In his poem 'Deceptions', from what is generally held to be his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, Larkin writes arrestingly of someone whose "mind lay open like a drawer of knives".
I believe it's fairly well-known that Philip Larkin was sexually attracted to Margaret Thatcher. From his correspondence we have the following:
Your anecdote reminds me of a brief exchange I once had with Mrs. T., who told me she liked my wonderful poem about a girl. My face must have expressed incomprehension. “You know,” she said. “Her mind is full of knives.” I took that as a great compliment – I thought if it weren’t spontaneous she’d have got it right – but I’m a child in these things. I also thought that she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines, not that I don’t kiss the ground on which she walks.
But I rather think that her mind - and her drawer, or drawers - full of knives must have been part of the attraction for Larkin.
In his song, You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side, Morrissey sings similarly arresting lines: "Someone kindly told me that you'd wasted/Eight of nine lives." Famous for his Freudian slip-like live lyric changes, during performances of this song he has been known to change the lyric to the seemingly nonsensical (so we are told): "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives". I remember it from performances I have heard as "very sharp kitchen knives". (I know people who collect very sharp kitchen knives.) (Incidentally, Moz also seems to have changed this lyric along the lines of, "Someone kindly told me that you'd thrown away, every day of your precious teenaged life.")
The website It May All End Tomorrow suggests that such lyric changes by Morrissey are flippant and without particular meaning. I would suggest that, like Freudian slips, they have more meaning than is at first apparent.
To indicate the direction in which I am thinking, imagine the line, "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives", as being sung by Philip Larkin. To Margaret Thatcher.
Which brings us to Mishima Yukio, and we've almost come full circle.
Well, if I don't write this today, I probably never will. It's been over a week now since I saw, in company with Mr. Wu, Morrissey in concert at the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park.
I'm a little tired of live music reviews, as they seldom seem to convey more than the fact that the writer either enjoyed or didn't enjoy the event. I don't really want to write the usual live review, but I don't really know what else to write. Anyway, let's see what we can do.
There were a number of acts lined up for that day, but I think the only ones that Mr. Wu and myself were interested in were Beck and Morrissey. Besides which, I was coming up to London on the day, and Mr. Wu had to work, so we were bound to miss most of the line-up. I met Mr. Wu at his place of work, and we discussed what songs we thought Morrissey would do, and what songs we would like him to do, and whether we would catch much of Beck's set. Mr. Wu was particularly keen for Morrissey to do The Last of the Famous International Playboys. I made some jokes about the first song being National Front Disco, and so on. I also remarked that it would be interesting to see how he comes across now, since he's at an interesting stage in his career. It seems as if, with his 'comeback', he's more popular than he's ever been. At the same time, he has only recently been involved in another controversy, perhaps the most notable of his career so far, ending as it did in legal action being taken, by Morrissey.
I had a feeling that it was going to be a good show. Morrissey's recent statement somehow seemed to exude confidence and augur well.
When we arrived at Hyde Park, Beck was already onstage. We strode briskly in the direction of the music, stopped only by a girl giving away free samples of wine. Even that would not have stopped us, had not the girl shouted, "It's free!"
Soon we came to a place of comfortable distance and settled in. To be honest, I don't want to spend any longer writing this than is necessary, and writing about Beck's set, it seems to me, is not necessary. It was the first time I had seen him live. At one point, I remarked to Mr. Wu, "I think he's phoning his performance in." "Not even that," said Mr. Wu, "he's faxing it in." Mr. Wu assured me that he has seen Beck before and he has been brilliant. I wondered if perhaps he resented being second billing. Whatever the reason, Beck's set was the dullest kind of rock'n'roll set, and not something I would have expected from someone who can do this.
There was about half an hour or so of this, then, mercifully, there came the interval. Mr. Wu complained that it was better in the old days when there was some compilation tape put on before the main act, usually put together by the headliners themselves. Then we noticed something strange as we watched the video clips being played on the video screens either side of the stage. They were brilliantly chosen and hilarious. It was obvious, after all, that this was the work of Morrissey. I still want to track some of those clips down, but they included footage of Brigitte Bardot, some camp old hoofer singing to a girl in a tutu that he is the one she should confess to, some clips from an episode of The Untouchables in which there featured lots of dialogue about a villain, or victim, called Morrissey ("It's settled then. Tonight, we take Morrissey", etc.), an interview with Shelagh Delany, and probably more that I've forgotten.
After a pleasingly brief interval (sometimes these things do drag on), the drum intro track to The Operation started up, and the band and Morrissey entered the stage. All were wearing Playboy T-shirts, and the first number was, by great serendipity, The Last of the Famous International Playboys. It was obvious that it was going to be a great gig. Somehow, Morrissey had known when he had written his statement that it would be. Towards the end of the first song, Morrissey did one of his famous live lyric changes. "In our lifetime those who kill/The news world hands them stardom", became, "In our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom". We both laughed at this, Mr. Wu and I.
The second song was a Smiths song, Ask, which was a very pleasant surprise. In fact, the setlist was full of great surprises, including The Death of a Disco Dancer, Vicar in a Tutu, Stretch Out and Wait, Sister, I'm a Poet and Billy Budd. With the occasional lapse into hohummery here and there (All You Need is Me), the gig just seemed to get better and better. When The Death of a Disco Dancer started, I had the feeling that this was going to be the best song of the evening. The interesting thing about a Morrissey gig is that, even in the midst of all the physical confusion of a live performance, the words still seem to matter. This song felt, to me, incredibly zeitgeisty. "Love, peace and harmony/Love, peace and harmony/Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice/But maybe in the next world." The ironic bitterness of that repeated "very nice" came across quite chillingly. Surely we're at a point in history where that really is the decision facing us - love, peace and harmony, or "the next world", in other words, the end of this one.
Maybe it was just me, but APOCALYPSE seemed very much in the air. I mean, perhaps that should not be a surprise. Still, some of the lyrics struck me afresh: "Will the world end in the nighttime/I really don't know/Or will the world end in the daytime/I don't know", from Stretch Out and Wait. Perhaps tellingly, there was another lyric change here. The following line is usually, "And is there any point ever having children?/Oh, I don't know." This time the answer to the question was a single, emphatic, "No!" There was also the slight lyric change in Ask: "If it's not love, then it's the bomb/The nuclear bomb that will bring us together."
I suppose the apocalypse theme - also emphasised in a peculiar way by Morrissey complaining about the smell of roasting meat wafting over the park, "Putting death into your body, death into your body," he repeated a number of times, ending with the peculiar quip, "Oh, I've gone too far" - chimed in with some things I had been thinking anyway. I believe the crowd there numbered about 30,000. I thought, and not for the first time, about the tremendous amount of resources that are needed for such an event, in terms of electricity, transport and so on. Obviously, it would be hypocritical of me to be damning of such a use of resources, since I enjoyed the event, and I wonder if such mass public celebrations are, to some extent, necessary. Still, I also wonder how much longer we can keep this sort of thing up. Maybe, if we get the right energy sources, for a much longer time. But we don't seem to have the right energy sources at the moment.
What it did lead me to reflect on is the nature of stardom, and what I have long believed to be the very unhealthy relationship that our society (Britain, and I'm sure other societies) has with art. There is really no system for nurturing the artist in our society, outside of a few elitist institutions. When, back in the early eighties, Morrissey sang lines like, "No, I've never had a job/Because I'm too shy", what he was really expressing, in both a very direct, and very roundabout way, was the difficulty of being an artist in a society that does its very best to destroy artists. The usual response to anyone trying to 'make it' in any artistic sphere, before they have made it, is, "Who the fuck are you?" People resent artists. People wish to lynch artists. A huge event like the Morrissey gig, resembles, in some peculiar way, a sacrificial bonfire, complete with the smell of roasting flesh wafting across the field. The difference being that the sacrifice now is only symbolically of the artist ("Tonight, we're going to take Morrissey"). It is a bonfire erected to the artist's success. The artist has become god. How did he do this? He overcame death - the death that society tried (and failed) by any means necessary, to inflict on the artist and the artist's dream.
What kind of a relationship is this to have with artists? On the one hand they are despised as vermin, and on the other, revered as gods. And then people are surprised when occasionally those artists are human and act like arseholes. If you had had a whole country lusting for your blood one minute, and then worshipping you the next, the chances are, I reckon, you'd act like an arsehole sometimes, too.
All this is summed up for me in the words of that opening song, The Last of the Famous International Playboys: "See, in our lifetime those who kill/The BBC hand them stardom/And these are the ways on which I was raised/These are the ways on which I was raised/I never wanted to kill/I am not naturally EVIL/Such things I do/Just to make myself more attractive to you/Have I failed?"
Well, on Friday night, in Hyde Park, at least, Morrissey did not fail.
The encore, and possibly the best song of the night, was another surprise, What She Said, from the album Meat is Murder.
"What she said/How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead/And decided to bury me/God knows I'm ready..."
I didn't buy the single All You Need Is Me, because I think the song's a bit naff. Anyway, I came upon the two B-sides from the single on Youtube, and they happen to both be cracking songs. The lyrics aren't the best ever, but music and vocals are great. Also, for some reason, they both end with great lines after some fairly mediocre lyrics. In the case of Children in Pieces, "but instead of sympathy I find/my sentimental heart hardens/my sentimental heart hardens/Get your hands off me/Kid, you must be bad luck". Also, credit to Morrissey for once again choosing specific and unusual pop-song subject matter, namely the abuse that took place in the schools of the Christian Brothers.
Oh, I said they both end with great lyrics, but maybe the final lyrics to My Dearest Love are only great in context.
It is, indeed, typical that Morrissey should choose for the B-side two songs that completely overshadow the A-side, and I should have known, really. I'm sure he does it on purpose.
Anyway, they're still available to you and I - for now at least - on Youtube:
(PS. Sorry the blog's been low on textual content recently. The pressures of work!)
I've been a bit busy recently, hence the lull in my blog. I was hoping to research and write more on GM foods, amongst other things, but I don't know if I'll get time for that, after all. I also have an urgent mission relating to Burt Reynolds that I still haven't completed, and, well, all sorts of things.
A few bits of news for those who are interested, and then we shall go to the intermission for a while. First of all - the title of the forthcoming Morrissey album has been announced, and it is... Years of Refusal. Hmmm. Not the best title ever, but some of the song titles make up for that, my favourites being, I Was Bully, Do Not Forget Me, and Because of My Poor Education. I don't know what happened to Mozzer's poetic album titles, though. Best album title? Maybe Hatful of Hollow, I think.
I've started writing a couple of new stories, too. I won't give details of those, but will only say that my recent reading of Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo' has revived my interest in stories that make your flesh creep and give you unquiet dreams. I've also completed the first draft of my novel (sequel to the forthcoming Shrike), Susuki, and hope to have certain persons read it and give me feedback so that I can revise it effectively and send it to a publisher soonest.
Other news? I watched Silence in the Library, the latest Doctor Who episode last night, and thought it was okay, but not as good as it was billed to be.
With renewed intimations of my own mortality, I find I am spurred on to read more and more books (violence in the library?), and have started, amongst many, many other volumes, Beroul's The Romance of Tristan.
I am growing accustomed to my life in Wales, and have no plans to leave, though would not be surprised if circumstances force a move at some time.
As usual, apologies to all those waiting to hear from me who have not heard.
Er... Anything else? New stories up on Chomu. I'm planning to conceive a passion for Andean music when I get the time.
You wouldn't believe how many different writing projects I have at the moment.
Any questions?
No? Then let us proceed to the intermission, and you will be hearing from me sometime. There now follows an intermission:
"I'm so glad Morrissey's suing that fucking magazine."
The pea-souper parts. In the piss-stinking alley there is the swirl of a cape, a flash of red, an almost silent swish of steel. A scream is quickly stifled. Jolly Jack strikes again.
As you may know, I spent last week in the capital. Much of the time, I'm afraid to say, I was very, very drunk. However, it was, on the whole, an interesting week for me, and I'd like to write about it now. Because there's too much to tell, however, I shall limit my remarks to the visit I made to a friend's flat, where I stayed the weekend.
On Saturday the 26th, I attended a certain meeting of writers in a certain pub in Central London, where I met the friend in question. There was conversation about Wales, about who should be the next Doctor Who, and so on. I'm not sure what time it was when we left. I suppose it was about eight or nine. Maybe it was later. I'm not going to give out my friend's name, because he's threatened to put stuff about me on Youtube if I write anything libellous about him here. So, let's call him Thor, God of Thunder, even though, for some reason, that's a very incongruous name.
We got the bus to his part of town, climbing up the stairs to the top deck. I banged my knee on a corner in the process and was in agony. "I've destroyed my knee!" I said. We sat at the front of the bus, right in front of the top-deck windows. He sat on one side of the aisle, if I remember correctly, and I on the other, so we had to talk reasonably loudly to hear each other. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what we talked about, partly because of the threat that something will be posted on Youtube, and partly because I've forgotten most of it, anyway. However, a couple of rows behind us was a guy who looked exactly like Al Murray's Pub Landlord, but with a far more colourful, going-out-on-a-Saturday-night-and-wearing-aftershave sort of shirt on. When it came time for Al Murray's stop, he got up and, on his way out, approached us and said, in his Al Murray voice, "I'm not being being funny but that's the fucking funniest conversation I've heard on a bus in ages." To which he appended some other remarks. Thor, God of Thunder laughed, and then said, "Fuck you!" as Al Murray scooted down the stairs, and then laughed again.
Eventually we arrived at our destination and walked to Thor, God of Thunder's flat. I must have told him at around this point, that at my birthday gathering, when I had mentioned I would be staying with him, I had been told to be careful because it was a very rough area.
"Yeah, it is," said Thor, God of Thunder. "There's people getting stabbed and shot and gang-raped and all sorts round here. But our flat's in the nice part of the area, on the other side of the road from all that."
We must have stopped at the off-license at some point, and Thor, God of Thunder got himself some lagers and some bottles of Bishop's Finger for me, making the obligatory double-entendres about me wanting the Bishop's finger tonight and so on. We got to the flat and re-commenced the drinking, now adding music and the rolling of fags into the mix.
Much of the conversation that evening was related to the contents of this blog, and that is what I would like to focus on here.
"I looked up the video to Puss 'N Boots, like you told me," said Thor, God of Thunder, early on.
"Oh yeah, what did you think of it?"
"To be honest, it made me angry."
"Angry?" I laughed.
"Yeah. Well, you've got to remember I'm not English, I'm Welsh. So, for a start, the King of England in that video made me angry."
"Why?"
"He was just so fucking... excitable." Here he mimed the king wibbling his fingers around his face in excitement. "All fucking winking and nodding. The idea that two hundred thousand Welshmen died because of this excitable old man just made me fucking angry. And also, it's not a good song."
"Hmmm, I don't know. Maybe. I just think it's a mad fucking video. I put it on my blog. And the Puss 'n Boots girl looks a bit like some tarty version of Kate Bush."
From there, if I recall correctly, we actually moved on to the subject of my blog. I attempted to play Thor, God of Thunder the clip of Noel Gallagher talking about The Smiths.
"Why the fuck have you got Noel Gallagher on your blog? Why would I want to listen to what this barely articulate monkey has got to say about anything? This is a guy who fucking shook hands with Tony Blair."
"Well, I put it on because I thought what he said was interesting, and his choice of song was good."
"Yeah. I think about half of the first album was wicked. The next album was poo. Then the next album after that was horse poo. Then the next album after that was gnu poo."
"Yeah, well, like I said, I don't like Oasis."
"Then why d'you put it on your fucking blog?"
Sighs. "I thought what he said was quite interesting."
The chronology of the conversation is all mixed up in my mind now, but I think this is what led to us talking about Morrissey. Anyway, at some point in the evening, Thor, God of Thunder said, as if reminded of something that he's been meaning to talk about:
"I'm so glad Morrissey's suing that fucking magazine."
"Yes."
"These people trying to make out he's racist, that makes me so angry. You know, of course, I don't even fucking like Morrissey. If anything I dislike the guy. But you can't call Morrissey racist. Everybody fucking knows Morrissey isn't racist. Even I know he's not racist, and I can't stand the guy." He began to get into his stride. "You know there are a few things in life that are constants. You've got..."
"The Queen?"
"Yeah, like the Queen, err... Paul McCartney, and Morrissey. I mean, his views are... horizontal. You've got this guy, he's been careful not to comment much on his own sexuality. He may be gay, he may not. We don't know. But he's not homophobic and he's definitely not fucking racist. I think it's obscene that they're trying to portray him as racist. I don't even fucking like the guy. But it's just a load of people trying to hang on to his least pube and give it a yank. They wouldn't do that to Paul McCartney, but for some reason Morrissey's got this thing about him where people want to do that. But he's like Paul McCartney. He is Paul McCartney. He should be held in the same..."
"Regard?"
"Yeah. No, not regard. Another word. I can't even formulate my words properly at the moment because we're listening to craaaaazy Jazz, but he should be held up like The Beatles or something. I don't like The Beatles, either, actually. I think they were fucking shit. But, anyway, he should have the same kind of status, of, like a god or something. I mean, you've got this guy with a fucking Elvis haircut, he was in a band called The Smiths, who did whatever the fuck they wanted, and wrote songs like Girlfriend in a Coma. He's not homophobic and he's definitely not racist."
This subject, after a while, having been exhausted, we returned to Adam and the Ants. We watched the Puss 'N Boots video together.
"See," said Thor, God of Thunder, "it's not a good song. My impression is that this was maybe a bit later in his career when he was starting to lose it, but he was selling records so the record company kind of went along with it and let him do what he wanted. And that fucking king is just so fucking excitable, leering over that girl's arse and everything."
"Hmmm," I said doubtfully.
"Come on, think about it. If you'd been buying all the other stuff, like Stand and Deliver and Prince Charming at the time, would you have bought this when it came out?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Probably."
"You wouldn't. You wouldn't."
"But I like the fact that it's completely mad. I mean it is."
"Oh yeah."
"That's part of the attraction. I wrote a bit about it on my blog."
I am interested in failure, though. So interested that I seem to have to live it out quite thoroughly. In fact, only the other day, I was thinking of writing a blog post about why I am fascinated by Stuart Goddard, otherwise known as Adam Ant, of Adam and the Ants fame. Stuart Goddard was and probably still is, a fantasist, like myself. He threw himself with wonderful, deranged flamboyance into his silly, flimsy fantasy world, and for a while, the public supported him in his derangement. And then the trampoline was cruelly snatched from under him. Or so it seems.
Thor, God of Thunder made a disapproving face.
"Silly?" he said. "Why is it silly?"
"Yeah, no, you're right. It isn't really. In fact, after I wrote that I looked at it again and thought it was a bit weird, or wrong or something. But I don't censor myself on my blog. I just write things the way they come out."
"Yeah, no, you should. But if you were writing about failure you should have put the Puss 'N Boots clip there, not Prince Charming. Prince Charming is a good song. It's got a good message, he's at the height of his career, and you can imagine DJs like that Hairy Cornflake guy thinking, 'What the fuck is this?' but having to play it anyway, because Adam Ant was selling records. With Puss 'N Boots they probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Slipped it on the turntable and didn't care."
"Well, I used the Prince Charming clip because of the whole Cinderella theme."
"Yeah. I see what you mean. I still think you should have used the Puss 'N Boots instead."
Warming to our Adam and the Ants theme, we proceeded to watch a number of videos on Youtube.
(Actually, though, I note now that this video is hilarious and incredibly visually witty.)
Next we listened to ... oh hang on... maybe we watched a different clip of Friend or Foe. Oh no, I remember now. We then proceeded to watch two different clips of Goody Two Shoes.
"I didn't know this was him," said Thor, God of Thunder.
"Yeah," I said.
"'Don't smoke, don't drink - what do you do?' That's got to be one of the best lines in pop."
"He's got one of those kind of things you tie over your navel."
"Brilliant. And those boots! He looks fucking gay. When was this? Early eighties or something? That's fantastic. All the girls are going to love him, because he's a beautiful, beautiful man, and he's selling tonnes of records, and he decides to come on TV dressed as the gayest thing ever, and the record company executives can't do a fucking thing about it, because he's too popular. Wicked! I'd put my cock up his arse."
Eventually we exhausted even this subject.
"Are you hungry?" asked Thor, God of Thunder.
It was about three in the morning.
"Yeah."
"Let's get some pizzas."
Unfortunately, when he tried phoning, nowhere was open.
"There's only one option left," he said. "The question is, how much do you want this pizza? Are you willing to risk your life?"
"Hmmm. Yeah, I suppose so."
"Okay, we're going to have to go to the rough part of the area."
We walked down the hill to a 24 hour shop. The door was locked.
"We can't get inside," I said.
"Course we fucking can't, or we'd just bomb the place or something."
We gave our order through a transparent, though rather grimy, grill.
"Two vegetarian pizzas. No, these have got pepperoni on. Have you got any vegetarian?"
They did have.
All the while, across the street, a group of figures were crowded around the entrance to a closed shop, and were beginning to kick at the door.
"Something's going to kick off in a minute," said Thor, God of Thunder. "Grab the pizzas and run."
"No, walk, don't run."
"Run. Quick. Quick."
When we got a little distance away and slowed our pace again, Thor, God of Thunder began to go on a rant about the state of the country.
"When we were kids, right, you'd get bullied. I got bullied at school. I had long hair and fifteen inch flares. You know, and you'd be shitting yourself. But you wouldn't be in fucking fear of your life like you are now. No one should have to walk down the street and be in fear of their life. And no one cares, no one's got any pride. I mean, look at the state of the place. Fucking look at it."
We got back and ate one of the pizzas. I don't remember much about what happened between then and bedtime, which was at about five AM, and what I do remember, I'm not going to write about here.
I woke up earlier than my host the next morning and had to bide my time till he awoke. I did various things, including re-reading the very first story in Nagai Kafu's Amerika Monogatari, which was excellent beyond description. Eventually Thor, God of Thunder emerged and invited me to have a shower. On my own. When I got out and came downstairs he looked at me and said, "You look really old with your hair wet."
Well, I've just arrived in London and am marvelling again at how expensive everything is, and wondering how I ever managed to live here as an unsuccessful writer. The answer, of course, is that I didn't. I moved to Wales.
Anyway, my feet are sore. I've just come back from Waitrose with (hopefully) a week's worth of food. I'm vaguely looking forward to my birthday celebrations on Friday.
Before I went to Waitrose to buy tins of chopped tomato, pasta, and so on, I noticed a new review of my German collection, Dunkle Gestade (Aufgesang), online. I did the computer translation thing on it, and, well, it was pretty bad. Now, as I understand it, 'aufgesang' means something like 'volume one', but it's looking very much now like there's not going to be a volume two, after all. Every single review I have seen of my German collection has been bad. I believe sales have also been poor. Critics and public in Germany seem to be of one mind here: My stories are shit.
It's at times like this that I find that I'm forced to confront the unpleasant possibility that I might simply be a deluded no-hoper. I've often thought that there can be no worse fate than to be a 'bad poet'. Forever to be teased by the Muse, only to see her lavish her affections on everyone but yourself, to be, in fact, the Muse's cuckold, and a laughingstock. The very core of such an existence is embarrassment. Nobody wants to be this person, but somebody, some poor wretch, for the sake of cosmic completeness or some such thing, must be. And that person is me.
Faced with such overwhelming evidence that I am a complete failure, what do I do? I can't simply go on flying in the face of opinion, can I?
Hmmm. I suppose the logical thing to do would be to give up writing and find something to which I am more suited. Unfortunately, there is nothing to which I am more suited. I am a failure at the thing to which I am most suited. That's a bit of a bummer. There's nothing else I actually want to do, either. I mean, really, I'm so woefully lacking in motivation in every other area of my life apart from writing that... Well, I don't want to even tell you about it. Basically those other areas (and I'm not even going to mention them) have atrophied more or less into non-existence.
At times like this I want to believe in a god, just so I can tell him what a cunt he is.
Am I going to give up writing? Well, unfortunately, that seems unlikely. You know, I don't want to come across as indomitable, as some kind of unconquerable spirit, or anything. It's not really like that. It's more like - very much more like - someone who knows very well he will never be desirable simply carrying on in a resigned manner with his trainspotting. What else can I do? Quite simply, what else can I do?
Now, I'm sure that there are lots of glass-half-full people, who, if they read this, will want to point out that a few bad reviews does not a failure make. Well, maybe not. In which case we must ask, what is success? Am I happy with my stories? I don't know if I am, really. The point of stories for me is largely communication. I seem to be failing in my communication. But that's not quite it, either, is it? It's like painting a picture. You know if you haven't got that branch on that tree quite right, if the expression on that face isn't quite alive. My work is riddled with bad branches and dead faces. That, I think, is what really hurts. One can hope one is being too perfectionist, but one's hopes, then, rely on the feedback of reviewers and so forth. Apparently I haven't been perfectionist enough.
I was rather hoping that, since my success in the English-speaking world has been, shall we say, modest, that I would be like Edgar Allan Poe, whose reputation first took off in Europe. That must be the problem, I thought. They just don't understand me in the Anglosphere. But actually, my reception in Germany has been much worse than in Britain and America. So, that blows that theory.
I'm thinking now of Dazai Osamu, and feeling very close to him. I'm thinking of the odd-shaped tales in which he mentioned, here and there, how 'at that time' his stories never sold, or that he's been writing 'nothing but dasaku'. 'Dasaku' is a Japanese word meaning something like 'turkey' or, well, basically indicating artistic works that fail in their purpose. He says somewhere that he never understood the criticism that he was a talented writer who was unfortunately lacking in moral fibre, and that he felt it was the other way round. He was a very moral person with no talent, and knew no other way to write than simply to forge ahead blindly with the full force of his being. Yes, I understand these words very well.
Morrissey, I believe, once said that he was intensely interested in failure, adding impishly, "Only in other people, of course." And that's a telling qualification to his comment. Morrissey fascinates because he has made a success of failure. I am not like Morrissey. Rather, I am like one of the characters about whom he sings. Like, for instance, the 'hero' of Little Man, What Now?. "Did that swift eclipse torture you? A star at eighteen and then suddenly gone, down to a few lines on the back page of a faded annual." Except, of course, I have the consolation that I have never been a star, so 'eclipse', in my case, is inappropriate. No, more appropriate to me is the song Southpaw, but, once again, I don't even want to go into that. Basically, where Morrissey has made a success out of failure, I have only made a failure out of failure.
I am interested in failure, though. So interested that I seem to have to live it out quite thoroughly. In fact, only the other day, I was thinking of writing a blog post about why I am fascinated by Stuart Goddard, otherwise known as Adam Ant, of Adam and the Ants fame. Stuart Goddard was and probably still is, a fantasist, like myself. He threw himself with wonderful, deranged flamboyance into his silly, flimsy fantasy world, and for a while, the public supported him in his derangement. And then the trampoline was cruelly snatched from under him. Or so it seems.
"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!"
Yes, failure interests me, and I'm fairly philosophical about it. Even if I am a 'bad poet', I am also a bit of a contrary bastard, I suppose, and will simply go on writing bad poetry, literally or metaphorically, until I die. That will be my statement. That will my contribution to the world. I don't know if it's a choice or whether I just can't help it. It feels somehow like both at the same time - a choice that I can't help making. On his tombstone, Kafu wanted the epitaph 'Kafu the Scribbler'. Seidensticker, his translator and biographer, considered that Kafu had never written any single work worth translating. I love Kafu. Perhaps I will have something similar on my tombstone. "Quentin S. Crisp. 1972 - 2010. He wrote a load of really stupid stories."
Anyway, we'll all be turned into robots in two years, and live happily ever after, so it won't matter.
Just in case this sounds like unmitigated self-pity, I'll add something else from one of Dazai's stories here. I forget the title, but it was a story in the form of letters being written between two writers. The older writer (I believe) scolds the younger that he has a "masterpiece complex", that he is impatient to write a masterpiece so that he can get it over with and stop writing. But there is no end to writing. You simply have to pick yourself up, and pick your pen up, and carry on. And carry on. And because there's no ending, it's perpetually as if all you have done so far has come to nothing, and you are only just starting. And that's the way it has to be.
I became a hotel doorman, I stood there on the doormat Clutching my forgotten discs in their forgotten format Trying to hand them out to all the stars who sauntered in The ones who hadn't been like me, who hadn't lived in vain I gave up ideology the day I lost my looks I never found a publisher for my little red books When I died the energy released by my frustration Was nearly enough for re-incarnation
But if I could live my life again the last thing that I'd be Is a Maoist intellectual in the music industry No, if I could live my life again I think I'd like to be The man whose job is to stop the men who think like me Yeah! If l could live my life again that'd be the thing to be The man who plots the stumbling blocks In the lives of the likes of me!
Excellent stuff. I particularly like the use of the word 'nearly' in "nearly enough for re-incarnation". The narrator even fails to get re-incarnated through his frustration. I'm sure that's what will happen to me, too.
Oh, if anyone in Germany has read Dunkle Gestade and actually liked it, I would be quite interested to know.
I often feel that the comments section is the best part of this blog, which is why I also feel it's a shame that I don't get that many comments, in a way. I'm not complaining, actually, as if I got too many, I probably wouldn't be able to respond to them all, anyway. However, this preamble is my way of leading up to the fact that Abbass very kindly posted a link to a Morrissey song recently in the comments section of this entry. I responded by talking about what the song title (The Lazy Sunbathers) referred to, and by posting some links of my own (though I neglected to point out the Noel Coward reference in the lyrics of The Lazy Sunbathers). One of the links I posted was to the Moz song above. However, it has occurred to me that this song is just too good for me to let the link to it remain hidden in a corner of the comments section, so here it is on the main page, at the top of this entry, the wonderfully titled, Mama Lay Softly On the Riverbed.
I'll come to some of the reasons I think this is an excellent song in a minute. Hmmm, first of all, to address Abbass's observation that I do post rather a lot of Morrissey. He (I hope I'm not making an incorrect gender assumption there, and apologise if I am) was kind enough to say that there was nothing wrong with this, but this does seem to be a point of contention. So, I'd like to look a little at this contentious bone and then I promise I won't mention Morrissey for at least a week. The David Quantick 'review' to which one of those links should lead, really sums up just about everything that anyone seems to hate about Morrissey. I don't actually want to go through this point by point, because I want to have my lunch soon. What it seems to boil down to is two things: The accusation that Morrissey is racist and the opinion that his latest work is a let-down after the genius of The Smiths. Oh, there's a third thing - that Morrissey is a "vanity-stricken egoist with a persecution complex", but I just don't care about that third thing enough even to analyse it, probably because I'm one too and know how it feels. So, the first point - racism. Until recently I suppose I've thought that the question is a matter of no one being entirely free of racism or the potential for racism. Therefore, those who demand that Morrissey should prove he is not racist should first prove they are not. They can't. I suppose they are trying to prove they aren't by tediously throwing accusations at others, but I've had enough of this kind of prick. So, I have just tended to think that, within the qualification that no one is entirely either racist or un-racist, that I don't really know what Morrissey is, but don't find it, anyway, to impinge on his artistic output. However, having recently re-listened to Irish Blood, English Heart I found myself really struck by it for the first time. (It's never really struck a chord with me before.) I found it suddenly to be a very honest and intelligent response to accusations of racism - a response that is not 'drawn in' in the way his accusers would wish him to be drawn in.
Irish blood, English heart, this I'm made of, There is no one on Earth I'm afraid of.
I think the word 'afraid' is key here. Inter-racial and inter-cultural relations should be conducted without fear, should they not? I felt this was exactly the right choice of word. Not to be afraid of who anyone else is, and not to be ashamed of who you are - that is what I felt the song to be about.
So, on this score, the mud of the muddied waters is settling for me now. Controversy continues, but I am more inclined to see this as instigated by those who want to make themselves look good.
To continue to the second point: Morrissey is not as good as he used to be/as good as The Smiths. Well, this is, in my opinion, true. I mean, I'm not sure how to be anything else but subjective here. However, I would make the qualification that Morrissey is not consistently as good as he used to be. Sometimes Morrissey the solo artist is as good as The Smiths, and that is something that is rare enough in pop music to be remarkable. In particular, I think he came up to Smiths standard with some of the material on Viva Hate and Vauxhall and I. In fact, You Are the Quarry, his 'comeback album' is pretty much in the same league as those two, in my opinion, particularly if you take some of the B-sides into account.
I think that Morrissey has certainly lapsed into artistic redundancy at points. I didn't hate Kill Uncle as much as many people seemed to, but I didn't rave over Your Arsenal the way some did. Southpaw Grammar and Maladjusted I find to be patchy, but pretty good, with some underrated gems on them.
This brings us to the last album, Ringleader of the Tormentors (dodgy commentary in that link), which came out in 2006, and which I have therefore lived with now for almost two years. To review it in brief, I'd say I really like some of the songs, but overall find it a little stodgy and a little bombastic. It was produced by legendary producer Tony Visconti, but, the truth is, I don't think I actually like the production, well, particularly not on I Will See You in Far-off Places and Life is a Pigsty. Some, such as writer Douglas Coupland, have really rated this album. But I suppose I felt that if this had been Morrissey's school project and I had been a teacher, I would have been writing something like, "Could do better" on his report.
Unfortunately there then followed All You Need is me and That's How People Grow Up, which were 'not bad'. But I should not be describing a Morrissey song as 'not bad'. This is not a good state of affairs. The release of the Greatest Hits album compounded this sense of redundancy. People were beginning to mutter the words 'Las Vegas period'. I think some of them still are. I'm not.
And the reasons I'm not are largely due to some of the newest songs leaked in live form on Youtube, songs such as I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris, and, of course, Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed. These songs don't seem to feature quite the attention to detail lyrically as Morrissey has made his trademark in the past. I do remember one reviewer saying that Sheila, Take a Bow did not display Morrissey's usual ability to surprise us with words, and, compared to much of Morrissey's recent output, that song seems to contain surprising words in abundance. However, Throwing My Arms Around Paris does sport a lovely melody, and the incredible line: "Only stone and steel accept my love". And Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed?
At first I found the words disappointing, reminding me of Elvis Costello's claim that Morrissey writes brilliant titles and then forgets to write a song for them. Some of it even seemed awkwardly phrased to me: "Life is nothing much to lose". And there was some laziness going on, too: "Was it the pigs in grey suits persecuting you?" The triteness of the word 'pigs' is slightly mitigated by the combination with the also trite 'grey suits' to make something that, together, is not as trite as the sum of its parts, but still.
However, I have been listening to/watching this clip a great deal, and even my doubts about the lyrics have evapourated. The tale seems to be one of a mother who is driven to suicide by drowning, Ophelia-like, in a river. What I like about this is that, although the words themselves don't feature much of Morrissey's well-known invention and wit, the lyrics start from an unusual premise, and present the story with an unusual angle.
Mama, why did you do it? Mama, who drove you to it?
There are many things to focus on in this world of ours, but Morrissey has asked us to focus not on sailors fighting in the dancehall, but on mother. Who drove you to it? Yes, indeed, what nefarious machinations are taking place here? The persecution of the mother brings into sharp focus the evils of an impersonal society. We can feel it. When asked about Morrissey in an interview once, I responded thus:
I recently had a conversation with a Morrissey fan. I hope she won’t mind me alluding to the conversation here, as it’s possible she’ll read this. She described Morrissey as ‘sacred’. In other words, she wasn’t prepared to accept criticism of him. And I understand the sentiment. I suppose I am slightly more prepared to accept criticism of him now than when I was younger, but the point is, whatever he may be like as a person (and I don’t know) he has managed to express something that to many people is sacred. I think this is to do with people’s innermost feelings about themselves, to which Morrissey has found his way. In Reel Around the Fountain, there’s the line, “It’s time the tale were told/Of how you took a child and you made him old.” It’s really the child that is the sacred thing – that innocence that is destroyed by a corrupt world. I think that’s what people identify with. It’s like when people say, “You can say anything you like about me, but don’t you dare say anything about my mother.” It’s a kind of displacement. The mother is really their innermost self. Or should that be, the Mozzer is really their innermost self?
And here is the Mozzer, in this song, after all, saying, do what you like, but if you touch my mother, I'll kill you:
Bailiffs with bad breath I will slit their throats for you.
And in the clip you can see that he makes a slitting motion as with an old-fashioned cut-throat razor as he sings this. And who amongst us has not felt this at some time, that nothing mattered, as long as they could storm the offices of the Inland Revenue, or wherever the appropriate place might happen to be, and in the name of vengeance, slits the throats of every fucker there?
And then, that line that at first I thought was awkward:
Life is nothing much to lose.
It's so true, especially in a world that is full of 'un-civil servants', 'bailiffs with bad breath' and all the rest. It also reminds me of a Japanese death poem (jisei) I once read that was translated as something like: "Seen from outside, this world is not worth a box of matches." When there is nothing worth dying for, there is also nothing worth living for, and this line, which is not only true, but is also sung with feeling, brings us a little closer to whatever that very private thing is that is worth dying for, after you have spat out your venom on this putrid and despicable world.
I don't believe Morrissey is a celebrity for this reason - when I listen to his music, I don't want to be him, I feel okay about just being me.
And then, at the end
We're going to run to you We're going to come to you We're going to lie down beside you, Mama. We're going to be with you We're going to join you We're going to lie down beside you, Mama.
This reminds me somehow of the bit in Blackadder where Doctor Johnson is trying to explain the plot of the dictionary to King George. "There is no hero, unless it be our Mother Tongue." "The mother's the hero? Nice twist."
It feels very right to me that Morrissey should very explicitly place himself on the losing side, on the side of the mother, here, at the end.
Well, I didn't call this entry 'Morrissey's blog' because that's what this blog is becoming, despite what some might think. No, I called it that, because that's pretty much how I'm coming to look at Morrissey's musical output. I don't think he's in a hurry to produce a masterpiece anymore. He's putting out whatever comes to him. He doesn't need more ammunition. Some of the shots he fires off will miss the target, but when they hit, well, you get something like this, something that reminds you, after all, that
Yesterday I wrote a little about the Monkey's Paw principle of the universe, which one might describe, if one has a pathological need to rhyme things, as the 'Universe Perverse'. Briefly stated, this principle is that, contrary to, or further than, the lyric of the Rolling Stones that declares "you can't always get what you want", actually, you can never get what you want. To quote, as is my wont, from William Burroughs, "How long does it take for a man to learn that he does not, cannot, want what he wants?"
I'd like to explore this principle further today with an illustration provided by Annette Funicello, in the song The Monkey's Uncle's Paw, to which I posted a link recently. Despite the brash and upbeat surface of the song, a look at the lyrics reveal it to be an intricate piece full of implied tensions and secret trapdoors of unexplored obsession. In terms of our theme for today - wishes and how they never turn out the way you want them to - the most important line must be, "And I wish I was the monkey's aunt". Not a particularly unusual line on its own, the kind, in fact, to be heard in every other pop song since 1963 (when sexual intercourse began). However, juxtaposed with the previous line, "I love the monkey's uncle", it takes on new and complex significance. We must approach this with care.
First of all, let us ask, why "the monkey's uncle"? If the monkey's uncle is, in fact, a monkey, why not simply, 'I love the monkey'? We cannot discount, in this case, the possibility that the word 'uncle' was included for rhythmical and metrical reasons, however, the relation, so to speak, with 'aunt' suggests that this is no accident. Is the monkey's uncle, then, not a monkey himself? Is he some kind of Lovecraftian Arthur Jermyn figure? Such a hypothesis is supported by a line elsewhere in the song which runs, "Call us a couple of missing links". However that may be, after stating her erotic love for 'the monkey's uncle' (Uncle Arthur?), Annette proceeds to wish that she was 'the monkey's aunt'. "What a nutty family tree!" she exclaims later. Indeed. If she and the uncle are siblings of different parents then no blood relation is necessarily implied, and this may, in fact, be the scenario painted in the song. Is such a scenario accidental, or are there esoteric reasons behind its surface pattern? If so, it would not be the only part of the song to present a cryptic aspect. Another example comes in the surprise scene of the wedding:
[BB:] Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa [Annette:] On the day he marries me [All:] What a nutty family tree! [Mike:] A bride! [Brian:] A groom! [BB:] A chimpanzee!
And there is the peculiar denouement, the twist in the tail, if you like - who is the mysterious chimpanzee? What does this enigmatic wedding guest desire? The twist in the tail here is that there is no tail. The chimpanzee cannot be the groom's nephew (the eponymous monkey), since he is not a monkey, but an ape. Has he come, like Mr. Mason in Jane Eyre, to interrupt the wedding with the revealing of some dark secret? Or is he an indication of just how nutty the family tree is becoming?
I'm afraid that I'm wandering off into speculation now. Let us take the other fork in the road. What if the monkey's uncle and the monkey's aunt were siblings to the same parent? Is this not the true implication of the "nutty family tree"? As well as expressing a desire to break the bounds of the taboo proscribing inter-species love, in her passion she wishes she could add to this transgression the transgression of incest. However, inter-species love and incest are mutually exclusive taboos. One is the taboo that results from the lovers being too far apart on the great family tree of life, and one the taboo that results from them being too close together. Our Annette wishes to have both at once! And who can blame her? Such is the nature of human desire. How long does it take for a very talented singer and actress to learn that she does not, cannot, want what she wants? She wants a family tree so nutty that the closest relatives are also the furthest away. Can such a thing be?
At this point I'd like to suggest the resolution to this conundrum by means of a further complication. I wrote in my post yesterday that "I'd very much like to be Annette Funicello". What if, right? What if, Annette became the monkey's aunt and I filled in the position that she had just vacated? It sounds like a dream come true. But I'm sure you already know what would happen. As Annette I would find myself gazing enviously at the monkey's aunt as she carried on her incestuous relationship with the monkey's uncle, scornful of the world's regard. Annette as the monkey's aunt would find it no longer so extraordinary to be in a relationship with the monkey's uncle, despite the novelty of incest, and also the possible novelty that Uncle Arthur was a monkey-human hybrid, because she would now be in her own primate world, and the glamour would have vanished. And what would have happened to the consciousness formerly inhabiting the monkey's aunt? That's anybody's guess, but perhaps she would have migrated to my former mortal habitation, and I can tell you, I'm pretty damned sure that she'd be disappointed with that.
What can I say? It's a depressing world.
Anyway, I hope you don't mind me going on about Annette Funicello so much. I mean, which would you prefer, for me to go on about Annette, or for me to go on about Morrissey? Or, if you like, you could have both.
I suppose you're wondering, if you're particularly dense, what the attraction of Annette actually is. Am I being ironic? Well, of course not. In one of the Annette clips on Youtube, someone has left the following comment:
Annette was so bloody cute! How could anyone not have adored her? These must have been the days, now all we have is Britney Spears
To which someone has replied:
I agree!
It wasn't me, but it could have been.
She even manages to laugh faintly but almost convincingly at Frankie Avalon's utterly abysmal joke about sand boxes.
So, I suppose that my attraction is precisely (?) the attraction that Annette herself has towards the monkey's aunt. If I were ever actually to meet Annette, I imagine that I would be invisble to her, since I exist on an entirely different frequency. She is one of those people who makes me think it's a very strange planet indeed that is home to both of us. Maybe it's something like matter and anti-matter. If they actually come together the universe implodes or something ridiculous like that (someone correct me here). And, I'm sure that's exactly what would happen if I were ever to meet, on the same frequency of existence, Annette Funicello. Wishful thinking?
Continuing from my recent post about Morrissey, immigration and racism, I think I should make a distinction clear here (the problem with my blog is that I write almost all posts in one sitting, and there's always something left unaddressed). I started off by talking about James Watson and saying that I felt uncomfortable calling him racist. I then went on pretty much to say that saying negative things about immigration did not make Morrissey racist, and it could have been inferred (incorrectly) that I thought Watson's and Morrissey's remarks in some way equivalent. Of course, they're not. If racism is an unfounded belief in the inferiority of a particular race, then saying that one's country is losing its identity because of the number of immigrants is clearly not a racist statement. Suggesting that Africans inherently (as a matter of genetic inheritance) have lower intelligence than caucasians, with no evidence, would seem, almost by definition, racist. In the case of Watson, in the quotes of which I am aware, he referred vaguely to tests that showed Africans to have lower intelligence, and stated his belief that in a few years we would discover that there is a genetically determined lower intelligence among Africans. There are a number of things to be said about this. It would appear to be part of the whole scientific racism phenomenon, of which one famous example is the 1994 best-selling study The Bell Curve. Scientific racism is, in itself, a huge subject, so I'll have to really limit my remarks here. First of all, I'm not aware that anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory definition of intelligence that would make it possible to reliably test for it, anyway, so that all tests so far must be assumed to be in one way or another biased. Secondly, Watson seemed intent on anticipating a future discovery of genetically lower intelligence. There are all kinds of questions here, as to why he would even wish to anticipate that, and so on, but, once again, I will limit myself. How will something as nebulous and indefinable as intelligence be correlated with DNA? That's my question. In the same way that it's correlated with answers to culturally-biased examination papers today? I mean, first of all, you have to decide whether or not someone is intelligent in order to correlate it with genes, surely? Without spending paragraphs and paragraphs on the subject of racist science, I'm going to stick my neck out and say, quite simply, that I think Watson is wrong. At the moment, I don't really feel the need to say more than that.
Perhaps, given the fact that Watson's comments so well fit the bill for the definition of racism above, you might wonder why I feel uncomfortable calling him racist. I think there are a number of reasons for this, and one of them is that I feel that people have become trigger-happy with the word in recent years. I do think that people have recognised that they can shift attention away from themselves and their own shortcomings by pointing at someone else and saying, "Racist!" I also think this is a deeply cowardly and unhelpful tactic. Since I don't particularly like Watson, I felt there was an element of that in my own accusation, and I didn't really like that. To be honest, whether or not Watson is racist was, for me, almost a side issue. What I found myself taking exception to were his values as expressed in the kind of society he would apparently like to engineer (genetically) - a society in which "all girls are pretty". If he's being serious here, and I assume he is, then I can only say that I think his aims are vile. I don't think that his vision could ever be acheived, anyway, but it's a 'master-race' vision. His comments about Africans were therefore interesting to me because, of course, racism is a huge factor in any 'master-race' vision. I was keen to speculate about whether there might be something inherently racist and 'master-race' within the ethos of the whole field of genetics, and it was pretty convenient for me to rope Watson in to support my speculation. In the end, I don't have daily (or any personal) dealings with Watson, and there's no actual need for me to comment on whether or not he is racist. But since his comments are in the public domain, I can still comment on them. Beyond that, I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt, as I would hope that people would give it to me.
There's another factor in why I would rather not sling about accusations of racism. That is, I think that racism is one part of a wider problem, and the basic problem of being human, which is simply how to live with other people's differences. If I were to give a single word to the wider problem of which racism is part, I would call it 'dehumanisation'. In other words, by characterising a particular race as inferior, you are dehumanising them. But it's as easy - perhaps easier - to dehumanise someone by calling them racist, as it is to dehumanise them through the use of derogatory racial stereotype. I don't believe that people are born with a tattoo behind the ear saying "racist" or "not racist". As I've said before, I think anyone is capable of racism. Racism is as nebulous as identity. If someone expresses a racist view, surely it's far more helpful to talk about it than to turn them into an outcast. (Yes, I know some people are more difficult to reach than others, and do present a very real problem.)
This brings me back to Morrissey, who has now issued a statement in response to the NME article. It's a fairly interesting read, though I note that Morrissey is not really as good a prose writer as he is a lyricist. I noted in particular his full support of the Love Music, Hate Racism campaign. I found this interesting because I'm not sure I would support that organisation myself (incidentally, despite being a vegetarian and oppoosed to vivisection, I don't particularly support PETA, either; I don't like Pete Singer's utilitarian philosophy). Why am I unsure? Because they oppose the invitation made to the BNP to speak in an Oxford debate about free speech. As a writer, if I am passionate about anything, then it has to be free speech. My impression is that the people of Love Music, Hate Racism, like many, many people who would probably say they support free speech, don't actually understand what free speech is. It's very tedious to have to say this for the thousandth time, but free speech doesn't mean letting people say anything as long as you agree with them. It means letting people say anything even if you don't agree with them. It's always better to talk than to fight, surely? I suppose that the invitation to the BNP could be seen as a deliberate move to stir things up a bit, but really, what's the point of even having a debate on free speech if you're only going to invite people who agree with each other?
I'm reminded here of the stance inevitably taken by governments with regard to terrorism. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," they always say, as if to prove how strong and morally upright they are. This is really another permutation of the pointing a finger at someone else to distract people from one's own shortcomings. Now, though, instead of "racist" we have the word "terrorist". They're terrorists, we're not. They're racists, we're not. No negotiation. No talking about things. If we talk to racists, that makes us racist. If we talk to terrorists, that makes us terrorists. And we wouldn't want that, because we're good people, aren't we? And the fight goes on.
I'm going to wander off into left-field a bit, here, I'm afraid, and say that my final musings in my blog post about the whole Morrissey debacle - the musings about whether or not nations should exist - have a lot to do with the idea of enlightenment. As in, yes, Zen and all that. I mentioned that I almost always write my posts in one sitting, and I'd like to do that this time, too, and now I've only just got onto another VAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSTTT subject. I'm beginning to flag, but I shall try to rally. Let me just get some water.
So, where was I?
It occurred to me that one possible problem with my thinking on questions of race and immigration was the tendency to look at some abstract big picture and take things to their 'logical conclusion' (always a bad idea). I did mention what has often been my antidote to logical conclusions and 'big picture' thinking - individualism, or my own version of it, which is simply taking each person as I find them and each moment as it comes. I don't want to dismiss the immigration debate entirely, but as I'm sitting here writing this, immigration is certainly not a problem for me, and perhaps, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, nothing is really a problem in the here and now. This is linked with an old idea of mine, and one which I'm almost certain is not originally my idea, that the answer to all our social and international frictions is not political, but spiritual - that we will continue having violence on an individual and a mass level until everyone is enlightened.
By the way, I hope that no one reading this is imagining that I'm going to come to some great conclusion at the end of all this? No? Good.
Enlightenment is something that interests me deeply. I'm not even sure if it exists, but it seems to me that it might constitute the only possible redemption for the individual and the race.
What is enlightenment? Er... don't ask me, Guv. Apparently it's pretty fucking ineffable. For those not overly familiar with the 'concept' I'll try and give some (undoubtedly unhelpful) pointers in a minute.
I am not aware that I've ever actually met anyone who is enlightened, though I am informed by someone I trust that he has. Still, I'd rather rely on my own experience in being able to say definitively that enlightenment is 'natural and real'. There are, however, many, many accounts of enlightenment available, in books, on the Internet, and all over the place.
Some time back, the writer Thomas Ligotti published, for a limited time, his long essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race on the Internet. The essay was a discussion of horror fiction heavily slanted towards an exploration of pessimistic philosophy, with the overall effect of being an argument for the voluntary extinction of the human race in order to put an end to human suffering. One by one, Ligotti examined and dismissed possible answers to suffering. Naturally, one of these possible answers was enlightenment. This was dismissed, too, as something that only ever happens accidentally, and that very rarely, and which, if it happened wholesale, would reduce us to beings interested in nothing more than our next meal, if that. I found this exploration of the subject of enlightenment (and by extension, the essay as a whole) to be weakened considerably by the fact that it seemed to rely on the figure U.G Krishnamurti as the ultimate authority (or anti-authority) on all things enlightened. U. G. seems to present us with a particularly curmudgeonly version of enlightenment, and blasts all other enlightened beings (apparently including the original Buddha, by which I suppose is meant the prince Gautama Sakyamuni) as charlatans. However, there are other accounts of the subject to be taken into consideration, such as that, for instance, of Suzanne Segal.
For myself, I find that I have become, over the last few years, strangely interested in the reputedly enlightened figure of Eckhart Tolle, author of a number of books on the subject (more-or-less) of enlightenment, most notably, The Power of Now. I mention him here in particular, because of certain remarks he has made on the subject of group identity:
The self does not want to be free of that; that's not where the longing for freedom comes from. The longing for freedom does not come from self. The self speaks of freedom, but then sabotages it continuously. It says, 'I'm looking for peace', and then creates conflict. And then you can see how it operates collectively, the same mindset operates collectively. 'Let's have another peace conference.' And in the meantime they produce massive amounts of weapons. So... 'Let's talk about peace.' The peace process. They're still talking about the peace process, and they're continually throwing grenades and machine-gunning... The peace process. Peace - they don't want peace. Because the mindset depends on non-peace for its survival. And so whether your sense of self is predominantly a personalised sense of self or whether it's predominantly a collective egoic sense of self - a religion, or a nation, or a racial thing - then it can be even stronger than the personalised; it's actually exactly the same principle at work, exactly the same mechanism at work, but can be even more mad than the personalised sense of self, which is mad enough. But you can see how mad humanity can become when they identify with a collective 'me'. That's the height of madness.
As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, it is identity itself (the self itself), that appears to be the source of all conflict. This is something that Tolle says, and something that I'm inclined to agree with. The thing is, I personally don't know what to do about such a situation. I appear to have a self, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing anytime soon. Also, in the same way that there's some lingering doubt in me that we should simply do away with national identity, I can't help feeling there's something of value in the self, too. For instance, I'm not sure how love is possible without a self. (Who would be loving whom?) But I'm aware of counter-arguments - that it's precisely the self that obstructs love. In any case, if enlightenment exists, it doesn't appear to be something that can be understood or arrived at by reasoned argument. It seems to be in the nature of a quantum leap of consciousness that happens without being willed, and does not happen when it is willed.
All of this is an ongoing internal debate for me, that I engage in, and then let go, engage in and let go...
On the question of whether Eckhart Tolle is himself enlightened, well, first of all, I'm not sure such a question is even important, but I'd be disingenuous if I said it wasn't a question that interested me. I'm inclined to think that, of all the examples of reputed enlightenment I have encountered, he is the most convincing candidate so far. I cannot fault anything he says. I find no pettiness there, nothing pernicious or manipulative or wilfully obscure. I am, however, not without reservations on the question, which, just for the record, I will list below, though they probably serve as a list of my own shortcomings more than anything else:
1) I have reservations simply because I am a doubting kind of person in many ways. I think doubt is an important part of keeping an open mind.
2) I hate the title 'The Power of Now', which reminds me of the song The Power, by Snap!. It's a curious question as to whether being enlightened should enhance one's taste. Why should I anticipate that it should? (And why should I put such faith in my own taste?) Nonetheless, this kind of thing bothers me. I remember seeing the website of someone who claimed a near death experience, and gagging at how tacky it was. "If you've died and gone to the shining edge of the cosmos and back," I thought to myself, "how come your poetry is so utterly shite?"
3) Tolle changed his first name from 'Ulrich' to 'Eckhart', apparently post-enlightenment, as an allusion to the mystic Meister Eckhart. If the basis of enlightenment is having no identity, why change your name, which shows a concern with identity?
4) Does being enlightened oblige you to write the same kind of insipid self-help books as everyone else? This is a bit of a worry for me, as I'd rather keep writing a rather dark vein of... stuff. Also, there's a samey-ness here that's not entirely attractive.
5) After having read pretty much everything Tolle's written and watched his DVDs and so on, I still don't feel especially enlightened, which is bound to be my fault. However, even assuming that Tolle is enlightened, and this is my fault, what's the use of going on reading the books and watching the DVDs?
6) It's not only me. I haven't actually heard of a case of anyone becoming enlightened after reading any of his books or watching his DVDs.
7) Tolle's apparently quite wealthy now, and continues to make money from his teachings. This does bother me a bit. But then, maybe this is a problem with perceptions of enlightenment. Why shouldn't someone enlightened have money, as long as they're not attached to it, and as long as that's not what motivates them? I suppose one answer to that question would be that they might want to avoid more than average material wealth simply in order not to hoard.
8) He's 'too nice'. This sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining, but I think I do trust people a bit more if they show their dark side. I like the tai chi symbol that shows darkness and light intertwined. Is it possible to deny the darkness? That's not a rhetorical question. I think it's worth considering. I mean, I'm not sure I want violence to continue forever just for aesthetic reasons. I'll give an example of Tolle being 'too nice': He's blandly dismissive of drug use. Okay, so he doesn't take an authoritarian tone, and what he says is fair enough (if you have highs, you'll have lows), but he seems unwilling to look at the fact that it's possible even to have 'noble' drug use, as in certain tribal rites of passage. This strikes me as a slightly 'radio-friendly' approach.
9) Not showing one's dark side, somehow, also seems to have implications about sexuality. I haven't entirely fathomed why this is. I suppose that I tend to subscribe to the Woody Allen view that "Sex can be dirty, but only if it's done right." I find it hard to imagine healthy, wholesome sex without wanting to puke. Eckhart does talk a little about sex, describing it as "the most deeply satisfying experience you can have on a physical level", and does apparently have a partner (no prurience here, please), but I honestly find sexual desire and the kind of enlightenment he presents to be somehow incongruous. Interestingly, Buddhism, too, has a tradition marked with asexuality. There is the celibacy of the monks, of course, and there's even the fact that there's no Buddhist wedding ceremony. As someone who has at least a nodding acquaintance with sexuality, I suppose I'd like a better idea of how that fits in the enlightenment picture without having to resort to castration or something.
Actually, I think that's pretty much it - my list of petty excuses for not being enlightened, but, like everyone else, contributing to all the horrible conflict of human society. I suppose that makes me a terrorist, too. But I think, as we're all terrorists together, we should try and negotiate with each other.
A while back I wrote about the scientist James Watson and the comments he made about lower intelligence among Africans, which apparently led to him being asked to resign. At first I was hesitant about saying that he was racist, then I said he probably was, then I felt uncomfortable with this and ammended my comment. After that my discomfort with any accusations of racism I had levelled grew, so that I wanted to write something else on the subject. I even felt sorry for Watson. He, like many people in recent years, has effectively been blacklisted for speaking in an unguarded manner. In being asked to resign, he has basically, it seems to me, been told to shut up. Although I think my own worldview is very different to Watson's and I even rather despise some of what he seems to stand for, I don't really want to live in a world where if certain people don't like what you have to say, you must shut up.
Well, before I could get round to writing anything new about Watson, something else caught my attention and has, for some reason, been preoccupying me. A while back on the Morrissey Solo site someone anonymously posted some news (or a rumour) that a "skin storm" had once again taken place between Morrissey and the music magazine NME. On the discussion thread of that entry, NME's editor, Conor McNicholas, denied that there had been any fall-out, describing such rumours as "unsubstantiated noise".
Soon afterwards there came a statement from Morrissey's manager, Merck Mercuriadis, with the text of a lawyer's letter addressed to the NME.
It seems to be a complicated sort of story, but apparently the text written by the original interviewer, Tim Jonze, was entirely re-written by the NME editorial staff, and Jonze subsequently disowned the feature. The issue of NME in question features a picture of Morrissey on the cover with the quote, "The gates of England are flooded. The country's been thrown away." Above and below this are the rather unsubtle headlines, "Bigmouth Strikes Again" and "Oh Dear, Not Again". On the NME site, a caption tells us that "Cover star Morrissey gives his most contentious interview in years."
The bone of this particular contention is that of immigration.
And it truly does seem to be a contentious issue. The discussion threads on the related news items on the Morrissey Solo site, here and here, make for interesting reading, not so much for the articulacy of what is said - since the comment are seldom very articulate - but because of the strength of the division between those who seem to believe that saying anything negative about immigration amounts to racism and those who think the negative aspects of immigration are simply facts that must be faced.
Here are a couple of articles giving the whole story in brief, with quotes from the interview in the former, from Sky News and Drowned in Sound.
I don't actually have a 'position' on immigration because, quite simply, I don't feel like I have enough information on the subject to come to any conclusions, but it's not something to which I have given no thought. In fact, I have given quite vigorous thought to immigration and race relations in general ever since living in Japan and experiencing what it was like to be part of a racial minority.
I'll attempt to jot down some of my thoughts on the subject now in no particular order:
I don't know how widespread this view is, but I've always felt that it is quite possible to become British, not only in a legal, but in a cultural and social sense. Trevor McDonald? British as tea and crumpets. Salman Rushdie? I would have said he was British, too, but I saw him once in an interview saying that he didn't feel British. Fair enough. His choice. Kylie Minogue? You get the picture. In Japan, such a thing is impossible. You are either born and bred Japanese, or you are not and never will be Japanese. I did not like this. I felt that the Japanese had cut themselves off from the rest of humanity. I began to feel a poisonous resentment at the invisible social wall that existed, and grew contemptuous of Japanese society. Did that make me racist, I wondered? Maybe I am racist, I thought - racist for thinking that the Japanese are racist. It seemed to me an immensely depressing dilemma, and I began to feel that the whole question of race will never be solved. There are differences between peoples (and people), on all kinds of levels, and differences seem inevitably to lead to conflicts. What can be done apart from making everyone the same, which would be another very depressing solution, even if it were possible. Perhaps, I thought sometimes, the Japanese were even right not to want foreigners becoming part of their society, since the whole society was, anyway, so etiolated and hidebound that it would probably fall apart if it tried to integrate one or two people who had not been indoctrinated into the unwritten rules since birth. "Make sure they come. Make sure they go." That, as someone who taught me Japanese, was the attitude towards foreign students and foreigners in general. Nice to have guests to admire your quaint little home. But you don't want them hanging around for long.
I came to a determination that individualism was the only viable way of interacting with the world, although I could see problems with this, too. In any case, I didn't want to interact with anyone as the representative of one group with the representative of another. Even to think in terms of groups seemed to me inevitably to lead to racism. On the other hand, I recognised that there are, indeed, such things as national traits. Is it racist to recognise and criticise such traits? I decided it was not, since criticism would be based on attitudes and social practices and not on any racial attributes. No culture or group of people can possibly be exempt from criticism.
I basically despise political correctness. I know there are many intelligent people who support it, but I simply do not believe that you can systematise tolerance. Such systems, on the contrary, breed intolerance and witch-hunts. They stop people thinking and they stop people talking openly. There can no longer be any honesty and no longer any celebration. I remember a conversation I overheard in a restaurant. The speaker appeared to be a headmaster. He was talking about how any Christmas celebration had been banned at his school (apparently against his wishes) since it would make non-Christians feel left out or alienated. After that ban, requests had been made for (I believe it was) Ramadan to be celebrated at the school. The headmaster, grimly and wearily, told of his satisfaction at having quashed that particular request. "If we can't have Christmas, they can't have Ramadan." No celebration, but instead a sullen resentment on both sides - that is the price of political correctness.
Britain once had an empire, through which we acquired considerable national wealth, though naturally this was never distributed in a particularly even way. Considering that our wealth has come from foreign lands, it seems only right that we should share that wealth with the rest of the world now by accepting immigrants. However, there does seem to be a certain measure - quite a strong measure, in fact - of self-hatred in the 'liberal' position that even to question immigration is racist (and the equivalent of wishing to set up death camps). I can understand that. I mean, I know all about self-hatred, and I often think that Britain has had a worse influence in world history than just about any other country on the planet. But I don't think it's at all constructive to base social policies on self-hatred. I think there should be an open, and, if possible, unbiased enquiry into the real impacts of immigration and that any policies should be decided according to the findings of such an enquiry. Having said that, I'm not especially optimistic about political solutions to any social problems.
The 'liberal' view that questioning immigration is tantamount to racism implies that there should be no limits on immigration whatsoever, since to apply a limit surely one has to question where that limit should be. If there is a reasoned principle behind this view (and perhaps there isn't) then logically it can only be the utopian idea that nations should not exist. Perhaps they shouldn't. Will there be wars as long as there are nations? It's hard to tell with certainty, but it could be the case that nationhood is inherently destructive. Perhaps it would be magnificent if the British were so welcoming and self-effacing that there were no controls on who crossed our borders and lived here. That would mean we were laying no claim to territory, that we had, effectively, dissolved the nation. I don't think that will happen unilaterally, however, if it happens at all. And round about here is where I get stuck, I think. Isn't it, in the most basic sense, identity that leads to conflict? I am me because I am different to you, because I am different I do things differently. I don't like it when you do this or that. These are my camels, not yours. Etcetera. And nationhood is group identity. And yet, however many times I ask myself whether it is imperative for nationhood to be dissolved, I cannot come to a conclusion. Let's imagine that nations were dissolved politically - there would still be language groups, religious groups, other kinds of groups. Would these be new, slightly more amorphous nations? And do we really want to wipe from the globe all the differences that cultural and other identity brings?
I actually think this - and pure survival in a ransacked environment - is the biggest issue facing the human race at the moment, and I must apologise if I can't solve it in a brief blog post. Anyway, whether you agree with Morrissey's (alleged?) comments or not, I think he has touched upon an issue that must be talked about, and not swept beneath the carpet by the arbiters of political correctness.
I've just been leaping around in the kitchen in a manner deranged to the music of Sparks. Well, apart from my evening constitutional, I live a fairly sedentary existence, and we all need exercise, and, furthermore, I can't afford to go to the gym. And that's my excuse. I'm just grateful that there are still some places left in this country that are not fitted with CCTV and that no one came home from work early or anything.
The Sparks album - Kimono My House - was sent to me recently by a friend, with six other CDs. I realise I've come to it over thirty years late, but so far this is my favourite CD of the seven, and I've been playing it constantly. I don't really know much about Sparks, but I'll try and give my impression here in a really trite way - The Smiths crossed with Queen and Talking Heads. I can hear Morrissey's choirboy falsetto in Russell Mael's vocals, and there's a fair resemblance in the witty turn of lyrical phrase, too. I can also hear Queen's creamy guitar and light-opera melodies here. And I can sense David Byrne's nervous quirkiness in the stage presence of the brothers Ron and Russell. I know that Sparks are an influence in the case of Morrissey, and would not be surprised if the same were true of the other two bands mentioned.
Because of Russell's super-high-pitched vocals, it's not always easy to make out the lyrics, and I didn't have much idea what the songs were about until I looked up the lyrics online. At that point, many things fell into place. Certainly the first two songs on the album - This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us and Amateur Hour - are quite startlingly evocative depictions of awakening sexuality in adolescence, and all the competitiveness, excitement and humiliation that come with this. Reading the lyrics and then re-listening to the songs was like going back in a time-machine to a teenage that I'd almost forgotten, and not necessarily my own, since my own experience was more humiliation than excitement. Nonetheless, the lyrics were as familiar as if they were my own experience:
Zoo time is she and you time
The mammals are your favourite type, and you want her tonight
Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat
You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers
This town ain't big enough for both of us
And it ain't me who's gonna leave
Yes, I recognise the teenage panic of not knowing if you're going to be the one who gets the girl. This agony was to be expressed later in a somewhat more downbeat, but equally witty form in songs by The Smiths such as I Want the One I Can't Have:
On the day that your mentality
Decides to try to catch up with your biology
Come round ...
'Cause I want the one I can't have
And it's driving me mad
It's all over, all over, all over my face...
And if you ever need self-validation
Just meet me in the alley by the Railway station.
The same theme, as I said, continues in Amateur Hour, and I have to say, I found the lyrics to this hilarious:
She can show you what you must do
To be more like people better than you
Amateur Hour goes on and on
When you turn pro, you know, she'll let you know.
I don't think the Mael brothers were actually teenagers when they wrote this, but the freshness of the expression suggests that they weren't writing entirely from the point of view of outside observers, and that maybe, even if it's buried, this teenage experience continues to be a vital part of us. Certainly, it still sounds vital to me, a thirtysomething old codger and curmudgeon. In recent years I have found music far less physically addictive than I used to and have tired somewhat of guitar bands who trade on the sheer energy of their performance. But I am listening to Sparks now in the way I haven't listened to music for a long time. I find myself really getting off on the energy of it. Just watch this YouTube clip of them performing This Town Ain't Big Enough.... I defy you not to get caught up in the wonderful rising tension of the whole thing:
Anyway, that's why I've been playing Sparks like a teenage guitar-addict recently. It also helps that the lyrics are actually witty, because then I can always fall back on the alibi of irony if I absolutely must. And wit in popular music is so rare, it's a real blessing when it comes; I'm never tempted to scorn it, in the manner of the jealous, as affectation. Some of it actually makes me laugh, which is no bad thing:
You mentioned Kant and I was shocked
You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues.
Okay, so it's slightly laboured, but it's still funny. Or how about a verse from Talent Is an Asset, sung from the point of view of parents proprietorial over their little Albert Einstein:
Albert is smart, he's a genius
Watch Albert putter, an obvious genius
Someday he will reassess the world
And he'll still have time for lots of girls.
No? Please yourselves.
I'm going back to do some more dancing. When I turn pro, I'll let you know.
I've been poking about on YouTube quite a bit recently. YouTube really makes it easier to create interesting blog posts, I think. Or maybe it just makes it easy to be lazier.
In any case, I've been delving into lots of Morrissey and Smiths footage, and there's a lot of interesting stuff to choose from. I would blog about my favourite (so far) interview footage of Morrissey, as there's a great deal I feel I could say about it, especially in as much as it seems to show a more loquacious Morrissey than we seem to see these days. However, it's late, and I feel that it might be a little redundant of me to blog it, since it has already been blogged.
Instead I will blog the YouTube clip inset. I don't know who Johnny Carson is, but it's a clip from his show. Morrissey performs two songs, both from the flop album of the early nineties, Kill Uncle. The first of these is the hugely under-rated Sing Your Life. Morrissey is at the height of his rockabilly phase here, and his performance is quite astonishing. I felt quite revivified after watching it. The second song is the fairly forgettable There is a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends. This version is a little more
