 |
 |
 | [256 pg. paperback] $14.95 + S&H |
|
|
| [256 pg. paperback] $14.95 + S&H |
| In times of strife, inter tribal, inter domestic, inter national, inter factional, the urge is always, and should be, to do less. Even in times of general contentment. Do less. Don't wear yourselves out. Save energy. Save electricity. Make do. Humans have always beaten themselves up over the supposed benefits of hard work. Well, there'll be time enough for that when you're dead. And it's always those with really good jobs, as well as the really stupid ones with made-up self-important type jobs, who go on about the dignity of labour, and/or the importance of working hard. Work is for those who don't want to play. When I re-birthed last time, work was all the rage. Work was the be-all and end-all. Work to what end though? You need to be 3 people (at least) to do the amount of work the perpetually over-ambitious claimed they were doing. Luckily, I was at least 3 people. StanleyK, not for the first time, and considering the Ealing Guinness schtick a suitable precedent nicked my idea wholesale. How I learned to stop worrying and plant the idea of multiple parody characterization in SK's fecund yet frightened brain is a story that changed the entire way comedians were to be seen as all-round templates, via serious movies, for the multiple personality society. He took the credit, but it's down to me that you can now be exactly who you want to be at any time you want to be it, even if you don't have a personality. PSellers was more than a template. He was the clone icon to die for. All proceeds from multiple non-personality turned to comedic gold. He existed only because SK was himself frightened to be who he apparently was. Despite deference to the state of his mind, it was I who enabled him to progress into areas previously unimagined. Anti-gravity fantasy, terminal chess obsession, grandiose mythic theorizing and state of the art security techniques, so that he might at least live a life not entirely crippled by paranoia. They were all my ideas, though I neither received nor expected any credit. Anyway, back to work. Work can be a soporiphic it's true, but when duty calls, you lay down those tools, you unburden yourself of collective responsibility, you switch off the info systems. Take to the hills (metaphorically of course – we don't want any more crazed survivalists clogging up the virgin spaces than are absolutely necessary to maintain species integrity) and lie low. Inhabit areas of low electrical production. Hunker down, keep your eyes peeled, and think seriously of killing anyone who may be thinking of encroaching on your personal space. Invites to kill me! Inside is where you look. This is species integrity on a scale we can all understand. The urge to distance oneself from people is all but overwhelming under certain stressful circumstances. In cities, the urge to kill is of course almost un-answerable. The frowns on the faces of struggling urban dwellers bespeak a super human will, an almighty effort just to stay out of jail. How easy it would be to take a life. Murder is square one. Murder is always in our hearts. You know it's true. Cities ain't no good. Cities attract the scummy verminous leeches on holidays undertaken from human warmth and cities deny your essential pre-secular needs. The country's empty. Still, we can't all live there. Leave the city if you can. In my dreams I live on the outskirts, around the orbital. This isn't a retreat, a badly conceived removal from the vortices of electrical energy. It's a survival strategy. Topographical maps of the present space occupied are re-constituted inside the head, so the wider the vistas before us the more open the brain's outlook. Space is both inside and outside, it doesn't matter how free the mental equipment. A closed environment, pressing in on the brain, will mean the ambient pressure exerted on the brain is magnetically reproduced as electricity, the voltage depending of course on size of hippocampus. Those who tend to travel a lot have, of course, significantly enlarged organs. But we know in our hearts that there is too much electricity in cities, corralled in dead end lanes, swept by wind vortices up and around the main thoroughfares and into cul-de-sac mews terraces. It gets blocked, eddying in shallow pools in distressed shopping malls. Too much open space of course and the brain goes into a tailspin from lack of oxygen. It can't quite deal with the incipience, or the enormity, of pre-electrified landscapes. When I was born, I immediately felt crowded. Breasts loomed large like mammoth snowy mountains. I felt crushed under their weight. My dreams and waking dreams thereafter often featured a kind of unspeakable smothering weight, a pressing and irresistible force. I was hypnotized in dreams by magnetic rolling granite plates, which seemed to crush the life out of me, great rolling stone clouds of particularized solidity and immensity. Granite-stone creatures, golems of incalculable power and more or less astonishing believability, far beyond horror story nervousness, pursued me. Stone creatures which were now immobilized and cauterized, rooted as totems of domesticated psychosis in Regents' Park. Frank, on the other hand, as soon as he was dead complained of not being able to see things clearly. And of being able to see things only as though they were at a great distance. Death seemed to rob him of any sense of perspective. The one eyed dead. He was blind to reality. He went on, naturally, to become an academic. Christ knows what his discipline is. His indiscipline. His main talent is for hopeless and aggressive lechery. No wonder his wife eventually booted him out and into my bed. Academics don't actually need a discipline. They just extemporize in the crevices of obsession. They need only an aptitude for minutely missing the point, for failing to see the wider picture. They require simply a laughable propensity for leather jackets (or tweed with leather elbow patches if of an older vintage) and polo necks. An urge to write unreadable and unread books, a delusion that these works somehow push humanity's envelope just that little bit further. On the academic gravy train, in wooden polished corridors, names on stenciled nameplates, individual tuition of favoured students, appearances on the BBC/retained payroll status for rentaquote opinionising, beetle browed theorizing on late night and unwatchable talk-ins, condescension a second nature add-on. Dusty celebrity status, pasty shoed tiptoeing into virginal bedrooms, child abuse in the dead of night, divorce courts heaving with wistful and long suffering wives. They're worse than film stars. In normal chronology they're just dusty monuments to the individual delusion, study bound in the realm of fear, hunkering down in speciality, specifically to avoid life or any of its ferocious variants. They might as well be Trekkies; they may as well admit their status as fanboy obsessives. The impulse to nurture obsessions at the expense of the bigger picture is a characteristic shared. What else do academics do but nurture morbid obsessions and fiddle with their barely pubescent charges? Secrete menopausal fluids from rheumy eye sockets, take what isn't theirs, seduce the needy and the immature. Academia is a hothouse, decadent plants usurping youthful blooms by stealth... (Not sure this is wide open...not sure it's controlled...by what means do we reach a decision on policy? How do we implement that policy? Authentication of policy? Is break character configured? Who's going to look at this...Ahab can explain the issues then you can liaise with him...why not hardwire the uberview?...free jazz in this context a tautology...) ...A lisp goes well too. Allied to a decadently overbearing self-image, a misplaced view of their place in the scheme of things. Don't get involved with them. Do less, don't pay, and pay now. Or live less, and pay now. Just avoid debt. Debt is the universal gaolor. Reverse credit. Credit being merely a form of tax, a tax on presumption. A tax on nervy want, on impatient acquisitiveness. Well here's the answer. Don't be taxed. Reject credit. Do less...look inside. Feel the weight, feel the weightlessness of existence. The existential dead weight, as sung by academics. Stop shopping, NOW!!! said my brother. It's about the most cruelly tender thing he ever did say. He knows a thing or two. Just stop shopping. Don't go out. Stay in. Shops are full of what you don't want. Opt for cruelty. Be cruel to yourself as a way of approaching the divine. Look inside, see the cruelty. Our capacity for cruelty cruelly exposed by the simpering insistence that we aren't capable of cruelty. Our ability to avoid cruelty fatally undermined by our sanctimonious assertions that we're all too civilized to eat each other. In fact, Frank like all academics revels in his capacity for cruelty. He imagines that he should be afforded the dispensation open to geniuses, the deference of others, because a genius is what he imagines himself to be. I've seen Frank reducing helpless girls (in shops) to tears merely by sarcasm and/or cynically raised voice. He thinks he's above the common herd, the hoi polloi, as he likes to call them. And let's face it, that kind of behaviour is just so passé. Standing in front of the entrance to Pret a Manger, just round the corner from Leicester Square, Frank stood and regaled his audience, a gaggle of credulous, bashful acolytes, with loud complaints about ever-encroaching franchise culture. He fulminated against the ubiquity of corporate funhouses. He frothed about cappuccino culture. He held forth and he pontificated. He went red, his temples began throbbing and a slight foaming became noticeable around the corners of his mouth. He extended himself. Thumbs in belt loops, he relaxed into his strident broadside oblivious to the ebb and flo of those without academic leanings. "Next..." "Are you speaking to me, young man?" He eventually enquired with extravagant pomposity. "Next..." A customer more attuned to the pace and the culture of the west end stepped in and ordered a latte to go. Frank was lost for words, lost in the slipstream of accelerated life. He declined immediately to wait another second and flounced away, audience in his own archly choreographed slipstream, to thunder indignantly on other displeasing aspects of urban life. His words hung and swooped like seagulls as he marched away, dipping in and out of the grubby street ambience, the noisome metropolitan drone, swooping occasionally with glib and screechy impudence into the fractured consciousnesses of those within earshot. As he pranced down the street thundering denunciations this way and that, heads were turned and necks rubbered. ...I wouldn't tell him this, but I turned 40 at birth, 20 odd years ago, and I feel utterly worn out. Clapped out. I kind of feel that the heaviness, the weight, is catching up on me. The electricity is getting inside me, silting up the channels. A lesser manboy or deranged household god would whinge endlessly in utter self-pity and wallow like a water buffalo in the warm baths of self-loathing but me, I'm not given to self pity. It's time for re-entry. I never went to prison, so I might try that. But I'm more a shadenfreude kind of guy, like Frank. Maybe our only point of correspondence. I revel in others' misfortunes. I put my own neuroses and/or psychoses to one side, and examine the failings of others with amused contempt. I write scathing reviews for low circulation publications, emblazoning my hatred for sterile cod-creativity in haughty and imperious style. I laugh at the messes people get themselves into. Frank knows this and I think he approves. As my familiar, he kind of depends on my endorsement. I feel the weight of his obstreperousness. I'm exercised by the effect he has on people. People I know. I wish Frank hadn't died before he'd had time to really grow into himself. To rid himself of his airs and graces and learn to conduct himself without striking absurdly camp and affected attitudes. Campness needs to be grown into, must be gradually assumed, it is a favourite pair of slippers. Too camp too young is merely vulgar. If only Frank could have been more like me. He was at home with his wife see? A white walled casa, Andalusia/Islington style terrace...miniature cactus plant...tautologous rubber plant, art nouveau engravings, miniature enervated wife clicking in stilettos, small dogs yapping, kids in the playroom. Au pair at the drinks...Wife mooning over the open windows, distraught, tearful and beautiful before the smashed crockery and glassware, mangled birthday cards torn and strewn every which way. 50s style light fittings, art nouveau effects dashed to the floor, Frank's bits and pieces all over, all papers and effects defenestrated, while I'm in the pub around the corner. We're having a morose boozing session, him complaining vigorously about his little wife being a bitch, just a fucking evil BITCH, me affecting to take the slightest notice, humouring him and making believe I'm on his side. If he knew I'd been fucking her on the quiet for years he'd be speechless. Done up like a pantomime dame of rage, he'd look at me through red mists and then start blubbing uncontrollably. Best to spare the punters that kind of spectacle really. Frank's an ugly man when angry, and even more ugly when upset. So I just retreat into a sort of erotic reverie in which I dream anew of what I'll be doing to her later on, all the while wearing a fixed expression of concerned sympathy. They fight (apparently) like drunken tigers, all rage focused on the other, projected, transferred. Eventually Frank is forced to concede defeat, or if not defeat then capitulation to the more entrenched will of the other. Dionysia throws her head back, a smear of lipstick slashing her cheekbone right to left, and lets out an exultant yell. She wears the trousers in this ménage alright. Well of course she does. Frank doesn't have any legs does he? How could he wear the trousers? He tells me, because he knows, that academics live like kings. Sovereigns in their own right, they have the pick of affordable housing. It's all graft. Designed housing, as opposed to lived in housing, the like of which most of us have to put up with. I'm left in possession of a shabby and disreputable looking terrace number while he lives like a fucking king. Hand in glove with architect buddies with whom he went through college. Academics and coffee table lifestyles, on the Scandinavian model, go together like HAL and IBM. They get invited on TV. I may have mentioned this. Free rides to Broadcasting House in limos paid for by the license payer. It's a scandal. I'm the real genius here. I'm the one who has visions. I'm the one who lends his name to religions. People pay me...to touch them! You know that? To touch them! Anyway, back to secular reality. Frank stormed away from the coffee franchise leaving eddies of perturbation in his wake. Pavements sclerotic with coagulating moochers, day-dreaming, pavement hogging snoozers. All shop doorways blocked by hordes of somnambulant tourists. He left them all for dead. Coffee Junta was spilling its hyped up imbibers into the street all energized and wired. Wired and yet non-locomotive, non kinetic. The only movement was a kind of torpid ripple of intent. Inane intent. The currents of indecision that guided their compromised movements kept them ebbing and flowing this way and that, at the same time rendering them incapable of moving decisively in any direction without first checking on the movements of their closest neighbours, like flocks of slowly migrating birds that haven't made up their collective mind to sod off. And this lot weren't migrating anywhere fast enough for Frank. They were in his way. Feckless human barriers against the energy flow. Tourists and somnambulists everywhere, more effective in deadly gainsaying than any number of thick-necked bouncers. Just stand a group of tourists in front of a club and you'll never get anybody through the fucking doors. Ever, thought Frank. "Get the fuck out of the fucking way you dozy fucking half-witted fuckwits" he bellowed at the stodgily massed ranks of confused and half asleep pedestrians. Sensing that his righteous and irreligious wrath was being hopelessly misread by the assembled sleepwalkers as a kind of bathetic paranormal happening, misapprehended as a mere apparition of rage brought on by endless ODing on the city's truncated electricity (a phenomenon that all the tourist guidebooks had taken to including in their literature) and observing their reaction, one that implied that as far as they were concerned this holographic avatar of spite was merely a tourist spectacle, Frank barged headlong into the group without further ceremony. He thus knocked several shocked tourists to the ground, marching headlong through the rooted backpackers. A chatter of muted protest went up amid the group and apologetically shocked glances were shot this way and that. Frank was away and gone without a backward glance before they were able to re-assemble as before, inanely blocking the thoroughfare, the recent apparently pixilated avatar of rage already a distant and vaguely perplexing, unpleasant memory. A tourist diversion they'd rather, on the whole, have done without. Frank knew though that the same non-migratory behaviour was bound to be repeated wherever there was a doorway or entrance or exit. Entrances to tube platforms a particular favourite. Twittering collections of Chinese students, with nowhere special to go, clogging up the exits. The twittering reaches unendurable levels of fractured murmuring as they perceive the danger of the approaching train. Trains enter stations with an urgency not at all mirrored in the faces of their drivers. All sorts of ghostly operators drift around the circle line. But the trains belie their somnambulant masters, breaching the hot air in front of them with insolent dispatch; they are nightmare intrusions, waking the platform sleepwalkers from their reveries. The day-glo posse lethargically scatters allowing the cowed commuter class to emerge, nervous and blinking, onto the platform. And Frank, still fretting and twitching from the caffeine/cocoa high and the insufferable unwillingness of his acolytes to actually listen to him, pushes his way through the schlepping throng and steps out in apparent ignorance of the oncoming vehicle. A blizzard of dust envelopes him as he falls headlong onto the tracks. The dozing driver thought he'd seen a ghost. The fact is, he had. Frank's now doing less than before, and he's all the better for it. The driver got 6 months off work. They generally find this sort of thing makes for good copy with the makers of unwatchable TV documentaries and it adds weight to their unions' negotiations for higher pay in the interminable round of talks aimed at avoiding industrial action. The city is not brought to its knees and everything carries on as before. Frank is dead. A suicide of immaculately conceived Gnostic immediacy. He didn't even know he was going to die that morning. A kind of split second decision, unfortunately for Frank carried out without benefit of an attending documentary crew and therefore a suicide which was empty of re-birthing potential, being merely another LT statistic and just an irritant to passengers both up and down the Piccadilly Line, commuters unaware of the potential divine import of the action and merely hot-collared and fractious at being made to wait for their supper. The divine in small matters unperceived as usual, un-seen by the train companies and their shareholders. A private performance in public, a consummation of the first sacrament of cataclysmic re-entry to the quotidian realm by Frank the fat bottomed, monkey arsed academic. Frank's doing less and less these days. A bit of street theatre, well hung and snow white tan, demotic wheelchair ranting, cap in hand solicitation of tourists, nuisance phone-calls to former students, email stalking of those students whose willingness to submit to Frank's attentions made them especially meaningful to him, being threatened by ex boyfriends and their fathers, hanging around in crappy Soho boozers re-living a life that's no longer viable, sizing up the talent, cocking a jaundiced and weary eye at the low rent crims as they size him up, and generally trying to get back on the elephant trail. He's thrown away his bike and latterly his chair and spends his days in ritual procession along ex-bus lanes and cycle tracks, vainly attempting to re-invoke the divine in himself by re-tracing his tracks over the ancient elephant routes as set down millennia ago by the three of us in our heyday. As the Incas processed in religious devotion around bird and dragon outlines on the Nallarbor invoking rain and pleading for divine benevolence, so Dionysia and I (and Frank to carry the supplies) once invoked elephant divinity. We laid down elephant tracks which were in subsequent millennia used by profane civilizations as bus lanes. Way back when. Elephant trails that, once restored to their correct usage and if viewed from an airplane or similar flying machine, score out the unmistakable shape of an elephant's head over the deranged, unplannable thoroughfares of pre-mythic London. |
| [256 pg. paperback] $14.95 + S&H |