A Journey is an Hallucination

“Of all the many striking statements made by de Selby, I do not think that any of them can rival his assertion that ‘a journey is an hallucination’. … Human existence de Selby has defined as ‘a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief’… From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or surrealism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even ‘living’. If one is resting at A and desires to rest in a distant place B, one can only do so by resting for infinitely brief intervals in innumerable intermediate places. Thus there is no difference essentially between what happens when one is resting at A before the start of the ‘journey’ and what happens when one is ‘en route’, i.e., resting in one or other of the intermediate places. (The intermediate places) are not, he warns us, to be taken as arbitrarily-determined points on the A-B axis so many inches or feet apart. They are rather to be regarded as points infinitely near each other yet sufficiently far apart to admit of the insertion between them of a series of other ‘inter-intermediate’ places, between each of which must be imagined a chain of other resting-places – not, of course, strictly adjacent but arranged so as to admit of the application of this principle indefinitely. The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain – ‘as at present developed’ – to appreciate the reality of these separate ‘rests’, preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion, an entirely indefensible and impossible procedure since even two separate positions cannot obtain simultaneously of the same body. Thus motion is also an illusion. He mentions that almost any photograph is conclusive proof of his teachings.”

—- Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

Recently Read: The Private Parts of Girls

If poetics ever evoke a musical genre, Sophie Mayer’s The Private Parts of Girls would be the winter-glisten of shoegaze. Although that might be inaccurate for two reasons: firstly, the poems in this book are more the dissolving pink sherbet and barefoot carefreeism of summer than the huddled polar fur of winter; secondly, while shoegaze is an accurate match in terms of relating musical to poetic style, it does not necessarily count as a positive (much as I love that short-lived early 90s musical burst).

Much like the fuzzy guitars swamped in feedback layered over echoing vocals and distant drums of bands such as Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, the poems contained in The Private Parts of Girls are little specks of light mired in the sparkling waste of their own stylistics. This is perhaps most evident in the poem What the Pink Book Said, which seems to be a single encapsulation of nostalgic childhood or teenaged summers long gone, fizzing and stinging with mentions of strawberry lipstick and stolen kisses. But under the vivid mind-candy, it’s hard to really pick up on any particular thing being said, exactly. Is flat out description enough in a poem?

A quote on the back of the book from Luke Kennard states: “Mayer’s non-sequiteurs arrest youby their very strangeness, then draw you into a sensory chain where they seem just … true.”

While I would certainly agree with the sensory nature of Mayer’s poems (this is perhaps her greatest asset and strongest skill), there is a problem with frequent non-sequiteurs. While the potential is there for a stream of consciousness-style writing to absorb the reader, what it does in this case is to leave a sense of detachment. It’s as though the poems in this book one by one clamber onto a shimmering raft that sails ever farther into the distance, leaving the reader on the shoreline, squinting at the horizon for some semblance of recognition. Mayer dives immediately about three steps into her poems without giving us a hook or chance to find our bearings; the result being that her beautiful and often arresting images end up becoming so much part of the norm they are downgraded to background music, a scented candle of metaphorical description.

Other poems in the collection hint at meaning and commentary, but it is very possible a few read throughs are necessary for this book to truly sink beneath the skin. There’s no denying the heady, pungent colour and feel of Mayer’s writing; to read this collection is similar to a sugar rush, in that everything flits and sparkles past you a bit too quickly, leaving you momentarily dazzled but confounded as to what’s actually going on (an incredibly strong sugar rush, then).

The problem with incessant imagery, no matter how bold and unique, is that imagery in and of itself leaves little purpose and becomes throwaway; we can do nothing with it expect admire it, then discard it, our minds left with only a vague impression of something having happened, as with the foggy recollection of dream.

Recently Read: Kraken

Octopuses and their rubbery crunchyness, their pinkness. Strawberry bonbons with tentacles. Octopus sweets. Miniature sucker-stippled gods flocking through a bedroom aquarium’s clear water. All textures and feelings that drew me immediately (the giant misstep of The City and The City aside) to Kraken out of all China Mieville’s other books. Who’d not want to sleep among the fleshy tentacle bracken of a kraken bed? No? You’re an idiot.

The very reason this book of all Mieville’s works scores moderately poorly on places like Amazon, is that imagination scares people. They treat it with suspicion. Oh, wait, I can’t touch it or see it or prove it? It’s not real then. No thanks. It must be horrific to be one of those people. Another facet of imagination is that some consider it to just be whimsy or, to use a word I’ve never spoken in everyday life, folly. It’s viewed as escapism, trying to withdraw from life, or reality. Such casual brushing of creation aside as “silly” is a highly repugnant character trait. In truth, imagination and fantasy are perhaps the most precise tools we have for excavating whatever dark nuggets of truth we can from reality’s soil. For many, fantasy is the conduit through which they engage more successfully and with greater ardour with life and its spectrum of beautiful troubles.

Definitions of fantasy are difficult, but I perceive it as a second-life or one side of a double personality, where everything we fail to do or achieve can come to life and be accomplished. Some of my most poignant conversations with people have taken place in this fantasy realm, because the opportunity to speak them in reality never comes up, or because once spoken aloud the words so carefully and cinematically voiced in daydream fall flat and hollow as dead bees. Reality has a way of muddying the brain’s vivid watercolours, of sucking the juice and zest from sincerity and imagery. We want our language, our communication with those we care for, to be as precise and brilliant as it can be in films or literature, but without preparation and rehearsal of every encounter with a friend or acquaintance, this is rare. The wonderful moment comes with the clashing of reality and fantasy, when the window for speaking eloquently from the heart in a way that feels earnest and not staged arises.

During the course of Kraken we are assaulted with a confectionary of characters and images dredged up from those taboo corners of the mind. What always confuses and amazes me when hearing people talk about such ideas, or when reviewing books by Imaginationists like Mieville, is the wonder and awe with which they speak. As if to create such creatures and worlds and to write them down is so strange and so unheard of and so far outside of everyday life. But I guess, for many, it is. It’s difficult to not become nonchalant about these things when your whole existence becomes fantasy. When the bizarre and the unusual are what you live and breathe and crave and hunt daily, rather than look shocked or feel surprise when reading about men with giant fists instead of heads, you tend to nod and think “Good” as though somebody had told you about a particularly pleasant bus journey. Fantasy and reality mesh and become the domestic and daily, instead of the uncanny. Perhaps it’s for the best that fantasy remain adored by some and derided by many. Would it lose its sparkle should it become the mundane, the commonplace? That’s the possible danger; a world saturated in imagination, a biblical flood transforming all shining ideas to old luggage and dishes piled in the sink.

That’s not to say the ideas in Kraken ever become ordinary or boring. In fact, I would have enjoyed a lot more being crammed into this book. As it is, we’re still treated to an array of nice ideas including speaking tattoos, a man who keeps his heart locked in the walking flesh box of a little boy, an ipod possessed by a singing spirit and, my personal favourite, a house where the sea lives and never answers the door to those peeking through its letterbox. It is the skill and fleetingness with which Mieville tosses these ideas into his novels that perhaps renders them ordinary without being dull. His scant descriptions and sometimes only sentence-long mentions of certain humanoids and devices retains their vivacity, their freshness, and prevents his books from being bogged down in self-aware creativity.

Language Erosion/ Simile People

Taking the bus to work each morning, I hear a lot of odd or amusing things. Recently there were two teenagers behind me, a girl and a boy, proudly proclaiming the following tidbits that went something along these lines:

Boy: “Miss (insert generic name of teacher) was trying to get me to read a book and I was like f*ck that.”

Girl: “I honestly have not read a book since I was like 8.”

Boy: “Too right. F*cking books like.”

Now it’s an odd thing in itself to boast of one’s own ignorance. “I have a limited vocabulary – wahey!” “I have trouble articulating my thoughts and emotions with any coherence – get in!”  But the other thing that struck me was the disintegrated language these two were communicating in. If language were an acropolis of gleaming palaces and towers, their conversation would have been the withered and ruined stumps of an ancient city smouldering beneath its own wreckage. Vines and creepers webbing over crumbled ramparts, gargoyles with rubbed away faces.

This is by no means a recent realisation. It’s been going on for years – the staccato, broken way in which people (and it’s not exclusive to, but in my experience more common in, teenagers and young adults) talk. Sentences are half-formed, chopped and changed mid-way through the telling of one anecdote as, like magpies, the speaker’s attention is distracted by something shinier.

The word “like” permeates every paragraph, every statement. “I was like angry, she said like…” Are people actually angry, or happy, or afraid, or feeling something that is “like” or similar to those emotions? It’s impossible to tell, almost as if people have stepped out of themselves and are now living double lives as ghosts that observe the activities of their physical twins and comment from afar. We are like this or that, but we never seem to actually be it. Everybody is a simile.

(As a side note, 90% of the conversations I hear from young people revolve around what somebody else said, how that person is a “bitch” and what the speaker said back. I don’t believe in the theory of everything being better “in my day,” as people always mis-remember their pasts, but were my contemporaries so full of bitterness and rage at that 14 – 21 age?)

What I’m really interested in is what causes shifts in language patterns, how certain phrases or ways of talking come about. I’m not free of it myself; I find it incredibly difficult not to use the words “just,” “sort of” and “perhaps” when speaking, largely because I don’t believe any idea or belief is concrete and is always subject to change or be entirely wrong. Language filters down through our species, it’s a beautiful disease infecting us with each generational wave that develops its own slant on communication. Presently nearly everybody is saying “epic.” There are epic fails and epic wins. (Never talking about epic poetry though are they? The losers).

So words and particularly buzzwords are passed around, picked up, adopted. They are our invented little children we dreamed into being and made popular by forcing them in among the cool crowd. But it’s my theory also that the internet and technology influence language. You have “jargon” speak, after all, but you also have product names that come into common circulation, such as Apple’s use of the lower case “i” in front of everything.

On a more sinister level, what if technology is aiding to eradicate language altogether?

The first signs of this were probably evident in texting, whereby every statement was shrunk down to its bare components and abbreviated to nonsensical ramblings. Likewise, and more currently, Twitter limits the space you have for expression, therefor making it essential that you hack away at your lovingly constructed ideas until you have a butchered, mangled and ugly dog of a paragraph that’s never going to beguile anybody.

Okay, the idea is that you be concise and get to the point, but I just feel it’s another tool that caters to the idea we don’t have enough time for anything. No time for reading, for daydreaming, for thinking. The mind is slowly being conditioned, a brain in a lab tank, to only be able to cope with miniscule snatches of external input. Will people in the future look at a 200 page novel and be terrified of its size? Will they skim over the paragraphs and wonder why on earth the book has been constructed from such long streams of letters?

Perhaps books, or e-books, of the future will be nothing more than twitter updates. “Joseph K woke to find he had become an insect. He died alone in his room. The end.”

You also have the trend for portmanteau creation, which has been running for some time, and lends itself to practically any two concepts being jammed together (but it doesn’t create anything new, which is my problem with it, it’s merely stating what already is, but quicker). There is something marginally imaginative about this, at least, but it’s easy to imagine the entire English language being reduced to portmanteaus (foreshadowed by Orwell and Atwood, among others).

This article recently popped up in The Guardian, which pretty much echoed my thoughts on reading and just how much it does for our brains, our personalities, our existences. I usually find that people who don’t read just aren’t able to delve down deep into an idea. I think of them as being almost 2D, because they live on the surface of things, quite often perfectly adept at exchanging facts (“I went here, I saw this, it was good”) but not so willing or keen to really explore ideas and invent their own ways of looking.

Whether things like Kindle will inspire more people to read is yet to be seen, but it is a disturbing thought that we don’t quite know what we’re doing with technology yet. I think in years to come those of us who are still around will look back and realise that, actually, all this rampant technology utterly and irrevocably destroyed the minds of our younger generations.

 

Best Reads of 2011

I’ve read more widely this year than I have in a long time. Here is a little jumbled list, covering novels, magazines, poetry collections and plays, of my favourites.

The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break by Steve Sherrill

I’ve already talked about this book here. Having had some time to dwell on it, I think what I most like about this book is the way it depicts the bizarre interaction of males with pinpoint accuracy. There’s a conflicted and emotionally confusing layer-cake about being male around other males, some unfulfilled sadness that manifests as envy, desire, and the aping of strange behaviours. There’s also something about Sherrill’s writing that dwells on the surface, but always with the hint that he could sink to incredibly depraved and dark depths, which I quite like.

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

I read two DeLillo books this year, the other being Point Omega. It’s difficult to say I enjoyed his work, exactly, partly because there is a quality to his work that leaves you feeling completely gutted out and empty afterwards. He has plenty of unusual ideas, however, and The Body Artist, essentially a ghost story, is unlike any other ghost story you will have read (probably. I don’t know what you’ve read). Eerie and cold and distant, it lingers in the mind afterwards.

What To Do by Kirsten Irving

A poetry pamphlet largely concerned with outcasts, individuals, characters and real people who don’t quite fit in. Included are tales of evil Japanese scarves, and characters from Greek mythology living out their days in an asylum. The poems are sharp, concise, constructed with apparent care, and brimming with bold language and striking imagery. When viewed together, the entire collection has the feel of a gawky teenage kid lurking on the periphery of the popular crowd.

The New Uncanny by various authors

Not quite as sinister as you might expect, this short story collection nevertheless features some mildly disturbing tales, with stories ranging from the relatively mundane to the brilliantly surreal. The mysterious figure on the highway in a luminous jacket with no face, the mimicking voices through the hotel wall, the strange dead possum puppet held together with nails and glue … all feature in a host of generally macabre tales. Without a doubt the standout is Gerard Woodward’s The Underhouse, in which a man creates an upside down mirror image of his living room on the ceiling of his basement.

Terrific Melancholy by Roddy Lumsden

I wasn’t expecting this collection, or Lumsden’s writing (this being my first encounter with him) to be quite as strange as it is. Each poem here, ranging from longer verse to tiny sonnets, is a little gnarl in the weft of usual human looking, a quirk of outlook and personality that suggests an original and sometimes unsettling voice. When you have poems with titles such as What the shrimp calls its tail I call its handle, you know it’s good.

A Matter of Death and Life by Andrey Kurkov

Really enjoyed this. A concisely written and neat little novella about a man who wants to end it all. But, deciding mere suicide is not glamorous enough, he hires a hit man to pursue him and murder him, only to decide he wants to live after all. The prose is sparse and uncluttered, allowing the shifting emotions and outlooks of its protagonist to shine through.

The Mirabelles by Annie Freud

Sometimes we look for the most elaborate and complex way of expressing things for the pursuit of originality, but this collection took hold of me and convinced me that there are points at which simplicity works. Freud’s explanation of what love actually feels like, and its comparison with lust, is as perfect and accurate a summation as anybody could hope to produce. Her simple and often domestic poems are marred only by the occasional drive to be wilfully obscure with her titles, such as with Sting’s Wife’s Jam Has Done You Good, a title that has seemingly nothing to do with the poem’s content.

The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter

If it weren’t for a certain poet, this would be a strong contender for my absolute favourite thing I read this year. What begins as a fairly ordinary, domestic play about a small group of people throwing a party for their friend soon mutates into a deliriously nightmarish and disturbing carnival of mental torture. A strong current of hatred runs throughout, manifested in the horrific characters of Goldberg and McCann, two mysterious men who turn up to the party and bring about the downfall of poor Stanley Webber. Not one to forget.

The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

This one was bought purely on a whim, an attempt to reclaim some of that childhood magic felt at Halloween. The tale of a group of friends soaring through time looking to save their friend is undoubtedly full of imagination and lovingly written by Bradbury. It’s just a shame that, as an adult, it can be difficult to enjoy literature so specifically aimed at kids. I’m positive that had I read this book as a child I would have loved it.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

Dick is an author I’ve been wanting to read since I was about 17. There’s just so much to read in the world! I opted for this book largely because I’d not heard of it before, and wanted to come to the author with no expectations of what the book might be. For a huge portion of the novel, I was hooked. The story of an ordinary man living in 1950s America who suspects his reality might be constructed and not real, is a compelling one, even though it is now a sort of staple of sci-fi we’re all used to. There’s just one problem: the novel utterly falls apart at the point of the big reveal. At this point, Dick gives up all effort at tension and instead trails off the book with a few laboured, over-explanatory chapters that are, really, quite ludicrous. A shame, but I’ll definitely be reading more of him.

Cake poetry magazine

A great little magazine looking to exhibit the work of young poets and short story writers alike. I bought the carrot cake issue, which features a host of new writing from, refreshingly, an almost complete list of new names. It is a shame when fresh and exciting publications begin to get cluttered with the same old names, but luckily that has not happened here. Blending lighter verse with more weighty poetry, and sparks of flash fiction, Cake is certainly one to keep an eye on.

Moonrise by Meirion Jordan

Although a few years old now, Moonrise is an impressive first collection from a poet so young. The poems are tightly constructed, and diverse enough to keep your attention till the end, blending as it does nature poems with witty little odes to Spider-Man. I’ve seen Jordan perform at Chapter Arts centre, and he delivers his work in such a mannered, modest way you can’t help but warm to him.

Tiny Deaths by Rob Shearman

Best known for penning the Doctor Who episode in the first of “New Who” in which the daleks return for the first time, Shearman’s collection of short stories explores mortality through a number of skewed viewpoints. All of the characters here are strange and almost apathetic about death. There is a story about a woman who gives birth to antique furniture, only to be exploited by her greedy husband for what he can (literally) get out of her; and a tale in which a television set begins to bleed. Not quite as thrillingly weird as the blurb might say, this is still a fun little read.

The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard

It’s hard to pick just one Ballard novel, as I’ve read a few this year. Up until recently my favourite was The Atrocity Exhibition. But, having read the first two chapters of this novel, I felt as if Ballard had rummaged around inside my existence and painted a canvas of my soul. His protagonist voices almost my entire warped experience and ethos of life; I almost feel resentful that practically everything I wanted to say in a novel has already been written so beautifully here. A man steals a plane and crash lands in Shepperton. Things soon escalate to the realm of fantasy when the pilot begins repopulating the place with flora and fauna and birds from his own sperm, dreaming the residents into new forms as he goes, and ultimately fusing with their bodies. Perverse acts of sex, fusing with other human begins, the meshing of existence … Ballard did it all. What do I write about now?

The Itchy Sea by Mark Waldron

Speaking of perverse, here is my favourite thing I read this year. There’s little point in gushing too much, as I’ve already done that here. But suffice to say, Mark Waldron is my favourite poet, hands down.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 18 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Nude

Image by Hans Bellmer

MANNEQUINS

Your eyes become scalpels dissecting every square inch of the bodies. No matter how many bodies you cycle through, you notice their adherence to a rigid blueprint that dictates their existence. First, the shoulders sketch a wingspan bisecting the head and torso. Below this their pectorals describe wedding cakes beneath their sweaters. You notice the dimensions of their feet compared with your own. The curvature of their ankles displays the fragility of a swift. All this beauty seems wasted on such automatons.

 

BILLBOARD

Suspended above the city a monolithic billboard presents a series of geometric panels. Each panel forms a honeycomb in a six pack. The model gives off a distinct air of dehumanisation. Action men figures fused in plastic packaging bear virtually no discrepancy in their resemblance to this sentinel of New Beauty. Splashed across the billboard obscuring the office block is a second blown-up figure. Only one of the girl’s cheeks can fit in the giant space, the other portions of her head and limbs hang in several other panels – frozen memories of girls who never existed.

 

ICED IN GLOSSY PAGES

The magazines you purchase stockpile their pages with these gruesome aberrations. Nudes contort their bodies over sleek car bonnets and gymnasium equipment exuding the feel of antiquated torture devices. The only body parts that are safe from modification are now the internal organs. The magazines fester and multiply. Some nights you’ve witnessed the pages breathing, these flesh bibles a new breed of parasite.

 

DEATH MAGAZINE

The drive to witness depictions of bodies not factory massed to supposed perfection culminates in the underground publication of your own magazine, Death. Sandwiched between these mortuary pages a palimpsest of deceased and mortally wounded figures parade, apocalyptic horse carcases. Death magazine is the health conscious publication turned inside out, where waxen skin is scarred by stitches and sutures. People thumb through the pages in supermarkets, compelled by the splashes of violet bisecting the clinical chrome of the mortician’s table. Girls in high collars with coconut scented hair breathily sigh their collective relief.

 

INVADING ZONES

When you think about the ones you have desired, the appeal has only been partly sexual in nature. You desire other entities because you wish to become them. It has always been the nail in the coffin of intercourse for you that, after the act, the two of you have remained in your respective zones. Confined by nature, those lattices of bone and cages of cartilage entrapping you. You’ve long imagined a beautiful collision, the clashing of mangled bone a car crash in slow motion. Those crash test dummies caught in a protracted ballet while their chrome universe implodes about them. So would atoms, hairs and nails fuse with those of your lover.

 

SOFT EXISTENCE

You wake to find a transformation has taken place. Smooth vistas of muscle like soft-heaped fields of snow have accumulated on the sweep of your shoulders. An electric awareness of the dynamics of the body and the space it inhabits is stirred. The cool tiles of a changing room floor lash sensory tendrils up through your feet, into your testicles. How pleasurable, the fusion of the hard surface with the soft assemblage of your limbs. An image of a pair of scissors stitched together from meat seeds itself in your mind.

 

CLOUD

This metamorphosis finds you with a female as your lover. Your own vehicle now is a taut ballet of nerves, sinews and ligaments; hers a pashmina draped between a statue’s palms. You are a mountain grasping at the cloud of her. These organic vehicles interlock, strange machinery designed to port into one another while the heart’s LCD remains dead, unblinking.

 

THE ABSENCE OF STRENGTH

As the model for a life drawing class you are guaranteed your captive audience. Every swift hand capturing your physical essence in fluid blossoms of Indian ink. Arms extended behind your head, your abdomen’s church is exposed for worship. Existence is a question of inversion. Your previous body was a bending of the spine, a coiling in on itself. This new body desires to be propelled outward, to escape the bones that pin it in place. Afterwards you stroll round the studio, thrillingly naked beneath your robe. The one quality absent from each of the sketches is that of strength. There’s something fragile about the reclined figures; in the tulips of the thighs. You once saw a sparrow mangled by a car, and as you pull on your clothes your head is full of its fractured bones.

 

MONSTER HEAD

An installation has been running in the university’s art studio for several weeks. Projectors throw the image of a headless torso on every wall. The body bleeds onto the ceiling and floor, forming a cube of impossible perfection. You stand before the image, a lone crusader in the path of a decapitated sentinel. Impossible, to tell the difference between a forearm and a skyscraper, a cathedral and a fist. Like an insect captured in the flare of a camera lens, you behold the eroticism of the headless form. You are reminded of the Minotaur, how the male body takes on new meaning when the medium of communication is severed. This creature of sculpted biceps could not be reasoned with were it to exist. You remember photographs of submissive mannequins with explicit sex organs you found in an art magazine. This headless male medusa is the inversion of that design, a mechanical sexual activist.

 

TRANSFORMATION

Performing push-ups in the gym’s mirror-enamelled studio, you notice the oily black globs spotting from your face onto the hardwood. The changing room mirrors reflect obsidian mascara streaming from your eyes. In the mirror, with hair of frozen seawater, you’re a dishevelled athlete squeezed into the container of a mermaid. If music could be frozen into the luxurious swirls of cathedrals, surely your breasts are hardening to the same florid sconces. Your entire being could be sucked through the pinhole of yourself and blown across space in a scatter of violet powder.

 

MEAT MEN

An army of meat men pound treadmills in gymnasiums. You watch humans systematically metamorphose into a worldwide flesh internet. A million brains port into each other and adhere to each other’s body rules: to be aesthetically flawless and sartorially sanitized. Using the latest photographic enhancing software, you scan images of yourself into the computer and alter the imperfections of your body. You print off the image and tape it over the mirror. Is it the case that a neo-classical image of the ideal has been beamed directly into the dreams of every last individual, a telemorphic narcissus woven of oracular fumes, to which all aspire eagerly as hamsters in a plastic wheel? How can your mind stay intact when it absorbs every variant of human existence boiling down to the same utterly boring goal?

 

NAKED

Smooth knobs of spine pop, like bubble wrap. The abdomen’s lantern caves in on itself while a glass throat distends with a sickening crack that puts you in mind of tumescent plants straining from the soil. If you had fingers would you even attempt to grab the globe of your head and shove it back into your shoulders? What can these awkward constructions of calcium, fingernail and blood do for you anyway? No man is an island John Donne said, to which you say Every man certainly is an island, terrible in his body’s own imprisonment. You implode and give up your red dust to a scatter of wind.

 

Thing Envy (Body Horror)

The current version of John Carpenter’s The Thing showing in cinemas comes across a little unclear in terms of its purpose. Whether it’s a remake, a prequel or a “reimagining” is confusing, as the film blends elements of all three. But, if a remake, it certainly does not fall in with the usually terrible type of film-making that category holds. It’s not great, but it certainly doesn’t do anything that would make you want to shout at the screen. In fact, I quite liked it.

But. This probably owes a lot to the fact I am enamoured of body horror.

It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? Our own recognisable, safe and familiar structures, distorted to grotesquely monstrous, alien, new forms? Everything we can take for granted suddenly warped out of all recognition. The idea has a pretty long standing tradition in cinema, particularly Cronenberg, although I’m sure there are loads of other directors doing this type of thing. Right now I can only think of two examples: The Human Centipede, something which, as a concept at least, has an irrefutable appeal (it’s just a shame the concept is swallowed a bit by the bog standard nastiness expected of torture horror genres); and there’s also Brian Yuzna’s fantastic orgy of mutating flesh in Society.

Even when it’s done in a subtle way, as with Black Swan, it’s beautiful and thrilling to observe. Natalie Portman’s peeling of her own finger skin and the strange crunching of the bones in her feet affects the audience in a way that no amount of over the top shocks could ever do; but it’s when fighting herself in her dressing room that body horror truly comes to the fore as a gripping cinema trope. With her eyes turning glutinous and red, Portman’s neck distends horribly with a sickly cracking sound as it takes on the swan’s shape, spine bulging through skin, head manic and ravenous and almost separate from the body. Perhaps it’s the outlandishness, the look of terror in the eyes of those characters who witness this happening before them in film? I’m not sure.

Possibly, it is the desire to replicate such bodily feats. Who would not enjoy more control of their body? How many films have we seen wherein a character may morph their basic shape, changing arms into weapons, or subsuming the body of another. I think maybe we feel trapped in our own skeletons, limited in terms of what we can actually achieve with just arms and legs that go up and down and forwards and backwards and do little else for us.

In this new version of The Thing there is a definite standout scene. It comes when all those cooped up in the Antarctic base are supposed to gather in one room to take a test that will determine who is human and who has been infected by the monster. Almost unnoticeably at first, the character of Edvard dislocates his arm, which then scuttles spider-like onto the body of another man, latching to his face and gorging on his proteins. This whole scene is underpinned in quite a subtle way by sexual tones. Not only is there the elongated rope of muscle attempting to force entry into one man’s throat, but there is the next part, in which Edvard’s rapidly mutating body, having grown numerous muscled arms and legs, clambers over the character of Adam. What it does next is filmed and animated (this being CGI) in a bizarrely delicate, almost loving way. Edvard’s head, still recognisably human but evidently now part of a monster, extends on its neck and drapes itself across Adam’s face. For a protracted moment, with its mouth wide open, it appears to be seeking out Adam’s mouth as if to kiss him, but eventually the skin of their faces simply coalesces, a single sheet of flesh stretched over two skulls, as the monster head rolls its cheek caressingly against Adam’s.

Here, there are overtones of that idea where we idolise or find ourselves infatuated with somebody to such an extent that we actually just want to be them. It is the outward, visual realisation of that idea: becoming somebody via absorption. I’m not sure whether the director was going for this feel, but this scene is possibly the most simultaneously romantic and horrific depiction of human conflation there is.

Incidentally, it was also the point in the film at which I found myself thinking, God, I wish I could be that thing. Absorbing other people into ourselves, subsuming everything about them, existing as that kind of physically malleable, limitless entity. Whatever the “thing” of the title is, yes, I would very much like to be it. Wouldn’t we all?

The Problem with Networking

Since joining Twitter, I’ve come to realise that networking, far from being a simple process of hobnobbing, is a tactile skill all of its own. Moreover, it’s a skill I’m not entirely sure I want to possess. The term ‘networking’ – I’ve always seen it for all the self-serving ugliness it embodies. Unfortunately, most arenas, the poetry arena included, rely to some extent on networking. Certain publishers make no bones about how vital it is that you, as a poet, make connections in order to boost sales and become the lucrative figurehead they’ll desire to publish in the first place.

This leaves people such as myself in a tricky position. If I’m not prepared to hobnob and make these connections, then maybe I shouldn’t be seeking publication in the first place. But must it be as clean cut as that? What if I really do want to publish, but want my work to speak for itself and accumulate recognition on its own merit, and not because of who I know? Is that allowed in the contemporary poetry world? Or is it a complete, unfeasible fantasy?

Aside from anything else, I simply don’t understand how to network. To strike up a conversation with a total stranger, somebody whose voice you cannot hear, whose body language you cannot see, within the global limbo and unreality of the internet, seems absurd. Even if you do attempt communication, it usually yields a few surface-level comments, a pleasantry or two, before the wick burns down and the two of you fade into the obscurity from whence you attempted your online interaction.

Perhaps this relies more on the type of people available to me on Twitter; I noticed that a clutch of the poets whose work I truly love do not use any of these social websites, and that’s probably telling me something about the type of people I respect and the type of writer I want to be. I’m not really a fan of the internet in general, nor of any of the big social networking sites, or the culture these intrusions into our once peaceful lives has bred. I have no idea what I’m actually supposed to do with my Facebook account, besides endure the craze of people taking photographs of tables laid out with plates of half-consumed food. Joining Twitter was done in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm for something new and gleaming; the effect it’s really had is to make me feel as though I’m continually shouting down into a deep, dark, echoing well, from which no other voice issues back.

The other problem I have with self-driven publicity is the feverish way it ties in with the idea of achievement. There is so much emphasis on achievement now, and I think it is the outwardly-growing canker born from some in-built human terror of the ephemeral nature of life. We can’t quite be okay with the fact there is nothing we can hold onto, nothing that is solid and will stay with us. Achievement links to ideas of possession – if you achieve, you have. But what is it exactly you come to own? We almost believe achievements are solid, concrete things, like the crystals a character might acquire in a computer game. And so, writing purely for the pleasure it brings is not enough. We have to transform that simple pleasure into a life quest, an unrelenting series of small accomplishments that build and build to a pamphlet, a collection, an award maybe.

Despite everybody’s constant assertions that if you’re in poetry for money and fame, you’re in the wrong business, I don’t think people can stop themselves from dreaming. Who doesn’t imagine their poetry being talked about? Surely I’m not the only one who feels a bit sad by the fact poets are never seen in the public eye. Talk shows line up actors, musicians and comedians, but never poets. In fact, I’ve noticed it’s increasingly rare even for big name authors to appear on television these days. It creates an interesting paradox, because people often say they’re not pursuing poetry for fame or financial gain, but by the same token if that’s true (and I know myself that people really mean it when they say that; the joy, the motivational force, is purely the act of gaining pleasure from language and expressing ideas) then why not be content to simply write? What compels us to publish?

I think a shade of it is ego. It as to be, really. Think about it. You’re writing things down , looking at them, and thinking “Other people should read this!” For all modesty and insecurity, you must believe in the power and worth of your writing somewhere deep down if you are motivated enough to send it off to an editor. You also need a thick skin and toughness of heart to handle the piles of rejections. I think the ego must be quite developed, that a little arrogance must exist in a person who decides to be a published poet, rather than simply a poet.

And the other reasons? Well, I’m not sure.

But all this achievement calls to mind stark imagery of humans scuttling about and clambering over each other like beetles to get somewhere – and where are we destined to end up? Where do we all think we’re going, and what prize, what gleaming solidification of inner success do we imagine we’ll be holding when we get there? Existence has been boiled down to a series of goals we must tick off our list: do well at school, go to university, get a good job, marry, buy house, buy stuff to fill house with. We don’t even need any of this useless junk, we’re just encouraged to have it, because having is a goal in itself.

Personally, little enjoyment comes to me from success. When something I write finally finds its place in a magazine, I get a jolt that lasts a few seconds and seems very unreal, followed by relief. I feel relieved because I’ve scored another point, which will count towards some ultimate final tally. I’m looking forward, but not enjoying the moment itself. True pleasure comes from the act of writing the poems or short stories in the first place, in the tinkering stages that follow. Likewise, daily life things that bring me pleasure are infinitesimally small. Fairy lights in winter. Coffee with a sugary powdered doughnut. Walks in autumn. The feel of a nice new jumper. Sitting in a cafe. Listening to rain falling at night. (Horribly twee things, I admit, but there you go).

It seems enjoying an activity or idle domestic bit of fluff for its own sake isn’t enough anymore; we’re unable to extricate it from some bigger plan. It calls to mind the culture of gyms, and that social pressure to always be on the move and exercising so that, what, we can feel ourselves alive or somehow puff and pant our bodies out of dream and into reality, assure ourselves we’re real? We’re terrified of being idle, of simply being still.

All of this clashes, unfortunately, with the irrefutable fact that I do need to feel my work accepted, for it to be looked at by strange eyes and deemed fit to publish. The desire is just there. So how are these two reconciled, without feeling hypocritical?

Publication: Magma

Today I make my debut in Magma magazine! The issue is based around the theme of ‘Profane and sacred.’ Feels quite bizarre to be typing this, as I’ve wanted to get something published there for quite a while now. Needless to say, very happy!