“The best way to get into something is to think of it as mischief.”
It is not an ordinary world, each hair of grass a copy of the other. Before the fractures of continental drift, Earth held a single land mass shaped like a giant ultrasound of the creepiest baby in the galaxy. It was an accurate forecast. It now swarms with loud flightless birds that no longer speak in their own words. Early hurtlers sheared the wings off their philosophy, leaving them behind for others to try on.
From Lucian’s True Story onward, writers have been populating the moon with avocadoes, giant spiders and severed heads, as if to keep such horrors at a distance. But it wasn’t until Johannes Kepler’s Somnium, with its understanding of gravity and comparative lack of larking about, that they transitioned from fantasy to science fiction. The moon was still a way to wish society’s disappointments to arm’s length, however, as in Campbell’s The Moon is Hell. The gargantuan quantity of fact and consequence denied and evaded by human beings must go somewhere, and may constitute dark energy, the mysterious gear thought to compose 70 per cent of the universe. Thankfully most of the universe contains no pain receptors. These exist in great density on Earth as either deliberate torture or a measuring station. The greatest concentration is in a species which cannot stop lying and yet clings to the desperate insistence, in the face of all evidence, that there are really only seven stories. Their dictum of business is to sell people what they are already buying. True innovation and its dissemination are blocked, delayed, punished and obscured by the culture of the hour. In this hell, true creativity can only be an act of intense mischief.
Terence McKenna talked about the artist or shaman as someone deputized to take on and express all the weirdness in a society – it has to come out somewhere so this seems a good release system. Today those deputies see it as their duty to prevent anything genuinely weird getting through, at best expressing only former weirdness released long ago and since blanched of its power. How will the real thing come out? Where will the vivid go? Curiosity or hindsight tell us it will go wherever the most people are not looking.
In the pantheon of archetypes, only the trickster doesn’t run on rails – it zigzags across others’ stories, self-starting and unreactive. It was first delineated, in fact, to contain ‘everything else’ which scholars and ancient storytellers couldn’t manage to think up and symbolise in the other archetypes. Since these scribes were chronically unimaginative, the bulk of the universe’s more interesting facts and possibilities ended up in the trickster. Those exiled from the dead arena revel in the fertility of their damnation – the glory of unconditional weirdness, with its generosity, exuberance and lateral grace. The supposed weird fringes are the only place honesty can find asylum. Real shock is honest. One cannot be sly and shocked simultaneously.
Popular lifetimes are like the frantic cartoon you see if you use a Tarot deck as a flick book. It’s different each time you shuffle but there’s always a blood-sugar panic of powerlessness. Destiny is a dead lightbulb from the room where you were born. The discarding of inherited scripts gave rise to the highwayman Gamaliel Ratsey, performer of gleefully baffling robberies in which he threatened to ‘compare’ himself to anyone who didn’t comply. The trickster slides parallel to bewildered definitions. Alexandra David-Neel, John Whiteside Parsons and Isabelle Eberhardt slipped between divisions without being aware of them, resulting in lives other than stock footage. The painter Chaim Soutine was attacked by his sitters, a hazard exacerbated by his belief that hanging offal everywhere would speed him to glory. Every landscape he painted flexes and flares with an effort to leave the canvas, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, in which it seems a slash of paint is caused by the canvas trying to get away. A system is never so good that it couldn’t be improved by a hen on the rampage. A hen displaying sustained rage and destructive disdain amid any human circumstance – though not toward it – is a hectic gift from Mother Nature.
Storytellers tend to neuter trickster figures for longer works. Wu Cheng’en tied Monkey to a boring priest for his Journey to the West, fearing that the adventures of Monkey unbound would lack a structure people would recognise. The super-conservative Marvel movies rewrote Loki as a villain so clueless his greatest achievement was to make the Hulk seem interesting. A life or text in which every link is spelled out will be expunged of mischief, leaving no task to the mind. We are left with countless accounts of reactive remnants and records of mitigation, shrivelled from the get-go. It’s such an effort for ear-breathers to get their heads around trickster behaviour that they lazily short-hand it as zany and hyper, and thus in accord with a world of scared extroverts. But the real thing is the least hysterical in the room.
We’ve seen that the command that there must be nothing new under the local sun has even led people to blame their own ideas on external forces, in the same manner that people are expected to ask themselves ‘Who am I?’ and earnestly pretend they don’t know. All of which leaves a person unable to speak in his own words and expecting acclaim for old outrages as if unaware of double jeopardy. Pain or pleasure habituates when stationary, becoming ineffective – the Sirens found they had to frequently modulate their song. The true work may be a mile of dovetailed atoms in which each idea is one operative molecule. With this it may be possible to inject an anthem intravenously. How does a paper book work on zero voltage? By spinning unequal drives, a volume may constitute an artificially-generated black hole, its incandescence eroding the time that holds it. Satire ensures a book is not a passive experience but an active one requiring the reader to lean into its curious machinery. Snagged and dragged in, it’s not the end but a beginning.
Voltaire, a man with a heart like a boxing glove, who chose a pen name like an electric shock, exercised such unfashionable integrity of thought he threw the race into a sort of asymmetry. Later in life Voltaire conceived of a book that would delineate the same cosmic negligence which today provokes a million suicides a year. Candide displayed humanity in all its polyphonic justifications and retractable morals, its inequality and poverty as bad as anything seen in our own time, and the pious puffed-up with humility. The only things that are hard to believe are the interlude in El Dorado and the fact that the characters survive their various ordeals. It’s not often one encounters such openness in an adult. The speaking of human truth seemed a precocious innovation and always does, as it’s the thing that’s no sooner dug up than buried again to provide amusement another year. Good satire acts as a reality agonist, flooding the brain with common sense and the heart with honesty – a bloody relief.
Unlike the sloppy sarcasm that has now taken its parking space, satire is a set of very specific mechanisms. The simplest is the bait and switch, whereby a principle is stated with which all can agree, and which is then applied to the ‘wrong’ situation to show a double standard. The end of the sentence is the detonator for the truth the reader has already swallowed – it’s too late to cough it up. At its best this chest-burster method is amazingly messy and annoying, and has people backpedalling so fast they red-shift due to the much-loved Doppler effect. In Voltaire’s L’Ingénu the protagonist gives his first confession and naturally assumes that the priest will likewise confess to him. A struggle ensues. Voltaire specialised in innocents who took folk at their word, their effect as unsettling as the more knowing holy sarcasm of Dario Fo’s St Francis and the clarifying angel in Twain’s The War Prayer. Such succulent reason studded with consequence amplifiers sets up a beautiful golden mechanism with light running all through it, a pure but human honesty machine that burns along like a vimana.
Satire engines of a certain type ‘conclude’ a civilisation and so bring to light what sort of knot it’s swung itself into. History is not a string of burnt flags. Mere history could not assemble such irresponsible masters decade after decade. They assemble themselves, pausing only to bite a sparrow’s head clean off in an atrocious foreshadowing of future difficulties. Humanity changes its shirt, religion, phone, but not its nature. Firearms are needed for a full-dress version of its philosophy. American friendly fire is rightly feared throughout the world. But the comparison of monsters with one another does not decrease their population. Evil clarified remains evil, and those who delineate it get their hands dirty. The extraordinary I, Pet Goat II glistens with the evil it portrays. It’s hard to have a life on the slope of the gravity well. Sloths take weeks to digest the toxic leaves they eat, with everything else slowed almost to a stop by the process. Meanwhile they’re sitting ducks for predators that they must disarm and discombobulate with the biggest, wettest eyes and cutest faces on the planet. This has never been an option for me, since at the best of times I resemble a snail which has been stamped on by a pathetically sobbing barber. Luckily, satire is not the mere circumnavigation of a lie.
Satire discharged at a low trajectory may have the largest target area but the blowback is an understanding of its shallow effect. Multiple targets and absolute precision create a richness of specificity, an exquisitely tooled tableau of chinless wonders and crawling chefs. It’s easy to make it look like an accident. Catalytic satire may expend no energy while unlocking it in the space it occupies. At its best its very existence and placement is a confounding artefact which sends everything around it into silence and absurd defence. In this it resembles large portions of nature, the implications of which must be ignored if a person is to engage in society. When elephants were used in battle, their riders tried to blur the line between themselves and their powerful steeds by dressing them in trousers identical to their own. In the day of the armoured tank this practice has ceased. Such modest admissions of human frailty are relatively new – as recently as the Second World War the US navy used dazzle patterns to make observers believe its ships were a more radical shape or that those on deck had snazzier hairstyles. Today the individual soldier pretends to no greater power and films the evidence on his phone.
Voltaire has now forgotten he lived among a million clowns. It turns out his genius was consecrated to a type zero civilisation. He wasn’t dumb enough to think that evil dissolves upon discovery, but he had his hopes for the future. Politics has long since found its way into every corner of government and crime is the only remaining way of making money commensurate with one’s efforts. Saints are worked to weakness in empires of stupendous dupes and panoramic scaffolding. Its roots reaching under the dusty valve tomb of television, the internet was established as a safe tantrum arena while ensuring that the desire of many artists to be appreciated for their art and also to be left alone to create it was finally irreconcilable. The muse of satire is called Thalia, who rhymes with failure, as does her name.
In the middle of the 20th century, palaeontologists found a small dinosaur fossil Coelophysis inside a larger fossil Coelophysis, and wondered whether it was a case of gestation or cannibalism. The same question will occur to those who find human fossils in the ruins of our cities.