DO MORE/LESS – SCORING THE VECTORS OF INCONSEQUENCE.
Excerpt from the Buffy Strangelove Devotional Directional Manual – Vol 2 Section 4: (evidence provided by Crime Scenes Inc)
…In times of strife, inter tribal, inter domestic, inter national, inter factional, inter dimensional, the urge is always, and rightly so, to do less. Even in times of general contentment. Do less. Save energy. Save electricity. Make do. Humans have always beaten themselves up over the supposed benefits of hard work. Well, there’ll be time enough for that when you’re dead. And consider: it’s always those with really well paid jobs, as well as the really stupid ones with made-up jobs, who go on about the Dignity of Labour, and/or the psychological importance of working hard. But we know that Work is in reality merely a simulation, and only for those who don’t want to Play. At my last re-birth, work was still all the rage despite my previous hard work. Work was the be-all and end-all. Work to what end though? You need to be 3 people (at least) to do the amount of work the perpetually over-ambitious claimed they were doing. Luckily, I was at least 3 people. StanleyK, not for the first time, and considering the Ealing Guinness schtick a suitable precedent, nicked my idea wholesale. How I learned to stop worrying and plant the idea of multiple parody characterization in SK’s fecund yet frightened brain is a story that changed the entire way comedians were to be seen as all-round templates, via serious movies, for the multiple personality society. He took the credit, but it’s down to me that you can now be exactly who you want to be at any time you want to be it, even if you don’t have a personality. Sellers was more than a template. He was the clone icon to die for. All proceeds from multiple non-personality turned to comedic gold. He existed only because SK was himself frightened to be who he seemed to be. With due deference to his genius, and notwithstanding the paranoia inevitable as a result of his ill considered public epiphanies of comedy violence, it was I, through Sellers’ improvised imaginings, who enabled him to progress into areas previously unimagined. Anti-gravity fantasy, terminal chess obsession, grandiose mythic theorizing and state of the art security techniques, so that he might at least live a life not entirely crippled by paranoia. They were all my ideas, though I neither received nor expected any credit.
Anyway, to work. Yes, work can be a soporiphic. That much is true, but when duty calls, you lay down those tools! Unburden yourself of collective responsibility! Switch off the info systems! Take to the hills (metaphorically of course – we don’t want any more crazed survivalists holing up in the virgin spaces than are absolutely necessary) and lie low! Inhabit areas of low electrical production! Hunker down, keep your eyes peeled, and think seriously of killing anyone who may be thinking of encroaching on your personal space! Inside is where you look. This is species integrity on a scale we can all understand. The urge to self protect, to distance oneself from other people, is all but overwhelming under certain stressful circumstances. In cities, the urge to kill is of course almost un-answerable. The frowns on the faces of struggling urbanites bespeak a super human will, an almighty effort just to stay out of jail. How easy it would be to take a life in the crowded spaces. Murder is square one. Murder is always in our hearts. You know it’s true. Cities are no good. Cities attract scummy verminous leeches on holidays undertaken from human warmth and cities deny your essential pre-secular post-psychological needs (see Vol 1 Section 5). The country on the other hand is to all intents and purposes empty. Still, we can’t all live there. Leave the city if you can. In my own dead dreams I live on the outskirts, near the orbital roads. This isn’t a retreat, a badly conceived removal from the vortices of electrical energy. It’s pure survival strategy (Vol 3 Section 7). Topographical maps of the space occupied at present are re-constituted inside the head via Elephant Gnosis™, so the wider the vistas before us the more open the brain’s outlook. Space is both inside and outside, and a closed environment, pressing in on the brain, will mean the ambient pressure exerted thereon is magnetically reproduced as electricity, the voltage depending of course on size of hippocampus (Vol 2 Section 2). Those who tend to travel a lot have, of course, significantly enlarged organs. But this is all at a fundamental level instinct. We know in our hearts that there is too much electricity in cities, corralled in dead end lanes, swept by wind vortices up and around the main thoroughfares and into cul-de-sac mews terraces. It gets blocked, eddying in shallow pools in distressed shopping malls. Too much open space of course and the brain goes into a tailspin from lack of oxygen. It can’t quite deal with the incipience, or the enormity, of pre-electrified landscapes…
(Ongoing Documented Ward Testimony: Brian Yapp under self hypnosis speaking as Nobby Wyse the Fruiterer)
…When I was born, I immediately felt crowded. Breasts loomed large like mammoth snowy mountains. I felt crushed under their weight. My dreams and waking dreams thereafter often featured a kind of unspeakable smothering weight, a pressing and irresistible force. I was oppressed by magnetic rolling granite plates which seemed to crush the life out of me, great rolling stone clouds of particularized solidity and immensity. Granite-stone creatures, golems of incalculable power and more or less astonishing believability, far beyond horror story nervousness, pursued me. Stone creatures which are now immobilized and cauterized, rooted as totems of domesticated psychosis in Regents’ Park. Frank, on the other hand, as soon as he was dead complained of not being able to see things clearly. Or of being able to see things only as though they were at a great distance. Death seemed to rob him of any sense of perspective. The one eyed dead. He was blind to reality. He went on, naturally, to become an academic. Christ knows what his discipline is. His main talent is for hopeless and aggressive lechery. No wonder his wife eventually booted him out and into my bed. Academics don’t need a discipline. They just extemporize in the crevices of obsession. They need only an aptitude for minutely missing the point, for failing to see the wider picture. They require simply a laughable propensity for leather jackets or tweed with leather elbow patches if of an older vintage and polo necks. An urge to write unreadable and unread books is a necessity, as is a delusion that these moribund works somehow push humanity’s envelope just that little bit further. They are all on the gravy train…in wooden polished corridors…names on stenciled nameplates…individual tuition of favoured students…appearances on the BBC…retained payroll status for rentaquote opinionising…beetle browed theorizing on late night talk-ins…condescension a second nature add-on. Dusty celebrity status…pasty shoed tiptoeing into virginal bedrooms…child abuse in the dead of night…divorce courts heaving with wistful and long suffering wives. They’re worse than film stars. In normal chronology they’re just dusty monuments to the individual delusion, study bound in the realm of fear, hunkering down in speciality, specifically to avoid life or any of its ferocious variants. The impulse to nurture obsessions at the expense of the bigger picture is the salient characteristic. What else do academics do but nurture morbid obsessions and fiddle with their barely pubescent charges? Secrete menopausal fluids from rheumy eye sockets, take what isn’t theirs, seduce the needy and the immature. Academia is a hothouse, decadent plants usurping youthful blooms by stealth…
Authorial voices intervene at this point in the narrative: Not sure this is wide open…not sure it’s controlled…by what means do we reach a decision on policy? How do we implement that policy? Authentication of policy? Is break character configured? Where’s Abrahams? Is he like FOR REAL??? Who’s going to look at this…Abrahams can explain the issues then you can liaise with him…why not hardwire the uberview?…free jazz in this context is definitely a tautology…is Yapp actually already dead then? Narrative function unclear at this point. Moot usage – we need to see things at least twice before we fully understand them. Rewind facility is of central importance. Meanwhile Wyse has morphed uncontrollably into Dionysia. Get some control.
…A lisp goes well too…decadently overbearing self-image…misapplied view of place in the scheme of things. I say to you!!!!! Don’t get involved with them! Do less, don’t pay, or pay up now. Be an autodidact. Or live less, and pay up now. Point I’m making is avoid debt. Debt is the universal gaolor. Reverse credit. Credit being merely a form of tax, a tax on presumption. A tax on nervy want, on impatient acquisitiveness. Well here’s the answer. Don’t be taxed. Reject credit. Do less…and look inside. Feel the weight, the vibrations, feel the weightlessness of existence. The existential dead weight, as sung by academics. See the tracks there…Stop shopping, NOW!!! This is what Strangelove said over and over again. It’s about the most cruelly tender thing he ever did say. He knows a thing or two. Just stop shopping. Don’t go out. Stay in. Shops are full of what you don’t want. Opt for cruelty. Be cruel to yourself as a way of approaching the divine. Look inside, see the cruelty. See the tracks. Our capacity for cruelty cruelly exposed by the simpering insistence that we aren’t capable of cruelty. Our ability to avoid cruelty fatally undermined by our sanctimonious assertions that we’re all too civilized to eat each other.
In fact, Frank like all academics revels in his capacity for cruelty. He imagines that he should be afforded the dispensation open to geniuses, the deference of others, because a genius is what he imagines himself to be. I’ve seen Frank reducing helpless shopgirls (in shops) to tears merely by sarcasm and a raised voice. He thinks he’s above the common herd. And let’s face it, that kind of behaviour is just so passé. I have an anecdote of the end of his life. Standing in the queue at Pret a Manger, just off Charing Cross Rd, Frank stood and regaled his audience, a gaggle of credulous, bashful acolytes, with loud complaints about the ever-encroaching franchise culture. He fulminated against the ubiquity of corporate funhouses. He frothed about cappuccino culture. He held forth and he pontificated. He went red, his temples throbbed and a slight foaming became noticeable around the corners of his mouth. He really extended himself. Thumbs in belt loops, he relaxed into his strident broadside oblivious to the ebb and flo of those without academic leanings.
“Can I help you sir?”
Turning, he enquired with extravagant pomposity “Are you speaking to me, my good man?”.
“Can I help anyone…?”
A customer more attuned to the pace and the culture of the west end stepped in and ordered a double espresso to go. Frank was in a different world, lost for words, lost in the slipstream of accelerated life. Being who he was, he declined immediately to wait another second and flounced away, audience in his own archly choreographed slipstream, to thunder indignantly on other displeasing aspects of urban life. His words hung and swooped like seagulls as he marched away, dipping in and out of the grubby street ambience, the noisome metropolitan drone, swooping occasionally with glib and screechy impudence into the fractured consciousnesses of those within earshot. As he pranced down the street thundering denunciations this way and that, heads were turned and eyebrows were raised…
(Dionysia to Brian, both heads visible, but he looks now like he’s in drag…both are shining in the sepulchral light)
…I wouldn’t tell him this, but I actually turned 40 at birth, 20 odd years ago, and I feel utterly worn out. Clapped out. I kind of feel that the heaviness, the weight, is catching up on me. The electricity is getting inside me, silting up the channels. A lesser man, a boy or deranged household god would whinge endlessly in utter self-pity and wallow like a water buffalo in the warm baths of self-loathing but me, I’m not given to self pity. It’s time for re-entry. I never went to prison, so I might try that. But I’m more a shadenfreude kind of guy, like Frank. Maybe our only point of correspondence. I revel in others’ misfortunes. I put my own neuroses and/or psychoses to one side, and examine the failings of others with amused contempt. I write scathing reviews for low circulation publications, emblazoning my hatred for sterile cod-creativity in haughty and imperious style. I laugh at the messes people get themselves into. Frank knows this and I think he approves. As my familiar, he kind of depends on my endorsement. I feel the weight of his obstreperousness. I’m exercised by the effect he has on people. People I know. I wish Frank hadn’t died before he’d had time to really grow into himself. To rid himself of his airs and graces and learn to conduct himself without striking these absurdly camp and affected attitudes. Campness needs to be grown into, must be gradually assumed, it is a favourite pair of slippers. Too camp too young is merely vulgar. If only Frank could have been more like me. I remember the crucial events as though I was Frank myself.
He was at home with his wife see? A white walled casa, Andalusia/Islington style terrace…miniature cactus plant…tautologous rubber plant, art nouveau engravings, miniature enervated wife clicking in stilettos, small dogs yapping, kids in the playroom. Au pair at the drinks…Wife mooning over the open windows, distraught, tearful and beautiful before the smashed crockery and glassware, mangled birthday cards torn and strewn every which way. 50s style light fittings, art nouveau effects dashed to the floor, Frank’s bits and pieces all over, all papers and effects defenestrated, while I’m in the pub around the corner. He’d been taunting her…
“Nothing would ever make you leave me would it? Don’t you understand I don’t want to be loved??”
“But Johnny…”
“’But Johnny! But Johnny!! I love you! I love you!’ I love…You love…She loves…everybody loves everybody else! Well I don’t see? I love NOBODY! I don’t even love Johnny!! Get out Hermione! Go and find somebody else to love!!”
…So now we’re having a morose boozing session, him complaining vigorously about his little wife being a bitch, just a fucking evil BITCH, me affecting to take the slightest notice, humouring him and making believe I’m on his side. If he knew I’d been fucking her on the quiet for years he’d be speechless. Done up like a pantomime dame of rage, he looked at me through red mists and then started blubbing uncontrollably. Best to spare the punters that kind of spectacle really. Frank’s an ugly man when angry, and even more ugly when upset. So I just retreat into a sort of erotic reverie in which I dream anew of what I’ll be doing to her later on, all the while wearing a fixed expression of concerned sympathy. They fight (apparently) like drunken tigers, all rage focused on the other, projected, transferred. Eventually Frank is forced to concede defeat, or if not defeat then capitulation to the more entrenched will of the other. She wears the trousers in this ménage alright. Well of course she does. Frank doesn’t have any legs does he? How could he wear the trousers?
He tells me, because he knows, that academics live like kings. Sovereigns in their own right, they have the pick of affordable housing. Designed housing, as opposed to lived in housing, the like of which most of us have to put up with. I’m left in possession of a shabby and disreputable looking terrace number while he lives like a fucking king. Hand in glove with architect buddies with whom he went through college. Academics and coffee table lifestyles. They get invited on TV. I may have mentioned this. Free rides to Broadcasting House in limos paid for by the license payer. It’s a scandal. I’m the real genius here. I’m the one who has visions. I’m the one who lends his name to religions. People pay me…to touch them! You know that? To touch them!
…anyway, back to secular reality. Frank stormed away from the coffee house leaving eddies of perturbation in his wake. Pavements sclerotic with coagulating moochers, day-dreaming, pavement hogging snoozers…all shop doorways blocked by hordes of somnambulant tourists…He left them all for dead. Coffee Junta was spilling its hyped up imbibers into the street all energized and wired. Wired and yet non-locomotive, non kinetic. The only movement was a kind of torpid ripple of intent. Inane intent. The currents of indecision that guided their compromised movements kept them ebbing and flowing this way and that, at the same time rendering them incapable of moving decisively in any direction without first checking on the movements of their closest neighbours, like flocks of slowly migrating birds that haven’t yet received the imperceptible signal. And this lot weren’t migrating anywhere fast enough for Frank. They were, in short, in his way. Feckless human barriers against the energy flow. Tourists and somnambulists everywhere, more effective in deadly gainsaying than any number of thick-necked bouncers. Just stand a group of these bastards in front of a club entrance and you’ll never get anybody through the fucking doors. Ever, thought Frank. Finally losing what little patience he had, he lost it.
“Get the fuck out of the fucking way you dozy fucking half-witted fuckwits” he bellowed at the stodgily massed ranks of confused and half asleep pedestrians.
Sensing that his righteous and irreligious wrath was being hopelessly misread by the assembled sleepwalkers as a kind of bathetic paranormal happening, misapprehended as a mere apparition of rage brought on by endless ODing on the city’s truncated electricity (a phenomenon that all the tourist guidebooks had taken to including in their literature) and observing their reaction, one that implied that as far as they were concerned this holographic avatar of spite was merely a tourist spectacle, Frank barged headlong into the group without further ceremony, knocking several shocked tourists to the ground. A chatter of muted protest went up amid the group and apologetically shocked glances were shot this way and that. Frank was away and gone without a backward glance before they were able to re-assemble as before, inanely blocking the thoroughfare, the recent apparently pixilated avatar of rage already a distant and vaguely perplexing, unpleasant memory. A tourist diversion they’d rather, on the whole, have done without.
Frank knew though, as a veteran path finder, that the same static behaviour was bound to be repeated wherever there was a doorway or entrance or exit. Entrances to tube platforms were a particular favourite. Twittering collections of asian students, with nowhere special to go, snap happy and blocking the exits. At this time, in this hour of immaculate immediacy, Frank approaches. The twittering reaches unendurable levels. There’s a fractured murmuring as they perceive the danger of the approaching train. Trains enter stations with a terrible urgency, bursting out of the tunnels with insolent dispatch. The drivers are dead faced. All sorts of ghostly operators drift around the circuit. But the trains belie their somnambulant operators, breaching the hot air in front of them with belligerence; they are nightmare intrusions, waking the platform sleepwalkers from their reveries. The gaggle lethargically scatters allowing cowed commuters to emerge, nervous and blinking, onto the platform. And Frank, he’s still alive. Still fretting and twitching from the caffeine/cocoa high and the insufferable unwillingness of his acolytes to actually listen to him, pushes his way through the schlepping throng and steps out in apparent ignorance of the oncoming vehicle. A blizzard of dust envelopes him as he falls headlong onto the tracks. The dozing driver thought he’d seen a ghost. The fact is, he had. Frank’s now doing less than before, and he’s all the better for it. The driver got 6 months off work. But not only that. The important thing is that they generally find this sort of thing makes for good copy with the makers of TV documentaries and it adds weight to their unions’ negotiations for higher pay in the interminable rounds of talks with the employers aimed at avoiding industrial action. The city is not in this instance brought to its knees and everything carries on pretty much as before. Frank is dead. A brainless suicide of immaculately conceived Gnostic immediacy. He didn’t know he was going to die that morning. Grasp while the iron’s hot though. A kind of split second decision, unfortunately for Frank carried out without benefit of an attending documentary crew and therefore a suicide empty of re-birthing potential, merely one more London Transport statistic and just an irritant to passengers on the Piccadilly Line, commuters largely unaware of the potentially divine import of the action and merely hot-collared and fractious at being made to wait for their supper. The divine in small matters unperceived as usual, un-seen by the train companies and their shareholders. A private performance in public, a consummation of the first sacrament of cataclysmic re-entry to the quotidian realm by Frank the fat bottomed, monkey arsed academic.
Frank’s doing less and less these days. A bit of street theatre, well hung, demotic wheelchair ranting, cap in hand solicitation of tourists, nuisance phone-calls to former students, email stalking of those students whose willingness to submit to Frank’s attentions made them especially meaningful to him, threats from ex boyfriends, fathers, hanging around in crappy Soho boozers re-living a life that’s no longer viable, sizing up the talent, cocking a jaundiced and weary eye at the low rent crims as they size him up, and generally dreaming of the elephant trails. He’s thrown away his bike and latterly his chair and spends his days in ritual procession along ex-bus lanes and cycle tracks, vainly attempting to re-invoke the divine in himself by re-tracing his steps, re-configuring the ancient elephant routes as set down millennia ago on the site now occupied by London by the three of us in our heyday. As the ancients processed in religious devotion around bird, dragon and monkey outlines on the Nazca Plain, invoking rain and pleading for divine benevolence, so Dionysia and I (and Frank to carry the supplies) once invoked elephant divinity. We laid down elephant tracks which were in subsequent millennia used by later, more profane civilizations as bus lanes. Way back when. Elephant trails that, once restored to their correct usage and if viewed from a spacecraft or airplane or similar flying machine, score out the unmistakable shape of an elephant’s head over the deranged, unplannable thoroughfares of pre-mythic London.
Tags: Academics, Brian Yapp, buffy strangelove, Buffy Strangelove Devotional Directional Manual, david kettle, Dionysia, Elephant Gnosis, london, Nobby Wyse, Re-Birth
