“The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.”
When the girl said rumpelstiltskin’s name, he took hold of his leg and whipped it upward, tearing himself in two and spraying his audience with gore. It’s rare today to find such commitment to a verbal contract. A promise is a mere curio and words are filmy drifts signifying nothing, so it seems good sense to go through life saying whatever’s convenient at the time. A dictator’s justifications have so little objective reality they have practically no natural enemies. This psychopathic severance leaves reality to fend for itself and, as always, reality thrives. Sartre wrote of a character who sees a tram full of unlabelled and uncontextualised objects and people. This is fairly easy to induce and is useful as a reminder of what is actually happening. Good artists learn early the habit of stripping the name and context from objects and seeing only their shape, so that disparate objects relate. It’s yellow apples and yellow oranges.
This can be a glimpse at scary redemption. The blackest bat has the cutest face. Being alive is past the compass of any pickpocket empire, a plastic rose in its false teeth. Travel shows the effect on the senses of stronger light, longer land and shorter time. But the spectrum of effects created by a mostly self-appointed mind, still and active as a hummingbird, ranges from pure uncut celestial telemetry to that citric itch in the marrow that bothers anyone with a clue and a scram bag.
Paul Scheerbart, whose head began at the wrong end, wrote Lesabendio in 1910 when halfway down a waterslide. On an asteroid of rubbery morphons, Lesabendio wants to go further and builds a spire to explore the outer atmosphere, throwing the world off-balance and causing unexpected transformations. His big trip was not outdone for meaning by Foyle’s space jaunts in The Stars My Destination and makes Dave Bowman’s passive Stargate holiday look like a waste of good monoliths. Meanwhile in the 1970s, Rudy Rucker started writing work amok with cartoon biology forced from fluorescent logic spores and stinking like the mirror image of cheese. His work is still some of the most frequently original to break up the desert. He delivers tricked-out fortune cookies from another dimension, bound for quarantine so eat up fast. Each heart-shaped flask of cognitive nectar rotates readers through a tilting sense of buzzy bendspace, causing a sideways vertigo. But he seems to incorporate fizzy Scheerbart architecture and bubble-gum aliens as if piped from the other end of the century by way of Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Suction-cup guests of this kind are acceptable today. Rudimentary math proved to Scheerbart that he would be decades in the roachy ground before the appropriate time arrived to write his asteroid novel, but he hadn’t the grace to wait. And so a bit of experimental-consciousness California slipped out of 1913 Germany. The philosopher Walter Benjamin found Lesabendio perfectly illustrated the ‘bungled reception of technology’ that we allow to shape us and of which I take the Easter Island extinction as an example. All 887 moai statues looked inland, so that the Rapa Nui people had inadvertently created a surveillance society which drove them to a frenzy of judgement and annihilation.
Scheerbart was also an early adopter of the airship as a means of touring a fictional world. The airship has become a shorthand signifier of the alternate world, the skies of other-London or alter-New York clotted with blimps in direct descent from Michael Moorcock’s vision in The Warlord of the Air and others. As well as coining the term ‘multiverse’ and writing the most mind-frying fractal chase scenes in his dismissed-in-alarm Second Ether books, Moorcock invented the modern age of steampunk (the first age being that of Fawcett, Verne and Wells) – all of which goes rigorously unacknowledged. The butcher Charles Dellschau seems to have lived a whole alternate life in Airship Texas, filling thick scrapbooks with records and memorabilia of the Sonora Aero Club, of which there are no other records. He had moss in his name before anyone investigated. The Henry Darger of steampunk, his cross-versal condition might have inspired House of Leaves if Danielewski hadn’t already copper-stripped d.a. levy. Perhaps in an alter-world an aero captain rode in a blimp as bright as a cardiac beetle and wrote secretly about the butcher’s trade. Was the 75 years between Dellschau’s death and his recognition used more constructively in the parallel world? If he was known earlier, would Russia still defeat the Nazis, the Gulf of Tonkin frauds be exposed sooner or Benno Ohnesorg dodge the cop’s bullet? The multiverse model has universes budding off fractally, encapsulated like the linked floatation bladders of seaweed. Some Pacific cultures eat bladderwrack with a butter sauce to indicate their position on the matter. An act which accepts absurdity with such ingenuously sarcastic gusto is a tilted cross-sectional state which zings the marrow. If sustained, this is the ‘still point’ satirical method working at the level of lifestyle, releasing far more surrounding energy than it expends – another experiment that has no Fourth of July. The ancient Greeks called the avenging Furies ‘the well-wishers’. Art confers no power but can express truth, which persists irrespective of mood or law. In summer it’s still summer at night. Perhaps in yet another world, art affects change and villains are rendered pure by principled satire. But on the Earth where airships are sparse and suspect?
Upon taking a gander at the state of things in this world, a wise man said: ‘It’s a good thing it’s true, because it’s pretty ugly.’ After the Colossus of Rhodes toppled it became a debating stage for the issue of beauty versus truth. Since in this case there was no real conflict, it was acknowledged for its beauty and dismantled for its bronze and iron. As to how long the indecision lasted, accounts vary from 3 years to 800. The beauty of house tiling in ancient Alexandria was not what made them perfect for flaying the flesh from Hypatia, her Christian attackers being immune to such crude abstractions. Materialism and the belief in the inevitability of progress, as posited by communist and capitalist doctrine, approach both truth and beauty with all the backbone of a banana. To protect them from the pyres of the Second World War, Norman Lindsay’s wife Rose Soady took 16 crates of his paintings to America, where the authorities burned them. Since the destruction of the Library of Ashurbanipal, the burning of books has continued to this day, not only in the US where the torching of Sanger, Reich, Shaffer and Vonnegut went without fuss but in Sri Lanka, Cuba, Israel, Egypt and the UK – the last touched off mainly by elderly people trying to keep warm.
When philosophers speak of ‘obstacles’ they have in mind a world where a step or two is free of them. This juicy fantasy is the fruit of living in the mind. Meanwhile, heroes can barely raise themselves off the floor. The billions who work of a broken heart move through an acidic exhaustion where sleep is viewed as an indulgence. During sleep we do not work or consume, are not outward-looking, hysterical or entertaining, and are becoming healthier. Many would wish it abolished, in others. Remember, if you pick up a strange book in a dream and read it, it’s your copyright. But such books are notoriously hard to bring back whole. Coleridge managed to retrieve ten sunburned sentences before he was interrupted by a hairdresser.
In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s book Definitely Maybe, scientific discovery is blocked at every turn by bureaucratic interference, strange deliveries and spooky women. Similar things happen if you try to obtain a copy of the book. Its characters conclude that the universe is resisting humanity’s progress towards powers that will upset cosmic homeostasis. Is this resistance societal or universal? Do the gears of a fractal mesh between different scales or are they just ornamental duplicates? When Einstein chatted with Rabindranath Tagore – from whom the scientist took away an idea for a new, even wilder hairstyle – the poet ignored considerations of scale and reach, claiming that it is a human universe. Yet despite the dewiest mooncalf knowing that the cold injustice of universal systems outpaces any human psychopath, humanity feels it has the luxury to manufacture additional hardship of its own brand. This surplus sorrow has the repetitive quality seen in other areas of the culture and nothing really new has been introduced for 12,000 years.
A thing done despite absolutely everything is a wonder indeed. With near to no time or energy, the creation of anything substantial becomes a long game. This means keeping the architecture of the project in your mind and the flavour of its first conception in your heart, so that on either side of a waste of time it can be called up intact with its continuity uninterrupted. The process is not spectacular. While imprisoned in a Soviet labour camp Irina Ratushinskaya wrote 250 poems on soap, which she memorised and washed away. Discipline is an honest decision maintained across saturative peril to guard and at times convey a precious thing. Panspermia are said to be hardy seeds or spores which have journeyed through space to land on Earth, where most are eaten at once by birds. The rest must live a fine line – to be dull enough to evade a bird’s eye and unique enough to be dismissed by the run of humanity. Many lizards and insects have developed extremely bright and complicated colours so as to be discounted by the latter. It’s a strange and risky game, to try for privacy without the interference provoked by appearing to. When Twain became terse about human carnage he was treated like a previously delightful gadfly who had suddenly kicked a kitten out of a window. Simone Weil ached with an always-unfashionable honesty about powerlessness and talked early about the ‘trickle-down’ theory, an idea without an exact counterpart in reality. Surrounded by the automated and menacingly upbeat, she would never let them stake a claim on her mind. She was later portrayed as having a story as sad as a dead girl’s glasses. In life a kind of justice pursued her, growing wings on her honesty. And wings, like honesty, are not socially comfortable. Powerful microphones have recorded the cry of a butterfly as it emerges from its cocoon, and those expecting a shriek of pugnacity or joy have had to admit it sounds more like weary resignation. The resurrections of Mothra, the giant butterfly in Japanese kaiju movies, are treated as colourful religious events, glitter falling upon fat children as the fluffy-faced behemoth dries its wings. Cultures without a monotheistic tradition often find themselves in this kind of jam, worshipping a marzipan badger or a pair of clogs they found in the shed. And the lack of dogma is a boon to the wise. Pythagoras believed in reincarnation and stopped someone beating a dog because he recognised in its barking the cries of a friend. A better man would have stopped it upon recognising in its barking the cries of a dog.
It is not known if an organism exists which can continue to put out energy indefinitely while bringing none in. People who care at all about the output of true creatives seem to expect a somewhat energetic despair. It’s disingenuous to flounce out hoping to be missed, like the Art Strike of 1990–1993 which nobody noticed. But as we have seen, it can go either way – attack or disregard. To ensure the latter, put original thought at the service of truth. This very few civilised souls can abide and they will respond in a frenzy of neglect. A realist like Zapffe provoked so many people to look the other way, he could more or less do whatever he liked. He chose to climb church steeples with grappling gear and smile down like an ape with a secret. Cioran, barricaded against human babble, sat ready to sneer at anyone who breached his room with jaws akimbo. Ernest Becker appears to have worn a Groucho Marx nose, specs and moustache for twenty years, baffling the Pulitzer people who finally awarded the prize to his corpse for The Denial of Death.
Originality is less welcome to the mind than the certainty of death, the exception being suicide and the prescribed resolve to find it incomprehensible. When Panait Istrati improved the shining hour by slashing his throat and surviving, Romain Rolland found he could get past the suicide attempt by focusing on Istrati’s writing, which had nothing new in it, and helped him to write more. When Istrati began criticising Stalin with zingers such as ‘All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?’, Rolland’s support quietly withdrew. The distaste around death is complicated when artists decide to lark about at the last minute. Jan Potocki carved a silver bullet from the handle of a sugar bowl, had it blessed by a chaplain and then used it to blow his brains out, after drawing a caricature of himself with a stupid nose. Boris Vian died of heart failure while screaming abuse at a movie adaptation of one of his novels. Li Po is said to have drowned while trying to have sex with a reflection of the moon.
Many deathbed laments concern the energy expended in the commotion of laws and our varying strategies to survive them, just as sharks grow and discard thousands of teeth over a lifetime. The honeycomb structure of an elephant’s skull protects the brain from the haranguing and abuse of limber opportunists but cannot retrieve the time wasted, nor the strength lost through exasperation. ‘Cruelty before kindness’ extends to the admiring words finally expressed after the death of a neglected artist, as though their death explains their meaning in detail. The cherry acid fauna of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein were allowed the light of day 40 years after they were painted, the painter thinned safely to his grave.
A patina of age helps. It’s said that upon discovery of the 8,000 terracotta soldiers under China’s Shaanxi province, one of the figures was doing something interesting. The accounts vary between mere squatting in a sarcastic way to extruding a foliate superstructure from its shoulders on which were inscribed the Zodiac of False Assumptions: that the space occupied by any human body is more interesting than that which is not, that all happiness is the same colour, that after getting worse things will get better, that the world will end when humanity does, that it’s a long way to twist to see your own soul and so on. Ignored by the sentinels around it for two millennia, it’s now valued above gold in the strange auburn market of antimundane contraband and is reputedly with a private collector in Novosibirsk.
Biological death – the only kind worth bothering with – is met with fighting stances among those who want to dodge it, an urge rarely motivated by a desire for wisdom. Those cadavers-in-waiting glamoured by technology tend to see a future in which tech arrives equally everywhere. It’s claimed that advances in science mean the first human to live to 500 years has already been born – if so, he or she was born into wealth and will hopefully use the extended lifespan to mature beyond being a privileged dick. Doris Lessing remarked that human beings do not live long enough to come to their senses. Another great thinker said he’d use additional years trying to read the expression on the face of a trout. What’s obvious is that with extreme longevity, some will go mad and some will go sane. If sane, there is a different kind of tiredness which comes with a strong, long life. It is not the feeling that the entire canvas has been filled in. It’s the certainty that you cannot force people to look at what you have so far. But given enough time, you may feel every tickle of sap through the planet’s intelligence as tiny rushes of understanding are established. It will be a long time coming. When a bunch of pendulum clocks are put in a room together, after a few days those pendulums will be swinging in unison. A single clock brought into the shop doesn’t stand a chance of changing the rhythm of the many, or of maintaining its own. But the heart that maintains its own rhythm is rewarded with treasure, the friction of its angle sparking vivid oblique cross-sectional vistas of the systems of the world. This honesty emerges as a social blemish as rich as a sunspot, complete with coronal loops and reconnection events.
Alternative to a longer life is a mind with a long enough exposure to photograph the long truth. From it may sometimes come a good idea the orbit of which is so large its intersection here seems straight and too simple to have a history. Gurdjieff contended that a soul can be created only by consciously intended work, authentic and from scratch, with nothing stolen. In Chapter 18 of Picnic at Hanging Rock, withheld from the public until after Joan Lindsay’s death, Miranda and her friends encounter – and are still encountering – a solid vortical hole in space around which time is encapsulated. An instant’s sight of it solves a lifetime of questions for the maths teacher Miss McGraw. This is an object worth creating. Lindsay, around whom watches and clocks had always stopped, accomplished this object with a long build-up of pressure and a final, partial release.
Strange flavours bleed through when someone’s concerns have moved on while using the same old forms. In Tove Jansson’s beautiful Moominvalley in November, the Hemulen and friends find the Moomin house empty and decide to wait for the cute family. During this time they have a party and a variety of small meltdowns, and try building a treehouse. Toft, who tells stories to himself, ponders a small deep-sea nummulite who eats electricity and, little by little, becomes like nothing except itself. The creature rises, emerges and gradually swells into a huge visible phenomenon. Toft tells the nummulite, now hardened and bewildered with worldly defences, ‘Make yourself tiny and hide yourself! You’ll never get through this!’ The creature again finds its own element. Toft waits for the family the longest and finally spots the mast lantern of the Moomins’ boat far off and approaching like Dylan’s riders. There Jansson’s final Moomin book ends.
It seems that great things cannot be consummated until all the lies about them have been heard, so let go. Once expressed, your ideas need not be under your protection. One book answers another and we can let them flap and squabble. Rosendorfer’s Grand Solo For Anton answers the Strugatsky brothers by suggesting that this world is designed to conceive a single book containing everything, from which the next world will be seeded by the only survivor – a man so boring the author had to get rid of everyone else to make him bearable. Joyce’s notion of a seed book for the next universe is played out. People are fuel for the book’s calculations and their personal ambitions are irrelevant. I suggest that the human world’s blocking of individuals’ creativity is a sign that it is performing an experiment to which it wants a very particular answer – bad science writ large. Irrespective of authority’s declaration that privacy is a suspect luxury, its oddly invested insistence that in our youth we felt invulnerable and immortal rather than exhausted and precarious, its systemisation of a notional process whereby grief and injustice fade over time, its strangely fearful decrees of what thoughts are impossible and events unforeseeable – reality controls the narrative. It was once trumpeted that true theatre extended many miles above, below and beyond the stage, which is a mere letterbox peep at a portion, but Artaud had other information, having sneaked a peak up at the rigging and seen hysterical and constant maintenance. He had begun to suspect trickery when he noticed the absence of his own levels of agony on stage. The selective view does not survive the colourless cure of honesty.
You may continue waiting for the accident to finish, until the day you disappear from your mirror and oxygen can’t use you anymore. You will leave the human world as bland as you found it. You may even be famous.
Or take your remaining life in your hands and see how much of it is yours. There was once a man who lived like a moth trapped in a bellows camera, exhausted by worthless prestige. Instead of a heart he had a green toy kennel containing a roasted almond, and his philosophy was an ingrowing slogan, something about a room taking a liking to its own emptiness. He did target practice on porcelain phrenology heads, gave directions in ‘clicks’, boasted of paying a special tailbone tax, was secretly baffled by his own pets and finally attacked them in panic and release. Cowering in an ambush of frontiers and invoking remnants in place of rumination, his arguments were airtight and fruitless. He was skin stretched over fear. On his final morning he took a quick gander at the renewed immensity above his head and began betraying it afresh.
There was once a girl who was pale and packed as a root. Those who chose to notice her quiet corner saw her complicating by inches until phosphene riches covered every instant of her progress, an ongoing masterpiece. She walks through the falling world sweating alchemy and extruding complex solid eternities, charged particles streaking upward around her. She creates meaning and hides it above the weather.
Those few who genuinely seek originality will be magnetised to your stuff, even without signposts. It’s a sure thing when you own the island’s only taxi. Intensely creative common sense gives pure answers of a richness which nudges it into a bandwidth of invisibility – to answer to the edge, then over. When we forget the depth of the planet we forget that cities are cosmetic. Every door opens directly onto infinity. But we are dog-tired and dazzled, with heads like stop-lights.
The great dilution, profitable to the very few, will not take us all. Elsewhere in the heart are lush jungles rained on in the heat, and heavy windowed spheres the dark-stained gold of lions. You are the sugar of the Earth. I bless you a blue streak. I hope the bloodbuzz of accelerating vision blurs you into the seraphim blast of reasonable assumption, producing high hours amid the blaze. On the wall your nuclear shadow, a mere outline without depth, will still prove too strange and unpliable for most. And if it ends in screaming as purple-yellow vines grow from gemstone wreckage to brandish what you have done, you can take strength from knowing it was all your idea.