Just back from Student Theatre At Glasgow's production of Cinders; mah-juck! (as we say in Glasgow, dear).
Since my small readership aren't in a position to go and see it, I won't dwell on the details of the production over-much and will merely say that everybody excelled: the stars, the small roles (but!, I hear you cry, there are no small roles; quite right, of course), the tech, the music, the make-up people (everybody was gaunt and blear-eyed, *shiver*...); everything clicked together so precisely, in such an intimate space, that it became very difficult to consider the play as a production at all. So I won't! You come here for the Dark Forests of the Slavic Soul.
The play concerns a girls' reform school in 50s Poland: a film-crew are making a documentary around a production of 'Cinderella' by these hardened - or apparently hardened - juvies. I wondered early on whether time and place particularly mattered - I knew that the playwright was Polish, but not the context in which he'd written it - and whether you couldn't have put the same story in a similar institution in, say, Ireland. But somewhere in the second act I knew this wasn't the case, and the reason why hit me during the applause. Indulge me a reading: this is only looking at a very complex work from one angle, of course, but I like it. After a year of squeezing texts in medieval instruments of torture to yield up thematic life-blood, its nice when a thesis just hits you. I shall try and avoid spoiling.
The setting is very low-key: a bored party official we only see at the start, short references to the war, 'Ah... only before socialism...'. And indeed the play makes fun of the direct approach to making horror out of totalitarianism, and at the people who fall for it: '"Hitler shot my father and laughed as he did it", I can't use that!' get's a guilty laugh. This is a very self-conscious play all through, and it takes a bloody good playwright and an equally good production to squeeze your bleeding heart with a play about the dangers of squeezing bleeding hearts. But it triumphs, and as the boundaries of the play-within-the-play break down, so do those of the outer play until in the last scene people wanted to jump onto the stage and do something, dammit.
But I realised at the end that, although you probably could have the same characters and events in any country, they'd signify something quite different. Here we see very different two men - a teacher and the film-director, the latter idealistic to the point of fury and the former tragicomically neurotic - who have both become so obsessed with creating something that it's become more important than the mere humans caught up in it. And in the end, as will inevitably happen, losing sight of the harm they're doing for principles makes them lose sight of principles as well. We are in fact witnessing the story of communism in the 20th century.
Anyway, go and see it if you ever get the chance. Of course it won't be as good as STAG's: nothing ever is (at least before socialism).
Friday 23 March 2012
Exploits of Orwell and Pinter
During his Oxford days, Pinter was reckoned an ace oarsman and was a favourite of the boat-race team. One day he met up with his pal Orwell for a drink. As he rose to go to the bar, Orwell couldn’t help noticing that the seat of his trousers was sodden wet. Exercising the greatest possible tact, he pointed this out.
Pinter grimaced. “Ah, yes. We were out practicing, you see, and sprung a leak. A very small one, and so we kept on blithely rowing without noticing the water until it was almost at our ankles. Our fault, really, we’ve been putting the craft under too much strain lately.”
Orwell nodded agreement. “Actions have consequences, old boy. You seep as you row.”
Pinter grimaced. “Ah, yes. We were out practicing, you see, and sprung a leak. A very small one, and so we kept on blithely rowing without noticing the water until it was almost at our ankles. Our fault, really, we’ve been putting the craft under too much strain lately.”
Orwell nodded agreement. “Actions have consequences, old boy. You seep as you row.”
Saturday 17 March 2012
Of magic and Marxism
I’m a socialist, you may have gathered from some of the stuff down there: it’s out of some mixture of ardent desire for world justice and Morningside belief that everything is just so untidy the way it is. I’m not any good at parties, economies, issues etcetera and hope never to be elected to anything, but I have my convictions and I stick by them, and I occasionally feel the urge to write something on behalf of The Movement.
So for some time past I’ve been turning an idea over in my mind. It’s something that troubles me a lot about fantastical settings and which – fantastical settings not being a byword, in the English-speaking world, for literary seriousness – nobody seems to bring up. All modern people of goodwill, whatever their opinions about parties, economies, issues and all that sort of thing, would surely accept the principle that every person ought to come into the world the same kind of human being with the same rights and duties and chances. There is no room for slaves and masters in a civilised country.
In our world we know that all the mechanisms set up to divide people into real people and, you know, them – race, class, gender, the whole sordid heap – are made up in an attempt to fend off 'that dreaded, hated thing, a world of free and equal human beings' and it is part of the job of literature to show this. But hang on, in worlds where some people have magical powers, the assumption on which our notion of a just society is based is out of the window. People aren’t equal. What kind of a society do you get, then, according to Ye Aulde Marxisme, when the means of magical production are in the hands of this small class, who are obviously going to hold gigantic power in society? And is it a society in which your or I would want to live?
I thought further about this. A lot of the time, magic just sort of happens to you around puberty without any obvious reason. Surely that means that somewhere, sometime, the people on the bottom of the sordid heap of history are going to find themselves in possession of some undiluted magical whizz-bang? And that’s not going to end well: you don’t ask slaves to be reasonable to the slavers, we can’t all be Nelson Mandela. Magic, it seems, is just like capitalism: doesn’t solve any problems, just moves them about.
So for a long time I’ve been meaning to do something with this idea. I’ve got a sketch. Magic is coming back into the world (again like capitalism, magic operates on long waves which nobody really understands) just as a country whose name isn’t important is undergoing a hodge-podge of my favourite revolutions. And it nearly all seems to be coming back into one particular chap, our protagonist, an illiterate boy from some obscure hinterland scoured by slave-takers. Everybody wants to get their mitts on him, of course – surely there needs to be a mechanism for finding and indoctrinating magical people if a society is to stay up – but the Revolution gets there before the Dastardly Enemies of the People.
And then? I don’t know. There’ll an ensemble cast of bespectacled revolutionary heroes, defiant prostitutes, good-hearted White Guards; and gallons of blood, of course. I feel it might veer towards a sympathetic treatment of our protagonist as he himself veers into being a sort of magical Stalin (you never ‘veer’ into anything pleasant); because in the end, I am firmly convinced, no good ever comes of damn magic. But it must have an ending sufficiently ambiguous to pass as happy. The Revolution can’t fail; it’s an aesthetic necessity, dammit! The main thing is to approach this kind of setting with a concern for power and society that's generally absent.
And it’s all Dreadfully Serious, though the narrator doesn’t always succeed in keeping a perfectly straight face because my narrators don’t. So here, dwarfed by the explanation of them, are some odds and ends I did. Nobody has any names yet, so forgive the confusing proliferation of pronouns.
Space-time is a frightfully complicated thing which I won’t pretend to understand. But probably it wouldn’t be lying to tell you that, in the world concerned by this narrative, about three-hundred years have passed since its end. A great many books have been written about these events. You could learn all about how they affected the production of fine pottery in the countries where they took place, if you like that sort of thing. My book, the latest on the pile, is neither cutting-edge research nor authoritative summary, and if you are a serious student and somebody has put this on your reading-list you should protest.
No, my ambitions are small: I don’t propose to tell you why any of this happened, only that it happened, and that it happened to living people and not to a series of names, dates, blobs of ink on maps. My sources were cherry-picked, my biases show, and I took artistic liberties with the translation. But oh well: my humble hope is that, if it is not certifiably true, and in fact not very probable, and in fact not even terribly plausible, my history is at least believable. And one cannot believe in fine pottery alone.
Anyway, I really cannot stand introductions of more than a page.
The wind made waves on the heather: a brown sea, under a grey sky. The effect was completed, improbably, by a ship on the brow of the moor, a very fine ship, sleek, painted, and carved with a dragon’s head. On its deck, a sacrificial goat bleated its last strangled bleat, as if aware of the necessity of the proceedings but wishing they could have been a bit more professional. The blood on the deck looked brown as well.
It was spring, but you wouldn’t have known. Winter had been long, and only persons of naïve and sentimental disposition will tell you that a long cold winter means a long warm summer. After all, there is only so much year. No, a cold winter, in melting, soaks all the other seasons and you end up with a sodden summer and a sodden spring like this one. The young grass was sad stubble on the muddy chin of the world. The new flowers smelled like death.
[The start, at a funeral. The protagonist comes from a sort of Norse-Gaelic-looking setting, but they're the victims of something much like the African slave-trade. People making up fictional worlds that are supposed to be recognisably like our own often transplant historical societies in poor imitation of Tolkien, I gather. But the Searing Light of Marxist Science tells us that cultures and so on are all just built on geography and economy, so change the geography and you change all the cultures and their relations to each-other. In other worlds, why should the 'white northern Europeans' be the most successful at world-banditry just because they were in our world? I’d like to challenge some assumptions.]
His voice was not loud; it demanded quiet from others. It was not his mouth that did the work at all, but his eyes. You looked into them and knew they weren’t looking back; they were fixed on something invisible to you. He couldn’t hear your noise, either, and his obliviousness made everybody feel that talking would be futile. He was in fact slightly deaf: a childhood in the printing-shop had done that to him. It had done more than that. Metal-forged words had crashed daily down around his young mind, and in that mind their sound became the sounds of cannon, and toppled empires crashing to the ground.
Probably – even the omnipotence of the historian has got its limits, I’m afraid, when it comes to some things – it was at this moment that she fell in love with him. If people fall in love in measurable moments, which they clearly don’t; but then gross oversimplification is the whole business of the historian. So she fell in love with him, in her dogged pugnacious way. When you have lived a life full of people worn out, broken, vanished, hardly seen, well, it must be easy to fall in love with a mind like a red-hot printing-press. Perhaps she felt that a mind like that could love as well as it hated, if it was given the chance.
[I promised you bespectacled revolutionary heroes and defiant prostitutes. You were sold a bill of goods.]
He heard the sound of stars, saw hopes and fears, tasted love and hate, and felt himself shaken by the heavy-footfalls of time. I’m making this sound far too fun, amn’t I? No: it was without a doubt the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him.
[Our protagonist warns kids that this is your brain on serious magic.]
He stood perfectly still and looked intently over the fields, as though they were a piece of writing he was determined to memorise before it was snatched away. But in fact it was the same view he had seen often enough before: of the fields clambering up to the iron-grey horizon and sliding away into the mists and ghost-shapes. There were the same fences, the same rich blacks and subdued greens, the same skeletal smudges made by the bare trees.
There were far more beautiful countries in the world, of course, and he knew it: as a young boy he’d gazed long and hard at the illustrations of any book of travels passing through the printing-shop. But quite suddenly, he felt that these weary hills were worth any hantle of majestic mountains: partly it was the gladness of regaining something you thought lost, and partly the keen attachment people feel to an heirloom from the dead, and partly the pride in something made by the work of their hands. The land he had always known had become his, somehow.
[B.R.H, a patriot after all. The haircuts will be French, the inability of anyone to stop being tooth-grindingly dramatic for the shortest time will be Russian, I hope; but the scenes I take from our iron-grey island. Bagpipes on cue at this point. Lovely!]
Spring came again, and came as a surprise. It had been another long winter, and a winter of hardship and death, and a winter when rumours and lies circulated at parity with the truth owing to shortages; and truth to tell people had begun to doubt whether the long-promised spring would ever turn up. Had there been spring before the war? Wasn't it all another malicious propaganda trick?
But the world must spin on around its axis, else we should all inevitably fall off. Spring came. Frozen rivers buckled, cracked, burst the ice and resumed their courses. So did History, and we come to the final phase of our narrative.
So for some time past I’ve been turning an idea over in my mind. It’s something that troubles me a lot about fantastical settings and which – fantastical settings not being a byword, in the English-speaking world, for literary seriousness – nobody seems to bring up. All modern people of goodwill, whatever their opinions about parties, economies, issues and all that sort of thing, would surely accept the principle that every person ought to come into the world the same kind of human being with the same rights and duties and chances. There is no room for slaves and masters in a civilised country.
In our world we know that all the mechanisms set up to divide people into real people and, you know, them – race, class, gender, the whole sordid heap – are made up in an attempt to fend off 'that dreaded, hated thing, a world of free and equal human beings' and it is part of the job of literature to show this. But hang on, in worlds where some people have magical powers, the assumption on which our notion of a just society is based is out of the window. People aren’t equal. What kind of a society do you get, then, according to Ye Aulde Marxisme, when the means of magical production are in the hands of this small class, who are obviously going to hold gigantic power in society? And is it a society in which your or I would want to live?
I thought further about this. A lot of the time, magic just sort of happens to you around puberty without any obvious reason. Surely that means that somewhere, sometime, the people on the bottom of the sordid heap of history are going to find themselves in possession of some undiluted magical whizz-bang? And that’s not going to end well: you don’t ask slaves to be reasonable to the slavers, we can’t all be Nelson Mandela. Magic, it seems, is just like capitalism: doesn’t solve any problems, just moves them about.
So for a long time I’ve been meaning to do something with this idea. I’ve got a sketch. Magic is coming back into the world (again like capitalism, magic operates on long waves which nobody really understands) just as a country whose name isn’t important is undergoing a hodge-podge of my favourite revolutions. And it nearly all seems to be coming back into one particular chap, our protagonist, an illiterate boy from some obscure hinterland scoured by slave-takers. Everybody wants to get their mitts on him, of course – surely there needs to be a mechanism for finding and indoctrinating magical people if a society is to stay up – but the Revolution gets there before the Dastardly Enemies of the People.
And then? I don’t know. There’ll an ensemble cast of bespectacled revolutionary heroes, defiant prostitutes, good-hearted White Guards; and gallons of blood, of course. I feel it might veer towards a sympathetic treatment of our protagonist as he himself veers into being a sort of magical Stalin (you never ‘veer’ into anything pleasant); because in the end, I am firmly convinced, no good ever comes of damn magic. But it must have an ending sufficiently ambiguous to pass as happy. The Revolution can’t fail; it’s an aesthetic necessity, dammit! The main thing is to approach this kind of setting with a concern for power and society that's generally absent.
And it’s all Dreadfully Serious, though the narrator doesn’t always succeed in keeping a perfectly straight face because my narrators don’t. So here, dwarfed by the explanation of them, are some odds and ends I did. Nobody has any names yet, so forgive the confusing proliferation of pronouns.
Space-time is a frightfully complicated thing which I won’t pretend to understand. But probably it wouldn’t be lying to tell you that, in the world concerned by this narrative, about three-hundred years have passed since its end. A great many books have been written about these events. You could learn all about how they affected the production of fine pottery in the countries where they took place, if you like that sort of thing. My book, the latest on the pile, is neither cutting-edge research nor authoritative summary, and if you are a serious student and somebody has put this on your reading-list you should protest.
No, my ambitions are small: I don’t propose to tell you why any of this happened, only that it happened, and that it happened to living people and not to a series of names, dates, blobs of ink on maps. My sources were cherry-picked, my biases show, and I took artistic liberties with the translation. But oh well: my humble hope is that, if it is not certifiably true, and in fact not very probable, and in fact not even terribly plausible, my history is at least believable. And one cannot believe in fine pottery alone.
Anyway, I really cannot stand introductions of more than a page.
The wind made waves on the heather: a brown sea, under a grey sky. The effect was completed, improbably, by a ship on the brow of the moor, a very fine ship, sleek, painted, and carved with a dragon’s head. On its deck, a sacrificial goat bleated its last strangled bleat, as if aware of the necessity of the proceedings but wishing they could have been a bit more professional. The blood on the deck looked brown as well.
It was spring, but you wouldn’t have known. Winter had been long, and only persons of naïve and sentimental disposition will tell you that a long cold winter means a long warm summer. After all, there is only so much year. No, a cold winter, in melting, soaks all the other seasons and you end up with a sodden summer and a sodden spring like this one. The young grass was sad stubble on the muddy chin of the world. The new flowers smelled like death.
[The start, at a funeral. The protagonist comes from a sort of Norse-Gaelic-looking setting, but they're the victims of something much like the African slave-trade. People making up fictional worlds that are supposed to be recognisably like our own often transplant historical societies in poor imitation of Tolkien, I gather. But the Searing Light of Marxist Science tells us that cultures and so on are all just built on geography and economy, so change the geography and you change all the cultures and their relations to each-other. In other worlds, why should the 'white northern Europeans' be the most successful at world-banditry just because they were in our world? I’d like to challenge some assumptions.]
His voice was not loud; it demanded quiet from others. It was not his mouth that did the work at all, but his eyes. You looked into them and knew they weren’t looking back; they were fixed on something invisible to you. He couldn’t hear your noise, either, and his obliviousness made everybody feel that talking would be futile. He was in fact slightly deaf: a childhood in the printing-shop had done that to him. It had done more than that. Metal-forged words had crashed daily down around his young mind, and in that mind their sound became the sounds of cannon, and toppled empires crashing to the ground.
Probably – even the omnipotence of the historian has got its limits, I’m afraid, when it comes to some things – it was at this moment that she fell in love with him. If people fall in love in measurable moments, which they clearly don’t; but then gross oversimplification is the whole business of the historian. So she fell in love with him, in her dogged pugnacious way. When you have lived a life full of people worn out, broken, vanished, hardly seen, well, it must be easy to fall in love with a mind like a red-hot printing-press. Perhaps she felt that a mind like that could love as well as it hated, if it was given the chance.
[I promised you bespectacled revolutionary heroes and defiant prostitutes. You were sold a bill of goods.]
He heard the sound of stars, saw hopes and fears, tasted love and hate, and felt himself shaken by the heavy-footfalls of time. I’m making this sound far too fun, amn’t I? No: it was without a doubt the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him.
[Our protagonist warns kids that this is your brain on serious magic.]
He stood perfectly still and looked intently over the fields, as though they were a piece of writing he was determined to memorise before it was snatched away. But in fact it was the same view he had seen often enough before: of the fields clambering up to the iron-grey horizon and sliding away into the mists and ghost-shapes. There were the same fences, the same rich blacks and subdued greens, the same skeletal smudges made by the bare trees.
There were far more beautiful countries in the world, of course, and he knew it: as a young boy he’d gazed long and hard at the illustrations of any book of travels passing through the printing-shop. But quite suddenly, he felt that these weary hills were worth any hantle of majestic mountains: partly it was the gladness of regaining something you thought lost, and partly the keen attachment people feel to an heirloom from the dead, and partly the pride in something made by the work of their hands. The land he had always known had become his, somehow.
[B.R.H, a patriot after all. The haircuts will be French, the inability of anyone to stop being tooth-grindingly dramatic for the shortest time will be Russian, I hope; but the scenes I take from our iron-grey island. Bagpipes on cue at this point. Lovely!]
Spring came again, and came as a surprise. It had been another long winter, and a winter of hardship and death, and a winter when rumours and lies circulated at parity with the truth owing to shortages; and truth to tell people had begun to doubt whether the long-promised spring would ever turn up. Had there been spring before the war? Wasn't it all another malicious propaganda trick?
But the world must spin on around its axis, else we should all inevitably fall off. Spring came. Frozen rivers buckled, cracked, burst the ice and resumed their courses. So did History, and we come to the final phase of our narrative.
Monday 12 March 2012
Meanwhile, in the Dark Forest of the Slavic Soul...
So I was having a poke around in Slavonic Studies in the library today, as it feels sufficiently close to doing my Russian project to fool my guilty conscience, and I found the adapted-for-stage version of Bulgakov's The White Guard in the English translation by Glenny, the same chap who did the novel so well. I did not even know such a thing existed!
It's a great read. A lot more direct and in-your-face than the novel: in large part this is the nature of the form, and of course the hand of the Soviet censors is visible in places. The past - both of the characters and of their society - has been largely cut out, the subplots removed, and several characters merged. Everything has been made explicit that in the novel was mouthed suggestively, and of course we've lost the gorgeous dream-sequence history of the civil war in Ukraine. But the fierce, embattled humanity of these flawed and noble souls shines through just as clearly. The play makes up for what it can't do by putting the spotlight on what was only one feature of the novel, the sheer energy and sometimes fun of the characters interacting: Alexei and Nikolka discharge much the same roles as in the novel, but Elena has considerably more crap not to take because she doesn't take any crap, and Myshlaevsky gets even more zingers. You have to love Myshlaevsky. He knows he's trapped in The Tragedy Of A Nation and he's not going to let it spoil his fun.
I want to see it now! (In a clear demonstration of the basic rottenness of our capitalist system, it was on in Edinburgh about two years before I'd ever heard of Bulgakov.) But here is a thought. In Shakespeare's day it seems to have been customary on the English stage to represent two separate nations by giving one lot the broad Scots accents just made familiar by King James. In the particular historical context Scots as Ukrainian seems to me spot-on: a language or dialect with its own history and literature but considered by educated society to be slightly ridiculous in the mouths of anyone but the Unwashed Masses. And of course the prospect of watching fuzzy-hatted cossacks striding about the stage shouting in Taysidese is its own attraction.
Surely this means that our White Guards, who disguise their Ukrainian origins and connections by adopting authorised Russian elite culture more fervently than any mere Russian, can only possibly be played with southern Edinburgh accents as thick as treacle? The fact is, our tribe need more cultural exposure. I have the greatest possible admiration for both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Maisie MacKenzie the Morningside cat; but we need to be cast out of type, and a setting so soaked in blood, vodka, and white wine is about as far from type as you could get without losing the things so essential to our brand: black comedy and acute bourgeois neurosis.
So how about it, then, lads?
(No fiction? No. I had a vague idea of creating Maisie Comes to Kiev, in which our young feline heroine goes to stay with her cousins the Purrbins and their friends such as Meowshlaevsky and Whiskervinsky, fighting against the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petlyura, who history has already furnished with an absurd cat pun. But I couldn't make myself do it. I too had a childhood, you know,)
It's a great read. A lot more direct and in-your-face than the novel: in large part this is the nature of the form, and of course the hand of the Soviet censors is visible in places. The past - both of the characters and of their society - has been largely cut out, the subplots removed, and several characters merged. Everything has been made explicit that in the novel was mouthed suggestively, and of course we've lost the gorgeous dream-sequence history of the civil war in Ukraine. But the fierce, embattled humanity of these flawed and noble souls shines through just as clearly. The play makes up for what it can't do by putting the spotlight on what was only one feature of the novel, the sheer energy and sometimes fun of the characters interacting: Alexei and Nikolka discharge much the same roles as in the novel, but Elena has considerably more crap not to take because she doesn't take any crap, and Myshlaevsky gets even more zingers. You have to love Myshlaevsky. He knows he's trapped in The Tragedy Of A Nation and he's not going to let it spoil his fun.
I want to see it now! (In a clear demonstration of the basic rottenness of our capitalist system, it was on in Edinburgh about two years before I'd ever heard of Bulgakov.) But here is a thought. In Shakespeare's day it seems to have been customary on the English stage to represent two separate nations by giving one lot the broad Scots accents just made familiar by King James. In the particular historical context Scots as Ukrainian seems to me spot-on: a language or dialect with its own history and literature but considered by educated society to be slightly ridiculous in the mouths of anyone but the Unwashed Masses. And of course the prospect of watching fuzzy-hatted cossacks striding about the stage shouting in Taysidese is its own attraction.
Surely this means that our White Guards, who disguise their Ukrainian origins and connections by adopting authorised Russian elite culture more fervently than any mere Russian, can only possibly be played with southern Edinburgh accents as thick as treacle? The fact is, our tribe need more cultural exposure. I have the greatest possible admiration for both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Maisie MacKenzie the Morningside cat; but we need to be cast out of type, and a setting so soaked in blood, vodka, and white wine is about as far from type as you could get without losing the things so essential to our brand: black comedy and acute bourgeois neurosis.
So how about it, then, lads?
(No fiction? No. I had a vague idea of creating Maisie Comes to Kiev, in which our young feline heroine goes to stay with her cousins the Purrbins and their friends such as Meowshlaevsky and Whiskervinsky, fighting against the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petlyura, who history has already furnished with an absurd cat pun. But I couldn't make myself do it. I too had a childhood, you know,)
Saturday 10 March 2012
Meanwhile, in the 1930s...
I have had great fun reading Orlando and have felt for some time an urge to give it the sort of affectionate parody that I gave Jane Eyre. The problem is, a parody of Orlando would be Orlando only not as good.
Here's something, however. One of my favourite bits of the novel is the stuff about The Spirit of the Age, so I decided to create a scene in which the Age it helped to define gives way to a new one.
The scene was a moderately-sized country residence amidst its grounds. Autumn was coming: the landscape of that well-known but elusive place, which has had libraries written about it but cannot be found on an OS map, Rural England, looked dignified but weary. Everything was at its most achingly beautiful and also its most painfully transitory. Birds sang about mortality. Petals fell from roses with exaggerated slowness.
Inside the house, some of the rising and established stars of English literature had gathered for tea and debate. It was impressive to hear: with only their words, they dismantled centuries of literary heritage and re-assembled it in new and exciting shapes. They were very keen, indeed, on the new and exciting. There was little of it to be found occurring naturally on their snoozing amber island, forcing them into more and more extreme experimentation: they ripped up the boundaries of class, race, gender, time, and space.
Were one in a position to listen quietly in at the breakfast table on a particular September morning, one could here all of the following: the renowned critic Scratching demonstrating that Donne had been the first modernist; Euphrosinia Plum-Duff proving that being a man and being a woman were both equally impossible; a recitation by the avant-garde poet Smealley in which the motor-car was hymned as the lily of the 20th century; a discussion of the latest piece by Schotterboldt, ‘Man in blackface coughing repeatedly on the piano keys’; and a lot of really quite good homoerotic stuff.
Young David Oats, who had been proclaimed the proletarian Blake of the 20th century by Scratching, speared himself a fried egg with a sense of vague unease. It is true that any proper socialist feels uneasy after his fourth fried egg, but he had long since convinced himself that socialism did not mean that nobody would have four fried eggs for breakfast: it meant that everybody would, and so for a son of the mines to enjoy them in a country house amongst the finest intellectuals of the age was no doubt a step in the right direction. The left direction, that is.
But still, he felt troubled. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation to get up and go over to the French window. From this admirable vantage point, he witnessed one of the decisive moments in history. (It is true that nothing really decisive had ever happened at Tanglethorn Hall per se. But a look out of the French windows revealed a general world phenomenon.)
Storm clouds gathered, fat, black, and bombastic. Then they broke. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. It was clear that this process would continue for some time.
The rains they poured down instantly sent the entire world into a grim, soggy, demoralizing winter. All sorts of extra-ordinary things took place. In China, the piercing claws of a small, agile dragon in an awful pince-nez stirred a far larger, older, craggier dragon from its ancient slumber (although this all took place in conditions of immense inscrutability). In America, the party was declared over and the drunken guests were fished out of the swimming-pool and driven home, where to their horror they discovered that most people in America weren’t obscenely rich. In Russia, muscular heroes of labour were sent to sink a mine-shaft into the unexplored and surpassingly deep depths of the Slavic Soul. In Germany, a magnificent cabaret about the end of civilization had to be suspended in the middle of the second act when the theatre ran out of money and the producer was sent to a concentration camp. India, which up to then had been all adventurous Afghan frontier until you got to the temples of lost civilizations, turned out to be miles and miles of bloody India, full of coolies joining trade-unions and political parties. Africa was shown to exist for the first time.
Weighed down by heavy thoughts (and possibly also fried egg, we must confess) Oats returned to the breakfast table, listening to the rain patter on the roof like the machine-guns of aircraft in the coming war, which everybody had just realized was inevitable.
The atmosphere had changed in his absence. Scratching had joined the Communist Party and was now showing that Donne had been a pioneering Marxist. Euphrosynia Plum-Duff was trying to prevent the war by sponsoring seminars; everybody of course knew that the war was inevitable, but this only made them feel even more urgently the need for seminars. Smealey had gone off to Tuscany on invitation from Mussolini, but the company had been made up again by Schotterboldt, who had had to flee into exile.
Breakfast was allowed to go stale as everybody chewed on the world crisis. The servants came in to clear it away, and several people felt intense existential guilt about their existence.
Oats, who was particularly so affected, went outside to watch the drizzle on the hillsides. He lit a soggy fag and puffed at it, discontentedly. Standing in the doorway, we has suddenly jostled aside by the Scotsman Robert Wilson, who was on his way to catch a train.
Not much has been seen of Wilson at Tanglethorn that Summer except at dinner-time: he had been invited to replace a whole succession of Irishmen, all of whom had succumbed to the urge to travel to Paris which affects the men of Eirinn so strongly for some reason, as a provider of Celticism; but when it turned out that his brand involved no Lillies of the 20th century but only the potatoes, rain, poverty, and Calvinism of the 20th century he had fallen out of favour. These were the things literature was supposed to help abolish, people felt, or at any rate successfully ignore.
Oats had thought he might have stayed around to gloat now that the march of history had so eloquently proved him right, but as he explained, he suddenly felt an irresistible calling to alight on his native moors, there to brood more satisfactorily. Unfortunately Oats didn’t understand much of this, as Wilson said it in a new form of broad Scots which he had just invented.
Oats wished he had a native moor: he could do with a bit of brooding-room. He scanned the rainy grey horizon of Rural England. In a rush its oldness, its grayness, the endearing mediocrity of its landscape suddenly overcame him in a way that would have been quite impossible when it was the centre of the world, the sun never set on it, and its roses never wilted. Wilted roses, dead trees, and slag-heaps seemed suddenly to find their voices and join in a chorus of forgotten hymns.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain intensified. Oats sighed significantly.
Well, he said in the privacy of his mind, there’s nothing else for it. I shall have to fight fascism.
Here's something, however. One of my favourite bits of the novel is the stuff about The Spirit of the Age, so I decided to create a scene in which the Age it helped to define gives way to a new one.
The scene was a moderately-sized country residence amidst its grounds. Autumn was coming: the landscape of that well-known but elusive place, which has had libraries written about it but cannot be found on an OS map, Rural England, looked dignified but weary. Everything was at its most achingly beautiful and also its most painfully transitory. Birds sang about mortality. Petals fell from roses with exaggerated slowness.
Inside the house, some of the rising and established stars of English literature had gathered for tea and debate. It was impressive to hear: with only their words, they dismantled centuries of literary heritage and re-assembled it in new and exciting shapes. They were very keen, indeed, on the new and exciting. There was little of it to be found occurring naturally on their snoozing amber island, forcing them into more and more extreme experimentation: they ripped up the boundaries of class, race, gender, time, and space.
Were one in a position to listen quietly in at the breakfast table on a particular September morning, one could here all of the following: the renowned critic Scratching demonstrating that Donne had been the first modernist; Euphrosinia Plum-Duff proving that being a man and being a woman were both equally impossible; a recitation by the avant-garde poet Smealley in which the motor-car was hymned as the lily of the 20th century; a discussion of the latest piece by Schotterboldt, ‘Man in blackface coughing repeatedly on the piano keys’; and a lot of really quite good homoerotic stuff.
Young David Oats, who had been proclaimed the proletarian Blake of the 20th century by Scratching, speared himself a fried egg with a sense of vague unease. It is true that any proper socialist feels uneasy after his fourth fried egg, but he had long since convinced himself that socialism did not mean that nobody would have four fried eggs for breakfast: it meant that everybody would, and so for a son of the mines to enjoy them in a country house amongst the finest intellectuals of the age was no doubt a step in the right direction. The left direction, that is.
But still, he felt troubled. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation to get up and go over to the French window. From this admirable vantage point, he witnessed one of the decisive moments in history. (It is true that nothing really decisive had ever happened at Tanglethorn Hall per se. But a look out of the French windows revealed a general world phenomenon.)
Storm clouds gathered, fat, black, and bombastic. Then they broke. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. It was clear that this process would continue for some time.
The rains they poured down instantly sent the entire world into a grim, soggy, demoralizing winter. All sorts of extra-ordinary things took place. In China, the piercing claws of a small, agile dragon in an awful pince-nez stirred a far larger, older, craggier dragon from its ancient slumber (although this all took place in conditions of immense inscrutability). In America, the party was declared over and the drunken guests were fished out of the swimming-pool and driven home, where to their horror they discovered that most people in America weren’t obscenely rich. In Russia, muscular heroes of labour were sent to sink a mine-shaft into the unexplored and surpassingly deep depths of the Slavic Soul. In Germany, a magnificent cabaret about the end of civilization had to be suspended in the middle of the second act when the theatre ran out of money and the producer was sent to a concentration camp. India, which up to then had been all adventurous Afghan frontier until you got to the temples of lost civilizations, turned out to be miles and miles of bloody India, full of coolies joining trade-unions and political parties. Africa was shown to exist for the first time.
Weighed down by heavy thoughts (and possibly also fried egg, we must confess) Oats returned to the breakfast table, listening to the rain patter on the roof like the machine-guns of aircraft in the coming war, which everybody had just realized was inevitable.
The atmosphere had changed in his absence. Scratching had joined the Communist Party and was now showing that Donne had been a pioneering Marxist. Euphrosynia Plum-Duff was trying to prevent the war by sponsoring seminars; everybody of course knew that the war was inevitable, but this only made them feel even more urgently the need for seminars. Smealey had gone off to Tuscany on invitation from Mussolini, but the company had been made up again by Schotterboldt, who had had to flee into exile.
Breakfast was allowed to go stale as everybody chewed on the world crisis. The servants came in to clear it away, and several people felt intense existential guilt about their existence.
Oats, who was particularly so affected, went outside to watch the drizzle on the hillsides. He lit a soggy fag and puffed at it, discontentedly. Standing in the doorway, we has suddenly jostled aside by the Scotsman Robert Wilson, who was on his way to catch a train.
Not much has been seen of Wilson at Tanglethorn that Summer except at dinner-time: he had been invited to replace a whole succession of Irishmen, all of whom had succumbed to the urge to travel to Paris which affects the men of Eirinn so strongly for some reason, as a provider of Celticism; but when it turned out that his brand involved no Lillies of the 20th century but only the potatoes, rain, poverty, and Calvinism of the 20th century he had fallen out of favour. These were the things literature was supposed to help abolish, people felt, or at any rate successfully ignore.
Oats had thought he might have stayed around to gloat now that the march of history had so eloquently proved him right, but as he explained, he suddenly felt an irresistible calling to alight on his native moors, there to brood more satisfactorily. Unfortunately Oats didn’t understand much of this, as Wilson said it in a new form of broad Scots which he had just invented.
Oats wished he had a native moor: he could do with a bit of brooding-room. He scanned the rainy grey horizon of Rural England. In a rush its oldness, its grayness, the endearing mediocrity of its landscape suddenly overcame him in a way that would have been quite impossible when it was the centre of the world, the sun never set on it, and its roses never wilted. Wilted roses, dead trees, and slag-heaps seemed suddenly to find their voices and join in a chorus of forgotten hymns.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain intensified. Oats sighed significantly.
Well, he said in the privacy of his mind, there’s nothing else for it. I shall have to fight fascism.
Monday 5 March 2012
Statues
The following inspired by discussions at the GU LitSoc. If I create a literary work per hot meal it is entirely legitimate owing to the GU LitSoc's free pizza policy.
Statues, or: a traffic-cone poem
At the end of Princes Street where Edinburgh meets the world
I met the Duke of Wellington. Command was written
On his bronze face beneath the bird-shit. His horse reared,
Lifting up the weight of its dark metal muscles,
While its mad rolling eyes said:
'Bugger me, not again!'
With one hand he made that gesture that builds empires up
And topples them and builds them up again - as if directing his battalions.
But where are those battalions? For it wasn't only Napoleon that this Iron Duke
Broke at Waterloo. Behind him, the Register House: the numberless battalions of the dead
Form their lines across paper in locked cupboards.
And in front of him, the station:
So I followed the orders of his imperious hand
And caught a train. I went to Nice, to Florence,
Munich, Krakow, Kiev; but everywhere some carved face sneered sternly down at me
And made me want to smash it, to bring kings and generals toppling,
Break them in their turn. There'd be no blood or breaking bones:
Sanctimonious stone faces would be kicked about the street for footballs.
But instead I retreated from sanctimonious stone gazes.
Until I came to Xi'an, where the dead battalions have their statues:
Nameless, but not faceless, they stand in their clay ranks - far easier to smash
Than bronze and marble. Some were smashed even in death, but all were smashed in life.
Enough of smashing, then.
But bring the marble kings together,
Put them in ranks as their clay subjects stand in ranks,
Make them share their podiums,
Line up their rearing leaden horses, as if to start a race:
The first to one million dead!
And let the terracotta soldiers give mute witness
And pass mute judgement.
My train pulled in - a little late - at Queen Street.
The Duke of Wellington greeted me again,
From underneath his traffic-cone.
I thought of Napoleon in a droopy false moustache,
Ceasar with a red nose on his Roman nose;
Hitler hung about with strings of pearls or wooly scarves
In a shop window; a half-peeled banana in Lenin's gesticulating arm.
And the mute clay ranks look on, and mutely smile.
The list of cities are all those twinned with Edinburgh on the Eurasian continent: we are indeed, by a happy chance, twinned with the home of the Terracotta Army. I did miss out Aalborg, because the Danes are much too lovable (there is a rough correspondence between the eastern marches of cities and dictators, France-Italy-Germany-Ecksovietlandia, and come on, name me one mass-murdering Dane).
Glasgow - to the immortal spirit of whose immortal people an Edinburgh boy humbly dedicates this poem, may it live and prosper when all kings and conquerors are buried up to their traffic-cones, hurrah! - is handily enough twinned with many cities that stand as democratic landmarks on the map of world history: Marseille where the song of liberty was sung, Nuremberg where kings and conquerors finally got what was coming to them, and Rostov-on-Don, home of the free Cossacks.
It is also twinned with Bethlehem. Naturally the revolutionary connection is there - Bethlehem, Palestine!, the information boards paid for by the Glasgow taxpayer inform us proudly - but of course that is not the first association with Bethlehem. Many people think it is the place where light, peace, and love entered the world. So I suppose it and Glasgow sort of balance out.
I mean, I am from Edinburgh, one has to keep up appearances.
Statues, or: a traffic-cone poem
At the end of Princes Street where Edinburgh meets the world
I met the Duke of Wellington. Command was written
On his bronze face beneath the bird-shit. His horse reared,
Lifting up the weight of its dark metal muscles,
While its mad rolling eyes said:
'Bugger me, not again!'
With one hand he made that gesture that builds empires up
And topples them and builds them up again - as if directing his battalions.
But where are those battalions? For it wasn't only Napoleon that this Iron Duke
Broke at Waterloo. Behind him, the Register House: the numberless battalions of the dead
Form their lines across paper in locked cupboards.
And in front of him, the station:
So I followed the orders of his imperious hand
And caught a train. I went to Nice, to Florence,
Munich, Krakow, Kiev; but everywhere some carved face sneered sternly down at me
And made me want to smash it, to bring kings and generals toppling,
Break them in their turn. There'd be no blood or breaking bones:
Sanctimonious stone faces would be kicked about the street for footballs.
But instead I retreated from sanctimonious stone gazes.
Until I came to Xi'an, where the dead battalions have their statues:
Nameless, but not faceless, they stand in their clay ranks - far easier to smash
Than bronze and marble. Some were smashed even in death, but all were smashed in life.
Enough of smashing, then.
But bring the marble kings together,
Put them in ranks as their clay subjects stand in ranks,
Make them share their podiums,
Line up their rearing leaden horses, as if to start a race:
The first to one million dead!
And let the terracotta soldiers give mute witness
And pass mute judgement.
My train pulled in - a little late - at Queen Street.
The Duke of Wellington greeted me again,
From underneath his traffic-cone.
I thought of Napoleon in a droopy false moustache,
Ceasar with a red nose on his Roman nose;
Hitler hung about with strings of pearls or wooly scarves
In a shop window; a half-peeled banana in Lenin's gesticulating arm.
And the mute clay ranks look on, and mutely smile.
The list of cities are all those twinned with Edinburgh on the Eurasian continent: we are indeed, by a happy chance, twinned with the home of the Terracotta Army. I did miss out Aalborg, because the Danes are much too lovable (there is a rough correspondence between the eastern marches of cities and dictators, France-Italy-Germany-Ecksovietlandia, and come on, name me one mass-murdering Dane).
Glasgow - to the immortal spirit of whose immortal people an Edinburgh boy humbly dedicates this poem, may it live and prosper when all kings and conquerors are buried up to their traffic-cones, hurrah! - is handily enough twinned with many cities that stand as democratic landmarks on the map of world history: Marseille where the song of liberty was sung, Nuremberg where kings and conquerors finally got what was coming to them, and Rostov-on-Don, home of the free Cossacks.
It is also twinned with Bethlehem. Naturally the revolutionary connection is there - Bethlehem, Palestine!, the information boards paid for by the Glasgow taxpayer inform us proudly - but of course that is not the first association with Bethlehem. Many people think it is the place where light, peace, and love entered the world. So I suppose it and Glasgow sort of balance out.
I mean, I am from Edinburgh, one has to keep up appearances.
Down with non-partisan bloggers!
We're back! That is to say myself, my camera, my dinner, and my muse (the latter two are possibly one and the same). And here is the proof:
My budget was in a small surplus the other day: I could have gotten myself a new shirt, or an album on iTunes. I could have saved up to repair my bicycle, or helped end world hunger. I could have blown it all on sin and vice. But why would I do any of those things when I could have smoked salmon for tea?
Well, anyway, there are no more excuses to not be writing. Essays are done, and what is more, after much lingering awkwardly at the door, twiddling on the balls of her feet, Spring has come to Scotland! The sun spills light on sandstone and slate; buds blossom brightly in the Botanics; alliteration adds appeal. The lines of hills beyond Glasgow have gone from iron-grey to cautiously green; even the moss and creepers on the bare trees seem to have a richer colour.
It is just as well that my essays are indeed done: so that I can take time to go outside and write things using a pen and paper as my ancestors did in ancient days, yes; but also because Winter is a much more suitable season for the stern Marxist finger-wagging of which my essays invariably consist. Some residue of revolutionary fervour is left, however, and under the touch of the sun it has taken on a rather whimsical character.
During the long lead-up to the opening of the preliminaries of the preparation for the first round of the contest that precedes the American presidential election, we heard from various mouths that Corporations are People and they (as distinct from the people who own them and whom they employ) have all the rights of Americans. I wait keenly for the state of Texas to execute one. The whole idea seems to me an eloquently stupid example of how we have been accustomed to viewing society in late decades: as a mechanism for defending us, by tributes of treasure and the periodic sacrifice of a virgin welfare-state, against the dragon Economy. Nobody can predict the continent-shaking stirrings of this beast - who is certainly not just people making things and doing things whose relations might be re-organised to the general good. No, it is something beyond mere mortal kenning, with breath like the desert wind and a mouth like the pit of damnation.
But rather than just get pissed off, I decided to follow on with the idea of 'corporate personhood'. There follows part 1 of, hopefully, a recurring series.
Jonathan Bracejaw turned. He tossed. He turned again. He tossed again. All to no avail: sleep eluded him. He was tired, more tired than he had felt in a long time; but tonight... it was almost as if some alien presence were lying there in the darkness, forbidding sleep, watching him.
In point of fact of course there was a presence in the bed beside him, that of Marmalade. Marmalade, I should clarify, was a young woman (the bed had been stained with a great many things literal and metaphorical but never orange-flavoured jam) whose real name was Marya Sergeevna Bondaruka, or had been, long ago and far away; her pseudonym arose from a misunderstanding. But she was not really alien: she, or somebody physically very much like her (by surgical means, if necessary) had become something of a fixture.
Still, Jonathan could have done without her. She snored like a soprano sawmill, which cut across his ideas of how blonde amply-breasted young women to whom the adjective 'lithe' might be applied if anybody could tell me what it meant were supposed to behave, at any rate on the job. And he found it particularly distressing now: he felt, as he so seldom did, a need to think in the quiet and the dark.
After several attempts - the covers were all over the place - he kicked her.
"How much do I owe you?"
"Yeet's thriy o'clawk yeen the mauwrneeng," she said indistinctly. She could actually speak English with a cut-glass Home Counties accent, but she had learned not to: like the snoring, about which nothing could be done, it for some reason upset people.
"What, 'nothing', did you say?"
"Oh, peeez awf. Fawr-hahndred."
Jonathan clambered out of the bed and shivered. He disliked being naked as a rule (why he was willing to pay four-hundred dollars for a procedure to which nakedness was more-or-less essential is a question for the sociologists): it turned his imposing height into gangliness. "It wasn't worth it," he said as he fumbled for the money kept on his desk for this purpose.
"I know the feeling," said Marmalade irritably, neglecting her accent.
"Clear out." He tossed a wad at her with vehemence.
"I have to get dressed!"
"Do it in the toilet."
She sighed, got out of the bed, and switched on the lights. For all that her naked body, besides being the sort to which the poets and rock-and-roll stars of the human race have devoted too many fine words to justify me any adding some more, was entirely natural and just went to show what comes of a healthy diet and frequent exercise, the sight of it did not arose Jonathan so much as a fully-clothed and icy secretary of even moderate beauty would have: some mixture of gnawing guilt, distractedness, and excessive familiarity was the reason. He occupied himself in gathering up his own clothes from the floor.
"This is disgusting!," said a voice from the bathroom as he wrestled with his underwear.
"Fuck off back to Russia!"
"Ukraine!"
"Fuck off!"
He slumped on the bed, stared at the ceiling of his office, and listened to the receding sound of some exceedingly high heels. He was alone, for a little while at least. When he was alone, he felt less profoundly lonely.
But now it was no good. The ceiling was too large and bright, so he turned over, and found the pillow too dark and mysterious. A nagging voice - like his own, but not quite his own, belonging to his younger, better self, or to his conscience, or possibly to his mother - kept asking him how long it had been since he'd talked to someone he didn't, in one way or another, employ. He urged silence on the voice, but it took no heed: it wondered aloud where Marmalade had gone, and whether she was sparing him a thought; it speculated about these distant countries which he had never visited even though their citizens had almost certainly contributed to his fortune, Russia and Ukraine and - where had that other girl come from? Morocco! He hadn't been able to remember until now, and now he was assailed with memories. He remembered New England: the green fields, and stone walls, and the thundering green field of the Atlantic walled in by the little towns where he had spent his childhood. He had visions - wildly inaccurate, the dutiful narrator must record - of Russian, Ukrainian, Moroccan childhoods, and the hopes they nurtured, and the memories they left to torment their exiled children years later, in other countries, their hopes betrayed. And had he, who had ended up on top of them in the same soiled bed, done any better?
This was not the first such episode, though it was the most intense to date, and it would have ended as they all did - drowned in an artisan vodka that was, with an irony Jonathan might have appreciated had he ever noticed, Ukrainian - had it not been for one of those inexplicable farts of the vast digestive system of the universe.
It is necessary here to draw back the all-seeing narrative eye from Jonathan's office on the 567th floor of the LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries Building and cast it a short distance into the past. There we can view a sum of money orders of magnitude than that paid to the long-suffering Marmalade as it is transferred from the accounts of LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries to a gentleman with the rather absurd name of Athanasius McGill, an utterly trustworthy person, who pools it with even more money and distributes the whole to representatives and senators of the great United States.
As a result of all this, reality was altered in a small but important respect. After all, the United States government is certainly the most powerful institution ever constructed by humans, and if they can't alter the universe, who the hell can, I ask you? They have the power to legislate that green is blue and so it shall be. This explains a great deal. And if, a mere author of frivolous fiction, can cause such a person as Jonathan Bracejaw to exist, then the United States government can by the same means as me create whole categories of person.
The United States government declared that LifeSunTechGrowth Industries was as much a person as Athanasius McGill and Jonathan Bracejaw and Marmalade - possibly moreso than her, in fact. And so it was.
Now, we skip ahead again, to where we left Jonathan deep in introspection, guilt, and self-confrontation. By an astonishing coincidence, it was just as he made a heartfelt appeal to whatever higher power his battered soul believed in for company that the bill which he had a part in creating was passed into law, and caused his cry to be heeded in a highly - even an excessively - literal fashion.
There was a brisk knock at the door.
'Mr. Bracejaw, sir?'
My budget was in a small surplus the other day: I could have gotten myself a new shirt, or an album on iTunes. I could have saved up to repair my bicycle, or helped end world hunger. I could have blown it all on sin and vice. But why would I do any of those things when I could have smoked salmon for tea?
Well, anyway, there are no more excuses to not be writing. Essays are done, and what is more, after much lingering awkwardly at the door, twiddling on the balls of her feet, Spring has come to Scotland! The sun spills light on sandstone and slate; buds blossom brightly in the Botanics; alliteration adds appeal. The lines of hills beyond Glasgow have gone from iron-grey to cautiously green; even the moss and creepers on the bare trees seem to have a richer colour.
It is just as well that my essays are indeed done: so that I can take time to go outside and write things using a pen and paper as my ancestors did in ancient days, yes; but also because Winter is a much more suitable season for the stern Marxist finger-wagging of which my essays invariably consist. Some residue of revolutionary fervour is left, however, and under the touch of the sun it has taken on a rather whimsical character.
During the long lead-up to the opening of the preliminaries of the preparation for the first round of the contest that precedes the American presidential election, we heard from various mouths that Corporations are People and they (as distinct from the people who own them and whom they employ) have all the rights of Americans. I wait keenly for the state of Texas to execute one. The whole idea seems to me an eloquently stupid example of how we have been accustomed to viewing society in late decades: as a mechanism for defending us, by tributes of treasure and the periodic sacrifice of a virgin welfare-state, against the dragon Economy. Nobody can predict the continent-shaking stirrings of this beast - who is certainly not just people making things and doing things whose relations might be re-organised to the general good. No, it is something beyond mere mortal kenning, with breath like the desert wind and a mouth like the pit of damnation.
But rather than just get pissed off, I decided to follow on with the idea of 'corporate personhood'. There follows part 1 of, hopefully, a recurring series.
Jonathan Bracejaw turned. He tossed. He turned again. He tossed again. All to no avail: sleep eluded him. He was tired, more tired than he had felt in a long time; but tonight... it was almost as if some alien presence were lying there in the darkness, forbidding sleep, watching him.
In point of fact of course there was a presence in the bed beside him, that of Marmalade. Marmalade, I should clarify, was a young woman (the bed had been stained with a great many things literal and metaphorical but never orange-flavoured jam) whose real name was Marya Sergeevna Bondaruka, or had been, long ago and far away; her pseudonym arose from a misunderstanding. But she was not really alien: she, or somebody physically very much like her (by surgical means, if necessary) had become something of a fixture.
Still, Jonathan could have done without her. She snored like a soprano sawmill, which cut across his ideas of how blonde amply-breasted young women to whom the adjective 'lithe' might be applied if anybody could tell me what it meant were supposed to behave, at any rate on the job. And he found it particularly distressing now: he felt, as he so seldom did, a need to think in the quiet and the dark.
After several attempts - the covers were all over the place - he kicked her.
"How much do I owe you?"
"Yeet's thriy o'clawk yeen the mauwrneeng," she said indistinctly. She could actually speak English with a cut-glass Home Counties accent, but she had learned not to: like the snoring, about which nothing could be done, it for some reason upset people.
"What, 'nothing', did you say?"
"Oh, peeez awf. Fawr-hahndred."
Jonathan clambered out of the bed and shivered. He disliked being naked as a rule (why he was willing to pay four-hundred dollars for a procedure to which nakedness was more-or-less essential is a question for the sociologists): it turned his imposing height into gangliness. "It wasn't worth it," he said as he fumbled for the money kept on his desk for this purpose.
"I know the feeling," said Marmalade irritably, neglecting her accent.
"Clear out." He tossed a wad at her with vehemence.
"I have to get dressed!"
"Do it in the toilet."
She sighed, got out of the bed, and switched on the lights. For all that her naked body, besides being the sort to which the poets and rock-and-roll stars of the human race have devoted too many fine words to justify me any adding some more, was entirely natural and just went to show what comes of a healthy diet and frequent exercise, the sight of it did not arose Jonathan so much as a fully-clothed and icy secretary of even moderate beauty would have: some mixture of gnawing guilt, distractedness, and excessive familiarity was the reason. He occupied himself in gathering up his own clothes from the floor.
"This is disgusting!," said a voice from the bathroom as he wrestled with his underwear.
"Fuck off back to Russia!"
"Ukraine!"
"Fuck off!"
He slumped on the bed, stared at the ceiling of his office, and listened to the receding sound of some exceedingly high heels. He was alone, for a little while at least. When he was alone, he felt less profoundly lonely.
But now it was no good. The ceiling was too large and bright, so he turned over, and found the pillow too dark and mysterious. A nagging voice - like his own, but not quite his own, belonging to his younger, better self, or to his conscience, or possibly to his mother - kept asking him how long it had been since he'd talked to someone he didn't, in one way or another, employ. He urged silence on the voice, but it took no heed: it wondered aloud where Marmalade had gone, and whether she was sparing him a thought; it speculated about these distant countries which he had never visited even though their citizens had almost certainly contributed to his fortune, Russia and Ukraine and - where had that other girl come from? Morocco! He hadn't been able to remember until now, and now he was assailed with memories. He remembered New England: the green fields, and stone walls, and the thundering green field of the Atlantic walled in by the little towns where he had spent his childhood. He had visions - wildly inaccurate, the dutiful narrator must record - of Russian, Ukrainian, Moroccan childhoods, and the hopes they nurtured, and the memories they left to torment their exiled children years later, in other countries, their hopes betrayed. And had he, who had ended up on top of them in the same soiled bed, done any better?
This was not the first such episode, though it was the most intense to date, and it would have ended as they all did - drowned in an artisan vodka that was, with an irony Jonathan might have appreciated had he ever noticed, Ukrainian - had it not been for one of those inexplicable farts of the vast digestive system of the universe.
It is necessary here to draw back the all-seeing narrative eye from Jonathan's office on the 567th floor of the LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries Building and cast it a short distance into the past. There we can view a sum of money orders of magnitude than that paid to the long-suffering Marmalade as it is transferred from the accounts of LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries to a gentleman with the rather absurd name of Athanasius McGill, an utterly trustworthy person, who pools it with even more money and distributes the whole to representatives and senators of the great United States.
As a result of all this, reality was altered in a small but important respect. After all, the United States government is certainly the most powerful institution ever constructed by humans, and if they can't alter the universe, who the hell can, I ask you? They have the power to legislate that green is blue and so it shall be. This explains a great deal. And if, a mere author of frivolous fiction, can cause such a person as Jonathan Bracejaw to exist, then the United States government can by the same means as me create whole categories of person.
The United States government declared that LifeSunTechGrowth Industries was as much a person as Athanasius McGill and Jonathan Bracejaw and Marmalade - possibly moreso than her, in fact. And so it was.
Now, we skip ahead again, to where we left Jonathan deep in introspection, guilt, and self-confrontation. By an astonishing coincidence, it was just as he made a heartfelt appeal to whatever higher power his battered soul believed in for company that the bill which he had a part in creating was passed into law, and caused his cry to be heeded in a highly - even an excessively - literal fashion.
There was a brisk knock at the door.
'Mr. Bracejaw, sir?'
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