THE GREAT BEAST OF HAPPINESS (KILL ME 3 TIMES)
“Are you happy with your nose? Your buttocks? Your lips? Ears? Eyes? Nose? Had it with that old time religion? Try Elephant Gnosis! Have you considered Elephant Gnosis? Body double, inside and out?”
The motto, or catchphrase, of my tenure as London’s Top DJ…Remember, if it isn’t facile, I don’t get it. Of course, someone you loved to hate. And hated full stop. My smugly self-satisfied mug beaming down from every bus, every billboard, a wink of the eye, an arched eyebrow. Oleaginous manner, uproarious laugh, charming tendency to humiliate associates, pals, “mates” who daren’t talk back. Except one day, she did. They all do…they all did, one day. Talkback is payback. Now it’s booze all day long, booze and solitude.
“Can’t you let people decide for themselves how they want to look? The tone of this conversation is patronizing in the extreme.”
Buffy Strangelove: Self Therapy: Vol 3…
It was the voice of my nemesis. The doctor’s wife. Matriarch of the profane airwaves. Yeah, my boorish tones filled kitchens and lounges as I bullied and, let’s face it, straightforwardly insulted my listeners. Stupid. No respect due, certainly none offered. Voices which were clearly disconnected from their source. Departed souls in search of corporeal weight, buzzing around the frequencies of radio heaven/hell and the dial itself not really expansive enough to contain all my victims. I give them what they deserve. What do they expect? Who’s the star of the show, me or them? It’s me isn’t it? Oh yes. Do they really think their opinions are going to elicit anything other than straightforward and frank, undisguised contempt? Opinions, which they make the mistake of believing will confer on them, if expressed publicly, recognition which has inexplicably, up until this moment, eluded them?
So…the radio buzzed to the sounds of my voices. I was back in this contaminated land, less than a week after clearing customs and I was still getting tired. No energy. Still jet lagged, although to be fair I had achieved a smooth, psychosis free re-entry. Immigration fooled again, as though they ever stood a chance. So…my wings were unfolded, diaphanous. My career was quickly in full swing, the playful murders over-looked by a grateful, opportunistic establishment. Politicians and academics, no less than industrial magnates and corporate moguls, movers and shakers, are adepts, skilled in reflexive interpretation. A household god falling back to earth is a hyper-numinous event, or in publishing terms an inter-textual device, and a real handful of an opportunity. Good copy. But the cameras weren’t disabled for no good reason. They wanted me virginal, uncontaminated by textual pollution. Customs were disenfranchised, bought off. Those with an eye quick enough to spot the potential inherent in the arcane referentiality of the event were also quick to spot the potential in exploitation of the marketing aspects. Back scratching, co-dependence, a juxtaposition of apparently coincidental interests. So…doors were unlocked, palms were greased. While not known, as such, I became known. I appeared everywhere, my ubiquity a perceptual device that was mutually beneficial. I only appeared to appear as myself. I get under the very skin of the culture. Buffy mugs everywhere. You seen this geezer? Look out! The establishment, or hidden powers, recognized in me the hyper-will of their own crazed intent, the actual will to power. So…showing in cinemas, on billboards, at openings, lectures, garden parties, I was infiltrated at all levels.
Listeners sighed quietly or grinned inanely as the jingles played around their brains. Phone-in self help. Noses were a pre-occupation. As were breasts, penises, buttocks and necks. Surgery…plastic…the need for…the moral consequences of…the psychological impact of which…onto already fractured egos…self esteem paper thin…creaking under the weight…blots in my mind…Fat and knobbly, fat and voluminous, distended bellies and lumpy limbed, drooping and pendulous breasts, corrugated skin stretched tight over rib cages, too thin, too thick, buttocks that stick out, over-prominent brows, eyes too close together/far apart, rolls of fat, all pressed into service of body image distortion which we made a pre-condition of Elephant Gnosis conditioning.
For one thing, my body’s never been a problem until now. Now my belly gets in the way. All human misery is here…assumed for the purposes of my smooth assimilation into the fabric of this debased culture. It’s fertile ground for radio populism. My eyes and ears are distracted from the sound of my voice on the radio by an overweight angel, puffing and heaving in the yard outside, hovering with difficulty above the apple tree in the garden. The birds are silent, always silent. No two birds alike. The sublime purposefulness of their flight cuts like scissors through my coagulating consciousness…my thoughts blister, bubbling like soup. Angels and fat birds alike hover indistinctly beyond my peripheral vision. Journalists make of it what they will. Fat autogenetic bird-life: a cautionary story. Fat hands in chains: a cautionary tale. They are merely PR men, bought and paid for. They handle it thus…via anecdote:
The story of an amputee, whose hand was in the first place someone else’s. For some reason, he’d lied about the accident. First of all said it was a circular hand saw accident, something that could have happened to anyone…not mentioning that anyone who wanted to lose a hand might be more susceptible than usual to this type of accident. Turned out to have been deliberate of course, or semi-purposeful, an auto-mutilation. Then, the hand of the donor didn’t fit like a glove. Or rather, too much like a glove and not enough like a hand. So, having had the necessary surgery, he then stopped with the anti-rejection drugs. The hand felt “other”. Felt “strange”. Skin started peeling and flaking. The hand was, in gothic approximation of Technicolor Hammer fantasies of the 70s, in some sublime fashion possessed of its own will. Without will and with hands up, the amputee’s nightmare scenario had been enacted; bemused, peeved and potentially litigious surgeons subsequently lopped off the hand again. I know how he felt. Did the hacks miss the point? Maybe.
Some time ago, can’t remember when, I requested surgery on my own legs. Purely for the sympathy vote of course. Thought I’d get a better publishing deal. The legless are more rounded/better than those with a full set of limbs, at least in the perverse and fickle mirror of public approbation. And did it pay off? Did it? Big time! I have publishing franchises coming out of my ears now. Medical texts, abstruse academic works, travel guides, brochures of all sorts and sizes. My stock has never been higher. Never. I’m always in demand on the lecture circuit. Hotel bills paid for by ecstatic publishers…
But happy? Happy? I should be but I ain’t? My own jingles haunt me and taunt me. My body is just too displeasing to me. My body image is horribly compromised. But it’s the price I and therefore you must pay. I’m universal in this. I’m only corporeal. Maybe when I lay dying I was spoilt. The feeling that my body was merely kinetic energy, constantly shape shifting, a collection of plasma cells, disappeared all too quickly. What happened to my diet plan? I eat nothing but bran all week and I feel strangely ineffectual. I’m shitting out my entire body weight on a consistent basis, week in week out, but I never get thinner. I’m like I’m not really there. I see these fat birds through the window, and really I can see they’ve got a bigger problem than me. How can they maintain aerodynamic integrity? Beats me, but somehow they manage it. Flying is everything. Lose the ability to fly and you’re well fucked. Fat birds have also become kind of familiars to me. They perform routine acts of surveillance for me as well as fulfilling the more passive role that tanks of tropical fish perform for the less psychodynamic. Body image therefore is now nothing, nothing, to me. I perform psychic transference mantras, chant out the fat of the land, and adumbrate the otherness of the mythic realm, and the birds in my garden get fatter and fatter. I sit there dreamily listening to the radio-chat, in love with the sound of my own voice, gazing at them all lined up, hovering, evanescent, on my garden fence. Fish look as though they’re shitting all the time with that stuffed open-mouthed gawping look that they affect. But fat birds are almost literally angels. And they know which side their bread’s buttered. I allow them access to a little known world, an arcane kingdom of anti-sin, auto-forgiveness, religiosity, transference of guilt, anti-therapy, the full Gnostic Monty, the un-breached pleroma. I operate as a kind of demiurge for them, giving their imperfectly formed bodies a corporeal essence. And in return, they flatter me endlessly, reassuring me that my body is indeed godlike. I see reflected in their translucent wings an image, which is no longer compromised, of my profane corporeality, my belly undistended and my face youthful and my flanks sleek. I don’t have body image problems. The birds reflect my new weightlessness. I levitate to the fence and sit there with them, gormless and gawping. I’ve got a sort of idea that I am like the light descending into matter, that I am some sort of immense fireball hitting the waves, and that this accounts for my singular life and lives. But I don’t know. I can’t see clearly any more. I am forced to wear very thick spectacles if I wish to see. Which of course I don’t. Don’t need to. The visions keep me occupied. In correcting my sight, they distort my insight, my Gnosis. As though, looking through windows onto the world, I see fat angels all around, but not the light that makes them fly. I am full of medication…I should say…that must be true…although I’m not even sure about that. I just read the papers all day long. I listen in to the radio. I listen in to my voices buzzing and squeaking. I sound like interference. The papers are full of what used to be called trivia, but which everyone has long since come to accept as the real stuff of life. The self-importance of movers and shakers relegated, even in the broadsheets, to the inside small sections, the pullouts, hidden away inside. Trivia has come to flesh out most of what people, and I pride myself that I’m one of the people, regard as real life. Celebrity game shoots, hit and run accidents arranged for charity, humiliating game shows and vicarious voyeurism.
The papers full of trivia? I never notice. Never!! I for one certainly never noticed that media angles are trivial and have been for the last 30 years. I’ve noticed a certain relish for humiliation, after encouragement, of the presumptuous and the talentless. A subtle goading. A punishable sin which is wanting it too much. Another sin – too great a sense of shadenfreude when they’re brought face to face with their emptiness, when they are savagely disabused of the notion that they are in fact talented, or worth a second glance. We’re all pre-secular sinners in this regard. We all partake of that great sinfulness. There’s a dummy catholic in every western and eastern head. We delineate the trivial in grandiose lives, we see the trivial exposed and deified, we need no longer ourselves be exposed and can ourselves be deified. And if you prefer the secular life, just grit your teeth and turn the trivial pages. I leave clues all along the dial. I envisage, and embody. I encompass the trivial. I spread gossip and undermine reputations. I chat about the weather. I extemporize a self-righteous moral discourse for cod-satirical purposes. I am a benighted curse upon the upright and the almighty.
And new monsters surface every day from the pleroma. We feel the urge to listen in to their voices. Monsters from the so-called id, ghosts of depraved urges are still there, still there, just below the surface. My life in chains is compromised by the pressing need to escape the ghosts in my peripheral vision. (This is important to me…follow me here…the following exculpation nails the peripheral dummy god…we need this head start….) Count Dracula he creeps up on me. I am impaled on the false horns of his undead dilemma. I can’t move and he can’t go out, sit on the fence, in the sun. The birds mock him. But I can’t move without recycled riffs (untrammeled originality is anathema to movement in these circumstances) and am thus easy prey for the baseball-hatted villain. I trudge through pea-soupers, my legs like lead as I attempt to evade this monster, the divinely realized anti-familiar of my devotional life. I am transfixed, cruci-fictional as I await the crushing momentum of his heavy orthopedic boots. I’m a sucker for hypnosis. Easily hypnotized by charlatans, I am helpless before their fictional influence. I believe anything. I’m gullible as hell in this state. You can take me to the cleaners any day of the week. With little or no inter-textual relief, I’m hung out to dry. I’m a believer. Believe in anything. I think then that I’m a sort of deferred deity. They say I am, the unseen powers. Fat expensively trousered moguls subscribe to belief systems that have no weight, but still they invested in my ubiquity. Because I’ve done personality tests for the scientologists the results of which imply that I’m Thetan material. Definitely. I could really make the grade there, especially now Cruise has gone. My kind of publicity they’d kill for. No I mean it…Literally kill for….
But I just can’t evade the monsters in my dreams. I am stuck. In stasis. The radio hums with bad intent. You know it, I am the monster in my dreams. I’ve thought ever since re-birthing that these monsters are unavoidable. So I sublimated that, or that’s what they tell me. They say I’m running from these monsters so no, of course I’m not happy. I know this kind of public exegesis is reprehensible so I won’t say any more. That’s why I can’t remember who I am any more. Any psychiatrist will bore you half to death with the notion of denial. My good doctor friends will jump in feet first to let you know what they think. And will fight tooth and nail to try and hold back the inevitability of the post psychiatric world. But we know. We are post-psycho. Post-post psycho. Life is now lived, thanks to my good offices, at a level bathed in inter-textual hyper-irony. I am everywhere. On the oldest radios. Ham radios. In the wiring. Hard wired. Recycled as irony. The old and dying are now living a life that merely mimics oldness and mocks at encroaching mortality. The old are just playing themselves. They’ll live again. No danger. Psychology’s no use to them. Psychology belongs to a pre-parodic age.
From the Devotional Directional Manual:
“The elephant emanation is an eon old one. That part of creation dedicated to not forgetting, no matter how long or worn out the memory thread. It’s the wellspring of misery, not forgetting, tying a knot in it. Elephants are like a big wrinkle skinned knotted handkerchief, a divine emanation from the Godhead, a phone call from home, a reminder to the baser elements, the billions in this realm, that they should never forget. Forgetting, in the theology that existed before my own unquiet entry into this plane, was like a double remembrance. Things past were as likely to be remembered as things that hadn’t yet happened. In other words, some still lived in a hopelessly pre-ironic world. My descent into this realm sorted all that out, and elephants are the tools of profane remembrance. They yield, by sheer force of presence, or semi-presence, a light that is this realm’s saving grace. Without them, in other words, everything is in a state of gracelessness. Big time. Biggest time of all. I am the negative or inferior world-creator. In my cosmology, the pre-secular Cosmos is the result of an unforgiven or primordial error or accident; the only true existence being the Pleroma or transcendent order of Divinities. Elephants, never forgetting, or forgiving, prevent the tangibles of this world from slipping through the rent fabric into a pre-ironic, prelapsarian, world in which everything would once again be up for grabs. We can’t go back there. We can’t return. Ever. EVER!!! But never worry, there’s worse semi-deities in the Pleroma than me, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Metaphysically what this means for you is that the world as you know it is not the creation of the Supreme God, as my pals the various priests and secular monks of monotheistic religions would have you believe, but rather an emanation of the very lowest and most minor of all divinities, and an accidental emanation at that.”
It’s heart rending stuff eh? I would rather, as I think I’ve said before, have been a rock god. My guitar technique is or was a clanging zigger-zagger sort of technique/style, extemporized yet tight as a fucking nut. But you need help. You still need help. I couldn’t have just abandoned you. I can’t forget, although you can. The past and the future are open books to me. I know how bad it’s going to get. Elephants will assist you, in ways you can’t imagine, to remember the good times. I am there never to forget. They let the good times roll and rumble. They are, as it were, pachydermal rivets, holding fast the compromised fabric of this futile, unbolted, realm.
They hold it fast. The trails they leave, for nomadic journeys conducted at a pace beyond the understanding of the present jump-cut culture, are strewn with immense dumps and evacuations, and they emanate vibrations of pure Gnostic religiosity. Medusa Rappa the ex-witch she got it all wrong. She’d sort of understood at first about this thing but only really half understood, a very vague understanding. She had to go really. It was as though she’d danced around the edges of the idea, and got cold feet. She was a catholic recidivist, a dummy catholic. I knew she was losing it when birthdays and Christmases were increasingly ruined by the thoughtlessness of her frankly absurd gifts. She mistakenly embraced the whole extrinsic elephantine question, the outward ephemera of elephantine culture, the gloopy sentimentality of half realized pachydermal simulacra. And gifts would proceed from her accordingly…little porcelain elephant figurines, with card attached “This elephant belongs to Brian”…elephant cuddly toys, all Disney big eyed and fluffy…ceramic elephant key ring tags, all shiny and metallic…carved tribal tourist elephant fetishes…an elephant shaped swimming ring (I could never swim but that’s hardly the point)…elephant trunk twin-egg-cups (although I hate eggs)…socks with elephant motif on the ankles…an elephant tiepin (even thought I don’t and never have worn ties…or shirts…)…grey enamel elephant bookends…elephant beer…elephant tattoo on my shoulder, both elephantine stigmata and religious trademark. My taut skin itched like crazy as the ink found easy purchase in the subcutaneous layers. But it was a necessary undertaking nonetheless. A branding in either sense of the word. It covered over the old Medusa tattoo, a stigma I’d had good reason to disguise. After our disastrous union, an attachment injurious to both parties and to all progeny, the snake headed icon was the last thing I needed on my shoulder. The old tattoo was now delitescent, concealed behind the elephant head, the snake tendrils skillfully altered to appear as stylized, ornate elephant ears. The gorgon head fully metamorphosed into the elephantine.
So no, I’m not happy. I’m beyond happy. I consume misery and I shit out happiness. I am The Great Beast of Happiness. The Enforcer of Joyousness. My arse gives me so much gyp these days. And my belly is ruined. I can’t look in the mirror and my arms are numb. I’m the epicene emanation, an androgynous afterthought, the fictional counterpart of a coked up south London sax player. A forethought. Me and Dionysia, Frank and me, triplets in a mush of creative energy, in receipt of your heartfelt indifference. And you need therefore to kill me 3 times to make sure I’m really dead. Death is no easy thing for me. The auguries are only readable after most of the mush has been scooped out. I can’t really be stored for too long in a fridge. I have a sell by date, which is why my escape and re-entry was so pressing. Happy? We don’t do happy. We don’t know happy. We’re in the darkness looking out for ourselves. Career is on track though and me happily re-escaped. The world our oyster bed, the elephant trails re-opened, the electricity discharged, planets in new alignments, a population now re-open to viscous Gnostic vibrations from the elephant trails, auto-erotic building sex is on the increase, the Hypnerotomachia republished for good and all and me and my fat birds in ecstatic conspiracy to kill the profane and re-establish the arcane.
