Christ watches the goings-on from a big cross in the village church and not infrequently talks, and that one man beats the other over the head, but fairly – that is, without hatred – and that in the end the two enemies agree about essentials.”

I will never reach GG’s genius but if a whimsical approach can bring a smile and maybe cast a little light on our puffed up, pigeon-like political debate that would be good. And if I fail in that mission it will have been done without recourse to malice, spite or the projection of aggressive anger.