raw materials of justice & capitalism’s temple prostitutes
This is the police mortuary, the tradesmen’s entrance to the Court, as it were. Here are delivered the raw materials of justice, corpses that are precipitates of strange experience, alloys of fear and hate and anger and love and viciousness and bewilderment, that the Court will take and refine into comprehension. Through the double glass doors come those with a grief to collect. They take away the offal of a death, its privateness, the irrelevant uniqueness of the person, the parts that no one else has any further use for. The Court will keep only what matters, the way in which the person became an event.
To come in here is to be reminded that the first law is real estate, and people are its property.
–William McIlvanney, Laidlaw, 1977/2020, 39-40
Taking McIlvanney’s Laidlaw with me as my jury service read was a bad idea, because the raw material for the Court is not only a corpse. It is any living body.
The living bodies of the Witness, the Judge, the Jury, among whom I was, who, according to the glossary above, decide whether or not you are guilty: all of us are raw materials for the wheels of justice…
…and its property.
I chose better for the second day. I took Metamorphoses, Ovid, translated by A.D. Melville.
Poetry is the antidote for the Law, perhaps the only one.
…
The Burleigh Hotel was at the West end of Sauchiehall Street. The architecture was Victorian and very dirty. It had been cunningly equipped with curlicues and excrescences, the chief effect of which was to make it an enormous gin for drifting soot and aerial muck. It stood now half-devoured by its catch, weighted with years of Glasgow, its upper reaches a memorial to the starlings that had once covered the middle of the city like an umbrella of demented harpies.
…
The woman who came out of the cubby-hole at the side was unexpected. A woman like her was always unexpected. She was mid-twenties, attractive, and she had that look of competence in being female that makes men count their hormones. …
‘I don’t suppose you have a vacancy,’ he said, nodding at the keyboard.
She had adjusted to the archness of his levity before he had finished speaking.
‘This is our quiet year,’ she said.
–Ibid., 158-159
…
‘You like golf?’
‘Yes and no,’ Laidlaw said.
Harkness said nothing. He wasn’t in the mood for riddles.
‘It’s a good game,’ Laidlaw said quietly. ‘But I suspect all professional sportsmen. Grown men devoting their lives to a game. They’re capitalism’s temple prostitutes.’
–Ibid., 160-161
