ELEPHANT GNOSIS BOOK ONE, PART THREE: 3 (THREE) ANECDOTES.

3 (THREE) ANECDOTES.

First, 3 anecdotes. Anecdotal and elucidatory evidence. Billy Hard Hat, so called because his head, trepanned, turbaned and bare of hair, approximately resembled a hard hat. The ridge of bone encircling the crown stood weirdly proud from the scalp, the brow bone protruding further than it should have, prime trepanning material. He walked down the road, right arm swinging violently, both marking time and delineating personal space. The left arm, numb now for a few weeks, remained virtually motionless. His GP, well up near the top of the list of GPs suspected by the medical watchdog authorities of being incompetent and/or of active malpractice, had told him that it probably wasn’t anything important. But he knew better, or thought he did. His whole arm numb, for no apparent reason. Not quite right. He was a wiry little bastard though, and disease wasn’t on his fictional agenda. Hard Hat outlives them all. He has other fish to fry.

For now he was on his way to the dentist, to have a worrying lump examined, a frighteningly hard and painful lump that had suddenly appeared in his lower left jawbone. But he was also a hypochondriac, usually a compendium of imaginary symptoms. Given his hypochondria, it’s also true to say that Billy was a malingerer. This was not so much that he wasn’t prepared to work if he needed to. Just that he saw no reason, in this particular day and age, to extend himself. His life was a parcelling of time between casino, kitchen, brothel and pub. Workplaces were no part of his scheme. The dignity of labour was not a slogan that resonated with him. Labour was simply an outmoded concept. The work ethic is fucked, he reckoned. Desperately in need of a leg up, or it would perish altogether. Academics in the soft left press had speculated for some time indeed that it had better be fucked, or we all will be. Hunter-gatherers, they implied, are by nature lazy, spending only 6 hours per week hunting, whereas proto farmers (which we all apparently became 10,000 years ago) have to spend all their time producing more and more food, the emphasis on quantity, for more and more people. People who otherwise would perish in fact survived because of the intensive farming producing more and more food…. and so on, ad nauseam. These articles had amounted to a slacker’s manifesto, a serious scientific apologia for putting your feet up. More people. More food. But we’ve out-evolved the work ethic, it’s a redundant concept. We’re hunter-gatherers by nature, not farmers. This idea appealed to Hard Hat, who liked a scrap as much as the next man. Appealed as compared to the over-heated and morbid competitiveness engendered in institutional culture, plus he was a completely lazy bastard. He may have conceded the need for a pale imitation of work, but only because he needed to keep himself in soft drugs, betting money and porn videos. There was no higher purpose. No further end to which he worked. He was just a shiftless idiot when all was said and done. A malevolent and otiose manikin, whose one unique identifier as an individual was an unusual method of self propulsion. His tempered motor efficiency was achieved by means of an abnormally enlarged hippocampus, given breathing space via the trepanned cranium. And now, by way of prevarication, and affording himself respite from the ordeal to come, he approached the World’s End…

“…Football’s not about what you deserve. I don’t care whether we deserved to win that match or not. The fact is that that cunt of a referee should never have disallowed that goal. He bottled it because he didn’t want to be responsible for the home team losing an extremely tense match in the very last minute of extra time. That’s all there is to it!”

In the pub, a sozzled suit was loudly pontificating on the result of some match that had been showing on the big screen. Pub life as Billy knew all too well was now just football punditry, over-amplified and tedious beer-disputation, modelled on TV forebears who were themselves utterly bereft of dignity, charisma, soul, insight or animus. He walked past the fat buffoon with his right arm scything the air provocatively, deliberately spilling his Kronenburg in the process. Splash! as the liquid coursed over his shirt front.

“Watch it you little tosser”.

“Tosser?”

“Yeah, little tosser.”

“Little tosser?”

Emboldened by the dissolute aspect of the emaciated figure before him, the suit prepared himself for fun.

“Yeah, bald, ugly, deformed little tosser”.

And to drive home his point, he extended a palm and flicked Hard Hat’s turban from his head, exposing the trepanned skull and tumescent hippocampus.

Seconds later, the pub was in uproar. The suit lay unconscious and bleeding, his nose now split down the middle. Hard Hat was buried under a mound of enraged pundits intent on offering their critiques, personally, without prejudice and with the aid of fists and boots. He had far more now to worry about than the dental pain which a few moments earlier had been his major pre-occupation. His turban unravelled, his forehead throbbing and yet he himself, without noticeable dignity, called on the gods of his forefathers to assist him in his hour of need. At a previous appointment, the dentist had informed him that the lump was no more than a cyst; the result of an infection itself probably occasioned by one of the many cavities that decorated his teeth. Root canal work would be required. At least it’s not cancer, he’d thought. As he lay there, open to the attentions of the football pundits, the thought that he didn’t have cancer was nevertheless still a comfort, although not now quite so warm a consolation that he could afford to bask in it. Action was called for, and action was what he now decided upon. His wiriness and agility had often allowed him to extricate himself from scrapes before and now, eel-like, even with his arm still benumbed, he wriggled free of his attackers and was off like a rabbit, his good arm swinging vigorously as before. The pub struggled to its feet, dusted itself down, shot its cuffs and the punditry resumed, empty and vapid as before…

“…As somebody wrote the other day, the one undeniable fact about this whole nauseating farce is that Eriksson and the FA well and truly deserve each other.”

“But again, is he really so despicable? What actually has he done? If we’re talking about his ‘duplicity’over ongoing meetings with future potential employers, it falls flat. There’s no loyalty on the other side either. Loyalty is now effectively a completely debased currency, used disingenuously by both sides merely to score cheap points. Consider the fate of all managers as soon as results go against them. Where’s the loyalty there? As a pro aware of his market value (ie: what people, including the FA, will pay for his services) surely he has every right to maximize his earnings. We flatter ourselves if we think he should be honoured just to breathe the same English air as us. It’s a skewed perspective. A category error.”

“Yes I see what you mean. I agree. The issue here is the FA and their laughable posturing, their ridiculous yapping about being “humiliated”. The story is really just about English prurience and panic in the face of anything vaguely connected to sex, dressed up as moral outrage when the real subject is actually just bad PR. And bad boardroom management. How in fact the FA were not able to manage their own news presentation. It’s pathetic. It’s all he said/she said/he said nonsense and the FA are revealed again as totally incompetent. They’re the real villains. Continually making the wrong decisions. And then when exposed they start bleating, as in this instance, about it “not being right” that they’re made to “look like fools”… well, if the cap fits!!”

Hard Hat scurried up Camden High St, past Somerfields, past Woolworths, past the record shops, past the scummy boot stores with their grotesque sculpture frontages, past the fast food outlets and past the trinket stalls on towards the tube. Up to the tri-pronged pyramid junction at the top (to your left the delights and primary grazing territory of Chalk Farm, Hampstead and Primrose Hill standing proud at the fat crown of Regent’s Park. Straight on, the gentrified yet still down at heal precincts of Kentish Town and Archway. Or to your right, the prow of Camden Road leading down into the inmates’ playgrounds of Holloway and on up to the tumourous lump of Finsbury Park) where all the White Cider (8% vol) merchants disported themselves outside the appropriately named World’s End pub. The eye is livid here. For Hard Hat, all directional vectors are hard wired into camp self-effacement. Fictionalisation is at a premium. And here the punditry tends more towards the subjective, the street drinkers offering razor sharp critiques of the citizenry that are intensely personalized. And about nothing so abstract as professional football. Rather, straightforward personal abuse, both of their fellow drinkers and of straight-ahead passers-by, is the order of the day at the World’s End. Sales pitches are offers of degraded goods and passers-by feel themselves tainted, shuddering, though physically unmolested. Fights, pathetic bouts of ineffectual fisticuffs, are wont to break out between these hardened street critics at the drop of a hint of a slight, at the slightest suspicion that liberties are being taken. Liberties are taken routinely. And imaginary slights are taken with a consistency that is difficult for the uninitiated to comprehend. Disputes are entered into with a frightening tenacity that doesn’t correspond to the reality of any known spiritual template…

As Billy passed this body of recalcitrant and uncongenial men and women, a particular recumbent body caught his eye. The grizzled tramp, greasy coat fastened with string, sockless feet in distressed sneakers, livid face cheery red despite or because of the chill in the air, was propped in the angle of door and pavement, singing the songs of the damned. White Lightning at hand, he was at sleep’s door, serenading himself with the songs of his youth. He’d aged rapidly, 20 years bent double, time warped beyond parody, beyond time. What caught Hard Hat’s gaze was a slip of paper that had just fallen from the fellow’s inebriated fingers. An unredeemed betting slip. Result! The greatest moment of his life so far. Snatching it up with his good hand, Hard Hat quickly moved on, making sure he caught the recumbent figure a glancing blow with his Nike, not that the dead to the world crooner noticed a thing. He was beyond pain. Beyond the static charges of electricity that were afflicting the residual pedestrian commuter traffic making its way to the tube station.

The old man’s horse had finally come in. Lighting strikes once only. Middle age went by…five minutes…By way of celebration, he’d made the mistake of letting everyone in on his good fortune. His audience had responded in the only way they knew how and had beaten him to a pulp, but somehow the betting slip had in the ruckus escaped detection. Now it appeared again just as Hard Hat chanced upon the scene. Such are the weird convergences of chance upon which fortunes are made and lost. Too late for him now, as Hard Hat relieved him of the slip. 500 notes. Hard Hat was a pig. A pig in shit. All his birthdays at once. High-class tarts coming out of his ears. Finest skunk. At least for the next week anyway.

“The natural order of things is that kids should loathe their parents, what their parents like and what their parents want them to like. And that parents shouldn’t defer to the tastes of their kids. Since the 60s there’s been a cataclysmic reversal in the cultural/generational polarities. Now kids are out-parenting the parents. Out earning cash, gaining economic kudos, largeing it, distancing themselves from childhood and the childish with indecent speed. And their parents cheer them on…keen to get the little fuckers out of the house so that they, the ever immaturing adultescent parents, can return as soon as decently possible to the Peter Pannish Eden from which they were ruthlessly expelled by parenthood. They embrace technology every bit as enthusiastically as the cuckoo young. Back catalogues are re-purchased in new formats. The terminal playground of middle youth is filling up with scrubbed clean check shirts from 20–50 years old. It’s all middle aged spread chat rooms on the internet – full of somethings. Record company back catalogues – catering to the 30/40somethings. Internet commerce – progressed by geek boys and girls so their generational forebears might more easily distribute the largesse of their oh so expendable middle incomes. Share the boom money. Share the good times. Parents puking and mewling, over-coked, dinner parties…or for the less salubrious…club nights. You thought AbFab was satire. Pure, sober realism. Pure documentary. The whole country’s gone meta-infantile. It’s a national disaster. The 60s never happened in this theology. Or they only happened in order to conceive the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of the 70s. A time when no style/no taste really DID = GOOD!! English pop really did transcend for a few years the prevailing political cynicism. The dark middle age of youth is now upon The Culture.

There should be, but there isn’t, an ongoing antipathy and simmering unspoken resentment between the tastes, mores and outlooks of the two exclusive estates. Between the two there should be mistrust, bitterness, mutual suspicion and contempt for the others’ cultural frameworks. The estate of childhood and the estate of adulthood are mutually exclusive. So say all of us. A-fucking-men. The tendency of the various popular media to establish, with the collusion of the fashion lobby, adulthood as merely an extension of childhood is at the root of the modish assumption that there’s no qualitative difference between the two. They do this to open the wallets of child-adults. Nothing more nor less. Do we really want a society of on-message kids who’ll just ape their forebears? Evolutionary theory teaches that the succeeding generation must, if not literally, then figuratively, kill the preceding one. Without this friction, a friction which burns the next generation into shape, the human race will turn to mediocre, sub human sludge. How on earth are kids supposed to develop into autonomous adults when their models are groovy parents? The fate of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons is salutary. Done diddly done for, and all due to his beatnik folks……”

Yapp closed the magazine. He then closed his eyes. Opened them. He looked up from the glossy leaves, sticky and luminous. The hack who wrote this shit had earned his corn for the sweetly reasoned ersatz analysis, but still there was something missing, something absent. He sighed. Buffy, oh Buffy! Buffy Strangelove, the articulate amanuensis of his dreamworld, due to change his world. All worlds. Made up shit. Reality Corps leaflets left out in the rain. The world as he perceived it held its breath and nothing happened for a while. As soon as the betting slip had been redeemed, the world breathed again. Yapp sat in the public bar of the Elephant, Kronenburg in front of him, musing abstractedly. He already knew, the world at large already knew. There was a surfeit here of redundant information, glossy and superfluous. Tautologous information, confirming nothing. Billy Hard Hat appeared at the pub door, an excited smirk playing about his crooked mouth. He held in his nicotined fingers a wad of cash.

“It’s you birthday mate. All your birthdays at once.”

He was viewed without interest.

“Get ‘em in then”.

Hard Hat, with a hard on, made for the bar. Kensington could wait. He needed to get rat arsed first. Later opera tarts. Evening dress? A minimum requirement. High-class tarts; full-on lovescenes; quickies not on the agenda. 5 star luxury, Laurent Perrier or Roederer Crystal on tap, silk dressing gowns, curly toed slippers, room service not required for Room Service. He’d won loads at gambling, although not for a while. Gambler and rambler. Trepanned skull still and always a directional and divinatory tool. Correct numbers guessed with ease. He walked himself into ecstasies. In the circles into which he’d blagged an entrée contacts stay contacted. His credit was good. A caricature weird and exotic presence at the top Knightsbridge casinos, he was the recondite familiar of a number of society babes, a walking (or shuffling) talisman, a fantastical decorative ornament, a shifty homunculus, a comedic sidekick, an oddment, a ladies travelling companion, prescient in calling the shots at craps or blackjack. Working his way up, making his rep as Kitchen Porter in the kitchens of various top London hotels, his progress into high society was already archetypal. He was a blue-blood, a storyteller, a narrative fetishist who claimed descent from Tibetan dugpas, a fictional bloodline that seemed to imply impossible and previously under-researched genetic variations and (frankly) unbelievable versions of the truth. He claimed to the dizzy harem and anyone else who’d listen that the extrinsic world was merely his present playground. He claimed to have dreams in which he took wing and literally stole the earth. He offered fictional versions of himself in which he was identified as the original baseball-hatted vampire. He babbled of angels and familiars. He’d conjured them in his lunchtime. His religiosity knew no bounds and was, he averred, an elephantine accretion of his thrice-consecrated self, courtesy of The Big Guy. Buffy Strangelove’s name was never openly referred to by him, was only whispered in exotically appointed apartments. These big twitted babes, into whose ears he habitually decanted these outré fables, and into whose society he’d originally been precipitated after he’d blagged a stint as croupier – cover due to staff sickness – at one of the top casinos, and whose predisposition to credulity was unsurpassed, fell for his cock-and-bull stories hook line and sinker. In this harem of Arab servicers, magic and the related arts were the only things that made sense. So in this super febrile milieu, Hard Hat also made perfect sense. In this rarefied world, a twilight world of tarot throwers and magic practitioners, clandestine cash transactions and betting runners, fabulating homunculi were commonplace and unexceptional. Betting was always odds-on the afterlife, any afterlife. Even prosaic entrées to the mythical realm. Passwords were enabled. Billy was a bagman for the casinos, court jester to The Big Guy…Strangelove appeared as and when, unexpected and unannounced, and soon enough Billy began pimping for the whores. Perks were like crumbs from the top table, and he had to pay for them, big money, access the point of it all. Access and re-entry the divine metaphor re-fleshed, lent reality tonnage by Strangelove. Strange love. The point of it all. Shit kicking no-marks, onanists, wouldn’t have the access, he reasoned. He was access all areas. At a price.

His other sideline was supply. Information, rumour, Chinese whispers, documents…documents retrieved from celebrity trashcans, floated in word of mouth markets, information that was dynamite in the wrong hands. He nipped into and out of the sight lines of security cameras so fast that he registered only as a blur, only recorded as the faintest suggestion of trouble. He operated at 96 frames per second. Technology, the engine of accelerated culture, wasn’t fast enough to keep up with Hard Hat. He was away and gone before he could even register. And now he was armed with 500 notes. It was looking to be a good night. But the streets were fully cabbed-up, clogged with taxis, levitating magicians, double-parked dimwits, delivery cowboys, removal johnnies, bus lane outlaws and road ragers. Safer just to stay at home. And try getting a cab after 4 o’clock. To Knightsbridge? Are you kidding? In this traffic? Impossible. Cabbies, he discovered, are all in their stupid little green-hatted tea huts, swapping porno bluff stories, getting all testosterone over the tabloids and necking mugs of sweet tea. Bus drivers too have their exclusive little haunts, not that he ever caught the bus. Bus garages, in windy and desolate forgotten enclaves, in catatonic suburbs, play host to legions of sweaty, oafish malcontents. The dismal half-light swallows coronary cases whole, then spews them out in honking double-deckers, specifically to risk the lives of their passengers. Heart attack transportation for everyone concerned. I don’t take the bus, except up the hospital, because I still need that old time religion. But people don’t return my calls. My emails remain unanswered. I’ve got a hidden agenda. Actually it’s so hidden even I can’t remember what it is. I used to be a lecturer. Frank was on the lecture circuit, and would debate fiercely with other academics, look condescendingly over the top of his spectacles, take questions from the floor. His jokes were of the patronising variety, designed to discomfit his discoursing adversaries. High camp in academia.

My brother used to visit me, until I requested he stop. It’s not exactly pleasant being leered at by an idiot with a hidden agenda. My familiar angel hovers nearby, tutting and looking meaningfully at her watch. Then, in an overt show of impatience, whoosh and out the window she goes. The lights buzz, Buffy Strangelove invocations now seem, if anything, even less of a palliative. The doctors apparently can’t “do anything”. Looks like I’m a goner. Doomed. And no-one to carry on the family business. When we were cut open, cut apart, they expected at least one of us to die. Looks like the doctors will belatedly be proved correct. Why does it take 40 years to die? Where are my fucking legs? That bastard took them. Medical science. That old thing…

Brian Yapp (self interview/testimony to ward witness/therapist)…..I, uh, started exhibiting Frank about 10 years ago. I was offered good cash deals by shady east end boys in leather coats to show him off in church crypts, upstairs rooms of boozers, behind factory walls, on canal towpaths. Frank was by that time an embarrassment. He’d get threatening calls at his office from “fans” threatening to decapitate him. Otherworldly stalkers in theatrical capes threatening to give him a good seeing to. Messages left on his office answer-phone punctuated by maniacal bursts of laughter. But Frank Yapp is my amanuensis. He speaks in tongues. He’s all tongue. A limpid monkey boy, arse of a monkey, face of an academic. He’d attempted at one point to become a kind of pop svengali, inviting applicants on local radio to sing to him. 52 turned up but invading street tramps turned the thing into a farce. Word of mouth on the street had it that the hired hall in Shadwell was a kind of soup kitchen for wannabe “characters” with the added incentive of a sort of ur-career as local TV colour. TV crews, there to cover the event, filmed an admixture of filthy decrepits co-mingling on set with bouncy, cheeky faced wannabe pop stars, the whole orchestrated by a man (plus two beautiful assistants) in a wheelchair, without legs but with a huge livid arse. The cheek of the devil. He’s a visionary alright. The event, an organizational disaster, later turned up as a photo-montage piece, entered for the Turner by a young would be conceptual artist/bullshitter. Made the shortlist, but didn’t win the prize itself, which was won by the acclaimed conceptualist Damo Patchouli whose winning entry comprised an artfully arranged collection of betting slips and used lottery tickets. It was, as the art world had come to expect, a masterpiece of understated sarcasm, a grinning gauntlet of intent, thrown down before the skeptics and the sensible press.

The death threats came from disgruntled young wannabes who suspected that Frank had orchestrated the scummy invasion as a sort of sick stunt, a hyper-ironic comment on their own fecklessness and aimed primarily at their own discomfiture. Of course it had indeed been thus intended, as they suspected, as a satirical expose of their desperation for fame. Although the constabulary also cautioned at least two of the tramps, caught in the act of pissing through the letterbox of Frank’s Soho office. I had, of course, subsequently to take him on the road, a brashly erudite and gaudily percipient elephant man. This was before the TV offers came in. Copywriters are always a few years behind the pace, although they flatter themselves they’re ahead of it. Ad men are shingle, washed clean of ideas with each new tide. 3 anecdotes by way of illustration. Later…

BOOK TWO, PART ONE: THE INCIPIENCE OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

BOOK TWO

THE INCIPIENCE OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

“…I believe in a heaven from which I escaped; I believe I followed the light and that immigration need me now, as then, for clues. I believe it’s a heaven from which none of you, even you baseball-hatted guys, are theoretically excluded. I believe. I make others believe. If only you knew the cheap tricks we employ in getting there. If only. If only. The cheap cheap tricks…I believe…”

…About 200 yards away, the bus screeched to a halt. There was a loud though muffled bang. There was a commotion. What sounded like bellowing, trumpeting…Eileen looked up and thought she saw, in peripheral vision, angels…obscure clues, levitating down the Camden Rd, shimmering with intent. Across the road from the bus stop, in the playground, a thin pale yellow juvenile line ebbed and flowed. Several minutes later, the surplus passengers having alighted, she was aboard the bus. As it chugged and wheezed away, the old woman had ample opportunity to observe the young athletes skittering to and fro, free like angels, light as birds, swooping in and around in youthful abandon. There wasn’t much to look forward to for Eileen. 80 if she was a day, her time was gone. At most she had, what, 5 years left? If she was lucky. And now, sickness was stalking her, it was ever more insistently upon her. She had no idea whether the waves of nausea she felt every morning presaged the big one, or whether these sicknesses were only to be expected…at her time of life. Her GP hadn’t had much of a clue, pressing his fingers together in a parody of medical rectitude, his stock response having served to address nothing of her anxiety. Solicitous and careful, he’d just suggested that she take it easy…don’t expect there’s anything really to worry about…but you should expect a certain, ah, degree of deceleration at your age…

…Heaven again. Three shades of pale grey. Masked up. I’m alarmed at the prospect of running into Eileen again. She was my mother. What will she say? I know what happened anyway. I’ve seen it in my, ahem, dreams…Man at desk, suited, bow-tied, up to his elbows in invoices, fantasy self importance, bespectacled men in cheap fabric all around. Water coolers, tap-tap-tap of keyboard sound-ambience, the glow of spectral presences on hi-resolution screens, beyond which…nothing…“but Madame, you aren’t actually entitled to any disability benefit. The medical notes we have here on file suggest it’s nothing to do with rheumatism. It’s just…” he tailed off.

“Just what”? she demanded.

He played with his spectacles, and nervously clicked at his Parker biro. His limp tie flopped indeterminately in the suffocating office air, mimicking his lank hair, which clutched suicidally at the crown of his head. The office thrummed with boredom. Frustration was predominant, a majority of it emanating from the office staff themselves. The supplicants were beyond boredom. And beyond frustration, their suffering a livid caricature of suffering, a representation of something beyond and above suffering. Meta-suffering. Misery had outrun itself, the stragglers left behind in a welter of representational angst. They stood for misery, as inane daytime presenters might be representational of the urge to half-witted chuntering. The old and the disadvantaged, the needy, versions of misery for imagining, in front of primed documentary cameras. The old and the disadvantaged, both playing to a different gallery, one filled with angels.

…the voice drifted back into focus. “It’s just that we can’t pay you any more money. We don’t have any more money to give you. You aren’t entitled to any more. The last time we reviewed your case, it was decided that you were absolutely at the top of the limit that we can pay to any one individual, war hero or no war hero. I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do.”

She looked on benignly. “I am not such a dogmatist as you suppose. Besides which, I very well know that you generally require proof for what you believe, and am, therefore, very strongly predisposed to respect your conclusions”.

It wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. The old, beyond the reach of irony, he reflected, make do with tense reality. Old people, nudging reception desks and flirting with death, waiting in waiting rooms, kept waiting as though time weren’t now urgent, beyond the understanding of functionaries whose only purpose is to keep them hanging about, hanging on. For the old, all too aware of the impending exchange of life’s brief candle for a life beyond death, that is a life beyond irony. Death comes to visit each day and night, visions of elephants at large, familiar spirits, uneven and leathery hucksters of ambivalence. Choppers fill the night sky and circle like vultures, then seek out and occupy the dreams of the very old. Fires built to keep the warmth in merely attract the choppers. The choppers carry versions in black chic of the cloakèd one, the grim reaper.

Night-time dreaming with the chopper blades throbbing over-head…The orchestra was on form. Effortlessly dispatching the Messiah from memory, the attentive audience rapt, the evening was proceeding as planned, undetermined, by the book. Minutes in, the collective reverie was broken. In the upper circle a woman was moved to vomit copiously and loudly upon the heads and shoulders of the patrons seated in front of her. Clearly not fully functional, either mentally or physically, the octogenarian sat as though dazed, seemingly unaware of the appallingly inappropriate, clearly involuntary regurgitation. As critique, it was unbeatable, a poetically rich metaphor. The recipients of the contents of her stomach reacted as though themselves dazed. Dazed, and confused, and being largely composed of members of the English middle classes, their reactions were circumscribed by the need, long ingrained, to remain polite. Not to make a fuss. Not to acknowledge overtly the indignity to which they’d been subjected. Dabbing nervously at each other’s shoulders with hankies, they did their best to give the impression of having been only mildly inconvenienced.

Word spread by stealth until the pressure bubble was ready to burst. Static electricity filled the air and stewards, themselves having seen better days, were suddenly in attendence. Neighbours of the stricken pensioner began to move surreptitiously away as the stink of bile filled the air. The orchestra played on oblivious. The stewards began the task of excavating the woman from her seat. She was led slowly away, her humiliation transferred oddly to those who bore witness to the scene. The discomfort of the elderly sick reproaching those not yet ill, or old, or those as yet unaware of encroaching illness. An angel at her shoulder was visible only to a few, those fellow code breakers who’d strayed too far into the light during their hours of wartime watchfulness. Coded embarrassment, breached only through divine intervention. A member of the decrypt force that won the war, she’d lived long enough to know that there were no thanks due to her from the Walkman generation. It was perhaps a privilege still to be alive, now that the last remaining memories of that dark night of the national soul were gradually being extinguished, candles blown out, all over the land. There were still one or two left whose minds were not yet befogged and struggling, caterwauling into the dark night of dementia, and in these minds there was yet a degree of life. Half a century of contempt from those whose lives they’d made possible couldn’t wash it away. One of her fellow former cryptographers, bearded and pixy-bonneted, was these days in the habit of approaching the young uninvited, bearding unreflective personal stereo bearers, and demanding loudly that the volume be turned down. The bemused recipients of this heroic behaviour were always too taken aback to protest. The spectacle of this blue-bearded old coot, this drivelling yet strangely dignified seer, high on static, facing them down, giving them the eyeball, was just too much for them. And besides, the silent approval or snickering amusement of bystanders made it impossible for these fellows to play any role at all other than that of humiliated buffoons.

Down the steps came the old lady, supported on all sides by attendants who, though older and yet more decrepit even than their charge, were unflustered. These superannuated commissionaires stood for something insane, and they discharged their duty with immense gravitas. Half way down they allowed her to stop for breath, and there they left her a moment. They withdrew a reasonable distance for a fag break, their nicotined fingers disembowelling a shared pack of Senior Service. Puffing slightly, Eileen eyed them narrowly and then threw up again with great despatch.

Across the road, underneath the Albert memorial, a peculiar scene was playing itself out. A phalanx of evening promenaders was arranging itself around something apparently of interest on the pavement. The pernicious screen of their bodies obscured Eileen’s view. Suddenly, something emerged from this improvised igloo of inclining rubberneckers, a wiry figure in distressed headscarf, or possibly turban, clutching its side. It wound its way snake like through the throng, not pursued but giving the impression that it expected pursuit at any moment. It was impossible to tell what had occurred as the turbaned figure made its way quickly from the scene.

Outside on the pavement a female cellist and her compatriot, a puppy-fatted girl, were seated. They partly confronted the solemn exit party. They were holding a placard, which read, “Leave Jackie Alone – Music is important, Sex is not”. Slightly to one side stood Dionysia, my errant wife. Giving it away, literally giving it away. Looking to all intents like a very high-class escort, black box jacket and pencil skirt, slickly coiffed hairdo and jet black sunglasses. She affected an air of latent intrigue, whorish mystery, a monochrome extra in a Technicolor production. She carried an umbrella, though it wasn’t raining, her stilettos were razor sharp. Although sex was not the answer to everything, you’d be forgiven for thinking that sex was in fact the be-all and end-all of life in this sensually overloaded city. Every advert screamed the lure of sexual congress. Every design miracle an encoded invitation to masturbation. Actually, she considered, sex was, literally, the be-all and end-all of life. But still, a bit much to have it shoved in your face or up your arse at every turn. Sex which in these profane times was just banging and nibbling, slurping, pecking and rubbing. Just so much friction being generated. Friction without warmth. Electricity. Bad electricity.

Like with Frank, who’s dished the dirt in that cute way he has, for money, but we knew he was joking. He let me have it, Dionysia thought…subtle rumours, incest at the family table, supercilious contempt in the tabloids. The joker. How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth, she considered irrelevantly. Brothers and sisters really do generally hate each other passionately don’t they? And brothers and brothers. And wives and brothers. Wives and brothers in domestic ecstasy, family divinity, breached by bad intent. How to untangle the vectors? Frank knows, the joker. He knows how to ensure good faith, to breach the bad intent, which is all around. He sluices away these tangible gobbets of bad faith, dissolved in the air like rain. Sibling hate, refined love of the shared brainpan. Chopped away, the hippocampus surgically enlarged to accommodate two, or three, brains. These were her thoughts, preoccupations. At least until someone other than Frank, or Billy the familiar, some other vessel might be found to take care of these sacred articles. She desired a return to a life of fecklessness, domestic unrest. Over the road in Kensington Gardens, large grey figures were indistinctly visible, moving ponderously among the trees. Dionysia moved towards the perambulating fugitive, looking bemusedly at his retreating figure.

“You shall know me, but not at present. We are older and better friends than, perhaps, you suspect. I cannot yet declare myself. I shall look in on you and renew a friendship which I never think of without a thousand pleasant recollections. But I must now travel day and night, on a mission of life and death – a mission the critical and momentous nature of which I shall be able to explain to you when we meet, as I hope we shall, in a few weeks, without the necessity of any concealment.”

She inadvertently spoke aloud, the murmured words fleetingly audible, an afterthought. Hard Hat turned and half smiled.

“See here” he muttered. “I profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. You have the sharpest tooth – long, thin, pointed, like an owl, like a needle. Ha Ha! With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly. Now if it happens to hurt, and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish or the tusk of an elephant, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey! Is the young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?”

Dionysia indeed looked very angry as she drew back from the crowd.

“How dare you insult me so, mountebank? My husband would have you tied to the pump, and flogged with a cart-whip, and burnt to the bones with the brand!!”

Of course it was all simulation. Brothers and sisters…bound in direction finding divinity. Bound by hate. Simulated contempt. The sound of the discourse was carried away on the currents of her own apparently languid intent. The wind was rising and black clouds were rushing by in fast motion as though in filmic existential parody. A cheesy metaphorical exegesis. As it began to rain heavily, without intro or prelude of lighter spitting drops, the scene began to resemble a religious medieval biblical painting. Attitudes were struck, postures assumed. Desperate strollers clung to the porticos of the Hall, struggling to retain their balance. The wind was lifting them off their feet. Dionysia flung her arm up to protect her face from the sudden downpour (although she forgot to unfurl the umbrella, in some obscurely portentous way negating the obvious, refusing to adhere to the commonplace, the obvious, as a valid blueprint for action) and several of the previously languid strollers prostrated themselves at the feet of the old woman’s escort party. Eileen was suddenly borne aloft by her ancient protectors, the four attendants each grabbing either an ankle or a shoulder and rushing aimlessly hither and thither. The old woman had become a bizarre kind of tribal fetish for the promenaders, now terrified of the rain, an ornamental talisman to ward off the worst effects of the weather. Her magical properties only succeeded, however, in bringing down the rain in ever-fiercer torrents. Her venerable escort made for the bus lane, now their only hope. The elephants in Hyde Park began a stampede towards the Serpentine. Soon everyone was completely drenched. The deranged pall bearers dithered this way and that, plunging wildly and without apparent purpose away from the sanctuary of the hall itself, then veered insanely into the road, their geriatric cargo stiffening like a board in mournful supplication. The road was suddenly illuminated, seemingly from within. The rubberneckers were driven this way and that by the swirling wind, leaves from the trees in the park cascading on them like confetti at a witches’ Sabbath. The old woman and her porters suddenly disappeared. There was a humming. Electricity. The rain stopped. The thoroughfare was dry.

Dionysia was now unchained. She’d never really been any good at picking up her own sort and this had left her embittered against the world. And against me, her husband. She just hadn’t had her share despite being tremendously beautiful, a veritable ornament of the age, a thoroughly contemporary mythical figure…outrageously witty, she was a writer of considerable power and style. TV had, oddly enough, never meant that much to her, although she could have walked into any job that required poise, beauty and talent. TV and the media in general she regarded as well beneath her. She regarded her Gucci wearing rivals as somewhat lacking in essential dignity and not worthy of her respect. They wouldn’t have had anything like the foresight to be present at a drama like the one now unfolding. But her life in the last few years has been spent in domestic drudgery, invoking angels for me, product engineering, packaging and promotion of Elephant Gnosis™, assisting at re-birthings and re-entries, assuming domestic responsibility, hosting revival evenings, burning the midnight oil, attending to business, making do, writing it out, cheating on Frank, making sure me and my pals are supplied with booze well into the long unquiet nights. She’s dead tired of me. I am mad, obsessive, in her book. I talk obsession, I live it, I obsessively invoke familiars. I walk around and around, pretending to a revelatory insight, a visionary outlook, which she’s sure I no longer actually possess. Maybe once, but not now. Doc Abrahams is almost on the point of giving up on me. Night walks on Hampstead Heath, looking for fun and trouble. Talking to strangers. Talking to myself, looking at myself…in shop windows. Avoiding the cracks in the pavement. Oddly attired acquaintances caked in filth tramping through the house day and night. She puts up with a lot. I’ve become sub-mythic in her eyes. I’ve never been the lover she hoped I might be. She remembers that once I’d been a convincing visionary, a hot-wired seer. A visionary with legs. Eyes wide shut. Now the light seems to be dimming for me, a household god without wings. And I’ve consequently become sufficiently annoying that her thoughts are turning increasingly to the Sapphic pastimes. Frank’s dead, and I’m dead in the water, a lame duck semi-divinity. But I’ll make it. Elephant Gnosis™ is our collective saving grace. And now she stands on the threshold of a great writing career, and on the threshold of real occult power. Her mere presence in the park was enough to usher Eileen, her mother, into the light. She stands alone, at the highest peak of her aspiration.

She is at present writing nine complimentary volumes, each to be written and published secretly and anonymously, pamphlets…nine volumes of travel writing, visionary in import and each relating to the hard coded secrets of the universe; the nature of light; the constituent elements; levitation; torsion fields; codes of conduct, song books including a number of wedding songs, elegies, and hymns. Or this is the plan. But being a drudge, a moonlighting office flirt with dipsomaniacal tendencies, a domestic goddess with flashing eyes, goddess in the kitchen, vibrant in the bedroom, and devoted to fecklessness, means she’s unable to devote as much time to her writing as she might have hoped. It’s all travel books, guides, these days. Apparently just hack-work but in the hands of someone like Dionysia, really of a far deeper, intrinsically mystical importance. However, the publishers she knows are mostly mad, or manipulative, or stupid, attention seeking witches. They are the talent that never came.

Memo to rehab centre staff from Ahab: This goes to the heart of the problem. This is Buffy’s problem. She knows that he no longer moves in the circles that guarantee a series of affairs, liaisons and bunk-ups. This world, the demimonde of the blathering or blithering classes, an assembly of easy lays and loose attitudes, of actions without consequences, is now a closed book. To both of them. I fear their familiarity with this lifestyle will not stand either of them in any kind of good faith. He is scared of commitment, has become scared of the energy released even in phone sex. He’s taken to hanging around supermarket checkout queues, attempting to catch the eyes of enervated bulk loaders, flirting with hoarders of good will. Supermarkets, in his view and, it has to be said, that of the style supplements, are still a good place to catch the eyes of under-achieving freeloaders…

My hard-hatted familiar, Billy, had seen her standing there under the portico…the hooded figure, a vamp in 40s gear. He’d assumed that she was one of Frank’s girls. She was his type as well, all snake-eyed intensity and pencil thin stilettos. On approaching her, however, it was obvious to him that he’d made a fundamental mistake; that of assuming that he was remotely in her league. She’d merely glanced disdainfully at him from under her funeral veil, dissing him with a silent narrowing of the eyes…For a moment, Billy thought about brazening it out, making out that he knew Frank, that he was in fact a stooge of the Top Man, and that it was accepted practice for him to receive special favours from Frank’s women. One look from her, however, and it was clear that she was not in the mood for any sort of exchange at all. She looked, a doomed romantic in the autumn sunshine, like she wanted to be anywhere but there, invoking storms in the distant sky. Hard Hat felt the force of her as the wind got up. The sky darkened and he fell backwards into the tourist group. They clicked and smiled, all solicitous and f-stopping, as he lay there. He was in a dream. The tourists’ faces assumed feral intensity, vulpine, B-movie, a horrifying aspect, terrifying to a less than divine figure. They closed in on him. He was looking away, trying to avert his eyes, dreaming of the coast…the water, where salvation lay. Water, needful, dreamlike. He was sure he was meant to be away from here…the rocks…lying on the rocks, a crashed autopilot, a black box recorder, obsolete technology lying undiscovered, while whales and dolphins bore away the evidence. These matrices of bad intent, were now breached. Billy the conduit. Dionyisia the medium. At last. The inauguration of Buffy Strangelove, now almost complete. Auto-pilot elephant gnosis, gone and lost forever, electricity swept from the parks and thoroughfares. Reporters at a loss, operating without The Knowledge, unable to re-formulate the techniques of fretful reportage. Reports unwritten, because the templates don’t exist. They don’t know how to report it yet. The memes that will carry at my will the Information Fallacy, the rumour, are not yet formulated. Information mutants, hybrid rumours, all non-patent and un-copyrightable material. It’s now a race to the end, my fictive mission still a rumour, in danger only from immigration control. Ayton is now at the door, accompanied by shadowy therapy attendants/whores.

BOOK TWO, PART FIVE: THE PASSION OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

THE PASSION OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

They got 4 bastard interns in here to rough me up. Light me up and piss me out. I’ve been slapped senseless. As I lie here, bleeding from every orifice, I wonder…have I done the right thing? Did I miscalculate? The doctor I’ve come to regard as my nemesis seems to have taken umbrage…and I’ve been slapped senseless. Have I made it safe? What do I do now? I made the cut didn’t I? My name is or was on everybody’s lips. Since there was no such thing as society, let alone the individual, when I made my mark, society’s members had no duty to provide for each other, let alone themselves. The individual in society hasn’t fully actualized. The individual is still stuck at some halfway house between the psycho-religious and pre-mythic. Individuals have downscaled to the point at which individuality is a redundant concept. Individuals fill the vacuum with sub-psychological material, stuff to be worked through. They’ve become mere receptacles, defined by opinions and lifestyles that have no bearing on their real, which is to say mythic, lives. We can purchase whatever we need, not as citizens, not even as consumers. We purchase, in dreams and dormant parallel existences, ideas of selfhood. Ersatz selves. Fictionalized self-actualizations…concepts of love and hate. And I can churn this material out at will when I’m in a violence induced cataleptic state. My head swells and I sleep and wake at 2-minute intervals, chuntering away in tongues, ancestral voices. Words are exaggerated and form a safety net. Lovehate, it’s shown on TV as multiple character parody. And wildlife is my enabler. Through use of trained and distributed animal familiars, citizens are enabled. Raw Supernature, it’s the consumer’s friendly force for good. People are encouraged to make love, to love, love itself is finally seen as an enabler. Love redefined – barrow boy catharsis as in I claim my ritualized male right to cry and I also smash his fucking head to pulp – but things are never as simple as the self publicist claims. This is a new tradition. Wildlife auto-therapy. Laugh at the bedwetters, with their enabling sub-fictions, their epiphanies of self-discovery. I promote real fictions of the people and of myself. We become or are divine anyway. We make up what isn’t there as we go along. All efforts are made in this direction. When we learn to love ourselves, everything else follows as though naturally. Of course natural is the last fictional redoubt. Nature abhors a fiction. But we impose our fictions on a world bereft of the will to resist rampant fictionalization, via control of the broadcasting rights to all major channels, via gravity control, via Elephant Gnosis™ and using new traditions, new mythic templates. Without the rampant desire to appear on TV it’s difficult to see how this could have been achieved. We love appearing on television and our talent shows ram home the message: public bad, private bad, made-up good. Fantastical/phantasmagorical very good. By careful juxtaposition of the natural and the manufactured, we achieve an uneasy balance, a New Divinity. Those unable or unwilling to fictionalize, to fantasize themselves into existence, are rightly slapped senseless by self-righteous and self-aggrandizing citizens’ militias, remnants of the Reality Corps done up as medical interns/stooges. Mobs of the newly outraged stalk the streets of this brave land, deriding unbelievers and the over cautious for their lack of desire for fame and for their fatalistic acceptance of the dreary half life, lived outside the glow of media approbation. Oddly, disdain for display still persists in some backward enclaves, pockets of unglamorous obstinacy.

Being the man on the spot, a man for the new way, a copywriters’ wet dream, my fortune is made. I’ve cleaned up; Show Off and Display for Business platform, and they’ve sussed me, they’ve been slapped senseless. Politicians, scrying a national mood of despondency with the archaic, entrenched dichotomy between private greed and public sanctimony, and worried lest they be left behind in the general rush to appear on television, literally eat out of my hand. All politicians now routinely don elephant masks. I’ve patented the techniques. Politician’s integrity is no immunity. Now, inconsequential politicians, or those who would formerly have called themselves Inconsequentialists, are the cheerleaders of The New Fecklessness. They offer incantations to my familiars, among them the homunculus Billy Hard Hat, the bland avatar of hedonism and natural loving, on a nightly basis. The nightly news offers renewed exhortations and encouragements to show off. Gucci wearing newscasters hold the nation’s prim female adolescents in thrall. Public money and development grants are available to fund the ego-driven careers of would be beauties, but government rhetoric still suggests that the feckless must prove themselves over and over and over, be available for public mourning sessions, suicides half heartedly attempted, photographed exegeses of stale and morbid psychology-based behaviour patterns. Recipients of public grace must in return holler and shriek their righteous detestation of former lovers, abandoned spouses, unloved offspring, mothers-in-law, rivals in love, their overbearing pimps and ungrateful freeloading dependents. They must, in government circles, be seen as good value for a laugh. Public money must not be squandered on a badly motivated show off. And it looks as though for a while I may have paid the price for poor motivation. My motivation slipped, along with my mask, and I’ve taken a beating.

Academics like Frank don’t get anywhere unless they can prove themselves capable of giving good tube. Their livelihoods aren’t dependent on the research they do, the unreadable publications they waste their time on – they’re dependent on their ability to come over well on TV and radio. Any academic who doesn’t at least aspire to a secondary career as populist pundit and demotic discourser might as well forget it. The well appointed office, the secretary paid for from the public purse, well oiled, the endless round of academic cocktail parties, the invitations to dinner from the self important, are all just window dressing. The Green Room’s where the power lies. It’s Frank’s failure to address this aspect of his public duty that tempts me to cut him adrift. I’ve more or less lost patience with him. Without my patronage, his circle will slowly shrivel up, his so-called friends will drift away; his acolytes will begin to see him in a new light and his missus will hop into my bed. Poor old Frank, always two steps behind, even when he had his own legs.

But the culture of denigration has lingered on. It’s a harsh regime, an austere republic. Crybaby commentators bemoan the lack of feeling, the absence of pathos. Too late suckers…Too late. It’s too much to bear. Much of the old, pan-left wing there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-unmotivated-individual rhetoric still hovers like a miasma. Defence is that the punters will only get public money when they see that the custodians of those services, agents, liggers, print hacks etc are held to strict account and are sufficiently reformed to use the money wisely. Revival ministers say they remember the bad old days when theatres and TV studios were grossly inefficient and couldn’t deliver a letter – let alone a decent stand-up act or a passable celebrity knees-up-for-charity event. They daren’t put their fate in the hands of public employees so far outside the showbiz suicide loop ever again.

The result is the familiar, punitive language applied to public devotional service. Government ministers, in conjunction with bow-tied agents, comedy hacks and commissioners of lightweight populist documentaries, and movers and shakers like myself, must keep public worship servants on a tight leash, watching or controlling their every move. In this regard, this thoroughly immoderate government may be uncharacteristically up to date. For a new mood is now unquestionably abroad, one that no longer believes the pre-religious is inherently bad any more than that everything post-psychological sparkles. When Britons hear “pre-secular” they now think merely of the bouffant haired and the gaudily theatrical; that’s why 71% of voters tell my pollsters today that they would welcome the return of pre-secular narrative templates.

The mood is changing, moving away from the lazy caricatures of old. Press releases were scripted as follows: “Over the next several years the politicians of all parties will be hoping to annexe this exciting and brave new ground, and will be in the business of convincing the electorate that they intend to build on that shift, shedding a truer light on the public servants who are there to make Britain a more overtly filmable environment. CCTV, surveillance overload, is only the start. Pretty soon, no action will remain unfilmed, and will at least conform to broadcast potential templates. As I think we’ve seen, these are people of dedication, altruism and often possessed of quite staggering amounts of desire for spurious and undeserved fame. We should listen to these people who form nothing less than the backbone of our country – the people who want, at any cost, to be famous – and we should celebrate them.”

But in the meantime, we’re stuck with the whole sorry rigmarole of new ageism and the general death of a sense of humour abroad. My recently revived and patented Gnostic practice of searching within for the truth serves merely to demonstrate, to adumbrate the previous emptiness within. It’s important now to distinguish between the reality of the game and the arcane anti-history after which we’re cleaning up. Fish eye solipsists get it wrong over and over. But no matter how shallow the searcher after truth’s inner pool of wisdom and resources, that searcher has until recently been routinely encouraged by cultural brutalists and vernacular occultists to indulge his or her taste for the cod-mystical and the impoverished spiritual. Potential devouts are encouraged to grease the slippery pole, they are regaled with 2^nd rate cod-Rejuvenescence Theory and invited to attend symposia advertising the benefits of Non-Surgical Facelifts, Weightless Re-Birthings and Polarity Massages. Of course, patents are patents. And I’ve made it my business to rather take against the promoters of this kind of sloppy mush, and it’s let me in for a certain amount of abuse in the paranoid and godless media. But my friends in the government (well I pretend to like them – and they gain credibility and cash by association, so it’s co-dependence, not entirely specious) have vowed to make it harder and harder for the Atlantis crew, the Egyptologists, the popular occultists in the employ of mainstream newspapers and the Ley-Line mob to publish their sloppy fantasies. Percipient observers will have noticed that it’s been getting out of hand, but like the branch of a diseased tree denied the sap of popular acclaim, it’ll soon wither and drop off and people can get back to what they’re really good at, what they’ve been born to achieve, the creation of their own mythologies. That’s really something to aspire to and I feel proud to have been in some small way instrumental in preparing the fertile ground in which the seeds of Reason can once again take root. Friendly commentators say of me: He seems to be unstoppable, and everyone wants a piece of him. His charisma seems infinite. His wings are never folded. Buffy Strangelove is a Man For All Seasons.

Yes, a man, but without conscience. I was never in danger of having to recant my faith in myself. My impresario status is as unassailable as that of a man who is literally unphotographable. There is literally no dirt to dig on me. I’ve covered my tracks, paid off all former lovers and had enemies beaten to a pulp, but I am myself never implicated. I cannot be photographed. But let me correct a misapprehension. I’m not an impresario. I am in essence a simulacrum. I am demonstrative, mimetic of what it is to be an impresario. My hammy bombast is a necessary descriptive technique. My flouncy and overbearing demeanour is a survival template. My press coverage is all based on the fact that I am in some obscure way subverting my own intentions, parodying my own aims and ambitions even as I fulfill for the public what is widely held to be an important role. A role that should be, but clearly isn’t, beyond the scope of the satirical. I am the man for the job. That was always clear to me. A deathly serious business, and one that is, for me, the perfect medium for my message of hyper-realized subversion. Do you know what I mean? Do I make my point? Need I elaborate? The only thing missing, and let’s face it, it’s a thing that in my position I scarcely need, is my own TV show. I stay shadowy, in the background, an unseen presence, a clandestine force. I delineate in mythic form, through deft manipulation of the ways in which I am perceived, what it is to be a lobbyist of the powerful. It’s a learning tool. I am didactic. I become the distilled essence of what people care to believe in. What they are prepared to believe in. I am an in and out of focus group, tickling up governmental expectation in ways suited to my own ends.

This is the role that the divine, or devout, as refracted through the prism of hyper-intent, has always played, and continues to play, in advanced hyper-consumptive societies. My role is also to hyper-accelerate the means whereby people realize that they are the creators and consumers of their own divinity, if only they’d realize it. If only they realized it. My ends and means find their way via the trickle-down effect into all facets of public and private life. For instance, disgruntled partners everywhere start sex affairs with work colleagues. Instances of clandestine, though filmed, office sex multiply. People are seen to perform more and more overtly for the many security cameras that adorn the city’s streets. The monitors that have been set up in public places to allay apparently mounting levels of insecurity play host to clusters of loitering promenaders. People seem suddenly to prefer a kind of distinctly un-English public life; a life lived in the streets. Commuter routes at rush hour are uncharacteristically quiet as citizens in thrall to a new spirit of zen-display prefer to stay out at night. Newspaper editorials are full of praise for the story boarders of the new spirit abroad, and I am afforded fulsome tribute, although no one quite puts their finger on how I manage to effect this seemingly extraordinary turn around in the national psyche. With my bouffant hair and oily demeanour, as described earlier, I might have expected public opprobrium. But no, I’m feted and garlanded with flowers, my clients overflowing with tearful tributes to the way I’ve handled their desire for undeserved fame. And despite all this I remain effectively invisible. Almost overnight, the English have become open, generous, warm-hearted, natural, publicity loving and full of pure animal spirit. By encouraging willful exhibitionism in the population, I’ve literally given them the means of their own re-invention, their own (and this isn’t, I think, over-stating the case) salvation. By believing in me, people believe in themselves. In buying my products, using my patented techniques, people have re-invigorated the public in themselves. I’m a can do kind of a guy. I operate at a level just beyond the boundaries of the feckless banality that people call reality, by use of animal familiars. An elephant or two in peripheral vision can go a long way in transforming peoples’ feelings about themselves. Even if just out of sight, or only just in peripheral vision, the comfort derived by the general populace in these post-psychological times is of immense, incalculable, tautological benefit. An elephant in the heart can slap you senseless. I’ve been asleep…again…my manifesto is incomplete, but almost complete…

…But stop me doctor. I can see I’m losing you. I have 2 more anecdotes. One concerns the fact that a man on roller blades today overtook me in the course of my perambulations. This doesn’t amount to much in itself, but when considered in the context of London transport generally, it seems that this mode of transportation might be considered a viable alternative to walking or taking the bus. Special roller-blading lanes could, without too much expense, be created alongside the cycle lanes now increasingly dominating sections of the pavements lining the metropolitan highways and byways. The elephant trails currently being constructed from old bus lanes can easily assimilate the predicted increase in roller blading commuters. Most pre-seculars grind their teeth and mutter querulously if overtaken on the pavement by roller bladers, but to me it represents a paradigm for a new, integrated London transport system, using elephant trails as directional aids.

The other anecdote concerns a religious happening, a momentary confusion in a supermarket checkout queue. A young woman at an adjacent till, tittering and absorbed in ephemeral self-hate, had dropped a bottle of beer. The bottle fell as though in slow motion and on impact with the ground exploded with tremendous force, the loud bang startling all shoppers in the immediate vicinity. The contents splashed onto my baggy trousers. There was a hush as the liquid fizzed and bubbled on the tiling and as the damp patch on my trousers spread and darkened. The young woman who’d dropped the bottle tittered again. Her companion, equally feckless, giggled and shot glances of sub-comic shock at the bystanders. But I wasn’t laughing…although I could have been. Nor was I angry…although anger is endemic. I was neither angry nor amused. Due to the sudden pressure burst, I appeared to her in full elephantine regalia. It was a spontaneous display; a simulated preemptive gnosis. My body trembled, went numb, and glowed. My nose elongated and my ears enlarged. My hippocampus throbbed. Time was spendthrift. It was only a chance occurrence, a momentary shattering of the tense fabric of space/time brought about by the sudden shattering of glass, but it nonetheless afforded me the opportunity to procure temporary Rejuvenescence in her, without her prior consent or knowledge, without her being aware in any way at all or being in any way in control of her own re-invention. To effect partial gnosis in her, by accident, by virtue of this unpremeditated blooper, this unscripted faux-pas, was a watershed in my development as a fully realized zen-gnostic master.

“Do you want a fiver to get those trousers cleaned then?” the bottle dropper laughingly enquired, holding out a crumpled fiver and smiling at me, the obviousness of the potential for flirting apparent to all observers.

“Of course not. But I’ll take your money anyway”.

The crumpled fiver changed hands. The figure on the note, a Nabob atop an elephant, swapped winks with me. Refuel on the mystery train. The two newly post-secular girls departed…I could see the change. The flippant coyness was gone. The feeling was warm inside. A public act of religious devotion and they were still giggling, more or less androgynous, and they wandered away, almost certainly to drop another full bottle in another bereft location. The other observers of the incident may have forgotten about it almost immediately. As I walked away, I saw one of the girls had an angel on her shoulder…an automatic and spontaneous metamorphosis. The angel was visible there, only to me, a fat bird chirruping and prattling, spreading a heaven sent message of love.

A propos of this, if I may wind down now, one of the problems with modern girls, possibly also boys, but mainly girls, (boys are intrinsically out of the irony loop except for a few effeminate media types or “metrosexuals” if you will) is that they play the major part, the lead role, in their own re-branding as re-branders. They are paradigmatic re-branders. But the Gnostic stuffing’s knocked out of them. They deflate like balloons. The modern single woman, all spilt Chardonnay, non-deferential out-there-ness and re-branding, has been outgrown. Already obsolete. They use a language of hyper-irony to delineate a straightforwardly archaic process. Getting pissed is just getting pissed, after all. It contains no special meaning. Drink needs to be taken with another drink. This urge to re-brand, under the guise of newly formulated cultural perspectives, but in reality merely a fresh marketing angle is I have to say (because I know) a chronic condition. It’s a veritable holocaust of dropped import, of pedagogic confusion, and in misuse of the aesthetic they lose the wherewithal for re-invention. They re-brand and in doing so lose the capacity to re-fictionalize. Then they stagnate. They burn up. They OD on ID. They can’t get it up, or get it to go where they want it to go. They’re stuck. Stuck! They fail to outrun inability, they baulk at the un-ironic. In the meta-ironic mainstream, the relentless flow of stuff leaves them eddying in shallow backwaters, in pools of stagnant hyper-irony. You don’t need me to point out that from this disadvantaged position, re-entry to the quotidian realm is almost impossible, no matter how many camera crews they invite to their suicides.

Men are re-engaged as stooges. Their level of re-entry is observable; the trajectory is visible as intentioned. Men are newly re-envisaged by ink-pimps as merely stooges in the female passion play. We assume the Quasimodo buddy role, the pug ugly loser with nothing to lose, the mate of a mate, the horsewhipped victim, the butt of the joke, the repository of diminished characteristics, the caricature boozer with middle aged spread, the joke spread thin, the one line catchphrase, the gay chum of the fag hag, the brow-beaten middle manager, the ckeeky get, the office sap, the bucolic paternalist, the smug bachelor, the man lost in thought, the regurgitator of received attitudes, the attitudinizer, the double taker, the blubber gutted second rater, the sidekick, the mummy’s boy, the weasel faced romantic, the pinkly scrubbed boy next door, the floppy fringed bum chum, the grizzled veteran, the outspoken bore, the troubled alcoholic, the comedian’s comedian, the fat bastard, the tricky dicky, the pompous windbag, the self deluding ladies’ man, the man-who-is-actually-a-woman, the be-quiffed best pal, the sitcom dad, the coffee drinking exec, the gravely concerned doctor, the unctuous lickspittle, the estate agent, the absurd know-all, we are all now viewed as straight forward portraits from life, a parade of lifers exhibiting unadulterated verisimilitude. There are now no more parts for men. We no longer exist in the accepted sense of that word. Men are 1/3 woman, at least. Men don’t go to war, or keep the home fires burning. They just hang around; mouths drooling open, looking for action that never comes. They inhabit scenes from life, still life, scenarios that are generally badly directed, poorly scripted, appallingly acted and peremptorily edited. Their lives resemble distinctly second-rate movies, low budget straight to video fodder. Meanwhile, women are cleaning up at the box office, getting their fill of Elephant Gnosis™, re-birthing, indulging in the best of things, stealing fox-like into the limelight and staying there.

I keep a lid on my resentment of course, as befits a household god. My feminine third, with which I am of course constantly in touch by mobile, is of no great importance to me. I am always capable of seeing the fem and the male in everything. No special pleading for me, I know how things stand, how they stack up. In the mythic realm, we just live for the moment, the realm outside overstated psychological white heat. Psychology means nothing to us. Nothing. When psychology goes belly up, as it did several eons ago, when psychology becomes coffee table, available for the price of a pint and a fag, there’s no psychological kickback worth accepting. It’ll mean nothing once you too go belly up.

And now I find that I must attend to these wounds. I was attacked without warning. These wounds – they’re healing by degrees. Speed up now, I’m reaching the end. Three more anecdotes? By way of illustration? Not in this world. I am temporarily a reduced figure; my captors/therapists are circling…carnivorous pigs. They wear pig masks over their masks, unadulterated now and finally feral. Without official government guidelines they are not constrained, they are free agents, without limit. The biggest fucker brandishes a kind of slapstick and advances towards me. He still thinks and acts as though he’s in a sitcom or something…I can see the bumptious smirk underneath the mask. He’s a cartoon vaudevillian, caped and masked, a comic villain of the old school. I am pinned like a butterfly, awaiting evisceration.