THE APOTHEOSIS OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.
Did I come out alright? Come through? Am I alone now? Erect? How have the vectors of my inconsequence been re-aligned? I have a recent past, a case history and a non-linear anterior history but I don’t know…I don’t know…
These are the vectors of my inconsequence. I have a past. A recent or mid-past. This is now fully non-linear. I’m joined to my own words. Where’s the meat? This is anterior biography? It’s only words. If only words had the power to heal, or to harm. There’s plenty out there who know how to manipulate words. Words are the lifeblood. Pictures are all very well, but words are what really get inside the brain. The heart. That’s all we’ve got. All I’ve got. Rules? Who needs ‘em? I’ve just come over all feverish. I can’t quite see in front of me. Distended belly up in front, my sight line is compromised. I can’t see, but I can talk. I can feel the words, whittling away at the insides of my brain. Trying to get out, desperate for an independent existence. As though they could live outside me. Words are what I’m made of. Words have made me what I am. I am words. I’ve been here how long now? Several times lately I’ve been thinking I was born here. Born in blindness, compromised vision. My legs and arms are restrained; I cannot feel them. Underneath and behind they seem restrained. My legs feel sort of weird. I can’t really feel them. My head is open at the top, or that’s what it feels like. I think my brain is exposed. All the words and visions making the break; Jailbreak from the pale meniscus. Get out of there. Looping and re-looping inside my brain, the words get stuck in my throat. And sticking to the insides, they don’t know what freedom is…but they want to know. They want to know. They want to feel the cool cool air, become separate. We’re joined at the head, Siamese twins. My brother he’s gone. My wife is gone too. I am gone. We are an odd couple, twice over. A sitcom corroborated ménage of plastic eccentricity.
Armed with fever, I don’t expect the pornography of violence, morbid titillation with an eye to the main chance. That trend is firmly linear past. The 70s were the best of course. But we don’t look back. In here, I look forward and back simultaneously, time dust exploding in front of my eyes. I can’t see. It’s the future that matters. It’s linear time that matters. And no, we (or I) don’t approve of the potato headed…style, sentimental re-evaluations that re-configure football as a cultural signifier for the new legions of semi-men, that re-positions “men” (and women) in post-new man, post sofa-chat, dinner party, pre-cynical, never-never land of list making, obsessional, masturbatory lad wank fantasy.
This is the story; the potato headed reminiscences and anecdotes are cancerous extrusions, the potato headed authorship is in doubt and denial. I think I am the story teller of this. If I can remember the fractured historical time lines, it’s the story of how I learned to grow down again, to de-evolve to a pre-secular state, to cope with separation from mythical identities, family members, twins, to regress to a nescient state. A bubbling, drooling infantile ignorance, into which I induct the knowledge learnt. This is the story of how I learned to love the enemy, hunker down, stop mithering, leave no room for doubt, and leave my audience, the therapists and secular priests, my observers, wondering whether or not I’m joking. Am I the doctor? Where’s Abrahams? Ahab, the gnarled obsessive, veteran of the wards…my nemesis. He bides his time, eyeing me through slits, awaiting my forced re-entry. He is the appointed superintendent of my re-birth, my filmed suicide. Will he be the one to cut the ties, to pull the ripcord? Will this be the one I’ve been afraid of, the inevitable outcome, when I’m prevented from re-entry on my own terms? I can just about hear the elephants, but my hearing’s going as well. Will I be entitled, under Ahab’s watchful eye, to circumvent private/public trust bureaucracy and film my suicide again? Am I for real? I now no longer know whether I’m joking or not. I don’t think he’ll let me. He’s inside me, my head. This mode is now hard wired. Unless you’re told otherwise, doctor, please assume I’m joking. Or not. I don’t know, in fact, if I’m joking. It makes it very difficult. This, in case I haven’t made myself clear, is the unassailable trajectory of all future history. You want everything on a plate I see. There’s no more room for false catechisms, vacillating voices, blocked minds. What’s the agenda? Where’s the angle? Well there isn’t one. I was kicked in the head many times at the Battle of the Bridge. My forehead is a livid ivy of stitched and re-stitched wounds, battle scars of straightforward attacks. No strategy to speak of, no porno-violence for the sticky sweet markets. No vicarious living for the ones who weren’t there. The voices of discontent will have been banished. Sent packing. All mitherers have been summarily dealt with. Narratives are consequently suspiciously straightforward and transparent. They’re suspicious from the outset. Plot lines are gratifyingly free of obtuse resolutions. Artfulness is an end in itself. What I don’t know, I make up. What I don’t believe, I force myself to believe. Inconsequentiality, which if you recall I have special responsibility for, is the essence. Elemental irresponsibility and inconsequentiality are the twin peaks of my aspiration. The unvarnished truth; my role in shaping secular lives. I learned to stop doubting, to forsake knowledge, which is of no more value, consisting as it does of under-contextualized ephemera. I learned to love myself, my extended family, all former cuckolded husbands, all the people who ever meant anything to me. People in my vectoral cross sights, people who are me. I learned how to conduct myself so that the intellect wasn’t overwhelmed by doubt, the soul hindered by self-hatred. I breathed hard, held my breath, and shared this profane currency. I learned to obstruct the anti-holy, and rediscover the sacred. Within. Physician. Love thyself. Doctor of Love, that’s me, a numinous whaler in oilskins. In hospital, being stitched up gives you a feeling of well-being. I’ve ministered to myself. I’m a priest of my own religion. I’m a devotional being. As I’ll have cause to remark at least once more, until I make myself clear, in this account of my suicide-assisted rebirth as Non-Linear God of Inconsequence, I am my own shaman. I hear my own confession. I give myself absolution. My head is bleeding. I think I was hit. My eyes are closing. So only short sentences now, the captain is circling, hovering, a vulturous shaman of intent. I pray to the interior where the particles that make us up, the electricity of information, the immortal soul, are even now creating static. I’m trying to catch the bullet in my teeth. But I can’t go on. I hear the elephants outside, frightening the dogs. The restraints are livid. These things are never learned, only arrived at. Knowledge may arrive one day, leave the next and you never remember where you’ve been. You may construct elliptical theories, contrive bizarre metaphors (if you’re a bit of a poet) to cope with the elemental un-knowingness of knowing these things, but you cannot learn them. You arrive; they stick. When you leave, if you’re lucky they leave with you.
My therapist Abrahams, when I still trusted the old ham – and oh yes!! Really!! We have therapists here! – even household gods have therapists – was elusive, obtuse. He maintained and maintains that we need to come to terms with ourselves, because generally he thinks we’re really fucked up. Not fucked up like you, oh no!! Very different, but still fucked up, in anyone’s language…a little bit distracted – he said to me;
“You know your problem don’t you? It’s just that you’re afraid of death.”
As though that had any meaning for me, a household god…Wake up mate…Death? “You’re afraid of it”, he said. Just like that. “You’re afraid of Death.” Capitalizing that last word for sure. Just to make sure I got the point in a nutshell. Like a rabbit in the headlights (he said), you hope that if you stay still enough, It won’t get you. My thanatophobia was so chronic (he said) not to mention ironic (when you think about it, he said) that I’d often scream myself to sleep. Sheer howling terror of Death kept me up at night for years. Linear time. I still don’t sleep. Haven’t for years. My priest (I don’t have a priest now) said to me “You’re damned. You are damned. To hell! Get out of here! This profane practice…can lead only to inner and eternal darkness, evil on a scale never dreamed of in your life…” So no more aspirational devotion for me. I’m too…what is it? The word is…physical. I formed my own religion. Of which I’m the only member. I don’t even want your money. I don’t need it. People come to me, to be touched.
Nietzsche, emboldened behind his huge moustache, would have known how to deal with this mealy-mouthed ecclesiast. There is no church capable of containing the raw power; the wrath of God…is there? God is too egregious a fellow to be cooped up in liturgy, in theological sophistry. Isn’t he? God in 3 persons; in tripartite opposition to the unifying force, God the holy (Curly), superior to the Son (Larry), or equal to the Holy Modal Roller (Moe)? Confusion. And also in arcane theology, but these things matter. They matter. The urge to confess is all. The urge to one-ness. Confession is an androgynous act, a conjoining, to become one in fellowship with the other. Confession is the love juice that oils all human transactions. Whole psychologies are predicated on the need to confess. Adulterous affairs are undertaken merely as enablers of the sickly sweet smell of confession, and we get hot just thinking about it. I am the father confessor, but if you come near me I will kill you. That sweet sick feeling, unloading, gagging up onto the altar of our judgmental superior. But find your own altar. Make your own music. Even if you can’t. Or won’t.
I don’t now, and nor have I ever, spoken in tongues…which I’m convinced my good friend the doctor confessor will verify. Or in dialect. Dialect is the last refuge of the terminally evasive. Coded language; exclusive, like secret knowledge. Knowledge, secret, dialect, all washed away in the purifying force. And the shakers, movers, delirious deluded figures, rattling closer and closer to empathy. As if that would ever work. Try anything though. Some people never know when to admit defeat. I hope I’m not a pedagogue, nor even slightly pedagogically inclined. I’ve been giving the wrong impression if I’ve been coming over as pedagogical. You have to draw the line.
On a mission to explain, I’ve been feeding myself ideas. Concepts. Feeding and feeling myself up. Hospital food. Hospital radio. Feeding on useless gobbets of information. There’s enough for an album. A double, or even a triple album. Homemade and homespun. I’ve invented an anterior life, a doubling up of my inconsequentiality. Before timelines confuse the issue. My brother Frank wrote the words, I wrote the tunes. It was a sort of medley, all bases covered as it were. I’ve been hit many times. My face has changed for the worse. Words are now literally all I have. My arms and legs are restrained. My head is the worse for wear. Dull headaches are merely the preamble to searing pain. I’ve been making up a tune. I wrote this tune…I’ve been ranting…just for effect…I’ve seen the light, in front of and below me. My belly is opened up, distended and flaccid…
Further extract from transcript of Brian Yapp self interview: (CCTV quality recording)…I’ve been…[indistinct]…copping into the general vagueness. I’ve been RANTING. Web space denied to legitimate belligerence, so ranting takes a breather. The space between real living and imagined identity…People on a mission to reinvent faith…faith in a world beyond hope or redemption. People all over just vagueing out, career sleepwalkers, vapid techno-mules, labourers burdened with info-inconsequentiality, get rich quick dot com ghouls, professional…What does this mean? People who were so fucking…[indistinct]… that they’d decided that career paths were fucking valid…People who, from the age … so, had actually decided that they were going to do this, or do that. Snappers up of the best housing, driving up the prices. Neighbourhoods splintered and fragmented, I’ve seen already spurious communities becoming unstable under the weight of spectral presences, decaying half-lives…lived in slow motion between office and home. Between living and living death. Bourgeois soul rebels. Lapping the barrel of correctitude dry. Mortgages are unavailable to the people who live there… They have to up sticks and live in the orbital hell-holes dominated by cars sold and resold, houses and bungalows dreary with cladding. Car boot sales are the only cultural respite, apart from the boozer. I lived outside the orbital, the energy…[indistinct]…was…energized my…[indistinct]…levitate…People pick up what they can, discarding last week’s crap for this week’s garbage. Petty criminality is all over. Just animals. No free will at all. Rats out of sewers…
…I knocked off a sallow commuter a week, or 2 or 3 unreconstructed underclass warriors. All suckling on the city’s tits. Seriously lacking an identity. Cars and trucks too electric. When being someone is compromised to the point at which identity itself is a debased concept, who wants to belong to the pathetic club? The whole culture’s gone sub-judgemental. It ain’t me see? Everyone’s a lost cause, a waste of fucking oxygen… But no one’s to blame. Blame is attached for all ills on perceived slights, failures of etiquette. The offence giver is big in this fucking town. Everyone is offended. Everyone is slighted, as personal space and individual integrity is compromised. Offence is the …[interference]…w Thing. In the papers, on TV, on the radio, in news-groups, on e-mail lists, speciality whinge forums…Everyone’s got a sob story, self-exposure has been green lighted. Public catharsis therefore also the New Thing. Gobbed up, no place to hide your opinions, worthless as they are. People live their lives…vicarious exploitation…need to be noticed. But anyone’ll do, until the big show. Every syllable an audition, my every ill-thought out diatribe a showstopper.
But where it all goes wrong, see, where the culture’s in shock, retreating from its apotheosis…at the triple pronged Canary Wharf magick shack, is that this moaning is …[…]… wind. Moaning is no longer an …[interference]… tform, to give form and function to real angst. What we’ve got is just a mealy mouthed vacuous whining that gives moaning a bad name. It’s gone mainstream. Moaning is now conventional. Moaners no longer shape society. What? They never did? …the itchily dissatisfied, prickly heat sufferers, always lit the matches…[indistinct]…toe nails. It’s embedded in the popular…[indistinct] preserve of old women…bitter twerps, but moaners give edge to reality, shape destinies through bitching. A condensed bitterness coalesces around cultural currents, and piques them…[…]…self-justification. Everyone’s down on moaners, all because they became visibly enraged at every minor irritation…capture the essence of it, they are public…perception of ennui incarnated…Therefore, with angels and arch-angels…[footage cuts out]…enshrined as a pass-time for…[…]…in the dark days of the 80s, moaning has had its day. But really, all the people who know moan like the clappers, all day long. And when there’s no one else to moan to, they moan to themselves. But again, there’s …moans about other peo…[interference]…moaning all the time…life for most people about nothing if it’s not about moaning…life IS about nothing for most people. There’s a big fat …zero that just about sums it up…they mewl and puke and fight and scratch their balls and then they go belly up…But in the right hands, there’s no…[…]…that passes for moaning these days. Moaning gives us something. Speciality interests. Enclaves of like-minded hobbyists and lifestyle consensualists get together and beat the communal meat…feel communality…exclusive pursuits. Hobbies…inane time fillers. Anything rather than confront the emptiness within. The big fat zero. I’ve drawn strength doctor, from an identity predicated on a lack of identity, a lack of …authentic substance. Individuality is genre. Clubability is everything. I never joined any clubs. I’m hate. I hate people. I love their core…[…]…I…[indistinct]…they are now unable to bear their own company. I cannot, you will be unsurprised to learn, bear my own company. But I have, if you take the trouble to check my track record, acted as an enabler for others. I’ve given them the means, via agencies of self-promotion, the wherewithal, to really make a mark in this sphere. Looking up at the sky…I daydream, my head in rest supports; I see that I’ve done them all a favour. Before me, people believed they’d be better off shutting up and putting up. I made it possible…open up new possibilities. Loudmouths…a lot to thank me for. Me and the elephants…
Identity ceases to exist, except as conceptualized for use by those who join clubs, meet up…forget singularity. People are merely vessels…marooned in space and time. Recipients, consumers of leisure. Empty vessels to be filled with product. All joy drained, forced into the society of others, apart though together. There’s no dignity. You don’t dream in time and space. There isn’t any work done. And religion…Except mine of course. Belief is forced, made up. Commodity fun. As long as we’re funny we’re alright. Just fill time and space with product, otherwise disguised…loud guffawing…sexual excess…inane sensuality…frivolous prattle, satisfaction of trivial urges and everything’s alright it’s alright…(shouts) It’s alright. Now it’s alright. Now I’ve had words! Words are now OK alright…Done deals and built new pavements. New elephants trails. Clubs are redundant now we live outside. Euro of outside life, agencies open up possibilities for new kinds of life, new talents to foreground. I’ve foregrounded the impulse to display. I leave you no choice. My monitors are everywhere, support unfolding urban dramas…captured on old style security cameras. Crime has nose-dived, rendering the security apparatus redundant, a technology ripe for re-invention. I present more material via telepathy and through other outmoded means to my wife…
…London is my apotheosis, mythologized into supplementary wank fodder, column upon column of over excited, over stimulated, over stated eulogies. The best place of all. It’s just a wanker’s paradise, a self-serving lie, the people with most to lose from the loss of London as myth keep shtum…over their cappuccinos. I’ve made it live and breath again as a mythical space. Elephant froth, spume of trunked in water supplies over the city like angel lights…the old London populations have nothing to lose. They’ve already lost it…the tittering classes, flaccid bodies of literary pretenders, you know the type…fascinated by tube train arcana, postcode lore, street names fancied, ambience vampires…all sorts of morbid weirdoes. The real people don’t give a flying fuck about this, they just get on with living, fucking and dying…garden centers, pub for a quick one…way back from the places of darkness…packing their lives with the ballast of useless affluence, or in other cases with useless products worth £1 only. London’s belly, exposed and prodded by literary types, ex-corporation gardeners, seeking out hidden histories, gives off the stale gas of obsession. Dark deeds in the past, recounted for those on the fringes. And overlapping fictional voices with those of the unreal.
Scratching their balls, unwitting Wittgenstein mimetics, oriental wank fantasists, all thought and fear subsumed into the one will and/or life force. I popped up 60 years earlier as Hitler’s floozie…I entered the head of Stalin as a grisly private peep show…fantasizing over the deaths of their enemies. Paranoia, guilt, rage all just there, rendered banal, acceptable, because they’re not really your emotions, not your thoughts, merely clapped out second hand old things, private pornography, just floating about awaiting the expression that will be given to them by the likes of me and my familiars…
(lucid now)…London having been previously thoughtlessly mythologized from a non-coffee table perspective as a happening sort of place for the post ironic generation from the bottom up and from the inside out, when all you had to do was look around you to observe the legions of sub-myth entrapped metropolitans, I decoded that it was incumbent upon me to give them back a myth worth living in, a personal exegesis, personal cult religion, based on new and vibrant hyper-gnosticism, a theology of the self. I will ordain you as a minister in your own religion. You may have heard of this, but you may never have believed it. I appropriate the ironic for newly mythic usage.
We learnt from the chittering bogeymen of impoverished narratives about the underside, the alternative romance, we learned of occult-ish histories and we splash about in fuggy imagination, and we imagine lottery cash sponsored follies. Wheels within wheels…domes within domes. We spend money in our brains that the peasant functionaries in the government departments haven’t used/can’t use properly. Psycho-geographic walks through the darkness, the shadows are encouraged for a fiver. Seen London’s darker side!! Seen it from all angles. Ghosts have all fucked off to the orbital though. As we learn from ex corporation gardeners, savvy guides on deft meanderings in the underbelly, graffiti flecked with spurious import is illuminated with specious analysis, Illuminati are never far from the surface, cutting in like superannuated club bores on every conversation. It’s true you know. Concocted expeditions to destinations previously unimagined and now over-researched are endowed with surplus import and too heavy a layering of under-imagined meaning. What, not the fucking Illuminati again squire? We are imagined to be desperate for the meaning of the city to yield itself up. We are cracked up to be spellbound by the reinvention by never-were artists and poets. We are encouraged to gawp credulously at the revealed undertow of polluted force fields and static electric energy pools, which are ever present. We observe Walkmen with attitude, they buzz and squeak, electricity discharged at random into the debased ether. We drift like somnambulists from one unfunny situation to the next. The whole of life is hereby rendered as a de-evolution, a hugely un-amusing stand-up act. It’s a city whose guides demand you laugh at it, and remain awestruck. Unrestrained and causal, we are elemental buskers, catching its energy and using it for our own ends. They’re not used up. We’ve used up all patience. Plenty of residents are just clapped out and knackered. It’s all they can do to drag their bones from A to B. Like semi-expired batteries, only just enough fuel to creep around, but they know deep down they’re not going anywhere. They’re going under. They know time’s up. Time’s pinned them.
At loggerheads with the flow of energy, those with static cling tend to silt up the outlets, arterial roads blocked and sclerotic with commuter trash, old Roman highways bleeding into the guts of the suburban wasteland. Flyover cataracts, through-route lesions, junction embolism, sentry points for day tripping out of towners, the city feeds itself over and over again. The same raw material, the same diet. Commuters in capsules of contained wrath, bitter road rage charioteers high on immunity from the effects of their own anger, carpet chewers, eunuchs from the suburbs with saturday night fortitude coursing through their veins. They chant a release mantra. Kill the bastard! Mow the cunt down! Get the fuck off the road you CUNT!!! Cabbie wrath is similarly unexceptional, though explicable in terms of dread familiarity, a tourist friendly bellicosity that’s fooling no one. Road users are now habitually raged up and raving. They disabuse the tourists of the notion that they’re cared for. They’re the extrinsic virus…We distrust viruses like they were dangerous or something…but the tourists are full of belief. Knowledge, a pre-packaged gnosis available in guide book form. Travel guides, full of optimism, hope, belief in the point of it all. A dogged personal epiphany. A reaching out as well as a looking inwards. I’ve been sold dodgy hotdogs by low rent crims and I’ve liked it. Never that bothered on the point of expiry, my many botulism deaths were salutary. I died for their sins and their intrinsic optimism. They have a living to make from my dying. Outside hypermarkets, I assume dog man proportions and importune, taxing the day-trippers…I’ll still be here tomorrow…I have nowhere left to run, or to hide…I have no little place to call my own…A meaning needs to be excavated and then a thread extracted, a workable religious hypothesis extrapolated. I must be stiff. Keep your money in your wallet…walk around in parties of three or more. Corporate propaganda means nothing to the marginalized. Users of privatised utilities realise their existential precariousness. They luxuriate in the almost religious sense of having been forsaken by well-known and now visible elephant deities. They’re children at heart, and in fact, brought up on a cultural diet that is reassuringly childish. Low fat and low risk. Low resistance to the infections picked up in more robust times. The virus is different now, mutated beyond the reach of the panaceas of contemporary subsidised medicine. Every single visit to your GP is a test case. The whole thing unravels, each new mutation proving unsusceptible to treatment. The virus character is there…elephant masked, wielding a billy-club, right there…outside the door. Breathing into your intercom, reading your emails, poring over your tax returns, scratching a key down the side of your motor, dumping rubbish in your garden and pissing on your lawn, fucking your daughters and leering at your wife. Cameras, unobtrusive surveillance…cooool…unless you take religious matters into your own hands. It’s life and death now.
Civic irresponsibility mirrors private cynicism. You get what you deserve, or what you pay for. Those who pay deserve. I am essential for living, and for easy options. My pavements are encrusted, gum blackened and compressed into flattened spit gobs. They give up their essence of joyless fatigue. Walkmen are walking, joggers are jogging, arriving, to-ing and fro-ing, liking what they see. Multiple soundtracks mirror fragmented, crumbling micro-cultures, two or more tribes at war at any one time. Two factions, themselves split into sub-factions. It’s the cultural Diaspora, info-gobbets sent out and redeemed, welcomed home in new forms, bilious crowds of the mutually exclusive and self-interested. But I changed all of that. No-one need drop out now. I’ve given them familiars. Places to inhabit. Familiars and places…angels…like pigeons. Pigeons are unrealised gods, awaiting a re-entry that will never arrive.
Case File [cont’d]: This is how I frame a lecture, a white knuckle ride in public discourse. I see that deep down everyone in this city is a misanthrope. Those not admitting it are merely in denial. Livid irritation is the strongest, most potent currency, creating surplus voltage. Hatred understated is the hard currency. Hate downwards, upwards and sideways. Hate those taking up space, getting in the way. Barely suppressed anger…it’s big. No room to live. No lebensraum. Every petty office worker’s a nazi…under the skin…in the prickly heat of precious space denial. Tube angst gets right into the fabric of everyday life. The ones you love – just really irritating. Dionysia and I, always at each other’s throats. She writes the guides, as outlined above by me. Frank’s out of the picture now. He wears the cuckold’s horns over his mask. She never forgave him. This isn’t anyone’s fault, just the way things are. Intolerance is the new cultural currency and it’s on the up and up. I hate my brother, just because he is. I hate with a white-hot intensity. But this cynicism, the armour required every day just to get to work, is at heart just frustrated romanticism, thwarted love, the belief that things really should, really could, be better. Which is why I write travel guides, delineating the city’s elephant trails. I write them, Dionysia takes the credit. No, she writes them. I proofread them. It’s a well-ordered world.
That things are not generally better then they’re cracked up to be is turned into a desperate and bitter negativity, everyone else is blamed. I turn blame inwards, re-constitute it as electrical charge, and discharge it into the ether. Although the theme masked medics are all conspiring against my beatific vision of how things could really be, they can’t really touch me. Buffy Strangelove, this weird avatar, is the buffer against this localised angst. Buffy Strangelove alchemises the hard indifference of post-psychological existence into something fresh, something radiating iridescent beauty.
Despite this, we endure tittering boy-about-town DJs on local radio, Barbara Windsor drag-laughers bubbling out of the transistors, and bibliophagic, bibulous, fat gutted UncleMonty novelist/biographers, and ex-cool literary dynasties, holed up in their fantasy barracks, issuing cultural bulletins, mapping a meta-fictional London, a never-never land, a land of politicized follies, and overlooked mad artists, disregarded marginals, telling Londoners how it really is. But it never is this way. We roll our eyes at the lies they tell. We go slack jawed at the absurd fictions they propose. The obscure pleasure, of shared mythical living, they purport to sell. Pimps of the fetid urban sprawl, they presume to tell Londoners what they need to know. They really blow it up the tainted city’s arse. They don’t know, see, your average Londoners, without knowing that darker forces have been at work before. The knowledge has been washed, smart bombed away from their brains. The gnosis is absent, deranged. Marginalized. Darker forces are present than those they perceive currently pursuing them. Occult conjurings are in the open at last, conjurings whose provenance they’re ignorant of, being only just dimly aware of the overt magic being wrought by their everyday workaday demons. Time is sped up, no chance of re-invention for the dirty bastards in the bunkers of real life. But the meta-fictions and their narrators are deranged. History will bury their narrators.
These people are of course obliged to live and fuck and die without the benefit of a single useful thought ever entering their heads. Lack of nous is hard wired, they’re street smart but thick as two buckets of pigshit. Minds contain only white noise, or painful extremes of volume, reflected in agonized faces. For lack of a real focus, it’s gone tits up. We search in vain for an end to which education might be usefully directed. Policies are dreamt up in the wet dreams of think tank eunuchs and focus group time-servers. I offer my hand and my two penises for beatific adoration. Devotional objects, separated from my corporeal imaginings by hard surgery, performed by elephant masked quacks. I scream at the iniquity of it all, cruelty and cruelty heaped up. My legs are going quickly. I bike the contents around town. My city, the city of the night, is unfortunately becoming that of fleeting romance, of misheard insults, misperceived threats, vapid aggressions and squalid indifference. It now seems to make sense only to those who need to romanticize the filth of it all, and who actualize it all at a level avoided by most inhabitants, those who don’t feed off the shit-myth but who actually contain the shit-myth within their sorry lives. Masochism and an obsession with defecation…we know where that all ends don’t we? Don’t we? Most peoples’ lives…shit…for the good of the myth. Defecations are multiplied, in numerous subtly delineated forms. But me…I’m trying for a new myth, through my own suffering…no shit, Sherlock! That’s how self-interested I am. I am Top Of The World Ma!! I am the raw material. The material used and abused, I am the active meme. Knowledge is here again bombed clean out of me. I embrace in masked gnosis the very idea. I have…am…the very idea. I translate everything into classical Greek, I don’t have truck with demotiki…it’s literally all Greek to me. I spill my load on, of all places, Greek St, a Noho chancer; an unredeemable character, a hopeless schmuck, beering it up like there’s no tomorrow.
Busy worker ants. Book toting media cretins, awash with flaccid opinion and spurious narratives, sporting blue stocking fright masks. Television is, obscurely for the un-televisual, the unrelenting goal…full realization. Last chance to avoid the remainder bins. Write travel books, travel inside, if they can! But they can’t. Travel is a foreign notion to these blimps. There are no coherent narratives. Storyboards are as good as it gets. We’ve got shot of these literary games…ellipses in fashion…narrators never come clean and tell us who’s telling the story. Which is why I always make a point of letting you know exactly where you stand vis-à-vis yours truly, your humble narrator (no tricksy narrative devices ensuring you’re onside come the denouement) and Frank, our not so humble pre-psychological monkey-shiner. My story, let alone his, is enough to see you through. You’ll be your own minister. You don’t need spoon-feeding.
Meanwhile, back in crybaby-land, every storyteller jumps ship to sitcom land. Every tosser with a manuscript, doing the rounds; bicycle couriers doing great business. Immaculate receptionists look down their razor sharp noses. Parcels are franked and delivered. Couriers are mud spattered, fully pheromonal. Masks are worn to deflect inherent criticism and internet possibilities in addition open up in the minds of thin-lipped ambition vampires. Everyone is published…sooner or later. It’s just a matter of will, not talent. I got that one all wrapped up. Decoy dotcoms, spotty techno-geeks falling for my market oriented patter, my fall guys, geared up to fail, the fabled dotcom gold rush claiming 30 or so hopefuls per day. Back to mummy. Good money follows bad, gets wasted, following money that never knew where it was supposed to be in the first place. Frightened currencies go under, business geeks cower behind water coolers. Whole currencies invented for use on the net, currencies consisting of cheap ideas, unworkable hypotheses…subjects of dreary docu-soaps. They go tits up, flotillas of badly constructed boats capsizing in the flimsiest of breezes, because the weight distribution is all wrong, pitching pinkly scrubbed teen moguls into murky waters, into oblivion, so young mothers needn’t after all leave home. Get people together; see if we can’t provide some glue for this crumbling thing…this civilization. The walls are coming down. The tracks are laid. Cartographers draw up maps. But Cyberspace is unfortunately still perceived as the only viable growth area, despite convincing and recent evidence to the contrary. Real life is considered a laughably antiquated anachronism; real life is unsustainable unless it comes guaranteed by cyber reality. Transactions do not resonate, hum into life, unless originated digitally. It used to be that no one was real unless they’d been on TV, now you need a web presence too. Self-publishing, vanity publishing, those with nothing to say determined to say it anyway. The Internet. It needed destroying. I considered destroying the Internet as a going concern. Strike one. Now people are happy to stroll in newly constructed Arcadian urban boulevards, monitors observing their bucolic progress towards cappuccino nirvana, a contrapuntal lifestyle of living excess, without information cluttering the real highways and byways.
Leisure ghosts, flitting in and out of terminal charnel house gyms; bogus taverns with reduced price booze, and free Internet access. Every pre-teen has a dotcom business plan hatching in his or her fetid, fevered brain. What? Didn’t they listen? Not even to the voices of the angels? It’s the rules of Boom and Bust, and the bosom of the city actively suckles both boomers and busters. No proper jobs now? I’ve yet to read a job description that is actually intelligible, although I write them for a living. What does it mean? No more manufacturing industry, just sneaker moguls, hated baseball-hatted speculators, prospectors at the metropolitan information frontier, and miners at the capital Info seam. The pan-global bloodstream is alive with the junk of information, all useless facts nonetheless incipiently endowed with novel significance. Insignificance doubles every year. Insignificant transactions are entered into at double the rate every month. Voyeurs and loners become excited by the new possibilities. Real life becomes more and more private. Information becomes useless in exponential degrees.
So how do you become someone without new information? This is my project, opening up new vistas of fecklessness and inconsequence, available to anyone able to prove the primacy of their desire, the reality of their need, their desire for attention, to demonstrate their understanding of the irrelevance of actual talent. I am the new broom. My children run like the wind after fleeting fame and micro-careers. They prostrate themselves for me. They touch me. I make things work for them. I affect a floppy hat, a floral tie, baggy trousers and garish spectacles. It seems appropriate, the point at which identity itself is a debased concept…hence the flashy threads. It’s easy for you to identify with me, and you subsume your identity in my franchised myth. No one need know who you are, as you stroll through the fully realized urban boulevards dreaming of the biggest pay off. Who wants to belong to this pathetic club? The insane, that’s who; cherishing their whitened out individuality, the mad stick out like beacons of disease, indicators of deviance. Seething with desire for the wrong sort of attention, they become the succubi of my bad intent. I deploy them in a manner not unlike that employed by my familiars. They pass muster; get me gigs. They lay down the tracks for me. People give them a wide berth and I fill the resultant vacuum. But it is paradoxical after all that in a weird inversion of the mythic values that I’ve been at pains to inculcate, mental disequilibrium, the actual fabled pre religious absence of Gnostic intent, is valued more than ever by the mediators. Those with thick, un-trepanned skulls are feted by the faint of heart. These people suffer for my art. I mean really suffer. There are circles of hell less exacting than the processes those who aspire to my funding are obliged to undergo. It’s like the Knowledge, except with real purposefulness. Scorning the use of scooters to do the metropolitan areas, they zip around both desirable and non-desirable postcodes by levitation, emphasizing the fully envisioned nature of post re-birthed celebrity to those still not in possession of cleansed truth, and re-opening the disused bus lanes.
But what I’m up against is that the whole culture’s going sub-judgemental. Blame ills on perceived slights, failures of etiquette on the perceived offence giver. Everyone is offended, and all kick downwards. We have our metro-gods too, always on hand, on callout, givers and takers of offence. It’s not a great job, but someone’s got to do it. Everyone is primed for offence taking, so gangs of my offence givers are out there, just waiting to offend. Offence is the New Thing. It’s a ritual. And it’s a game. It’s a shame. It’s also more than a shame that my colleagues in pre-secular hell incessantly whistle inane tunes, punctuating the flaccid days… signature tunes of terminal boredom and indolence. They are waiting to be consumed. Their humour is wanting. The birth of their want, it signals the screaming space, white noise in terminal heads, a vapid refrain that never ceases, can never cease. If they don’t fret, then others can and will. The bodies of the living are already dead here, un-massaged. Polarities are non-aligned. Thought doesn’t enter in here. It’s forbidden, being the intrusive agent of life, change and will. Culture is something that curls the lip. The songs sung are obsolete. The lives lived are obsolete. The riff pounds on oblivious, beating sense to death. People just don’t know. Don’t have the equipment to know. I open heads, poke around in the temporal lobes, implant growth serum. Hippocampus grows according to the Gnostic capability of the patient, the show-off tendencies inherent. Not everyone measures up. Does this all seem just a little too gloomy? I fear so, but check the windows. Look outside! I engineered this. Again! Ahab looks on with vulturous intent. He thinks I’m dead meat. I am Buffy Strangelove…I am this idea…because I’ve known the emptiness. I’ve confronted it nightly, caught myself thrilling to the sensuality of negation. Anhedonia a necessary corollary of pre-life, nihilism in wrap around sarcasm, disdain worn like a heavy overcoat. Onanism is in the circumstances the best palliative, the unrealized a slaphappy chappy mired in angst. Pre-birthed. Mask up, breathing apparatus in place.
And so, let’s see, the witch with whom I had been conjoined was now singular. Medusa Rappa, a product of two or more different religions and social castes. Manifestly unhinged, manipulative, psychopathic…possessing not only the inclination but also the wherewithal and more importantly the will to assert the will. She’d been trepanned in adolescence, far too early. She wanted early or pre-cogged Gnosis. Trepanning then a youth fashion statement. And so the brain juice wanted out. That much was obvious. There was some other animus at work here. The cerebral fluid, livid from imprisonment, had been throwing hokey incantations, reciting an obscure kabala of release (manifested to the outside world as wildly inappropriate laughter at all the wrong moments) with a view to a jailbreak. The trauma of this too-early trepanning remained and deepened over the years despite exhaustive Elephant Gnosis™ therapy. Later in life she shot her former lover in the head while suffering short-term memory loss and like a fool I subsequently gave her a good character reference. Otherwise she’d have gone down for it. No question. The demented aspect she presented filled me with pity I guess. She was marking time to the beats of restraining medication. She wrote terrible hagiographic books, airport thrillers, cookery scum pamphlets…and she refuted all criticism, gainsaid any adverse sentiment…and was bolstered by the equally distressed wives of literary cronies…and was afforded at all times an indulgence denied to the merely prosaic. You can’t really argue with naked will and thus a pattern of appeasement was emplaced, the totalitarianism of madness not about to be challenged by democratic moderation. Medusa, the raptor. Medusa is another night in hell. In my desert shack, to which I’d been obliged to withdraw to concentrate on my anterior life, Dionysia was able to delete the harmful effects that the Rappa had inflicted, at first via Polarity Massage and subsequently by teaching me the tricks of Mythic Rejuvenescence. My batteries, in other words, were recharged. I was able to wait, to bide my time in elephantine meditation, invoking the herds that I was aware would one day be the key to my ultimate freedom, until such time as some sort of guiding spirit, some thin lipped creative genius in coincidental need of a household god, should happen past. And as I may have said, I didn’t have to wait all that long. Limos bearing coked up rock gods doing the continent were a not uncommon phenomenon in those days.
Murder was Medusa’s parting shot. One afternoon she casually announced she was a murderess. Casually, hysterically, as it were. She railed anew at the one she claimed to love, snapping out disingenuous denials as to her true motives. The brain juice overheating, the trepanned skull throbbing with intent, I knew in my heart that this death was a pre-cogged conception, an engineered event. And she knew I knew. A delicately poised dance of denial was consequently enacted. Questions were taboo, as was Reason. Instinct and savage religiosity were primary indicators. I’ve often wondered what possessed me to rewrite her character endorsement in these moments? As I say, pity is the likeliest answer to that one. But what spirit of appeasement possessed me, facilitating the supine capitulation? Surely it was voodoo of some clandestine type? It must have been sorcery that ended up itching me where it hurt. The rhythm method, rhythm and blues method, resulting in a prolonged delta blues for the future. It was a riff that was to be played out forever. A melancholy riff of stupidity, or feigned innocence, pretend-shocked discovery of the dangers of trusting to short-term memory set up a pounding refrain that would last the rest of our lives and beyond. I am a perjurer and I’m destined to pay the price the rest of my natural. I was not yet pre-birthed, and I was outgrown in lovehate. So it was that the secret service goons of her fecund imagination greedily consumed my image avatars, grabbed a few million confused and disoriented foot-soldiers, coshed a likely looking suspect, tied it up, gave it the 3rd degree and forced it at gunpoint into the inspirational hippocampus. My hand was forced. I therefore, as though in a dream, told the court that she was a woman of impeccable character. The reference was put on file. Her eyes glowed as my stuttering thoughts formed themselves into inadvisable approbations. Ever since I’ve known, since I snapped out of it, I’ve been sort of resigned. The game’s up…if you’re going to be caught like that, you deserve everything you get pal. I was done up like a kipper. It was sorcery. But my mum won the war. Cancer was what did it. She knows that idiots are obliged to live with their idiocy; it’s the price they pay for being idiots. The people I know are beyond redemption, until re-birth. We never learn, until Mythic Rejuvenescence kicks in, while knowing that learning is the only redemption. We are addicted to keeping a tight grip on our futile behaviour patterns, never learning, and our psychologists shake their heads and click their tongues. Ayton is one hell of a joker. Manning type, he’s a fat gutted mike stand leaner. I am his unsmiling audience of one. I have learned a mythic response. I have become divine in her absence, which he would deny me. She did love Strangelove he reckons, though profanely, in the way a hurricane loves the blasted landscape it leaves behind it, the way heavy thunderclouds burst above a fertile nightscape. It was all windswept emotion, centred on the bemused cynic who was through forgiving.
I’ve come through worse though. When I was even younger, I was married to a higher caste priestess who turned out to be a serial killer of the mind. A dragged up artist, a Horus-fixated falconer; she pretended a femininity that masked her true masculine instincts, the instinct to hunt and kill, to emasculate, to consume the paramour. But it doesn’t fit together neatly. She was in some other dream I had, a dream of angels, of incipient disaster. Clawed and hook-beaked, hook rings on nicotined fingers, feeding on gobbets of information. Houses were burning down and fat birds were darting to and fro, tearing at the fire victims. It’s all a kind of sorcery though. I’ve said that often enough. It’s all a kind of sorcery. The thing is, knowing which key unlocks the door, and then knowing which door to unlock. Tricky…unless you’re me. I can untie the vectors of inconsequence for you. That’s my boast and I stand by it. My doctors are utterly non-plussed. They don’t know what to make of it.
Tags: ahab, buffy strangelove, david kettle, Elephant Gnosis, Nietzsche, three stooges
