Viduity

I mentioned Krapp’s Last Tape before. I was never sure how to take the “hero”. Is he a comic or tragic figure? He is ridiculous as well as doomed so, both I guess. His yearly review of life seems automatic and a bit purposeless. When listening to recordings of his previous self he is appalled and bewildered. At one point he hears himself use the word “viduity” [period of being a widow] and is utterly baffled as to what it means.

Over the last week I have re-read three novels by Patrick McCabe and have been in the same state of bafflement. I mean I had already read these novels but could scarcely remember them. Where did they go? As I said I have given up reading from my iPad and so the only paper books I have are those  have already read. Patrick McCabe is my favourite writer from this island. His nightmare world of psychopaths, murderers, perverts - every kind of maniac conceivable – makes him the man I would  never  want to be.

The public and private personas of men in the novels of Pat McCabe are terrifying gothic monstrosities. Their minds are diseased, disturbing and horribly claustrophobic. No-one would want to know or be like any of the men from The Butcher Boy , Breakfast on Pluto, Call me the Breeze or Winterwood.   Take Francie Brady’s father in the Butcher Boy An alcoholic, wife beating, narcissist. With men like that viduity sounds like the better option. 

Resolutions

The first time I read Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape I remember thinking that Krapp was old. Not just the version of Krapp who reflected Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back” but, also the version speaking from the “spool” recorded on his 39th birthday. Now, for me, 39 is a distant memory and  I have none of the fire he was on about as an old (dying – his last tape) man.  Well,  I am not aware of any burning sensations. This year is 5 days old. You’re supposed to talk about resolutions at this time. My new year resolutions:  I have decided to stop using my iPad and phone in bed. I have decided to stop drinking alcohol. Again. I will succeed at both because, while I may not have any of Krapp’s fire I have a leaden stubbornness that has grown like a tumour ever since I started running.



I doubt that these New Year resolutions have any meaning. But then I doubt that there is any meaning in anything. Maybe starting with Beckett was a bad idea – the succinctness of his description of life “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more” has always seemed definitive for me. Well, nearly as definitive as saying nothing and doing nothing.  For that matter, his description of the choice to slap a coat of style over the void similarly rings true: “a bow tie around a throat cancer”.



So why bother making any New Year resolutions? Maybe none of it means anything. I guess the demand that these things should mean something is a mistake. Maybe if I had children I would see more meaning? But I am not sure. I have dogs and nieces and a god child. I love them all – they give life meaning. I see that that this is a circular argument but I don’t really care. Actually, that’s why I like running, you know. Nobody fucking asks  - what does this mean?  You just run and run and then you’re tired and you sleep. And now that I have stopped poisoning my body and my brain with iPads and booze I  hope I will sleep better.

And what becomes of you my love?

My brother told me about The Office on the same day as the attacks on the World Trade Centers in 2001. Of course, like everyone else I spent the 11^th September 2001 watching the planes endlessly crash and crash again into the skyscrapers, watching the towers fall, the dust, the death. I didn’t watch The Office until much later. But the two events – the best comedy show of all time and the most spectacular terrorist attack - are forever linked and not just because of their coincidence in time for me. They are both masterpieces of the spectacle of agony. If anything the excruciating, intimacy of the slow, torturous, social deaths of David Brent are more painful to watch. 9/11 was, to my eyes, a movie.  The Office was real life.

So I experienced 9/11 – a real event – as a fiction too outlandish, too horrific, to categorise in familiar terms. (Indeed when my brother told me what was happening in New York  my only frame of reference was the mid 1970s remake of King Kong where the monster climbed the World Trade Centres. The Office was different. Sure, he was a figment of Ricky Gervais’ imagination but as a reminder of personal failings shared by everyone to some extent – vanity, stupidity, arrogance, delusions of adequacy –  David Brent was usually too close to the bone for comfort. The Office, even after multiple viewings is painfully funny to watch.

Last year’s reprise of the main character David Brent Life on the Road got ‘mixed reviews’. For me, though it is a dark masterpiece. Particularly in the way that Gervais breaks the fourth wall. At one point in the film we see, on screen, Brent paying members of his band to go for a drink with him. This is a really pathetic example of how little respect they have for him. Brent is in his fifties now, a forlorn, lost soul whose pursuit of the depressingly hackneyed dream of making it as a rock star drives the plot of the film.

He endures insult upon insult, and seems only occasionally aware of how the rest of the world holds him in contempt. The disturbing, almost suicide inducing rupture of the fourth wall comes late in the film. Some of the characters actually start to stick up for Brent. One character spends £2000 of his own money on fake snow that he’d persuaded Brent not to buy so as to save his money and then admits on camera that he actually likes him as a person. The other band members willingly go for a drink with him. A female character, who’d shown a soft spot for Brent all through the film reaches out to touch his hand in the very last shot of the film.

But what I couldn’t shake off was this thought  - What if Brent had paid them all to say these nice things about him on camera? What if he’d been paying the ‘love interest’ all along to take his part? Gervais is inviting us to take consolation from the conclusion of the film but because of the bleakness of what has gone before, it seems to me that this is a ruse - the equivalent of a version of 11th September 2001 where Tom Cruise, Will Smith, and Brad Pitt manage to stop the planes at the last minute.  No one believes in that.

Living in Oblivion

You can never watch the same film twice. I have just watched Living in Oblivion again; twenty years after I first saw it. This is a film about how you can never shoot the same scene twice. There’s something in this about how children love to have the same stories read to them, something about how perceptions of sameness are really reflections of an attitude of defeat. Why is it that boredom is an invention of adulthood? What could be more definitive of the loss of childhood than the statement “I’m bored!”?

Living in Oblivion is a film about acting, about the difficulties of making a film; the opening twenty five minutes of the film shows repeated attempts to shoot the same thirty second  scene over and over again to no avail. Each time something goes wrong – a light bulb blows, a microphone drops into shot, the actors forget their lines, the actors perform incredibly, movingly well but the cameraman has slipped away to vomit and the magic is lost. You can never step into the same river twice; I guess now that when I saw this film first I saw in it echoes of a novel I loved  - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman  - in which the narrator fails to ever start the plot.

A film that can’t be shot, a novel that can’t get going and yet I really love both of them.  If something can’t be said to have begun then its end is perpetually deferred. The attitude that you can’t step into the same river twice is both fatalistic and hopeful, in short, it is an admission and denial of death. Especially when you are in a river of shit. Everything repeats and so, the rest is up to you. I like Yeats' decision to celebrate the futility of life given the inevitability of death:

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. 

What matter if the ditches are impure? 

What matter if I live it all once more? 

Endure that toil of growing up; 

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress 

Of boyhood changing into man; 

The unfinished man and his pain 

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; 

The finished man among his enemies?— 

How in the name of Heaven can he escape 

That defiling and disfigured shape 

The mirror of malicious eyes 

Casts upon his eyes until at last 

He thinks that shape must be his shape? 

And what's the good of an escape 

If honour find him in the wintry blast? 

I am content to live it all again 

And yet again, if it be life to pitch 

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, 

A blind man battering blind men; 

The sentiments expressed in that poem are a bit too cranky for my tastes. Still I like how it rhymes. Actually I can easily imagine Steve Buscemi, the main actor in Living in Oblivion reading the lines. In particular the whiney ones about getting dumped that follow "A blind man battering blind men..." that I have not posted because they're just too maudlin. 

Ashes

Ashes by Liz Quirke.

This poem reminds me of a damp windy day down at the river near my Grandmother's home place in Mooncoin, Co Kilkenny. I came across it by accident but the shock of the final metaphor has cut through time for me; backwards and forwards, through silt and drift nets, irrecoverable loss and the gift of love like a shadow in a candlelit bedroom.

When I die, bring me to the lake

and pour me in. Don’t scatter.

I want my toes to mingle

with the clay at the bottom.

I will become part of the sediment,

constant and forgotten.

And fish will nibble on my innards

and transport me to tables

all around Boluisce,

as a reminder to torchlight

poachers that they can never know

exactly what they’re eating.

My hair will sway among the rushes,

caressing the soggy shore.

My shoulders will fall into holes

left by bedraggled cattle

trying to water themselves.

My heart, I want you to lob

into the middle of the lake

like a stone wrapped in a letter,

where a salmon will find it

and make it its own.

All this, love, so when you sit

in the damp, my hair will

brush your hand and my heart

will graze your hook.

and the wind will carry my mouth

saying “catch me, I’m yours.”

The Babadook

This is a scary movie. Not because it's about stuff that couldn't really happen to you, but because it's about what it would be like to go completely batshit crazy. Most people are scared of that. It's possible. Maybe it's happening now?

The main character of this movie, a mother who initially seems put upon by a troublesome young son who may or may not be autistic, is gradually shown to be the nut - in - chief. The rest of the film is about her descent into the abyss.

So, is this a film about what it is (not) to be a mother? Sure, there's an element of critique of the institution of motherhood here but the core of this film is its chill. It's very scary. The creeping sense of madness taking over, of hallucinations becoming reckonable as real, compel the action towards what seems to be an inevitable catastrophe.  The stuff that goes on inside your head is more terrifying than anything that goes bump in the night out there.

Habits

Does giving things up require strength? Maybe for some people it does but for me, it’s all about habit. Habit does it all. Habit is strong, more so; it’s relentless and dominating. This suggests that giving things up successfully only happens if you are weak; if you accept your weakness. Giving things up is easy once you understand that you have to step back and let habit do its work.  Habit is really strong so I don’t have to be.

I have given up alcohol. A little over five weeks ago I just stopped. I am training for another marathon so I suppose that’s the reason why. I like drinking alcohol because of the taste and the effect. A little part of me has died over the past few weeks because of this abstinence. I know that you’re supposed to be more alive and so on when you stop using a drug like alcohol but I don’t see it. That’s just a self-perpetuating myth espoused by those bewildered by medical and quasi-medical versions of what it is to live ‘well’.

I don’t feel any more alive or healthier. I don’t want alcohol anymore. It’s as if I just got bored with it. What about my dreams? None of them involves alcohol.

Over the last month or so, more than ever before, I have been hearing stories of premature and unwanted death (is there any other kind?). I often think that if I died tomorrow then I would have wasted the remainder of my life up to that point precisely because I had stopped drinking.

Life is too short to stop drinking.  But I am powerless really; I just haven’t got the habit any more.

If they say why, why....

Human nature is more observed in the breach than in the observance. It has always been like this - it's unnatural for people to act or think naturally. Unlike animals, volcanoes and planets, humans have to be taught how to be humans - although there is undoubtedly a natural basis to what we do and what we are, the question of how that plays out in history requires work. It requires culture.

So human nature is one of those peculiar things that denies binary logic. It is fixed and yet it is always being changed.  This is a recipe for catastrophe and/or for salvation. It's nearly Christmas so we might as well choose salvation.

Recently I have been thinking about Rousseau’s famous indictment of agriculture and metallurgy as the moment at which human nature was fatally corrupted:

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and ruined humanity. 

For Rousseau, before this moment human beings lived in a state of nature, wearing animal skins, living in 'rustic huts', and, crucially, working in such a way that they did not have cause to seize control of land as property or people as slaves. They were happy:

So long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy

When it's described so explicitly, this account of the fall of humanity from a state of nature into the paradise lost of the Industrial and Agricultural age seems, historically speaking, absurdly naive. And yet Rousseau's central point that property is the source of a lot of evil (There can be no injury, where there is no property) still has a lot of validity.

There are a lot of reasons to be very suspicious of this point of view. "There can be no injury, where there is no property". Oh really? Tell that to the millions upon millions of Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin in the 1930s. Tell that to anyone who's ever lived in a police state. If property is an affront to human nature then perhaps we're better off being unnatural? 

But I still think the idea has a lot of validity. Stalinism did not do away with property. It forcibly redistributed property for the purposes of maximising the power of the state. The central point that I take from Rousseau's thinking is that innovations such as metallurgy and agriculture worsened the quality of life for the vast majority of the agricultural labourers and proletariat, both in the public and private spaces of life, caught up in these revolutions. 

Rousseau's pre-agricultural fantasy about a state of nature is unnatural. Which is not to say that it does not have a reality. Its reality is in the form of a promise, a figure of  how things could change for the better. It is a trope that can be used to cast light on  political reality; but as such it is a utopia that tends to self contradiction if it forgets that it is no more natural than the dystopian reality it seeks to displace and transform. 

There can be no doubt that the victims of political idealism in the centuries since Rousseau published the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men number in the hundreds of millions. This does not mean that political idealism can be just jettisoned. 

For Rousseau, human nature is predominantly based on compassion and, all things being equal, a kind of self-love that is not manifested as a zero-sum game in relationships with others. These kinds of traits may not come naturally to many - however it is certain that they are 'in' human nature - otherwise they would not have a reality for people. 

The alternative to this version of human nature, as Rousseau well knew, was that advanced by Thomas Hobbes - it's natural for human beings to fear and suspect, fight and kill others. The same argument has to apply here, too. Hobbes has to be right - these things are 'in' human nature otherwise they would not have any more reality than the ability to communicate using sonar or breathe underwater.

The thing is, those traits that are in human nature are always subject to mediation, transformation, repression, exaggeration and so on. There is no human nature that is outside history. There is no human nature that is not cultural.

So on that note (culture), and returning to the opening, open question of catastrophe or salvation, I think it's time to paraphrase the Nazi 'poet laureate' Hans Johnst - "When I hear the word nature I reach for my Browning!"

Words, Words, Words

“Words, words, words” 

Sometimes I can’t see the wood for the trees. That idiom has always puzzled me. Does it mean that I can’t see the forest because I am looking at the individual parts of the forest (the trees) too closely? Or does it mean that I can’t see the actual material (the wood) because I am looking at the bigger picture of the trees? I suppose it can mean both: I can be blind to details or I can be blind to context. I am tempted to think that this is a duck/rabbit trick – I can see one or the other but not both at the same time. 

When it comes to language I have a similar experience. Through training I tend to look at language in different ways. There are many ways of looking at words, words, words.  Sometimes I think I am the butt of a joke being told endlessly, that I am Polonius on the wrong end of Hamlet’s sneering and I can feel the words “Very like a whale” forming on my lips. Maybe all this time I am looking at words, words, words, and the stuff that really happens is taking place behind my back, under my nose, over my head? It’s possible, indeed I think it’s inevitable. I think the most hopeful line ever written is at the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)"

This is the light at the end of the tunnel. But for now I am still in the tunnel, sorry on the ladder; keep climbing…

So, words, words, words. Recently, under the influence of structural and post structural linguistics, I have been thinking a lot about how meaning is supposed to be unstable. About how, when you look up close (at the wood, at the trees) what you see is not a word but rather, words, words, words. The ‘logocentrism’ of language is, for Jacques Derrida and others, is how words hide behind words, how meaning is passed off as stable, as fixed, as present. For Derrida and anyone else influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, language, words have meaning by virtue of their place in a chain of ‘signifiers’.

I understand the relationship between these possible signifiers as being a both neutral one – chair means chair because it is not cheer, hair, there, bear and so on – and a value laden one: ‘God’ means something good because it’s better than ‘Devil’.

Similarly, both ‘Derry’ and ‘Londonderry’ name a place, both ‘Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’ name an organisation but the binary relationship is inverted depending of the affiliation of the speaker.  

Looking closely at how words work by showing/hiding, presencing/absencing can often lead me to forget how fixed certain meanings can be. Another cardinal notion of structural linguistics - that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary – can seem comically pedantic. This is where the wood (or the trees) of the bigger picture can disappear because with your eyes on the abstract it is easy miss the feelings, functions, resonances of context.

Of course, the opposite tendency – to miss the wood (or the trees) of detail – happens when context seduces. Ideas become dogma and words start to glow with a life of their own. Words themselves start to matter.

What happens when words matter? I have been thinking a lot about fundamentalism of different kinds recently. The first that comes to mind is Islamic fundamentalism.

At a fundamental level, Islam is fundamental. Words matter. Words have matter. Words are the matter of God. What is the status of language in the Qur'an? For believers it is certainly not representational. There is no separation of sign and thing - these words do not re-present God they, in a literal sense, present God; the word made flesh, the 'presencing' of God.

Neither do Muslims think of the words of the Qur'an as being the incarnation of God. For Islam, God is indissoluble (God "neither begets nor is begotten") and therefore, all of these - the words on the Guarded Tablet (al-lawḥ al-maḥfāẓ  the place where the Qur’an was written in heaven prior to their arrival on earth), the received, revealed words of the Qur'an in the mind and mouth of Mohammed, the words of the page of every (Arabic) Qur'an - are of one flesh.

So, the Qur’an is literally the word of God. Haven’t they read Structural Linguistics? When it comes to logocentrism, God is the daddy of them all. Nobody does it better. Is this a problem?

I don’t think it’s the biggest one. The problem with Islamic Fundamentalism is that some of its adherents have taken to killing on a mass scale. They’re not the only ones. There are Europeans and Americans drunk on a fundamentalism of their own – the axiomatic rightness of military intervention in the Middle East and the Capitalist system that it supports are ideas far more lethal and long standing than anything informing the actions of the Taliban, Al Queda or Daesh. When it comes to Islamic Fundamentalists their sense of rightness is on the surface; Jihad is being waged against infidels. European/American Fundamentalists engage in an obscene, venal double speak where ‘freedom’ is being brought to ‘stabilise’ the region. There are two seemingly opposed tendencies here. One seeks to arrest meaning, the other seeks its exile. In both cases – excessive logocentrism and excessive logo - ex - centrism - language seems to be to a victim; dogma and deceit are both ways of abusing language.

Of course I think that behind the lies spouted by politicians there is a language ‘behind’ the surface relativism. The discourse of ‘freedom’ versus ‘terror’ may be so much babble for public consumption, but in the background language is just as logocentric. Words have strict meanings at this latent, bottom line, not for public consumption level, too, make no mistake. The fundamentals of Western involvement in the Middle East - Oil, money, killing, stealing – are undeniable.  

Logocentrism is alive and well. By the way, in all of this I am not blind to the difference between interrogating a politician and interrogating God. The equivalence that I describe between the Western and Islamic fundamentalists is an ethical one, not a linguistic one. I have no fear of criticising a politician…

Now I am not going to say that logocentrism kills. Words don’t kill, steal or rape; people do. Words may hurt a lot but sticks and stones break your bones. It is tempting to isolate certain uses of language that do actually do things – J L Austin’s Speech Act Theory calls these ‘performative utterances’. Hamlet may have been playing around with words, words, words, but when he altered that letter to the King of England his words literally murdered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But there are limits to what words can do. 

Before that point I like to think of words as weirdly cybernetic. They are human and yet they are not. They exist in our minds and in our mouths and yet they are outside us, in the air, on this screen. Is it any wonder that meaning tends to arrest or exile? Words matter and that’s fine. But they also do not matter. They are us and they are not us. The challenge is to keep this gap open – to stay true to the meanings of words and yet to allow for a space to interrogate and reimagine those words. Where there are words there is hope.  

The fact that logocentrism can be brought to see the wood when it tries to show us the trees or brought to see the trees when it tries to show us the wood, means that meaning can be allowed stability just as much as it can be destabilised. 

Beyond persuasion and seduction, promises and commands words are powerless. Sometimes, the talking has to stop. Even Hamlet acted in the end.

Missa Solmenis

Who's going to the sacrifice: The lamb of God or just more lambs?

I went to mass last night. Well, kind of: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis  is far more enjoyable than any mass I have ever been to. Did I miss the point? Are you supposed to enjoy mass? I mean, isn’t enjoyment of mass idolatry? I went for the music; for the wall of voices, for the lead violin melody in the Sanctus, supposedly marking the ascent of the spirit of Jesus to heaven after  the resurrection. Perhaps it’s idolatry – I loved the music rather than the God it celebrates – but wasn’t it parasitism, too? I mean, Beethoven would never have written such beautiful music if he hadn’t actually believed that there was a God , would he? In going to this concert, taking pleasure from it without returning the faith that sustained the work that created it was I freeloading, stealing?

I don’t know, but taking that argument to its logical conclusion, I could just as easily argue that non-believers should be banned from attended concerts such as that one. Maybe there should be restrictions on who can and who can’t go to performances of Missa Solemnis because if you let atheists in the door then ,eventually, there may not be any more music like that.

As I listened I was reminded of that old cliché – the devil has all the best tunes – and I thought of how wrong that was. God has some pretty good stuff, too. If Beethoven had not intended his music to enjoyed as music, for it to appeal to infidels then why did he make it so beautiful? I have the dimmest memories of what it’s like to be at an actual mass but the one impression I have is of the mind numbing tedium of the experience. If God had ever wanted his message to be delivered directly he would never had invented Beethoven. I think He loves idolaters.

The last section of Missa Solemnis is the Agnes Dei. I suppose it’s a sacrifice for God to let Beethoven take the credit for what is, after all, His gig – mass. The sacrificial nature of language has been in my head a lot recently; how it is that in order for certain things to have meaning, to have presence,  to be in the centre, others things have to babble into meaninglessness, disappear and fly to edges. I guess what I find really puzzling about Christianity is this tendency to allow, to demand sacrifice. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, who grants us peace.

I struck me that this is exactly why the refugees from the Syrian and Iraq wars are going to Europe; because they know that at a fundamental level in the Christian tradition there is this openness to the stranger – that the most privileged will sacrifice their privilege in the interests of justice and of love. These people are going to Germany and not Saudi Arabia because they believe that the Christian God may just allow, or may even demand idolatrous devotion. I wouldn’t want to practise idolatry under Sharia law.

Then again even the most superficial view of history tells you that only a fool would look to Germany in hope, and so, this is a really partial view of European traditions. Christianity may preach love your enemy, but, in its relations with the Orient, with Africa, with Asia, Europe has more often than not sacrificed everything in its way. There has been very little Christianity in how Europe deals with non-Christians; there are people alive tonight who’ll probably be dead in a few hours thanks to the British, American, French or Russian air raids.

I don’t know, this part of the world (Europe) has a lot of blood on its hands, there are a lot of dead bodies in the foundations of the building of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. And yet, the message of the new testament – to love your enemy, to sacrifice the most powerful (the son of God!) to save the vast masses – is at odds with the facts. It must seem to outsiders that Europeans often do not practice what they preach. There’s an apparently forked tongued babble of love and hate that must infuriate those on the outside.

 

The killings in Paris last month show how that fury can manifest itself, and yet that obscenity reveals the limits of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. The very openness that allows an idolatrous experience such as my enjoyment of Beethoven, such as Beethoven’s plagiarism and indeed, improvement upon God, is the openness that makes it easy for a dozen killers to massacre over a hundred innocents in the streets. Ironically, it’s also the openness that people fleeing the Middle East seek.

It remains to be seen as to whether the barbarism that sustains European civilisation can be changed because that is the real threat to that civilisation. The military thuggishness and economic greed of America and Western Europe helped create the problem in the Middle East – jihadi fundamentalism is just a more technologically primitive version of the same viciousness.

Going to Beethoven last night reminded me of why non Europeans love and hate Europe. I suppose it also reminded me of the need for courage. Without courage, a morality of openness to the alien, to the enemy, a morality based on love and sacrifice of privilege and power can be a fatal weakness. But without that morality there can be no Beethoven, there can be no lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, to grant us peace.  

Sexually Transmitted Haunting.

It Follows (2015) Dir David Robert Mitchell

It Follows doesn’t look or sound like a horror movie. There’s no thunder and lightning, very little screaming and most of the action takes place in daylight. The main characters – a group of friends in their late teens  - are unremarkable and ordinary. The photography – slow, patient, extended shots, pale, washed out colours – is a constant reminder of how banal these people’s lives appear to be.

The terror experienced by the main character, Jay, is hidden behind this veneer of suburban normality. Hers is a private hell made worse by that very privacy. She alone can see the ghostly figures that begin to follow her soon after she has sex with a new boyfriend. It turns out that the boyfriend had been haunted in the same way and through having sex with her he ‘passes on’ the torment.

As the film progresses Jay, in an attempt to defer the advances of the demons that have begun to follow her, tries to 'pass on' the curse  to others. She succeeds but the relief is only temporary. The ghosts come after her again after they do away with the men she'd slept with/sacrificed in appeasement.

There ain't no cure for sexually transmitted haunting. The film ends with one of the 'followers' slowly, inexorably walking after her and her boyfriend.

The pessimism of this film recalls the paranoid, reflex association of sex with death that was common wake of the AIDS epidemic twenty years ago. But there's something more chronic and general at work here.  This sex = death equation points to a profound pessimism in the culture that produces and consumes this kind of movie.

At first this pessimism seems to be a repudiation of romantic love. Soon after Jay first has sex with her boyfriend she's dreamily lying on the back seat of her car, playing with a weed/flower growing up through the gravel while she dreamily muses on life. Without warning he chloroforms her and when she comes to she's tied up. The dream date turns absurdly nightmarish when he reveals to her the horrible truth that now she's 'infected' as he once was.

However, this isn't just a moment of overcoming the naivete of teenage romance to arrive at a more knowing or worldly-wise take on love and sex. Sex is no longer now a private, pleasurable, voluntary act. It is a lethal act. True, it is also the only way in which that death sentence can be stayed but even that is a losing battle. The film ends but the future - a brutal and vain race against the inevitability of sex-induced death - is easy to imagine.

The pessimism of this transformation in sex doesn't even have the 'consolation' of perversion that David Lynch might offer. Sex is not an unruly force erupting from the unconscious in this film. It is a public and lethal necessity that has more in common with heroin addiction or wage slavery than with any kind of personal idiosyncracy. Sex therefore becomes a symptom of a sick society rather than of sick minds. What's more, the illness is a general one, a 'heteronormative' one - the scapegoat is not gay sexuality as was the case in AIDS - epidemic paranoia. Sex=death for everyone; not just the gays.

This message is so pessimistic that it fills me with hope. It Follows is a rejection of the most cherished of the rites and routes of sexual and familial conformity - fall in love, have sex, make children, build a future and consume onto death.

I said at the start that It Follows didn't look or sound like a horror movie. It's quite muted stylistically. But it's stil very scary! This is because of its subject matter. Its pessimism about sex means that it doesn't have to bother with gothic bumps, screams and flashes in the night at all. Like any good horror movie it holds up a mirror to show the greatest fears of its time. These fears are terrifying enough without any stylistic supplement.

What I like about this movie is that, in it, the scariest things of all are not the aberrant, the exceptional and the supernatural; the worst nightmares may actually be made of the stuff that lies in plain sight.

No More Heroes - Homer's Iliad and Bernie Joyce's 'Sh**te in a Bucket" video.

No More Heroes

The more I think about it I have begun to see the men of the Travelling Community as Homeric warriors in a world long abandoned by the gods. Like Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, Hector and the rest Traveller men fight, insult one another, race chariots (sulkies), and, in the end, they die premature deaths.

However, when Achilles and Hector went head to head on the plains of Ilium they did so licensed and aided by Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athene and Poseidon. Their actions were the actions of the great. These were men of a privileged, warrior caste. Their prowess with a spear, at the reins of a chariot or in flinging insults at one another were what made and maintained them as leaders. A man who could not fight, ride and taunt was not worthy of being a ruler.

By contrast, the acts of the warriors of the Travelling Community are marginal at best and usually illegal: bare knuckle fist fighting; videoed call outs uploaded to YouTube; sulky racing. These are not the celebrated epoch-defining acts of great heroes.  The exploits of traveller men are not celebrated; they are condemned.

The escalation of private insult into full scale, clan on clan butchery is precisely what Homer immortalised as the acts of heroes in the Iliad and precisely what is condemned in the tabloid press whenever Travellers start chopping lumps out of one another in public. The Greeks were allowed to take the law into their own hands; in fact that was the law. Travellers’ violence is proscribed; not demanded by law.

When Bernie Joyce went on the internet to insult the Nevins in the infamous ‘Shite in a Bucket’ video his words were are stinging and eloquent as any of the great rhetorical sallies of the Trojan War.

Bernie Joyce is the prince of epithets – Homer would love him. ‘Jelly Belly Mick’ and  ‘Bluebottle Martin’ ‘Joby with the Penguin’s feet’ are as immortal as ‘Agamemnon shepherd of the people’ ‘Hector of the flashing helmet’ ‘Odysseus sacker of cities’.

The taunting and threats are the stuff of Homer, too:

Bernie Joyce tells his adversary: “Do you ever  remember the bating I gave your uncle Paddy in Longford...I gave him two thumps…your uncle Paddy was dragged from that place, there had to be a bucket of water thrun on top of him when there should have been a bucket a shite thrown on top of that dirty looking yoke”

Similarly, In Book 20 of the Iliad, Achilles, finally renouncing his anger comes to face Aeneas: “I seem to recollect that once before you ran from my spear. Or have you forgotten that time I caught you alone, cut you off from your cattle and sent you scuttling at speed down the slopes of Mount Ida? ”

Highly inventive and hilarious they may be, but the call out videos made by travellers are more likely to feature in criminal investigations than to echo down the centuries as the high flown words of immortals.

There are no gods left. If Achilles or Hector were to come to life today they’d find it impossible to live as heroes. Even simple things like getting around would be difficult.  Somehow I can’t see them racing a sulky up and down the M50.

The powers that be in Ireland 2015 are not the gods of Olympus. They would have no toleration, no comprehension of the heroes of Troy. As any traveller could tell you this is no country for fighting in the street, insulting and threatening people with violence, racing horses on the public highway.

St Sebastian

In Western oil painting, most nudes are female. And this fact is bound to another one; the implied viewer, or, really, voyeur, is male. The female body is represented for the perusal, the pleasure and the acquisition of men. In the words of John Berger:

“In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him...women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own” (Ways of Seeing 54-55)

An exception to this rule can be seen in paintings - by some of the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance - of St Sebastian. Without exception, in works by Antonio Palllaiuolo, Antonella de Messina, Andrea Mantegna, Rubens and El Greco, St Sebastian is represented as an attractive young man. He is usually bound, penetrated by arrows, and bleeding. He is anatomically well proportioned, muscular, and despite his passivity, powerful.

Whose appetites were being fed in these paintings? For whose perusal, pleasure and acquisition were these figures created?

There are probably many answers to those questions but at least one has to be a tautology that makes the others possible: the people who like that kind of thing are the people who like that kind of thing!

So: gay men? Sure. Women? Sure? I really don't know; I am neither a woman nor a gay man so I couldn't possibly say.  One thing is clear, however; the subject and object positions implied by these paintings are different from those identified by John Berger. It's not just a matter of the reversal of the usual pattern, although that is what's happening too: where before there was an invisible, powerful male observer and a passive and self-observing and therefore divided and controlled female subject now the divided, objectified and self-objectifying figure is the male. The fact that the observer could now be anyone - female, male homosexual, a typical heterosexual male voyeur who now finds himself quite confused - means that the artificiality of the invisible observer's position becomes obvious. It could be that these paintings are the best way to learn to look at all other iterations of the nude in Western oil painting!

In any case, by the time naturalistic/humanist oil painting emerged in 14th Century St Sebastian was already a famous nude figure. In particular he appeared in thousands upon thousands of copies of 'Books of Hours'.

In the Middle Ages many literate Europeans learned to read through reading a 'Book of Hours'. A Book of Hours was a prayer book, gospel, reading primer and comic book all rolled into one. In many houses for hundreds of years across Europe, one of these books was probably the only book that a family had in its possession; the only book they'd ever read. I can imagine that its text and, even more so, its illustrations provided endless amusement and edification for its owners.

Books of Hours, were, especially before the invention of movable type printing, extremely expensive and prestigious items. They were status symbols; acquisitions. And, while they were ostensibly religious texts, their use was in effect secular and heterodox. Consider too that any text appearing in a book of hours was typically in Latin (a language that few people literate in their own vernacular could read); people had these books to look at the pictures.

It is not surprising that in the far more puritanical climate of both Protestant and Catholic Europe after the Reformation, Books of Hours fell into disrepute. Religious conflict meant that souls were to be fought over, persuaded or coereced into following one church or another; Books of Hours were far too private and democratic; they liberated the very things that reformers and counter reformers sought to control – thoughts, actions and feelings.

At the height of their popularity, women were at least as (if not more) likely as men to own and enjoy Books of Hours. The 14th Century poet, Eustache Deschamps imagined the thoughts of one lady: "As graceful and gorgeous as me... So the people will gasp when I use it, 'That's the prettiest prayer-book in town.”

Again and again, St Sebastian is represented in these prayer books. He is always naked, pretty, penetrated by arrows, bleeding.

I am reminded of the start of Pedro Almodovar's film Law of Desire (1987). In it a naked young man is shown alone on a bed in a room where he is being observed by camera by other men who speak to him in commands through a microphone. He is commanded to masturbate; to make himself an object for the perusal, pleasure and acquisition of the male observers.

Is it too much of a stretch to compare the 'nothing left to the imagination' objectification taking place in this film to the stock depiction of the naked, penetrated and bloody St Sebastian in thousands upon thousands of Books of Hours? I don't think so. Of course, Almodovar's implied observer is gay, but that doesn't change the point that in both cases, the male body is being objectified for the observer.

Consider again the secular and heterodox, to say nothing of uncontrollable nature of the Books of Hours. It is, of course, no argument at all to point to the anatomically nonrepresentational nature of the medieval illustrations of St Sebastian in the Books of Hours as a reason for why these images were not seen as erotic; the Renaissance hadn't yet begun! And in any case, without perspective the erotic imagination of the observer will have to work that little bit harder!

I am not attempting to claim that these representations of St Sebastian had no religious or moral meaning for medieval readers/viewers/voyeurs. St Sebastian is an exemplary reminder of the triumph of faith and perseverance in the face of torture. He is also the patron saint of plague victims. What could be less erotic than mass death?

However, the obvious answer to that question: “What could be more aphrodisiacal than the imminence of death?”  points to the undeniable fact that these representations had to have a powerful erotic charge. After all is said; why does he have to be nude? Why is he penetrated and bleeding? Why this love of the penetratable male nude?

The nudity of the Medieval St Sebastian was nothing compared to how he appears from the Renaissance onwards. Where before he was just one saint among many represented in the Book of Hours from the hands and imagination of the 15th, 16th and 17th Century masters he became the star of the show.

It seems that all pretence of religion has gone: St Sebastian is now mostly a vehicle for the celebration of the male body as erotic object:

St Sebastian (of Vienna) Andrea Mantegna

St Sebastian (of the Louvre) Andrea Mantegna

Martyrdom of St Sebastian Antonio Pollaiuolo

St Sebastian Antonella Da Messina

Martyrdom of St Sebastian Il Sodoma

St Sebastian Peter Paul Rubens

St Sebastian El Greco

As it happens I will get to see the Martyrdom of St Sebastian by Antonio Pollaiuolo this weekend in London. I'm not a woman and I'm not gay but I can't wait to see this naked man!

Slow Down!

Within a Budding Grove Vol 2 of In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

Is life too quick? I don't mean, "Is life too brief?", I mean, "do things happen before you realise they've happened?" Blink and you'll miss it. Maybe it's better to miss things? Marcel Proust would not have agreed.

As far as I can work out - I have just finished the second of the seven novels in Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Within a Budding Grove) - Proust is trying, through the all-devouring consciousness of his narrator (Marcel) to arrest time. It all happens in slow motion. The thing is, life just passes too quickly to notice the things that he notices, to think the things he thinks and to feel the things he feels. Because his descriptions are so exhaustive and exhausting and because his prose is the most complex I have ever read (Henry James included) the slow motion has to be reciprocated in reading. This is a very slow dance.

One or two examples will have to suffice:

In the second half of Within a Budding Grove the narrator describes his extended holiday at the seaside in the fictional town of Balbec. Every conceivable detail of the place is forensically examined over and over again. For instance, sitting in a train carriage on the way to Balbec his attention is taken by a blue blind on the window:

But the contemplation of this blind appeared to me an admirable thing, and I should not have troubled to answer anyone who might have sought to distract me from contemplating it. The blue colour of this blind seemed to me, not perhaps by its beauty but by its intense vivacity, to efface so completely all the colours that had passed before my eyes from the day of my birth up to the moment in which I had gulped down the last of my drink and it had begun to take effect, that when compared with this blue they were as drab, as void as must be retrospectively the darkness in which he has lived to a man born blind whom a subsequent operation has at length enabled to see and to distinguish colours.
 (265)

I chose this example because it is, believe it or not, very short.

Another, extremely convoluted passage that slows time to a trickle is when he first sees the 'little band' of girls passing the sea front. "Never, among actresses or peasants or convent girls, had I seen anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible". Fair enough; the standard lament of the adolescent pedant. However, he goes on to speculate that such voyeurism on his part is "no more than a projection, a mirage of desire". From this point on, after giving himself license to write about the girls and his desire in the most elaborate terms, the beauty of the writing itself becomes the end. He compares the girls to 'a bower of Pennsylvania roses' which, together with a flitting butterfly, frame the ocean and the slow passage of a ship.

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist’s satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship’s hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.
(437)

Who has time to think, feel, remember, observe in this way? And yet, the descriptions are for me accurate and beguiling. The effect of passages like these is just that one of slowing time down; of taking a moment and stretching it out to its limits, or rather since Proust is very much in control, it's better to say that he stretches time out to his limits. Of course, in a very real sense, all of this stretching time business is just an illusion and time will get us all in the end but what a way to make the most of whatever time there is! The question could just as easily be "Who can afford not to slow time down?"

But still I have been asking myself: why bother? What is to be gained by slowing down perception? What is to be gained by indiscriminately taking pains to represent every detail of perception? What is to be gained by describing trains of thought and exploring nuance upon nuance of feeling in such a complex way?

I try to put it in simple terms: Is Proust is trying to capture every single moment of consciousness because so much of what goes on in people's heads is disregarded, ignored, silenced? Maybe, just maybe, so much of immense value would not be lost if others learned how to see, how to listen and how to remember in the ways described in In Search of Lost Time. So is Proust a kind of people's avenger - helping the weak and powerless to find their voices in a hostile and indifferent world? A three thousand page version of Whitman's

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world"?

Hardly: I think Proust's concerns are primarily aesthetic; not ethical.

He may be an avenger of sorts but I think his mission is to see to it that wherever a ten page description of a bouquet of flowers goes unwritten Proust will come to rescue with one twice as long.

This book reads to me like a Noah's Ark of human consciousness. So much is included that it is hard to imagine that anything has been left out. The sheer weight of observation and thought, feeling and memory loaded into the hold of this vessel makes it hard to imagine that anything has been left behind.

This makes me think of the example (given by Baudrillard at the start of his Simulacra and Simulation) of “a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly”. Baudrillard's argument is of course, that the map is no longer a second order reality – today, models, simulacra are the real.

I think Proust would agree with this. He is the most radical of aesthetes. Who needs the real world if you have Proust?

At every point Proust rejects mimetic art. Or, more exactly, he rejects any tendency towards naive mimesis. For him, the world beyond representation is like a magnet of opposing polarity to that representation.

And so, In Search of Lost Time is a novel about artifice. It is a novel that makes visible the work of memory and imagination, prejudice and desire and shows how these always interpose themselves between the human subject and the world outside that person.

In addition it is a novel about representation itself; Proust was quite deliberate about this, telling a friend "My book is a painting".

There is no such thing as a direct experience of anything in Proust. Nothing appears in In Search of Lost Time as a simple unmediated fact. Everything - architecture, fashion, decoration, music, painting, conversations, the personalities of the men and women at all levels of society – is connected to everything else, there is no moment when Proust does not turn and face, turn and immerse himself into the entangled and entangling web formed by all of these aspects of human consciousness.

It did occur to me that this novel might well have been entitled In Flight from Lost Time because there never is a moment when some 'lost time' or other is not playing on the perception or thoughts of the present moment.

And yet, this is to misunderstand Proust. Proust is not in flight from mediated thinking or perception; he really does seem to be searching for it. That is why, I suppose, it seems that his descriptions of what takes place in the mind, body and outside world of his narrator are inventions rather than discoveries – he is describing incredibly complex experiences that could not conceivably appear in Nineteenth Century realism.

In fact, Proust is so consistent, so determined, so voracious that in the end what he reveals is the greater inauthenticity of realism. His descriptions, while they are incredibly complex, they are nonetheless, convincing. After reading Proust it is easy to be aware of how much is suppressed in order for realist fiction to be possible.

Just as abstract art reminds the observer that it is an artwork and thus gives the lie to the tendency to view representational art as a mirror onto the world, Proust never lets up with the exploration of the artifice standing between the person and the world, between fiction and experience; he never stops exposing precisely what realist fiction needs to hide.

For Proust there is so much going on in human consciousness, so much artifice between the person and the world, to say nothing of the relationships a person may have with herself that he more or less redefines literature. Of course, he didn't do this singlehandedly; Modernism does not equal Proust. And yet, while Joyce, for example, spent the first chapter of Ulysses parodying nineteenth century realism before launching into high modernism and therefore traced the same evolution followed by Proust, Proust's work is far, far more extreme.

It seems to me that the scope of Proust's work is in some ways wider, and in others, narrower than Ulysses. Proust's narrator is an exploration of the capacity of human consciousness to elaborate the aesthetic experience of reality.

Is there anything at all that Proust's narrator cannot experience in terms of art? Is there anything at all that does not involve labyrinths of thought, feeling, memory, ideals and ideas, fears and desires? So far, having read two of the seven novels, I don't think so.

So for me, Proust's work reads like a radical and prescriptive agenda for not only how literature should be written, but almost, for how life should be lived. Ulysses does not support such a radical view of art, literature or life. And yet, taking his previous novel,  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  and the first three chapters of Ulysses as one work – the Bildungsroman of Stephan Dedalus – Joyce seemed to building towards a crescendo similar to Proust's. However, the narrower focus given by Leopold Bloom's 'everyman' view of the world means that Joyce's version of modernism has, in a different way, a much wider scope than Proust. Taxi drivers may laugh to hear that Joyce intended his work to be read by them, but there is not the remotest hope that Proust intended In Search of Lost Time to be read by people in such 'lowly' walks of life!

Where Joyce might be praised for his democratic impulse, rather than ridiculed for his vanity,  Proust should be admired for his commitment rather than scorned for his elitism.

I mentioned above that Proust rejected mimesis. This is not quite accurate. Within a Budding Grove is full of references to representational art. Some examples:

Detail from Botticelli's Trial of Moses - Jethro's daughter (to whom Swann had compared Odette)

Manet's Woman with Fans: one example "of the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or history" that the narrator had used to show how Odette's beauty as captured by the fictional artist, Elstir would fade.

In each of these examples the narrator's experience of reality (in particular with Odette De Crecy/Swann) is had through the medium of artworks. This foregrounding of art as the antecedent of experience occurs throughout the novel.

As Eric Karpeles points out in the introduction to his brilliant book,  Paintings in Proust: a Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time, "In the novel, over one hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art". Art seems to be licensing medium of what is to be included in this novel. This has a kind of double exposure or extended 'dissolve' effect that makes the reader aware of the work of mediation in perception and thought, feeling and memory. Proust puts it in this way:

"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists"

This constant sequencing of one artwork after another, filtering and, indeed constructing reality itself is the literary equivalent of Magritte's landscapes:

                              

The ability to stand back from one's experience of the immediate moment, to slow down time, to reflect on what one is experiencing, why and how it is being experienced is not a trivial one.

In one passage of Within a Budding Grove the narrator looks around at the other people in the hotel restaurant; none of whom is capable of standing back from the flux of the immediate moment and understanding more deeply what is going on. His key concept here is 'analogy':

"And I rather pitied the diners because...they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way as to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies"
(451)

What conclusions are to be drawn from the fact that most people do not live and love, see, hear, feel and remember with the ability to reflect deeply, to arrest time and see past the surface of things?

As I pointed out, Proust's concerns are not ethical. He is not saying that these are bad people. Neither are his concerns epistemic. He's not saying that they're stupid. His concerns are aesthetic and as such I think he's saying nothing more than life is a whole lot less pleasant, without these moments of deep perception, without the ability to slow time down to a trickle.

Of course, Proust's concerns are not everyone else's. His insights do have profound effects on how life can be lived in so many more ways than the purely aesthetic: "the bondage of habitual appearances" exists in more ways and for more people than even Proust could have imagined.

Cutting "through the scheme of things", slowing time down, perceiving analogies, searching, finding and engaging with lost time, exploring the mediation that is always the way in which anything is perceived, thought, remembered, produced is hard work but I think it's worth it.

Actually, when I think about it now I haven't really moved on from what I wrote last year after reading Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time:

The lesson I’m taking from Proust brings me back to the reason for starting this blog. Life is infinitesimally short yet each second; each millisecond is full of meaning, full of life, full of pain and pleasure. How can I go on, dimly plodding on towards my ever approaching demise without opening my eyes, without trying to notice what is in front of me, without trying to remember?  I will be dead for a long, long time – I must try not to lose time.