Barbara O'Brien's Operators and Things: A Remarkable Account of Schizophrenia in the Age of the Organisation Man.

February 17, 2014, 4:44 pm

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How very odd, I mused, that my unconscious mind should call itself an Operator and call my conscious mind a Thing.

  

Barbara O'Brien, Operators and Things.

First published in 1958, Barbara O’Brien’s Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic is a fascinating lost classic in which a woman gives a first-hand account of her sudden decent into schizophrenia and a complex hallucinatory world dominated by hidden psychic controllers called the Operators.  It was first published in hardback by a little known firm called Arlington Press, but gained wider exposure as a paperback issued in 1960 by science fiction/pulp specialists Ace Books.  (The company were noted for their two-for-the-price-of-one Ace Doubleimprint, the format in which Burroughs’ debut Junkie first appeared, as well as several of Philip K. Dick’s novels.)  Ace published the memoir under a “truth stranger than fiction” banner, in a style largely indisguishable from its regular wheelhouse of pulp sci-fi.  This, however, was not entirely inapt, as the ambience of O’Brien’s schizophrenic experience often evokes the monochrome surrealism of The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and John Frankenheimer’s cult classic Seconds.  Operators was later republished in the 70s, marketed with a mind to tap the post-60s boom for alternative psychotherapies, particularly the anti-psychiatry movement popularised by RD Laing.  After that it went off the publication radar for a couple of decades, finally re-emerging in recent years with a small but enthusiastic cult following.  Though a slim volume, the book was fascinating to me for many reasons.  O’Brien’s invented world of Operators and Things evokes literary precursors like Kafka and Burroughs; her story offers a sidelong glance into the cold, alienating underbelly of office life during America’s golden age of postwar stability and conformity; most intriguingly, the latter sections of the book offer an extended meditation on themes which have been a lifelong personal fascination: the relationship between the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain, and the closely related mysteries of inspiration, intuition, and creativity.

(I should note that it is possible that Operators is actually a work of fiction – that it is one of those trickster books which invent a non-fictional frame almost in the manner of an allegory.  It could be that some author invented “Barbara O’Brien’s” story, in order to dramatize a critique of 50s  corporate culture, and present his or her speculative theories regarding the nature of schizophrenia and the unconscious.  I’m not really going to address that possibility in the following essay, as I don’t have enough information to speculate one way or the other, and the qualities of the book remain undiminished regardless.)  At the beginning of her narrative, Barbara is a stable, capable, if perhaps a little timid, professional woman working in the offices of the family-run Knox Company.  In a manner reminiscent of many later alien abduction narratives, her life is abruptly thrown into disarray by the appearance of a trio of strange figures at the foot of her bed:

 I awoke one morning, during a time of great personal tension and self-conflict, to find three grey and somewhat wispy figures standing at my bedside.  I was, as might be imagined, completely taken up by them.  Within a few minutes they had banished my own sordid problem from my mind and replaced it with another and more intriguing one.  They were not Men from Mars, but the Operators, a group in some ways stranger than Martians could be.

As O’Brien points out, her interlopers are not extraterrestrials, but turn out to derive their chief characteristics from a more mundane and immediate milieu; according to Michael MacCoby in the Introduction,  Barbara’s hallucinations “are not, however, the gods and devils common to another age; they are the horrors of Organisation Man; they are reactions to forces blocking attempts at creativity in work and attempts to enjoy relationships of trust with others.”  Published a couple of years before Operators, William H. Whyte’s The Organisation Man would, alongside Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, become an iconic document of the American workplace in the buttoned-down, conformist 50s.  Both works spoke to a sense that America, having won the war, was now drifting into a torpor of materialistic, suburban mediocrity.  Whyte feared that the American workforce was trading the country’s traditional values of individualism and self-sufficiency for a new collectivist ethos centred around the corporation or company.  The frontiersmen, the cowboys, and the rugged GIs were drifting into memory, and gradually being replaced, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, by a horde of indistinguishably suited company men and office drones, preoccupied only by their salaries, pensions, and easy chairs by the television.  As a side-note, it is interesting that the increasing incursion of bureaucracy and office manners and dress-codes has had such a pointed impact on American folklore and mythology.  A decade earlier witnessed the emergence of the Men In Black, one of the most enduring and intriguing of modern American archetypes.  The Man in Black was an elusive type of the Organisation Man whose employers (and employer’s goals) must remain utterly mysterious; their appearances and questions are, they assure us, simply a matter of formality and routine.  The archetype retains its vigour to this day, serving the function of angel in one place, and devil in another.  In the writings of John Keel, the Men In Black emerge as peculiar, automaton-like beings, presenting us with an often amateurish imitation of the human.  Perhaps there is some weird parallel between the Men in Black’s stilted imitation of authentic humanity, and the fact that the organisation men and women of the office-space were forced to adopt an imitation of something less than human, insofar as they were forced to mould themselves to the regular, predictable, and emotionally repressive dictates of office life.

If Whyte feared the loss of the individualistic impulse in the corporate office milieu, however, he was only half right.  The impulse towards a Darwinian type of competition seems to persist in most collectivist institutions, where it simply moulds itself according to the behavioural norms characteristic of the institution in question.  Since direct, physical confrontation was untenable to the modern, civilised veneer presented by the office, a new species of competitive behaviour had to evolve, one which was subtle rather than overt, and which concentrated on the adroit manipulation andcontrol of other people, so that they became the apparent agents of their own  downfall.  It is an exposure to this type of institutionalized office sociopathology which precipitates Barbara O’Brien’s mental breakdown, and provides her with the idea of the hook operator,  the central image of her subsequent schizophrenic fantasy:

But standards are manufactured things.  You don’t create them, you accept them.  And there are too many men like Gordon and McDermott for me to feel now that all of them are twisted.  In a way, they have adapted themselves superbly to a certain type of business environment.  Both Gordon and McDermott cut the most direct road they could find to where they wanted to go.  That they both knifed a few men getting there was totally unimportant to either of them.  ‘Such men are immoral,’ people say of Hook Operators, and of course this is true.

      

        Behind him stands the Hook Operator.  Having operated his hook successfully, the Hook Operator stands by with his other instruments, the knife and the hatchet.  He watches the trashing man, speculating, considering.  If necessary, he will move in and cut the victim’s throat, or with his hatchet cleave through the victim’s head.

It is this Machiavellian office environment which feeds directly into the extraordinary hallucinatory world which Barbara is thrust into after her encounter with the Operators.  She learns that the world is populated by two distinct types of human being: Operators and Things.  Operators differ from Things simply by virtue of brain-chemistry.  Operators are born with a special variety of cells which they call “the battlement.”  These cells give them a vastly heightened psychic ability, which allows them to read and manipulate the minds of ordinary humans, whom they christen “Things”:

 Hinton sighed.  ‘Things.  Yes, of course.  Think of the word with a capital initial, if you like.  It may help your ego a little bit.  All people like you are Things to us – Things whose minds can be read and whose thoughts can be initiated and whose actions can be motivated.  Does that surprize you?  It goes on all the time.  There is some, but far less, free will than you imagine.  A Thing does what some Operator wants it to do, only it remains under the impression that its thoughts originate in its own mind.’

Here we find the quintessence of extreme paranoia: the idea that our minds are subject to invasion and manipulation by nefarious external agencies.  These types of beliefs are a mainstay of paranoid schizophrenia, and the cultural expression of the paranoid schizophrenic tendency which we find at in the fringes of the conspiracy community.  The belief that our minds can be controlled from afar often embodies a technological component, as was first noted by Freud’s pupil Victor Tausk in his influential 1919 monograph On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia.  Tausk’s case studies describe a machine of “mystical nature” which is capable of producing as well as removing thoughts and impressions in the patient’s brains by means of “waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain.”  To invert Clarke, any sufficiently advanced diabolism is indistinguishable from technology.   The great Outsider Artist and schizophrenic visionary Richard Sharpe Shaver invented a dense mythology around the idea of nefarious mind-manipulating technology, in which the wielders of the influencing machine are found to be the “Abandoderos” (or Dero for short, dero meaning “detrimental robot”), an underground-dwelling race of degenerate fiends whom Shaver describes as “fearfully anaemic jitterbugs, small, with pipestream arms and legs, huge protruding eyes and wide, idiotically grinning mouths.”  Proving that paranoia loves company, the publication of Shaver’s ideas in the pulp Amazing Stories prompted a flurry of letters which seemed to corroborate the existence the Deros.  Let’s not run paranoia down too much; there is always some fire behind the wispy forms of mythological smoke.  Published a year before Operators and Things, Vince Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders shockingly exposed the new psychological and sociological subtlety with which ad men were attempting to read and manipulate the minds of the masses via technological channels.  In the late 70s, Jerry Mander invoked the Influencing Machine in his polemic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television:  “Doubtless you have noticed that this ‘influencing machine’ sounds an awful lot like television….In any event, there is no question that television does what the schizophrenic fantasy says it does.  It places in our minds images of reality which are outside our experience.  The pictures come in the form of rays from a box.  They cause changes in feeling and….utter confusion as to what is real and what is not.”  To many hard-line Marxist critics of capitalist ideology, the earlier quoted statement from the Operator Hinton is an apt enough description of reality:  ‘A Thing does what some Operator wants it to do, only it remains under the impression that its thoughts originate in its own mind’. 

In the form of the Operators, Barbara O’Brien discovers the ultimate hidden persuaders, a species of mundane, corporate Archon who are perhaps like a white-collar division of Shaver’s monstrous Deros.  Part of the reason why O’Brien’s book didn’t cause the same furore of true believers and fellow-travellers as the Shaver Mystery is probably that the world of the Operators is largely a reflection of our own.  Like us Things, Operators work for companies (with sometimes Burroughsian names like The Western Boys); these organisations broker “charters” on Things, charters being the exclusive right to operate, or manipulate, Things.  Operators then artfully manipulate Things (and other Operators) in order to win “points.”  One particularly cruel method by which points are accrued is called The Game: a group of Operators take turns implanting distressing thoughts in the mind of an unwitting Thing, and the Operator to cause the most intense emotional distress wins the pot of points.  Points are to Operators what money is to Things:

 ‘What you’re overlooking is that a Thing can be influenced chiefly because of its desire for money and power.  An Operator’s security and self-esteem revolve around Operator’s points just as a Thing’s revolves around money.  With sufficient points, an Operator can do anything in an Operator’s world.  He can be a great power.  He can own an organisation and buy the charters of hundreds of Things.  He can be safe from other Operators.  How does that make him more despicable than a Thing?  The hell of it is, Operators and Things are motivated by similar desires.   We’re both in the soup, Operators and Things alike.’

In some respects, O’Brien’s Operators resemble the Nova Mob postulated in William S. Burroughs’ endlessly fascinating and infuriating Cut-Up Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.)  Described by its author as an attempt to create a “new mythology for the space age”, the trilogy posits a Gnostic scenario in which planet earth is subject to the incursion of various parasitic entities known collectively as the Nova Mob, who invade and manipulate human beings in order to maximize conflict and suffering, on which the Mob subsequently feed:

nova criminals are not three dimensional organisms – (though they are quite definite organisms as we shall see) – but they need three dimensional human agents in order to operate – The point at which the criminal controller intersects a three-dimensional human agent is known as “a coordinate point” – And if there is one thing that carries over from one controller it is habit; idiosyncrasies, vices, food preferences – (we were able to trace Hamburger Mary through her fondness for peanut butter) – a gesture, a special look, that is to say the style of the controller – A chain smoker will always operate through chain smokers, an addict through addicts – Now a single controller can operate through thousands of human agents, but he must have a line of coordinate points –  (The Ticket That Exploded.)

Like Burroughs’ Nova Mob, the denizens of Lynch’s Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, and the Reptilians of David Icke’s popular conspiranoid mythos, O’Brien’s Operators subliminally manipulate human beings in order to feed on their distress and alienation; like Burroughs’ hypostasis of absolute Control, they are controlled by their need to control.  Habit patterns form an interesting component of O’Brien’s scheme.  In the language of the Operators, Things’ habit patterns are referred to as “latticework.”  In a grisly operation known as “dummetising”, the latticework of a Thing can be removed and effectively reprogrammed by their Operator:

‘It’s a process by which most of a Thing’s latticework is removed and new latticework is allowed to grow in,’ Nicky told me.  ‘Latticework is the growth in your mind which stores your habit patterns.  It’s called latticework because it looks something like the wooden latticework they use to support rosebushes.  Once latticework is removed, a new latticework will grow in quickly, but it may be a very different kind of growth.  The kind of habits you’ll develop will depend on the Operators working on you while it’s growing in.’

What is perhaps more intriguing is a point stressed by several of the Operators: once a Thing has had its latticework removed, it is in a state of maximum pliability, and can be controlled with ease by any Operator.  This is because Things (us, in other words) are constituted almost exclusively by their habit patterns; their capacity to think spontaneously and independently of ingrained, automatic mental patterns is extremely limited or non-existent.  Hence, O’Brien’s hallucinatory controllers echo the central insight of Gurdjieff and his initiated predecessors: we are asleep, and move through this life on an autopilot or trance of calcified mental habits and routines.  Ever abrasive towards the ego of the Things, the following passage suggests just howlimited is our capacity for creative thought:

‘That’s a dummy with a topknot,’ said Rink.  ‘And whenever an Operator runs into one of those, he knows that the Thing is not responsible for anything that it does.  It’s being controlled entirely by an Operator.  A Thing’s control is in its habit patterns.  When it has nothing but its thinking ability left, the most feeble Operator can control it, because Things can think only to a very limited degree.’

‘How limited?’

‘I’ll tell you this’, Rink said with finality.  ‘If it weren’t for Operators, Things would still be wandering in and out of caves.’ 

That is a rough outline of the complex world which O’Brien inhabits during the period of her schizophrenic fugue.  The Operators tell her that she is the subject of an experiment, whereby a Thing will be allowed to observe the normally secret activities of their Operators.  For the next six months, she travels fitfully across America on Greyhound buses, following the dictates of various bickering and omnipresent Operators.  Finally, after many misadventures, she abruptly ceases to see and hear her interlopers, and comes to the painful realization that they were all along only figments of her unwell imagination.  She makes a slow progress back to a kind of normalcy, being at first perfectly stable, but intellectually and emotionally inert.  It is in this interim period, however, that O’Brien experiences some of the books most curious phenomena.  The machinery of her conscious mind (which she refers to as the dry beach) is completely incapacitated by the trauma of her schizophrenia.  She is, however, aided at times by her still acute unconscious mind, which she describes as sending waves to the dry beach.  These waves help her out in small ways, alerting her to things she has forgotten about, helping her in mundane situations that her exhausted conscious mind is not capable of dealing with.  This, however, is where things start to get weird.  In the traumatic reorientation of her mental functioning, the powers of her unconscious mind seem to have been temporarily heightened to a staggering degree.  She first writes a novel at breakneck speed; but her conscious mind seems to have no input whatever into what she is writing:

  I would sit at the typewriter, put my hands on the keys, and start in.  I had almost no comprehension of what I was writing and no memory whatever of what I had written, once I had closed the typewriter.  My fingers seemed to know which keys to hit and that’s all there was to it.  Apparently they were being guided by the department below the sandy shore which contained the knowing waves and the perfectly synchronised clock and which seemed completely capable of forming the waves, operating the clock, and writing a novel without any assistance from the dry beach.

More alarmingly, her unconscious mind seems to be temporarily experiencing a series of wild talents which she refers to as Something.  These abilities appear to include telepathy and precognition; she experiences a “four day period of growing apprehension, knowing before people spoke what they would say, knowing, before they turned corners and appeared, that they were coming.”  Finally, Something compels her to go to Los Vegas:

Something kept me rooted at one wheel and Something urged me violently to play a certain number at a certain time.  I played a dollar chip and won.  I waited, rooted, got another strong urge, played, won again.  I played six times, won six times, and found myself with a purse full of money.

Then Something too departs from her mental functioning, and she returns gradually to a relatively normative mental health.  The whole experience spurs O’Brien to embark on a fascinating series of speculations regarding the nature of inspiration, creativity, and the unconscious, which reminds me frequently of the theories underpinning Julian Jaynes’ mind-bending 1976 masterpiece The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  In the conclusion of this essay, I’m going to consider Operators and Thingsin relation to Jaynes’ controversial theories.

Conclusion: The Subterranean Craftsman. 

Psychology does not know much about creativity.   Freud analyses Dostoevsky as a neurotic, but he admits ‘Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.’  In a similar way one can explain William Blake’s hallucinations and his denunciation of the Royal Academy’s Hook Operators, but the music of Blake’s words, the form of their content, and the fact of creativity, rather than stagnation, remain an awesome mystery.

Michael MacCoby, Operators and Things, Introduction.

The waves were far more clever than the dry beach.

                Barbara O’Brien, Operators and Things.

                It is surely a peculiar kind of book which can count among its admirers Daniel Dennett at one end of the spectrum, and Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Alan Moore, Robert Anton Wilson, and Grant Morrison at the other extreme.  The Origin is surely the only such book.  To Dennett, its appeal probably lies largely in the fact that it offers a neurological explanation for the emergence of religion – but the book has also been name-checked by just about every significant countercultural writer of the modern period because it remains one of the boldest and most elegantly expressed speculations on the nature of human consciousness and history ever produced.  It is eminently a book for what used to be called “heads”  - adventurous thinkers whose fondness for mind-blowing drugs is merely a subset of a deeper fascination with the nature of consciousness, and an equal predilection for mind-blowing ideas.  Jaynes begins his odyssey by asking: how many of the things which we tend to associate with consciousness actually necessitate the use of conscious thought?  Following the testimonies of various artists, mathematicians, and scientists, Jaynes concludes that surprisingly few actually do.  The best way to begin to think about this would be with the example of trying to remember something.  You rack your conscious mind – it’s on the tip of your tongue – but the required information just won’t come.  Then, at some point, maybe a moment later, maybe a day, the answer just pops effortlessly into your mind.  Something – not your stumbling, bumbling conscious recall - has gone into the files and retrieved the data.  Jaynes argues that precisely the same process occurs with mental tasks of fargreater complexity.  For the scientist or the mathematician, there is a process of conscious priming,  whereby a problem is kicked around in the conscious mind.  The conscious mind exerts itself considerably, before finally reaching an impasse – the problem appears intractable.  Then sometime later, in the shower, shaving, waiting for the bus, when the conscious mind is thinking about something completely different – wham, Eureka, the solution surges forth, fully-formed and unbidden.  Again, Something (to borrow O’Brien’s capitalization) – not the scientist’s stumbling, bumbling conscious problem-solving capacity – has somehow put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, without the scientist even being aware of it.  It’s like that peculiar phenomenon (or subjective impression) recorded by many who have dabbled casually in fishing: you only hook the fish as soon as you’ve stopped thinking about hooking a fish.

                Barbara O’Brien’s experience of rapidly writing a coherent novel with no apparent input from her conscious mind prompts her to consider the same mysterious properties of inspiration and creativity.  She also finds that the writer, when he or she is working at their optimum ability, always feels as though Something else has gotten into the driver’s seat:

Other writers who produced work of a higher calibre said almost exactly the same thing.  ‘The story wrote itself,’ was the phrase usually used to describe the birth of some story for which the writer had become best known.  Attempting to explain what was happening to them while they were in the flush of creation, writers drew revealing pictures.  ‘I felt like a receiving station for a programme coming in.’  ‘It flooded my mind like a faucet being turned on.’  (Operators and Things)

From these tentative early speculations, Jaynes arrives at a stunning hypothesis: that up until about three thousand years ago, human beings did not possess full self and meta-consciousness, but rather existed in a mental condition which Jaynes christened “bicameralism” (“two-chamberedness”).  This effectively meant experiencing the two working hemispheres of the brain as separate entities – that is that the brain worked in a largely unconscious manner according the same type of habit patterns which the other animals exhibit (and which the Operators refer to as “latticework”).  However, when bicameral man encountered a problem which the habitual latticework was incapable of coping with, the right hemisphere produced a solution which the left then perceived as an auditory command coming from an external source.  That is, the left hemisphere perceived it’s smarter, problem-solving, big picture grokking right hemisphere as something wholly other from itself – and as Something whose voice must be obeyed.  (Recall the Operator Rink’s assertion to Barbara O’Brien:  ‘I tell you this.  If it weren’t for Operators, Things would still be wandering in and out of caves.’)  Eventually, the bicameral mind brakes down, the hemispheres become – to a large degree – experientially and conceptually united, and modern self and meta-self-consciousness is born.  But from that initial experience of the smarter, gestalt-comprehending right hemisphere as a commanding and external presence, emerged all our conceptions – religious and societal - of the higher authority which must be obeyed: all our gods, all our chieftains and god-kings, all our ancestral spirits, all our mediumistic channels, all our Hidden Chiefs, Ascended Masters, and Benevolent Space Brothers.  Jaynes posits that all human cultural history – right up to the present day deification of the physical sciences – is haunted by a nostalgia for the bicameral mind, and for the immeasurable comfort of yielding to that apparently external voice of absolute authority and wisdom. 

It seems to me to that while Jaynes’ theory may not be completely (or even substantially) correct, he was still most definitely on to something.  It does often feel as though a radical alteration of some kind occurred to to our consciousness from which we have not quite recovered; that some fissure opened up which has made us, uniquely in the animal kingdom, of two distinct and often inharmonious minds, the uneasy denizens of two distinct worlds.  Ian Gilchrist, exploring and extending similar ideas to Jaynes in his book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World, suggests that “many of the disputes about the nature of the human world can be illuminated by an understanding that there are two fundamentally different ‘versions’ delivered to us by the two hemispheres, both of which can have a ring of authenticity about them, and both of which are hugely valuable; but they stand in opposition to one another, and need to be kept apart from one another – hence the bihemspheric structure of the brain.”  To those sceptical of over-literal, pop psychological treatments of the hemispheres, Gilchrist acknowledges that his division of specific modes of apprehending the world according to the left and right hemispheres may ultimately be a metaphor, albeit one which refers to real attributes of human consciousness.  (Gilchrist’s title – The Master and his Emissary  - can be easily mapped on to O’Brien’s Operator/Thing dichotomy.) 

 

However one feels about Jaynes’ theory of bicameralism, Operators and Things makes for a fascinating illustration of many of its tenants.  Discussing the fantasies of schizophrenics, O’Brien notes that the common feature of schizophrenic interlopers – whether diabolical, extraterrestrial, or technological – is that of absolute, unquestionable authority:

 I should like to note, at this point, that schizophrenics, long before writers dreamed up science fiction, had – as they still have – a consistent way of developing mental worlds filled with Men from Mars, devils, death ray experts, and other fanciful characters.

Regardless of their individuality, they seem to have certain characteristics in common: they are figures of authority who can command with considerably expectation that the dry beach will obey; they are superhuman and beyond the powers of human authorities who might interfere, such as policemen and doctors.  Once they appear, the dry beach speedily gets the general drift: either you do what these characters say, or else, for no other human can help you.

The crucial lesson which O’Brien learns in the course of her experience is that the unconscious (or silent right hemisphere, or whichever metaphor you prefer), rather than being the broiling sea of atavistic and irrational impulse which Freud imagined, is in fact a creative and immeasurably smart entity.  O’Brien presents her runaway unconscious most frequently as a kind of effortless master artist:

In most cases of schizophrenia, however, the unconscious appears to prefer not the techniques of the actor, but those of the director.  It does not create a new personality, but instead stages a play.  The major difference is that the conscious mind is permitted to remain, an audience of one sitting lonely in the theatre, watching a drama on which it cannot walk out.

Without stopping for a deep breath, it gets its Martian, or whatever, going.  With speed and apparent purposefulness, it escorts the conscious mind to a box seat, makes it comfortable, and projects the shape or shapes it has created, and the voice or voices it has chosen.

Many of the lessons O’Brien derives from her traumatic experience are not flattering to the ego.  The dry beach of daylight self-consciousness is a tiny spit of sand in a vast ocean of which it has only the most limited and fleeting knowledge; the ego, the would-be controller of its world, is a mere plaything in the hands of a variety of Operators who can see right through it at a glance.  All of  these things O’Brien learns obliquely through a kind of six-month Twilight Zonemental radio play.  However, the picture is not entirely bleak.  Connected somehow with the dangers of extreme loss of control, trauma, and madness, are the hidden wellsprings of creativity, of almost supernatural-seeming intuition, of all the higher potentialities of the mind; potentialities whose outer limit, O’Brien intriguingly suggests, we can scarcely conceptualize:  “Possibly, conscious man knows so little about the odd talents, that there is no language or concept by which the unconsciousness can explain its unusual processes.”  Of course, in the commonality of the delusion, the dream, and the painted canvas or flickering cinema screen, art itself remains the primary candidate for this difficult and ongoing exchange.

The vintage Operators and Things cover is from THE CHISELER - A THING TO REMEMBER

            The Scanner Darkly cover is from Art Is A State.
           
            The picture of the suburbs is from Electric Sunshine.


   

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Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin and Sci Fi/Genre Art Cinema.

April 12, 2014, 3:55 pm

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The premise of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is as old and familiar as the hills: a seductive, supernatural predator leading men to their destruction.  The idea is as old as the siren of mythology and the succubi of folklore, and as comparatively modern as the enduring fascination with the vampire as a figure of sexual potency and threat.  Since all the traditional functions of supernatural entities received a fresh coat of paint in the twentieth century via its new mythologies of science, technology, and space exploration, it is unsurprising that the succubus would reappear in the guise of an extraterrestrial.  Although there are probably countless examples, two spring immediately to mind: Mathilda May as the permanently undressed space siren in Tobe Hooper's under-seen 1985 pulp joy Lifeforce, and Natasha Henstridge's cloned catwalk alien Sil in 1995's Species, a film which was considered essential viewing by adolescent boys and not widely treasured outside that demographic.

Lilith (1892)  by John Collier, Lifeforce (1985) by Tobe Hooper, and Species (1995) by Roger Donaldson.

The material underlying Under the Skin is thus familiar and generic, but Glazer's approach to it is daring, original, and disorientating, so much so that the film defies any easy generic categorization as science fiction.  First of all, Under the Skin eschews any fleshing-out of its sci-fi premise: the sci-fi, extraterrestrial elements of the story receive no explanation, no exposition, and no back-story.  We don't know where the aliens come from, how they got here, or what precisely they require human beings for.  In fact, the very idea that Scarlett Johansson is an extraterrestrial is something which we bring to the movie, either from the pre-publicity we've read, or an awareness of the source novel, or our awareness of the general conventions of science fiction films; there is nothing in the film itself which explicitly suggests that this is the case.  This reticent or minimalist approach to standard plotting is crucial to the experience and impact of Under the Skin.  In one sense, it conforms to the film's astringent air of realism; the story of Johansson and the other aliens is, like everything else in the film, a fully realized world which we cut into randomly and observe from a distance, just as the various locations and victims which Johansson encounters along the way  are random intersections with people and things whose full histories exist outside the margins of her point of view.  On the other hand, by removing all conventional exposition, Under the Skin's science fiction conceits function primarily as images rather than literalized plot-points or ideas.  As such, their effect approaches more to surrealism than conventionally plotted science fiction, and by focusing its generic elements in the intuitive, murkily powerful realm of images, it might be argued that Under the Skin brings its genre conventions back to their source in the subconsciousness, and away from their subsequent reification as literalized aliens or vampires - back to the kind of powerful, inchoate images from which these archetypal stories emerge in the first place.

Yet, at the same time that Under the Skin abstracts its sci-fi into surrealism, it anchors this surrealism in a world of gritty, humdrum realism.  (Actually, anchor is the wrong word, since the film's surrealist and realist aspects tend to unsettle rather than equilibrate.)  Some places on earth are more down to earth than others, and Glasgow, surely, sits at the antipodes of Hollywood.  This, I think, is part of what makes Under the Skin such a distinct and disorientating film.  We associate this type of realism and milieu with independently produced dramas by directors like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach; we don't associate them with science fiction, surrealism, or Scarlett Johansson.  (Is the nearest Johansson has previously come to a British film Woody Allen's mangling of London in Match Point?)  Realism is in some senses always a relative concept.  The type of realism which Under the Skin strives for is to give us a palpable sense of the reality of the Scottish locations through which Johansson moves.  In terms of how it utilizes and evokes location, Under the Skin really is a remarkable achievement.  Making films requires a great deal of control.  Traditionally, a director must have an absolute control of his or her set or location, because the script must be adhered to without interruption, and the specific effects which a director has envisioned for a scene must go according to the director's intentions.  A certain amount of experimentation and spontaneity is always tenable, but in general, because of the extreme time and budgetary constraints to which the film-making process is beholden, a director has to know what they want in advance, and have sufficient control over their location so that they can achieve precisely that when the cameras are rolling.  Necessary and useful though this control is, it has a subtle but definite effect on how the location feels to the viewers.  It feels, often on a subconscious level, like a controlled movie location, rather than how locations actually feel when we experience and interact with them in the real world.  Of course, the skill of the director plays a crucial part in the extent to which a set feels like a set in the finished product, but nevertheless our minds on some intuitive level instantly recognize a difference in texture between the closed-off, rigidly controlled location film set, and the dense, dappled spontaneity of real places.

In Under the Skin, this distinction appears to break down; the locations have a sense of palpable and spontaneous reality almost as never before in a motion picture feature.  In order to achieve this effect, Glazer and his cinematographer Daniel Landin developed a radically new guerrilla methodology for shooting a feature, one which effectively combines elements of verite documentary, hidden camera television, and conventional feature film-making - while nevertheless maintaining at all times the core identity of a feature film.  Using their van as a kind of mini-studio, and developing a very small camera which could nevertheless record high-quality images (the One Cam, about the size of a box of matches), the pair sought always to cause the least amount of disturbance to the environments in which they were shooting.  Employing these methodologies allowed them to shot Scarlett Johansson - one of the biggest stars in the world - interacting on the streets of Glasgow with various non-actors who were not initially aware that they were participating in a feature film.  Now, this is an exciting and extremely risky approach to making a feature with a big star and any kind of budget, but it could easily have been nothing more than a meta-textual gimmick if it didn't contribute to the effect of the finished feature in some kind of meaningful way.  Even if you were unaware of how the film was shot, as I was when I saw it, you intuitively get the difference that these filming methodologies contribute - that sense of the spontaneity and "live", unvarnished complexity of the environment gives the whole film a distinct feel - its fiction begins to feel like a disconcertingly vivid lucid dream.  Landin's achievement as a cinematographer is one of the most remarkable I've seen in a long, long time.  One of the major challenges that faces a cinematographer is how to balance creating a beautiful image with capturing one which is true and faithful to the reality of what is being filmed.  (The problem is especially pronounced in a era where digital intermediate colour grading processes often generate a glossy, air-brushed image which is neither beautiful nor true.)  Landin gets this balance just right in Under the Skin - his images are coolly beautiful, but they have that remarkable sense of fidelity to location, that vivacity and spontaneity of real environments, which characterizes the film as a whole.

At this point, it would probably be customary to try to unpack what Under the Skin is really about, what precisely  it means to say about sexuality, gender, empathy, alienation, what it means to be human, and so forth.  While there is much to be said in this regard, I found Under the Skin such a powerful, haunting, and satisfying experience that I feel almost reluctant to analyze it too much.  It's just one of those slightly ineffable experiences that seems to lose a little something when you try to translate it into a neat and linear argument or position.  Under the Skin presents us with an utterly inscrutable alien presence hidden in the skin of an attractive woman - in reality, a major Hollywood star disguised as an anonymous figure on the streets of Glasgow - and by viewing the world entirely from this elusive vantage point, it shows us how cold and alien a place the human world often is, and how weird it is, as Alejandro Jodorowsky once observed, to have skin.  Under the Skin evokes the icy, disconnected ambience of urban life which is nevertheless a kind of austere, paradoxical beauty, and finds similar bleak poetry in beaches and forests, in natural spaces which almost wholly eclipse the human world, a concept which feels tenuous from the outset in this film.  One of the things which makes Under the Skin so powerful is perhaps the sense that it is a fully modernized folk or faery tale.  A very common motif of folk tales is one in which a denizen of the Otherworld attempts to live in our world.  Usually, the creature of the Otherworld, be it a mermaid or a faery, marries a human being, sometimes out of love, and sometimes out of duress.  But the creature of the Otherworld can never live in our world in the long-term - the faery maiden loses her powers, and the mermaid always longs for her natural home in the ocean.  In Under the Skin, Johansson's alien - due to her encounter with the young man with neurofibromatosis - somehow falls out of whack with her normal behavior pattern, her identity, if the expression is applicable, as an alien.  Does she experience the tentative beginnings of empathy or compassion?  It's tempting to think so, but difficult to really be sure.  One way or the other, she abandons her own world, and begins to enter ours in a more meaningful way than before.  She encounters a man who for the first time does not jump immediately at her apparent sexual availability, and has intercourse with him.  This experience puzzles her, and seems to further root her in our world, as opposed to her own.  But the denizen of the Otherworld always loses their power when they enter fully into ours.  Johansson's "power" as as an alien - if you can call it that - is a total lack of empathy, engagement, or compassion for her victims; the perfect poise of a natural predator.  Entering our world and losing that as a consequence, she is transformed from a position of power to one of vulnerability, from a predator to a victim - in a sense, the same transformation which has occurred to her male victims when they realized that it was they, and not her, who was to be the notch on the bedpost.  Perhaps part of the sorrow that hovers over the alien's demise in Under the Skin derives from a sense of folk inevitability - from our folkloric awareness that the paradoxical being cannot survive for long between worlds, and that beauty, airplanes, or something always has to slay the beast with one foot in the human world.         

Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) and Panos Cosmatos's Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010).

Speaking of paradoxical, composite beings, it seems to me that Under the Skin emphasizes yet again that the best science fiction movies being made at the moment all fall way aside the pale of generically conventional, mainstream science fiction.  Much heralded revivals of mainstream science fiction such as Duncan Jones'Moon and Neil Blomkamp's District 9 never amounted to much to write home about in my books, neither achieving anything like the originality, depth and formal daring of Under the Skin and last year's Upstream Color.   These latter films, however, are not easily categorized as science fiction, and are best understood as fusing elements of science fiction and art cinema.  This marriage cuts both ways, and it might be argued that some of the best, or purest, art cinema in recent years is emerging from the mixture of art film aesthetics with those of generic forms, be they science fiction, Italian giallo horror films, or the gonzo experimental spirit of Midnight Movie figures like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger.  With this in mind, one might argue the existence of a loose cinematic movement in recent years, beginning with Gaspar Noe's mighty Enter the Void, and incorporating Panos Cosmatos's Beyond the Black Rainbow, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer, Nicolas Refn's Drive and Only God Forgives, and Shane Curruth's Upstream Color.  What these films share in common is a tendency to give a creative shot in the arm to genres like science fiction and horror which have grown moribund in their mainstream incarnations, coupled with a revival of the art film's movement away from conventional narrative and psychological realism, and towards a cinema of greater formalism, abstraction, and sensory richness.  Also common to many of these films (and a sort of general characteristic of contemporary culture), is a strong cinephilia, coupled with an obsessive nostalgia or fetishisation of the past.  This tendency is particularly noteworthy in Beyond the Black Rainbow, Amer, and Drive, all of which are encyclopedic in their influences, and aim for a kind of creative re-imagining of the past - even the less overtly cinephilic Under the Skin clearlyevokes experimental sci-fi's of the past like Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), and Bernard Tavernier's Glasgow-set Death Watch (1980).    

 

Beyond the Black Rainbow is set in 1983, in a experimental New Age faculty called the Arboria Institute (imagine the Esalen Institute reborn as a early Cronenberg nightmare clinic) which is devoted to the exploration of better living through “benign pharmacology, sensory therapy, and energy sculpting.”  Summarizing the plot is not hugely helpful - director Panos Cosmatos (whose father George directed such less explicitly avant-garde fare as Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra back in the 80s) establishes the barest bones of a narrative in order to facilitate a jaw-dropping spectacle of pure, immersive cinema trance - a science fiction film re-imagined as psychedelic art installation.  Although it has a cult following, Beyond the Black Rainbow still feels criminally obscure - it's not even available, so far as I know, on any European region blu-ray or dvd release.  For a debut film shot in three weeks, the visual imagination, design sensibility, and mastery of mood and form on display here are staggering. 

Upstream Color

The multi-talented  Shane Carruth made his name with 2004's micro-budgeted hard sci-fi puzzle Primer.  In the long awaited follow-up Upstream Color, the director moved decisively away from hard sci-fi in terms of plotting, and became far more experimental in his film-making approach.  The plot of Upstream - exploring the life-cycle of a parasite which manifests itself at one stage of its journey as a mind-control drug - was easier to understand, but far less literal, and more poetic, symbolic, and emotionally resonant in effect.  Upstream is also far more explicitly an art film than its predecessor, adopting Terrence Malick's elliptical, non-linear editing patterns, and an experimental foregrounding of sound-design of a type also recently explored in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio.  Theresulting film falls somewhere between a downbeat romantic drama, a weird Gnostic fable, and a bold formal experiment - but it works magnificently, and reaches a genuinely moving conclusion. 

Amer

Moving from sci-fi to horror, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer is often labeled an homage to the giallo films of Dario Argento and Maria Bava.  This is reasonable enough, as the pair have obviously steeped themselves in the iconography, style, and period music of those films.  However, Amer is something very distinct from a giallo - like Beyond the Black Rainbow (but more so) it jettisons plot in favor of enveloping the viewer in an immersive, hypnotic, and extremely sensual experience.  As the film progresses, dialogue is largely abandoned, its dramatic function taken up by a constantly inventive and complex sound design.  The story of a woman's sexual awakening told from three different junctures in her life, what continues to fascinate and impress me about Amer is the way the directors use a kaleidoscopic array of formal techniques to heighten the most banal of situations, and infuse them with a barely suppressed hidden life of erotic and nightmare delirium - the film's opening half-hour being perhaps one of the screen's all time great evocations of a nightmare.    

 

The Advisory Circle: Now ends the beginning

May 16, 2014, 12:06 pm

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The People - Glastonbury.

May 16, 2014, 12:14 pm

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The Bird Out of Space and Time. (Part 1).

June 8, 2014, 5:58 pm

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1. The Bird Out of Space and Time.

             It was boredom pure and simple that drew Malcolm Jeffrey into the fortune teller’s booth in the narrow, copper-coloured arcade in the centre of that unfamiliar city.  Boredom, and a vague boyhood memory which the booth stirred in his mind, like fragments of light reflected on the uneasy surface of a dark pool – a memory of a book of strange heraldic symbols he’d looked at when he was a child.  He’d retrieved the book from a cabinet in what he recognised to be a grand old town house in some leafy estate near a canal.  However, he had no recollection of ever visiting the house or surrounding estate in his childhood, and this, combined with an overall ambience of unfamiliarity suffusing the whole memory, lead him to suspect that it was only a fragment of some dream.  Everybody, Malcolm suspected, had vague, partial memories of places which they had never been, little fragments stirred in their minds like light reflected on the uneasy surface of a dark pool.

                Malcolm was visiting the unfamiliar city in order to meet with a certain Mr. Sheldrake, a property speculator and antique dealer with whom he had done business for several years, without ever having met or even spoken to prior to this engagement.  The whole business troubled him.  Sheldrake troubled him, to begin with, because of his elusiveness.  In the past, he had always spoken to intermediaries – men who carried themselves with a peculiar air of enjoying a private joke at his expense.  Everything they said had the faint, barely perceptible irony of a double entendre, of something whose full significance would only become apparent in due course.  This sometimes led Malcolm to suspect that Sheldrake might have had dubious business interests – massage parlours, or amusement arcades, or something like that.

  

Everybody, however, insisted that they knew Sheldrake, and that he was above board – only it always transpired that, when pressed, they actually only knew somebody who knew Sheldrake, and that person, when pressed, only knew somebody else who knew Sheldrake, and so on.  Malcolm wondered if anybody really knew him.  The business with Sheldrake that Malcolm was currently engaged with – involving the former’s imminent acquisition of a derelict dockside property which had languished for some twelve years on Malcolm’s portfolio – was a matter of considerable import.  Malcolm’s firm was barely threading water, and finally off-loading the dockside property – which he had purchased in expectation of an illusionary regeneration project – would give him considerable breathing space.   More than that, it would finally free him from something which had always made him feel uneasy – ever since he'd first purchased the dockside property, he had suspected that it was, in some secular sense, cursed ground.  A history of bad, underhand deals could infect a property with a contagion of poor luck which persisted for some reason which Malcolm didn’t quite understand, and didn’t care to speculate on. 

When Mr. Sheldrake expressed an interest in acquiring the property, Malcolm saw an opportunity to finally have done with the both of them; to divest himself of two bad pennies at one stroke.  Naturally, the whole thing had been going a little toowell.  At the eleventh hour, with the deal all but finalized, Mr. Sheldrake contracted him through one of his intermediaries, and arranged the anomalous face to face meeting in the city.  

                His flight brought him to the city far too early.  Having checked into his hotel, lunched, and sat at a terrace for as long as he could bear that, he still had four hours to kill until the meeting with Sheldrake.  The city itself he found infuriatingly boring.  Malcolm enjoyed cities which possessed either the romance of antiquity, or the bright, sharp sheen of high modernity.  The worst kind of city, in his opinion, was that which possessed neither: those greyish, subdued cities that seemed perpetually mired in the recent past.  This was Malcolm’s impression of the unfamiliar city.  It had an ambience which might have been a decade ago, or it might have been no specific time at all.  He recalled with a peculiar emotional unease certain small airports he had passed through which possessed the same quality: ghostly places stuck in the tawdry aesthetic of an uneventful decade which nobody else seemed to remember, or ever care to revisit.  Lacking both the present’s modicum of vitality and significance, and the true past’s magic of irretrievability, the indeterminate recent past is the least alluring temporal byway.

 

And yet, in the course of that sluggish afternoon, in the midst of that grey, subdued city, Malcolm was immediately struck by the appearance of the arcade.   Though not tall, the building itself was imposing, covering a whole block of the street.  It was redbrick, but a brownish red which made Malcolm think of the colour of shiny new copper coins.  The arcade itself was located in the main, central section, whose lancet windows and slender, decorative turrets suggested a modest, austere cathedral.   Around this main structure, the ground floor buildings were anonymous modern shop facades, but the higher storeys maintained the redbrick, Victorian gothic style of the original building.  A sequence of turret windows, decorated with cross-like finials, extended out from the building’s grey slate roof.  Those windows, each like a tiny world unto itself, captured Malcolm’s imagination in some peculiar way, and the building as a whole reminded him of those books he must have read in childhood, which concerned themselves with strange, secluded and labyrinthine old houses, wherein children discovered hidden passage ways, lost heirlooms, and magical playmates.  Malcolm went instantly within, already drifting into an odd nostalgia for events and places which were so hazy they did not feel as though they belonged with his own memories.

                The arcade was located in a narrow, high-ceilinged open space which formed a passage between two streets.  The walls at either side of the passage housed various premises, with the centre occupied by an unruly sequence of booths and stalls.  The wares offered in the booths and stalls were all castaways: old hardback books, vintage coins, a gaggle of dolls squeezed into a pram, a rocking horse, a wigless mannequin whose glazed expression somehow expressed a sense of dislocation, everything contributing to the feeling of walking through a vast communal attic of forgotten things.   Malcolm had almost tired of the arcade when he came upon the fortune-teller’s booth, tucked against the wall to the left of the opposite exit.  It was a small, fragile-looking structure, draped in red velvet curtains, and enveloped with an air both of tawdry seaside carnival and hushed confessional. 
  

DARE TO KNOW WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS?

FULLY QUALIFIED EXPERT IN TAROT, PALMISTRY, AND ALL THE MYSTIC ARTS.

LEARN ABOUT TOMORROW…..BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.

Malcolm admired the copy for its lack of subtlety.  You could promise them marriage, and riches, and all manner of unexpected baubles, but fear of the unknown was always the winning pitch in the end.  Throughout his adult life, Malcolm regarded anything with the faintest redolence of sorcery or superstition with a most withering personal contempt.  People would believe anything, literally anythingat all, but that their lives were brief events without rhyme or reason, and with no ancillary meaning, excepting what pleasures they might acquire, and pains avoid.  It was an inability to accept that simple truth which drove the majority into the embrace of illusions and fantasies, and quietly transplanted their earnings into the coffers of mealy-mouthed prelates and uneducated, half-crazed gypsies, while they prayed, read horoscopes, and watched the empty heavens for signs that some higher-up took even a modicum of interest in their fortunes.  Superstitious people, as far as Malcolm could see, lived under the perpetual illusion that the world was always nudging them, winking slyly, or passing them little notes.  That was the genius of the fortune teller’s copy: a rational person would instantly perceive the sales gimmick, but three, maybe four, people out of every ten would get a jolt.  They would read the copy as speaking directly to them.  Here’s another note from the universe, they would say to themselves in so many words.

Yet, for all that, Malcolm found himself lingering at the threshold of the booth’s entrance.  Was this not after all precisely what he was looking for?  The hours were dragging by so slowly, and here was an amusing and relatively inexpensive distraction.  Well, with any luck it might be amusing; at the very least it would be time-consuming.  Malcom drew aside the curtains, and stumbled into the dimly lit booth. 

It was peculiarly quiet inside for such a threadbare structure; it felt as though the muffled buzz of the street had instantly subsided, like a wave levelled and carried back in the tide.  Now all he could hear was a clock ticking, and another sound which came at intervals, and reminded him of an awning rippled by a shrill wind.   The space he entered was a kind of tiny waiting room with a shuttered counter facing two chairs and a coffee table.  The coffee table was festooned with cheaply produced brochures that advertised mediation classes and metaphysical seminars which Malcolm imagined convening in drab semi-detached houses.  He rapped on the counter.  After an interval sufficiently ponderous that he had all but abandoned the whole foolish business, the shutter was raised, and Malcolm found himself regarded by a harried-looking woman with raven-black hair and wrinkled olive skin.  It was difficult to determine whether her appearance was one of youthful old age, or that of a younger woman prematurely marked by harsh and unforgiving experience.  Malcolm was enjoying the theatricality of the experience before a word was spoken.  She, this fortune teller, looked as though his knock had roused her from a cacophony of voices in the head, and a visionary delirium of rats and imps and tiny devils sporting themselves on rocking horses and carousels of diseased imagination.  She looked thoroughly and reassuringly mad, Malcolm thought, and even feigned a look of shocked recognition when their eyes first met.  A natural performer.

“Yes?” she finally enquired, in a hushed and tired voice that sounded like that faint scraping sound people sometimes hear coming from their bedroom walls at night. 

“How much for the cards?”, Malcolm enquired.  

She motioned to a list of prices on the wall, and Malcolm nodded.  The shutter closed again, and there followed another long interval, after which the door adjacent to the counter was finally unlocked.  Inside the cramped main partition of the booth, the fortune teller was edging her way around the table in a breathless, crablike motion.  The table dominated the cramped space.  Behind it, the woman had two articles of furniture: a bureau with a kerosene lamp to her right, and to her left an antique arcade fortune machine.  The rounded base of the kerosene lamp was decorated with art deco flowers which Malcolm guessed to be irises.  In a different mood he would have tried to buy it.  The arcade machine was called the Madame Mysterioso.  One side of it read the customer’s palm, and the other provided a barometer to test the intensity of their love of some person or object unspecified.  Malcolm was seated, and the woman depositing his money in one of the bureau drawers. 

“What’s your name?” he asked.  

“Charani.  I have seen you before.”

Malcolm wasn’t sure if this were meant as a statement or a question.  “I don’t think so.  I’m just visiting today.” 

Charani was more emphatic: “No, I have seen you before....not here, a long time ago.” 

She took the cards out of their silk purse.  “Everything has already happened many times before.  The cards do not show the future….they simply remember what has already been, over and over again.  Everybody knows the images of the tarot, but nobody remembers when they first saw them.  They are always familiar.  They are trying to tell us something.  A long time ago, when peasants got lost in the countryside at night, they tied a ribbon around the thumb of their right hand.  This was so that if they wandered into the Otherworld, whenever they looked at their hands, they would remember who they were, and where they had come from.  This was useful because sometimes in the Otherworld they were given food to eat which would make it impossible for them to leave.  The ribbon reminded them not to eat of that food.  What people call fate or fortune is only forgetfulness.” 

It was good pitch, Malcolm thought.  Those seeking the more routine slop would probably be dismayed, but many would easily mistake it for profundity.  Charani passed him the cards to cut, and then proceeded to shuffle them.  The cards glided with machine-like precision from the raised cradle of her left hand down into the cradle of her right, making a soft, swift clacking sound while they cascaded into place.  Malcolm became transfixed by their motion.  Charani’s eyes acquired a blank, frozen quality, and she raised her left hand higher and higher, until the straight, precise trajectory of the cards appeared almost unnatural.  Malcolm began to feel distinctly uneasy.  At one point, he was certain that the cards were rising up from Charani’s right hand, rather than falling from her left, and this ambiguity made him nauseous.

When he was a child, Malcolm and his brother Simon often went to visit their uncle who lived on the periphery of a small town in the countryside.  The area was half in the countryside and half in the town in those days, and he and Simon loved exploring the meadows and small patches of wood on their uncle’s land.  They found some trees in the woods whose gnarled, intertwined branches formed an even canopy which they could sit on. 

Malcolm, Simon, and their cousins used to sneak out on bright, chilly mornings to this makeshift den.  They smoked cigarettes and their cousins scared them with stories about Mag Halligan, a fearsome, ancient widow who walked the fields in the morning with her cows, and regularly set her bull on children who wandered onto her land.  They also told them stories about a combine harvester which was sometimes heard in the fields in the morning, but never seen.  After that summer, the boys didn’t go back to their uncle’s house for a couple of years, until they were about eleven years old.  Their uncle told them that he had sold his fields, and a new housing estate had been built on them. 

The next morning, the boys crept out like they used to.  They clambered up the hillock at the back of the house, and could scarcely believe their eyes.  The meadows and woodland had been replaced by a grid of identical bungalows, all painted a lifeless beige yellow that reminded Malcolm of the colour of old telephones.  The project was just on the brink of completion, and cement mixers, wheelbarrows, bricks, and shovels were scattered about the new road that wound through it.  Malcolm thought the unoccupied estate was a peculiar sight, and he imagined that it would suddenly fill up one morning with people, strange, blank people who had been left by the night like a frost.  They went down to explore the estate, peering in the windows and checking all the doors.  At some point, Malcolm lost Simon, and for what seemed like an eternity he crept from house to house, calling his brother’s name in a low, fugitive hiss.  Finally, he found him in one of the back gardens, standing stock still and staring into a window.  As Malcolm got closer, he saw that Simon’s body was trembling slightly, and his mouth wide open.  He looked frightened.  Malcolm hissed his name, but he didn’t seem to hear.  Finally, his head swung around and he saw his brother, and then he took off at a bolt in Malcolm’s direction.  The two boys sprinted back over the hill to their uncle’s house, and when they had gotten safely back to their beds, they closed their eyes as though they were asleep, and Simon whispered to Malcolm what he had seen in the house.

Charani had cut the cards again, and selected six cards from the deck which she had arranged face down in a cross formation.  She was turning the six cards up without comment.  Malcolm recognized two of the suited cards, the Moon and the Tower, but the others were unfamiliar to him.  “This is what crosses you,”Charani said, turning the last card.  Her reaction to the card was instant and visceral: she recoiled from the table, eyes darting back and forth between Malcolm and the spread of cards.  There was something unusual about this last card, Malcolm thought.  The image depicted was an Indian peacock whose body and neck were encased in an alchemist’s retort, and the card was labelled The Bird Out of Space and Time.  What was troubling about it, however, was the style of its draughtsmanship and colouring, which were utterly distinct in character from the other cards on the table.  The nearest analogue Malcolm could find was to the various decadent, symbolist, and aesthetic movements of the late 19^th century, but this was only a crude approximation.  The card had the unnerving quality of embodying a style and sensibility which the history of this world had never produced; just as Malcolm’s memory of the town house and leafy estate by the canal belonged to some existence other than his own, so the card was an artefact of some phantasmal era which belonged in the past of a subtly different world.  The iridescent blues and greens of the peacock’s tail feathers had a texture which was brighter, more lustrous, vivid, and lifelike than everything else in the dimly lit booth.  The bird’s fan seemed to swell and sway, and Malcolm heard again the sound which was like an awning rippled in a shrill wind.

Then he found himself in a dimly-lit, luxuriously decorated apartment whose ambience was antique and Moorish.  He was facing a couch which sat an incongruous and unnerving pair: an elderly nude male and a macaque monkey.  The man was emaciated and bald, with steady, black, unfriendly eyes fixed on Malcolm.  The macaque’s head jerked fitfully about, as though in anticipation of a struggle or meal.  Its gaze returned again and again to a beautiful, ornate hourglass positioned on the floor between Malcolm and his strange interlopers.  The man nodded to Malcolm, and motioned to the macaque.  In an attitude of timid reverence, the monkey turned the hourglass and briskly resumed its seat.

 

Now Malcolm became hypnotized by the bright red sand falling slowly through its funnel.  In a sudden, vertiginous rush, he felt as though he were plunged at lightning speed into the hourglass, and then as though he were a single grain of sand falling slowly through the funnel.  As he fell, he was subject to visions within visions.  He travelled through various alternate worlds, all essentially similar to this one, and all subtly yet unmistakably alien to it.  To some of these worlds, he had been deliberately summoned by magicians, and those magicians regarded his eidolon in an attitude of awestruck curiosity and exultant pride in the efficacy of their rituals.  In most of his visions, however, he was a fleeting intruder, an unwelcome, alien presence, and the beings he saw regarded him with fear, suspicion, and contempt.  He seemed to pass through an endless sequence of worlds with eerily unfamiliar architectures and customs, and be scrutinized by an endless sequence of faces which were basically humanoid in appearance, but whose cold, inscrutable expressions suggested mentalities infinitely removed from human emotion and impulse.

Finally, this long kaleidoscope of whirling, wearying alienage subsided, and Malcolm’s eidolon came to rest in a landscape which resembled a portmanteau of all the world’s bustling way stations, all its airports, bus stops, train stations, and bureaucratic waiting rooms folded into one vast concourse.  And there was always a great multitude arriving in that place, and great multitude departing from it, and always as many people waiting there for the time of their departure.  And those had first arrived looked and shaken, confused, and afraid; and those who were departing adopted a quiet, sober demeanour; and those who waited were eager, gregarious and light-hearted, their conversations coalescing into a steady hum.  Malcolm saw a young man and woman meet by a fountain.  The man threw a shiny new copper coin into the fountain, and the couple vowed that they would met again on the next leg of their journey, and remember one another, and the things which were so crystal clear to them in this place.  The fountain, however, was full to its brim of coins which they had deposited, for they had made the same vow many times over, finding and losing one another again and again in the tide of the world, and remembering the things which were so crystal clear to them in that place only briefly, as kind of inarticulate, disconsolate longing, an intimation or mood suggested by certain places, or the sensation of possessing memories which belonged to strangers.

Charani was rooting furiously through the drawers of her bureau.  “What’s wrong?” Malcolm asked, suddenly possessed of an irrational conviction that he had somehow wronged the woman. 

“Get out,” she hissed back, her voice having resumed the quiet, tired timbre in which she had first addressed him. 

She finally produced a box of matches from the clutter of the drawers, and set about burning the anomalous card. 

“What are you doing?  What’s wrong?” 

She held the burning card until the flames licked her fingertips, and then attacked its charred remains on the ground with her boot heels.  Her expression was livid and spiteful.  “Don’t you understand?  I’ve never seen that card before.  That card was not in my deck until you walked into this booth.  Don’t you understand?”  She spat, and resumed her seat.  Seeing that she was beyond reasoning with, Malcolm retreated through the waiting room and out of the cramped little booth.  As he exited the arcade, it occurred to him out of nowhere that the person who had sold him the dockside property twelve years ago was in all probability Mr. Sheldrake himself. 

The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 2).

July 22, 2014, 5:29 pm

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2.  Occultism in the High Rises.

1.

                I should have been at my very lowest ebb that summer, but for some peculiar reason I felt content.  Well, perhaps content would be overstating the case.  It would be better to say that I was untroubled.  My days were characterized by that particular kind of languor which neither troubles the soul, nor ever stirs it to any great pitch of excitement.  For most people, accustomed to life’s stressful rhythms of tension and release, such a period of extended suspension is hardly the most satisfactory mode of existence.  For myself, however, I was forced to conclude that such a lifestyle held an undeniable attraction.  To live without the customary stresses and pleasures of the active existence is burdensome in many respects; and yet while other muscles and faculties atrophy, the imagination is stirred to a strange, languid pitch of creativity, and subject to slip periodically into a state of placid ecstasy, a sensation like that of surrender to some exquisite painkiller.  Now, I should say that though I felt myself to be in perfect equilibrium, it may have appeared from the outside as though I were depressed, or undergoing some kind of bipolar fugue.  Such things are difficult to judge objectively.

                The main upheaval, of course, was the cooling off of my relations with Catherine.  That may seem like an oddly impersonal way of describing it, but the whole business was itself every bit as chilly and impersonal as the commonplace implies.  Our relationship had come to an end without a bang, with scarcely even a whimper.  We’d simply grown bored of each other.  In some respects, it was a relief to end a relationship of eight odd years on such cool and amicable terms, but it’s hard not to feel a little cheated when you’ve spent a large sum on liquor and have no hangover to show for it.  Most couples, I imagine, are subject to this type of boredom in their relationships, but stave it off by having children.  Typically, that’s the next leg of the adventure.  This, however, was not an option for Catherine and I; we regarded the idea of having children as being as inexplicable and unseemly as that of joining a cult, or espousing some alternative medicinal theory that the respectable newspapers frown upon. 

We had that, at least, in common.  So there was nothing else to it.  Magnanimously, I insisted that Catherine should remain in our house, while I would find a new place to live and continue to pay my share of the mortgage, until a more permanent arrangement could be arrived at.  That, more or less, was how I found myself living in the only three-quarters finished luxury apartment/mixed-use quarter by the dockside quays.

 

                The Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter was one of those wonderful follies which had been dreamt up during the property boom; dreamt, it should be added, with such keenness that most of it was actually built before anybody woke up or came to their senses, and thus it stood incomplete as a memorial to the strange fancies and manias of a time past.  It was an ambitious project which sought to transform several blocks of mostly derelict industrial yards into a sleek, all-purpose urban living space.  The central square was composed of four gleaming high rise towers that punctured the sky like glass hypodermics, and overlooked the rest of the complex: a wooded park, twelve smaller apartment blocks, an artificial lake, and a drop leading down into a massive square gouge in the landscape, where concrete foundations had been laid, and work abruptly ceased when funding for the project dried-up.  The high rise towers had their own supermarkets, cafes, gyms, and crèches, and one of the office complexes contained a large, open plan area which had been nebulously labelled “a cultural space.” 

                I have never fully understood what drew me to the Quarter.  To begin with, I’d always been fascinated by different styles of housing.  I remember that when I was a child, being driven around the countryside by my parents, something about houses always puzzled and intrigued me.  A house was something which it was apparently obligatory for all adults to own, or aspire to own – a house and a little patch of grass, a neat row of trees to hide behind, or peer through.  To an adult, such a thing is perfectly natural, but a child always longs to creep under the hedges and fences, to make a beeline through other people’s lawns and backyards like a cat in the shadows.  Growing up, houses retained for me some sense of that essential strangeness – that potent variety of strangeness that hides under the most ordinary and familiar surfaces.  Paradoxically, houses seemed to aspire to an appearance of emptiness and abandonment, and to a sense of mystery – like the adult personality, they frequently resembled a shell which had been constructed to hide something.  What was it they sought to hide, in their appearances of order and homogeneity, of stability and calmness?  What happened in those houses that you never visited, whose interiors you would never see?  

           Later, when I lived in the city, I developed a particular obsession with high rise apartment blocks.  Stacked one atop the other, with their little balconies replacing gardens, they transformed the once organic business of living into a mass-produced commodity and strange kind of public exhibition.  That was the thing that really captured my imagination about them: the way their balconies and windows positioned the once private act of living in a public space, and framed it like a painting or television screen to be perused by passing strangers.  I couldn’t purge from my mind the notion that the apartment block was like a behaviourist’s laboratory, a lattice of glass cages whose occupants were unaware of the vast, clinical eye which surveyed their meagre world at a glance.  Yet, at the same time, I found there to be a certain austere glamour and beauty in the idea of the high rise; the notion of living in a space which was at once private and public, in such close proximity to people who would remain as anonymous as the strangers on trams and buses whose direct gaze we labour to avoid.

Yet for all my fascination, I never got to live in an apartment block.  As a student, I passed through a succession of run-down Georgian dumps, and then Catherine and I moved into the suburban semi-detached which had been our home for the past five years.  A year or two prior, work had begun on the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter, and the tram I took to the university passed by its construction site every morning.  Although I would have been reluctant to admit it publically, the development fascinated me.  It represented a corrosive ideal which I found oddly seductive: an aesthetic of beautiful, streamlined emptiness; a dream of money and intoxicating, even rapturous, surface pleasures; a setting for warmly-lit, drug-fuelled revelries and soft, opiated recuperations, whose regrets and sad vows were always replaced by fresh, renewed appetites, by new surrenders to giddy night and gaudy vitality.  

My odd attraction/repulsion towards the Quarter was perhaps cemented by a photo feature I came across in one of the weekend supplements.  The television personality Roger Grady had purchased one of the towers’ penthouse apartments.  With prematurely greying temples, rugged features, and athletic build, Grady co-hosted the daily Afternoon Break show with the bubbly, voluptuous brunette Deborah Kelly.  He was pictured enjoying a light continental breakfast on an expansive roof garden.  Flanked by rectilinear decking, potted trees, and the gleam of distant skyscrapers, he wore off-white, slim-fit chinos, desert boots, burgundy golf sweater, and a navy windbreaker.  “BACHELOR BREAKFAST”, the caption read, “TV personality coy about relationships, says gruelling work schedule doesn’t give him time to wine and dine.”  Although Grady and I would later become very close, after a fashion, back then I regarded him with nothing but contempt and derision – the sort of contempt, mingled with a degree of unpalatable and unacknowledged envy, in which we tend to hold successful media personalities. 

My disdain for Grady had a more pointed resonance, however.  During my more indolent student days, I developed a peculiar erotic fixation with the deceptively anodyne landscape of afternoon television.  Though maintaining a veneer of cheerful, wholesome banality, I began to detect in the afternoon scheduling a subliminal language of potent, transgressive eroticism.  I saw a video once of a politician’s speech with all the words edited out.  What remained were only the breaths between each sentence, and the look, at once panicked and solicitous, which signalled the commencement of each fresh utterance.  It seemed to me, watching this video, that the body has its own compulsive, hidden language which it constantly seeks to smother and subdue by speaking, by losing itself in a stream of words.  In the split seconds between speaking, the person appeared like a frightened animal, poised and alert, ready for fight or flight – then the words came, a tension was released, and a sort of torpor ensued.  Speech, for all its marvellous efficacy, so often assumed the characteristic of a compulsive, hypnotic defence mechanism.  Although I knew, in a sense, that the idea was perhaps more poetic than literally true, it seemed to me that a vast, hidden reality might emerge through the removal of the spoken word from news broadcasts, political rallies, debates, even everyday interactions.  Bodies would dance about in perpetual, skittish motion, faces freeze in the naked panic of pure, silent being; shorn of all its ultimately hollow and officious verbiage, the landscape would become a pristine, sandy shoreline, washed by inhalations and exhalations of tremulous living breath.  (I suspect that it was partially this earlier intimation of a secret language of the body which made me so receptive to Grady’s theories about the mysterious Green Language.)

I believed that the afternoon light variety programme would provide an ideal test case for these theories.  Scrubbed of its banal pleasantries, I was certain that Afternoon Break would reveal the true mercenary sexuality that it subliminally communicated to housewives and the unemployed.  That being said, my theories regarding the hidden erotics of afternoon television were never exhaustively developed, and may have been simply a by-product of my puppyish and mildly masochistic infatuation with AfternoonBreak’s host Deborah Kelly, whose coquettish relationship with the camera thrilled me with its cold impersonality. 

Roger Grady, on the other hand, I found to be an irksome distraction.  Even by the standards of light entertainment, he struck me as a failure.  His bonhomie felt particularly forced, and his commitment to the variety format sorely limited; he made no attempt, for example, to hide his sullen masculine boredom during the fashion and cookery features, and was sometimes palpably rude to the guests who accompanied small animals or children.  The feature in the weekend supplement detailing his purchase of the Harrington/Sheldrake penthouse thus further exacerbated my feelings of contempt and submerged jealousy towards Grady, and solidified the ambivalent glamour which the Quarter held over my imagination.  Strangely, though, my destiny was becoming intertwined with that of Roger Grady. 

Long before I would move to the Quarter, and Grady make me the sole confidant of his inexplicable occult project, there was that strange, endlessly suggestive night in which I found myself attending a party at his feted penthouse.

      2.

                This was a few years ago.  The good times, I suppose.  Things with Catherine were fine, and I was new enough to my work at the university that I didn’t yet find it oppressively tedious.  The financial crash was a couple of years away, and still an unthinkable contingency in most people’s minds.  Money was everywhere in the psychosphere – the allure of it, the smell of it colouring the horizon, its particular mania festering in the communal imagination like an adolescent’s first discovery of sexuality.  It was a Friday, I think.  One of those summer nights where the sky acquires a certain crisp, electric sheen that merges seamlessly with the artificial glow of the city, bathing everything between the heavens and gutter in an ambient florescent haze, like the warmth of a distant, universal technology.  The streets were filled with buoyant revellers of various types, beaming shoals that milled together and overlapped unpredictably in the evening’s loose and carefree momentum.  I was drinking with a small group of my students, and at about eleven, a sleepy, neurotic rich girl called Esther announced that she knew some people who were going to a party in Roger Grady’s apartment.  We all distained the world of minor celebrities, of course, but the opportunity to swim briefly in their ego-inflated fish tank seemed too good to pass up, so I very quickly found myself wedged into a taxi with Esther, two other girls, and a handsome, sullen boy named James, who played bass in a band called Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and maintained such an astringent air of aloofness that I was never certain if he was arrogant or merely slow-witted.  

The girls were talking in rapid staccato bursts amongst themselves, while James and I sat in awkward silence. 

“Why are you called Four Flies on Grey Velvet when there’s five of you?” I asked, to make conversation. 

James shrugged. 

“It’s just a name.  Or George could be the grey velvet.” 

We were moving along the river, past pleasure boats and sodium orange walkways, the vacant, dreaming plazas of financial complexes, through the iron clockwork of an ancient, slate grey rolling lift bridge, and then we could see it off in the distance: the dream of the Quarter in its full nocturnal vibrancy, its jewelled gleam dancing on the surface of the river, and jutting proudly into the irradiated night sky.  I was drunk enough already to feel like I was floating, disembodied, along a current of events, but everything after that was dreamlike, seductive and strange.  We disembarked from the taxi, and ambled along a walkway that skirted the artificial lake, until we came to a stairwell that led up into the main courtyard.  Once inside, we were dwarfed by the towers. 

I have always found the experience of that courtyard difficult to describe, and wondered at how the architects achieved its vertiginous effect.  Looking up, you had the sense that the towers were not horizontal, but rather sloping diagonally toward a point, like the interior walls of a pyramid.  The buildings wrapped their balconied walls around your visual field, as though they were floating on the air above you, and slowly closing in upon themselves.  It was strange vista, somehow very appealing to me: the business of living arranged into geometrical and aesthetically spartan grids, uniform and rectilinear, yet set at some oblique, gravity-defying angle that made the whole structure feel weightless and dizzying to contemplate. 

While I was taking all this in, Esther was ringing her friend, looking up into the distant blackness where we envisioned Grady’s penthouse in full, sybaritic swing.  After a long delay she finally got through, and following an even longer interval, a tiny, energetic, wide-eyed girl appeared at the door, miming greetings, apologies, and various other emotions as she struggled to open it.  We entered a mezzanine with a concierge’s desk and vast, antiseptic jungle of brittle-looking shrubs and bushes.  Two well-dressed, middle-aged men with matching bald heads and mutual affectation of professional serenity sat at the desk, staring into the shrubbery as though it contained the threat of a creeping indigenous militia.  The new girl ushered us into an elevator.  “This elevator is specular,” she said, “listen to the music.”  The elevator was playing Mason Williams’ Classical Gas, so we yo-yoed up and down a couple of times, the girls attempting a rudimentary go-go dance, while James and I did our best to avoid their failing limbs.  The next track the elevator played was Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues, but the song’s mood of laden, almost cosmic eroticism seemed to bore the girls, so we finally made our way to the apartment.

The party was everything, I think, we could have hoped for: a feast for anthropologists of the near future, and a carnival of vacuous delights and strange delusions of threadbare grandeur.  The apartment itself was dimly-lit, with small groups slumped everywhere in a deep trance of chemically-heightened sincerity and seriousness, spitting paragraphs back and forth like animals who feed their young by regurgitation.  We passed briskly through these baying lotus-eaters, and went out onto the roof garden, where the main energy of the party was focused.  A sound-system was playing a mixture of dance anthems and Bryan Ferry ballads (then enjoying a brief, semi-ironic vogue due to their inclusion in an innovative series of tampon advertisements).  LED striplighting bathed the roof garden in a cool, blue sheen, making the revellers appear like holographic ghosts projected against the penthouse’s dizzying vistas of city and star light. 

We found a place at the fringes of the crowd, and the new girl went back into the apartment to find some glasses, but we didn’t see her again.  I occupied myself breaking the crowd down into its constitute elements.  There was a smattering of television personalities, their melodic voices emerging out of the white noise with the sickly familiarity of a favourite song travestied by pan-pipes.  I saw the host of a popular household DIY programme, seated by himself in the throes of some kind of drug-induced panic attack.  He was breathing deeply and evenly, and drinking pint glasses of water that seemed to flow directly out of his pores.  Throughout the night, he would cyclically return to the festivities with a demonical second wind, leading each time to a relapse into his former condition, until he was finally laid out on a sofa with a small electrical fan positioned near his sweating temples. 

There was a gaggle of pretty young women whom I guessed to be occupants of the glittering and eternal limbo between modelling and acting careers.  We saw two hulking, radioactively tanned beefcakes making gauche advances towards the women.  The beefcakes were the stars of a type of programming which was very popular at the time – one of those shows that documented the peccadillos of a vulgar working class nouveau riche.  (I’d seen them on television once, waxing an antique dealer’s scrotum and asshole as part of their weekly challenge.  It was suspenseful enough, I thought, although the effect was largely achieved through clever musical cues and editing.)  There was a small contingency of older, middle-aged men in attendance, a group of property speculators and lawyers whose cold, dead eyes were trained on the younger women, making rapid, intuitive calculations of their blood-alcohol levels.  They were talking to a telegenic economist who would find far greater fame after the crash.  (I overheard a snippet of the conversation:  “That’s the thing, nobody knows Sheldrake!  Nobody’s ever even seen him!  He could be just a name on a piece of paper for all anybody knows.”)  The festivities jumped to an even higher plateau of boisterous vitality with the sudden arrival of the aging and fearsome comedienne Maxi Mediumwave, fresh from performance in a children’s pantomime downtown.  Maxi burst onto the roof garden still in character and full costume – a black-hearted pirate queen with cutlass and ersatz parrot lolling on her shoulder - accompanied by a retinue of garrulous dames and ebullient, exotic male dancers who hung beneath her jutting chin like a gaudy necklace.  Even Roger Grady – clad in a sports jacket and blue jean combo which I felt was frankly beneath him - appeared notably energised by this spectacular entrance.

Although the other party-goers were inclined to ignore us for the most part, we were nevertheless able to absorb something of the drift of their conversations.  There were many whispers swirling around regarding the fortunes of the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter itself.  The funding for the project was only then beginning to unravel into a labyrinthine paper trail of loans whose securities transpired to be other loans whose securities then echoed recursively into infinite spirals of nothingness.  The main item of gossip that thrilled through the roof garden that night, however, was the most recent high profile tenants rumoured to have purchased an apartment in the Harrington/Sheldrake Quarter: identicals Bradley and Lucius O’Leary, known in the pop world as the Iguana Twins.  The Iguana Twins were the latest sensation to emerge from television’s talent furnace Idol Assembly-Line, having scored an unexpected Christmas number 1 with their auto-tuned reggae travesty of Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. 

Cultural theorists argued that there was an insoluble explanatory gap surrounding the Iguana Twin phenomenon.  Children and young teenagers adored them, but nobody old enough to articulate their thoughts cogently could even begin to understand the appeal; hence the Twins operated in a realm which could never be adequately quantified by the adult brain.  Most adults chose to regard them as an alarming manifestation of sociological decadence and creeping mental atrophy, while others suggested that they might in fact represent a new species of mutant genius, whose brilliance vibrated at some higher frequency to which adults no longer had access.  Androgynous, with handsome, gaunt, sepulchral features, the Twins seemed to embody the indecipherable sexuality of some future epoch.  They frequently wore contact lenses that turned their pupils blood-red, a gimmick which gave them the aura of a pair of ailing, homesick extraterrestrials. 

They spoke in a strange, insular stream of consciousness which often descended into a fully-blown nonsense language of their own invention: Shally Shindig, Cassa Zoom Boom! was a well-known expression of triumph in their private argot.  They were, however, master manipulators of Noosfeed.  In one of their most ingenious capers, they posted a sinister-looking close-up to their Noosfeed page, with the caption WHICH ONE OF US IS THE BAD ONE?  This provoked a furious debate amongst the cognoscenti which was still on-going.  Naturally, exotic Noosphere rumours swirled around the Iguanas, ranging from the easily falsifiable (that they weren’t really twins, but rather a pair of genetically unrelated narcissists who‘d augmented an existing resemblance with cutting edge surgical techniques emanating out of the Balkan region) to the more speculative and elusive (that they were part of an ET acclimatization programme, designed to gradually make the public comfortable with the appearance and presence of extraterrestrials, or, alternatively, to lay the groundwork for an imminent programme of clandestine inter-breeding.)

3.

                We didn’t stay too long at the party that night.  We were really only there as anthropological voyeurs, our intention being to sneer inwardly at the worthies as they sneered outwardly at us.  As fascinating as the spectacle was to contemplate, the atmosphere only became more oppressively manic and unfriendly as the night wore on.  Two events, however, remain etched in my memory, and are worth briefly noting.  The first was a rather unpleasant imbroglio which erupted between the two beefcakes.  Excluded from whatever supply of low-quality cocaine was circulating freely among the inner circle, they had responded by becoming balefully drunk.  One minute, they were engaged in a slurred, incoherent argument, the next lunging at one-another with explosive ferocity. 

Before anybody knew what was happening, they were rolling around on the ground in a powder-keg clinch, laying waste to Grady’s avant-garde outdoor furniture.  Everybody seemed more amused than alarmed, however, and the girls eagerly filmed the action on their phones.  Any doubts that the videos would become a minor sensation on Noosfeed were immediately vanquished when a seething Maxi Mediumwave threw herself into the fray, jumping atop the beefcakes and making a very valiant attempt to pry them apart.  This peculiar struggle continued unabated until Mediumwave’s parrot was decapitated under the weight of one of the beefcake’s shoulders.  “Look what you’ve done!” she shrieked, her face suddenly like a mirror cracking in slow motion.  The desecration of the rubbery bird shocked the two brawlers into sobriety and contrition; I think I saw a tear streaking down one of their cheeks, but I could have been mistaken.  The situation very rapidly diffused itself after that.  Mediumwave’s coterie flocked around her, and commenced an apparently familiar ritual of coaxing her febrile nervous system back to some kind of equilibrium.  The beefcakes apologized profusely to Grady, who seemed to regard the whole incident with a blasé, amused glint in his eyes.

                While this first incident was ultimately comical in nature, the second I recall as having something sinister or even portentous about it, although I cannot quite put my finger on the source of this impression.  There was a sudden flurry of excitement at the border of the roof garden, where a group of girls were looking over the edge, and pointing excitedly at the opposite tower.  The crowd surged over to the glass balcony walls, following their frantic directions.  Standing on an opposite balcony some eight or nine storeys down was the unmistakable shape of the Iguana Twins.  The rumours were true.   The first twin stood erect with his hands on his hips, and the body of the second was set at a peculiar slant, as though he were about to fall over, or take off at a sprint.  There seemed to be no motion whatsoever in either of them.  They wore matching white outfits, and their faces, though heavily shadowed, appeared blank and expressionless.  Despite the distance, their red eyes shone very brightly, looking like the eyes of a fox startled in the flash of an old Polaroid camera.  The apartment was dimly lit and the light had an eerie quality which suggested some kind of cold-storage facility.  Everybody waved, and the model/actresses called down Shally Shindig, Cassa Zoom Boom! and other Iguana nonsense at the top of their lungs, but the Twins retained their unearthly poise.  They seemed to be presenting themselves as an object of contemplation, as some kind of ambiguous Ying/Yang symbol. Then they jerked briskly awake, and strolled back into the soft, ultraviolent light of their apartment like disinterested gods.  I felt somebody nudge my shoulder gently.  It was one of the lithe dancers from Maxi Mediumwave’s coterie, wearing an uncharacteristically solemn expression. 

“Which one do you think is the bad one?” he whispered. 

“Lucius,” I replied instantly, with an odd sort of conviction that came out of nowhere.

                

We left shortly after that.   The elevator, as though receptive to the mood’s downward turn, was playing Procal Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale.  We appeared ghostly and insubstantial in comparison to our ascent, and the song’s lyrics reflected the wispy, enigmatic impressions that were gathering in our minds, struggling to cohere.  In the taxi home, we were mostly silent.  As she neared her stop, Esther nudged me.  She produced something from her bag, and held it up to the light so I could see it.  It was the head of Maxi Mediumwave’s parrot, whose passing was destined for brief Noosfeed notoriety in the days to follow.  Separated from its body, the parrot’s features were lifelike and conspiratorial. 

“You’d think it was going to speak,” Esther said, smiling. 

Continued shortly.    

Image of Toronto condo towers found here.      

August 2015: REPO MAN BLUES.

August 28, 2015, 12:19 pm

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"The life of a repo man is always intense."

The Bird Out of Space and Time (Part 7).

September 8, 2015, 3:23 pm

≫ Next: Infomercials of the Uncanny: Time-Life's "Mysteries of the Unknown."

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He had watched me silently from the rocking chair and then moved with imperceptible briskness to my shoulder, like the spider that suddenly bolts into motion when his hapless prey has snared itself in the web. Nevertheless, I was indeed trapped. He'd priced the Pusey book at a fraction of its market value, so that even if I derived no pleasure from owning it, it would at least stave off my imminent poverty for close to a month when things got bad. I nodded ascent, trying not to betray too much enthusiasm. He smiled, took the book curtly out of my hand, and strode to the counter, the motion of his long, rigid joints having the character of a kick-started arthritic machinery. Seating himself, he glanced at the cover for the first time.

“Ah, this is an interesting one, yes. I haven't read it now, but the, ah, circumstances surrounding it, very interesting....”

I was starting to worry that the buffoon was wise to the book's real value.

“The mysterious circumstances surrounding the book, are you aware of them?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, extremely unusual. The author vanished, you know, off the face of the earth. He was never seen again. And the manuscript of this very book was found among his final possessions. Did you know that?”

“I didn't.”

“Yes, he had a tiny garret flat in a rather squalid lodging house. And all they found there were some books on heraldry, a hoard of peculiar trinkets and curios, and the manuscript of this book. But no Mr. Pusey, alas. So you could say that this book was his last will and testament, if you like! All his worldly goods, so speak, bequeathed to the world, or all them that might have care to read it. And there were apparently great rumours and a great intrigue surrounding the disappearance of this - ” he paused to consult the book cover “ - this Mr. Pusey. It was speculated that he'd discovered some kind of portal or door, though which he departed from all the privations and imperfections of this world, to some supernal realm outside of space and time. Not only that, mind you, but certain aficionados claim that he'd divulged the secret of finding that portal in the manuscript, albeit in the form of a code or series of riddles, such that only the most diligent and attentive reader might discover it.”

Although I hadn't intended to betray any knowledge on the subject, the dealer had snared me again.

“That's nonsense. Pusey was a failure from an industrious, well-to-do family, living in obscurity and poverty. He didn't discover any magic door – more likely he took his own life, probably dived into some lonely stretch of the Thames, and the body just never found.”

The antique dealer's face brightened, as though he had been waiting to have this discussion for some time. He had a tendency to discuss morbid subjects with a disconcerting buoyancy and giddiness, as though his mind were a dying hearth, fed by the kindling of a particular type of metaphysical horror.

“Well, now, that might be the case. Indeed, that may well be the truth of it, in the end. Isn't it possible, though, that what you're saying, and what I'm saying, might both be true? Might, in fact, essentially be the same thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, sir, the taking of one's life might in a sense be regarded as a kind of passing through a door out of time and space, might it not? And, as to the second part of the rumour, supposing that this Mr. Pusey discovered something in the course of his researches – some awful fact, if you will, about the fundamental nature of reality, the knowledge of which drove him to self-annihilation. Well, might it not be this awful fact which Pusey had coded into his book, such that the diligent reader would also discover that fact, and thus be likewise driven to self-annihilation?”

“Your idea is based on an absurd premise.”

“Which is that now, sir?”

“That there is any fact so universally appalling that anybody and everybody who learns it would immediately be driven to suicide.”

“I think that premise is defensible, sir.”

“Certainly not. The world, and the series of facts that constitute the world, affect people in a variety of different ways, according the disposition and history of the individual in question. There is no joke that everybody will find hilarious, no sunset everybody will find breath-taking, and certainly no fact so unfathomably bleak that it would render the mortal existence untenable to all who are made privy to it.”

“Well, now, you make a good point there, indeed, a good argument! But I've given some thought to this, you see. This old shop is rather quiet now, and I have lots of time to think while the old clocks tick tock. I have to entertain myself, you see, because nobody would ever play a radio in an antique shop. Have you ever heard the radio playing in an antique shop? No, it’s an unwritten rule of the profession that our premises must be as silent and sombre as a mortuary, as though the old items were laid out to their final rest, so to speak. So I've nothing to listen to most days, except the old clocks tick tock and my own thoughts, such as they are, and to pass long stretches I've often given my thoughts over to somewhat abstruse philosophical questions, such as the very one under current consideration: is it possible that there could be some fact or discovery pertaining the nature of ultimate reality, so utterly dreadful in its ramifications, that it would drive all men who learned it to certain self-annihilation? And, indeed, the first objection I've considered to the existence of such a fact is the very point you raise: the variability of human disposition and taste, such that some will enjoy getting stung by a nettle, or the taste of Brussels sprouts, against the better judgement of the majority.”

“However, consider this: the more something pertains to the ultimate core of reality, the greater the degree of homogeneity we encounter in the human response to it. Certainly, people can have this or that response to a book, a film, politician, dessert, or a new humanitarian cause. But these things, I would say, do not pertain to ultimate reality; they are the grit and the castles we have built in our little sandbox of language and culture to hide from ultimate reality. We can afford a variability of response to these things, because they are, in the end, matters of aesthetic taste and rhetorical plumage – negotiable shapes which we can mould and re-make in the grit and the sand. But the closer something comes to essential reality, I say, the less variable our response to it. Consider aging and death – yes, some put on a braver face than others, and some will eke from the manifold indignities of the corporeal process a certain kind of poetic grandeur, or gallows wit if that fails, but most of us, I think, are uniform in our response to aging and death. Think you of the palaver of a Sartre or Heidegger, and how a group of young men might while away hours in furious disagreement as to the virtue of one brand of philosophical cant as against another. But only saunter by a voluptuous and desirable woman, and the differences between those young men wash away in the undulant tide of her flesh.”

“But these things – desire, aging, and death – are only manifestations, minor quirks, if you will, of ultimate reality. They universalize us to the degree that we cannot quite avoid them, or neutralize their power over us with the shapes we mould in the sandbox. Our bodies are, I would say, little pieces of the grammar of ultimate reality, slotting together and parting away by punctuation and ellipsis, so as they must according to rules which ultimately elude us. But if our responses became more homogeneous by virtue of this grammar alone, how much then the same person would we all become, were we put face to face with the speaker of that grammar, the source of all our pains and pleasures, and the immensities through which their echoes weave and vanish, like peddles cast to a bottomless well?”

Although I had no greater desire at this point than to extricate myself from the company of this garrulous and disagreeable codger, I had to concede a certain rhetorical flair to his peculiarly elaborate patter.

“Now you can probably tell, sir, that I’m no scholar. I only had as much schooling when I was young as kept me out of the way until I was able to start earning. But I’ve always had my curiosity about the nature of things. Well, not quite always. In hindsight, I think that curiosity came over me only after a specific experience I had when was about twenty-seven odd. A peculiar experience I had, sir, with a certain tree. I was still living at home then, up on one those narrow housing estates that are all cobbled together on St. Michael’s Terrace, near the gasworks. But I worked in the old Hobbs Lane brewery on the quays then, before that fire that some said was started by “Dozy” Davy and the “Michelin Man” gutted the place in ’84. And every evening I walked back to the Terrace down Percy Road. Do you know Percy Road? A narrow street, very old, grand houses, very wealthy. Well, not awful wealthy, but affluent, if you know what I mean.”

“Right as you come on to Percy Road there are two bars on the corner of the t-junction, and every evening their terraces were full of young men in suits and well-dressed women. I was a little envious, I suppose, of people that had jobs you'd dress up for, and the leisure and purse to be enjoying a drink on the evening of a school night. But there was also this tree, on the left side of Percy Road, which always commanded my attention in some peculiar way. I couldn't tell you what kind of tree it was, to be honest, only that it was very tall, planted right on the edge of the footpath, and leaning in a slant towards the higher storeys of the houses.”

“What it was about this particular tree that was so arresting I cannot adequately define. Trees are in general an incongruous sight on a city street, if you give some thought to it. The natural and built environments, many have argued, reflect two fundamentally different orders of being, the natural world being characterized by a fecund, irregular complexity, and the built environment, in contrast, by a tendency towards geometric simplicity of form. So a tree in the midst of a city street represents, I would say, the juxtaposition of two different orders of material existence, in the same way that a traffic light planted in the midst of wild meadowland would strike us as peculiar.”

“But this one, I think, felt particularly out of place, as though it had stood in splendid natural isolation, and the city, with all its concrete and stone and bustle, had simply encircled it to its very roots, but never vanquished it, nor altered its essential connection to the soil and the primordial earth. As though – and I know this to be only my fancy – Percy Road and the city were simply an event which had grown up and would pass away while the tree remained, magnificent, unperturbed, and indifferent.”

“One day, these vague intimations which I felt in relation to the Percy Road tree cohered to form what I would call an epiphany. It was an evening in May, and the first sunshine of a dour, gloomy year, with everything giddy and astir and rushing back into bloom. But I was in a mood that day such that the buoyancy of the weather only made me feel more aggrieved with my lot in this world. My troubles then were typical of young men, I suppose – the feeling, as it were, that the world were something I could see, but never quite enter fully into. Well, I was sore oppressed that day, and the envy I felt towards the carefree and fortunate revellers at the terraces all the greater, the more undignified. But then I took in the full picture, so to speak: the intersection of the two streets, the happy folk milling about at either side, and in the middle, curving a little to the left, the great tree. And in an instant, I had the most peculiar presentiment that the tree was the only thing in the picture that was actually real. It felt as though everything else – the houses, cars, people – were an illusion, an insubstantial image projected over the true world, and the tree alone, like a sore thumb, belonged to the underlying, solid reality.”

“Well, this presentiment put me in such a funk that I stopped in my tracks, and tried to figure out the source of such an impression. And it downed on me slowly that it had something to do with time– with how the human world, because of its awareness of time, was defined by and rooted in the temporal, in a way which the natural world was not. The movement and speech of the revellers appeared suddenly exaggerated and comical to me, as though speeded up. They – we – lived in an instant, and the awareness of that goes through us all like electricity, making us dance skittishly about, and perform such a febrile, frantic pantomime, as though it were actually real, and not simply such roles as children adopt in a game before rain or dinner calls them back inside. Even the houses, I thought, some a hundred or more years old, betrayed that uniquely human awareness of time, the energetic panic of it, followed by its exhausted pathos and humiliation.”

“Now, the tree, in contrast, appeared to me to partake in some fashion of the eternal rather than the temporal. Though it too had grown and would decay, it did so without panic or compulsion, without motion or discontent – its immobility and unperturbed mode of being perfectly attuned to the undifferentiated purity of the eternal, and the slight stirring of its boughs in the breeze like the lazy respirations of some god marking whole ages of human time in their falling away. It was a strange sensation that I felt in those few moments, and perhaps a little eerie and frightening, but it took me out of my present discontents, out of the whole stream of my identity in fact, while the May sun beat down on the junction.”

“Such things, of course, are fleeting, but the notion that the world which I took for granted might in some sense be unreal or illusory stayed with me. I come, as I said, from the Terrace, and such notions are not given much credence there. Over the years, I would occasionally have experiences similar to that engendered by the Percy Road tree – certain places, particularly near parks or bodies of water, certain conjurations of light, ivy-covered redbrick buildings, discovered streets or estates that give you the feeling you are no longer in your own familiar city – those things instilled in me a peculiar contemplative trance, where I began to have memories that belonged to strangers, intimations of the whole stream of separate identities, like diving into other minds for an instant, such that I occasionally felt as though I were not myself at all but everybody who would ever exist, and a great pall of dread and loneliness and nothingness with that realization, as though I lay beneath a thousand tombs, nourishing the soil of a thousand acres that would be visited only by the hollow reed of my own ghost, stirring the grasses and the foliage to a deeper gradation of the silence. And I thought for many years, sir, that it was some foible or malady of my brain that put these thoughts into my head, and I fretted about this in silence.”

“Years later, when my brother Morris and I were running this shop, I started to read books of philosophy, and I learned that the notion that everyday reality was an illusion – far from being an anomaly cooked up by some curdling of my brain matter – was in fact almost a commonplace among the learned, such that it seemed as though everyone who had ever given serious consideration to the nature of reality had arrived at some variation of the basic thesis that it was a counterfeit or mirage. Look to yon Hindoo sage of the antique Indies – he long ago proclaimed all things fair and foul but a veil of fantasy, and by thus reasoning does he display feats of contorted posture as could only be attained by regarding all cramps and palsies as afflict the body as but the minor threads of a tapestry of universal falsehood. Look to yon Plato, who saw all things as the etiolated shadows cast off by Perfect Forms, such that our world be like a ravaged face whose former beauty might yet be dimly read between the lines and creases. Or yon Parmenides, who reasoned that there was in fact but one single existing thing, such that anybody who counted more on his fingers had fallen into gross error. Or the Holy Roman Church, for whom this life and this world is but a paltry and backward hinterland to the Kingdom of God and the Life Eternal in the Hereafter. Did not Kant argue that we know things only such as our sensations make them appear to us, and what they are in actuality must remain forever a veritable mystery? Just so had Paul saith unto the Corinthians, that we see things here as through a glass darkly. Even today’s priestly caste, yon scientist, who prides himself as the supreme man of practical reality, saith that all this solid, variegated world which our senses perceive is but shoals of minuscule and maddening tadpoles swimming in seas of mathematical probability. ”

I could only gape at the dealer by this point, troubled by the paranoiac intimation which strikes many of us when we encounter the mad in public, that their monologues are somehow bizarrely synchronized replies to the train of our own private thoughts, if not our very thoughts themselves, spilling unceremoniously out into the world like a fold of flab through a loosened fabric.

“Well, what conclusion might one draw from all this? That – whether the supposition of the world’s unreality be a true intimation of the nature of things, or the product of a curdling of brain matter general throughout the species – men have, in all times and all places, resolved that that which they see directly is misleading, and thus sought to look through the world of appearances, and gaze directly upon ultimate reality, whether by contemplation, piety, or squinting into microscopes. Now, to bring us back to our initial theme, supposing this Pusey were consumed by that ambition – by this burning desire to pierce the veil, to see through the world – and further that he addressed himself to this task in a direct fashion, by looking very intently at things. He was, as I understand it, an inveterate street-walker, who always carried himself with an air of contemplative distraction. What else might he have been doing then, but trying to fix the world before him, as an object of contemplation, so that he could to see through it?”

“Let us imagine that his efforts slowly bore fruit over the years. First, the world began to soften around its edges. Its contents become liquid where previously they had been solid, and begin to flow into one another. The world becomes like its reflection on a body of water: protean, all straight lives curved, everything which was solid and fixed now undulant, everything which was rooted now cast off in a slow dance as the surface on which it rests stirs in its ceaseless interior motion. And he feels surely the beginning of a rapture, the sense of the imminence of his goal, the stirring of anticipatory bliss the lover feels as the object of their desire becomes, even if only notionally, attainable.”

“In time, the image of the world loses all its original contours – instead of the reflection on a watery surface, the motion of the surface has transformed it into a dancing figure of total abstraction – and each time Pusey goes into his trance, he travels further away from the everyday world. Thus, the nearer he attains to his goal, and the deeper his rapture grows, the more he is an isolated failure, an eccentric or madmen, in the world without.”

“One day, the world can persist no longer, even as an abstraction, and vanishes altogether. And now in turn, Pusey begins to see all those other things which mystics and philosophers have glimpsed beyond the veil: the Perfect Forms, the Unmoved Mover, the Pure White Light, mandalas and monads, mathematical tadpole swarms, they all pass before his eyes as in a parade, and each is revealed, like the world before them, to be an illusion, and like the world before them, they too collapse into abstraction and vanish away. And now, after a long period in a pure, milky void, a new picture begins to cohere, and Pusey knows that he has unwrapped the final Russian doll, pierced the last veil, and is presently to see ultimate reality, to know the final, unmediated truth which underlies all human illusions.”

“And he sees the slate grey sky of a cold desert, and beneath it a great wasteland of parched black soil stretches into infinity on all sides, an empty, uniform desolation with no beginning nor end, and no demarcation of one part of it from any other, a landscape through which one might walk for all eternity and maintain for all that time the same relationship with the horizon, and the same prospect ever before and behind. But as his vision of the wasteland becomes clearer, he sees that it is populated with objects that traverse its infinity, rising and falling, rising and falling, making the whole plane like a black ocean of steady undulation.”

“What are they?”

“Well, sir, they are jack-in-the-boxes.”

“What?”

“Jack-in-the-boxes, sir. The alleged child’s toy composed of a box, from whence a sinister clown figure abruptly springs, so as to engender comedic shock, with the box sometimes disguised in the shape of the universally beloved and soothing music box, so as to intensify the discordant shock of the clown’s emergence.”

“No, I mean, I know what jack-in-the-boxes are, but…..how did they get there? Who made them?”

“Well, sir, since you ask that question, I see you haven’t understood aright. The jack-in-the-boxes were always there, and nobody made them. They are, so to speak, the necessary being from whence all merely contingent being derives. The malice of the jack-in-the-box implied the necessity for a dupe, for a conscious being to be taken in by the pleasant appearance of the box, and thus startled by the clown. The universe is engendered only so that its sentient beings are lead through all their delusions of grand, noble, or tragic things, back to the ultimate mockery and blind malignancy of leering clowns emerging infinitely out of their boxes...”

“But how can clowns and children's toys predate the existence of matter itself?”

“Well, sir, one might well ask where such things come from in the first place, no? We are surrounded by notional things – creatures, entities, and convoluted notions themselves – such as have no apparent physical existence, and I'd like to know where they come form. Perhaps these notional things came before us, and gave birth to us as we have done to adding machines? The very first man who donned the motley apparel of the clown must have had some prior inkling of what a clown was – and his audience likewise – otherwise, they surely would have had him locked up or dunked in a pond, and the practise never taken off. And, sir, the origins of the jack-in-the-box itself are shrouded in mystery. Some say it were the rector John Schorne, that pious healer and terror to the gout and the common sinner, who inspired the conceit when he incarcerated yon devil in his boot for a time. Well, I would say that Schorne were far too recent, and the jack has been a slumbering in some box since yon Pandora, at the very least.”

“But I make apology for the long-windedness of my discourse; I meant only to provide an hypothetical example of a truth so terrible that it's discovery would drive all men to self-annihilation, and I would make boast that I have done just that, for though there are some who might have a partiality for infinite grey wastelands, and others for row upon upon row of leering, exultantly evil jack-in-the-boxes, there wasn't any borned yet as would rejoice in the combination of the two constituting the ultimate, underlying reality.”

I handed him the money.

“Well, that's certainly very interesting, but I really need to be getting along..”

“Indeed, sir, and my apologies again. You know I must say I'm actually rather glad to have rid of this book. Oh, I'm sure it's all superstitious nonsense, but I've a fear that I would have read it sooner or later, and mayhap then vanished out of sight myself. I don't want to disappear, you see. It's just that at my age, you wind up with very little to look forward to – very little, sir, in the line of new experiences and novelties on the horizon. Well, what I look forward to most of all now is my funeral. I cannot wait to see what sort of weather I get for the big day, who comes along to squint at me in yon box, what the priest says, and so forth.”

It seemed that he was to detain me with one further lunacy.

“Eh, don't you think that.....your funeral might be the one thing which you almost certainly won't get to see?”

He smiled cannily.

“That is indeed the opinion must would venture on the subject, sir, but I happen to have some insider information which gives me every hope that I will see my own funeral, as sure as I'm seeing you now, looking at me as though I had two heads. Well, in fact, I hadtwo heads once, after a fashion. I mentioned earlier that I used to run this business with my brother Morris. It was Morris, actually, who got the lease on this place – he won it in a game of cards with Ronnie Sullivan that went on for three days and three nights in the granny flat over Fagan's Drapery, while wives, childers, and assorted crones took turns mounting the stairs to try to rouse them from their collective lunacy with a wailing of entreaties and imprecations. They talked about that game of cards for years in the Terrace. Putting up the lease of a property on one hand, would you believe it? People lived shorter and wider in those days, if you know what I mean. Nobody worried about their health until they were dying, and they didn't really worry too much about it then because it was too late anyway.”

“Well, my brother Morris wasn't just my brother – we were identicals. Now, there are many popular notions regarding the uncanniness of identical twins which I can tell you from experience are spurious. For example, it's often held that one twin must be the good one, and the other the bad – well, I would say that most twins, like most people, are good some of the time, bad some of the time, and indifferent for most of it. Now, on the other hand, it's commonly believed that that the bond between identical twins is of a close, psychical nature, such that the twins are privy to knowledge about one another which confounds everyday notions of time, space, and the locality and interiority of the mental faculty. Well, I can tell you, sir, this queer supposition is entirely true. When I was a young child, I began to experience what I called “flashes.” The flashes were a queer thing. I would be doing any old thing, you know, walking home from the butchers, playing conkers with bigger lads, or taking a pinch of snuff with some bold lads behind the old concrete outhouse, when suddenly, just for the briefest instant, I would be seeing something else entirely. One second, I would be looking down a certain street, and the next thing, I would see a pair of feet bobbing at the bottom of a bath. Or I would be talking to somebody indoors, and the next thing, I'd be looking at a woman's backside sauntering down some nearby street! The sound of where I was would persist, but it was like, for a couple of seconds, I was seeing through somebody else's eyes. It were a strange thing, for example, to be entirely stationary, and yet to have one visual field in motion, as though one's eyes were a cinema screen.”

“Well, these flashes persisted intermittently as I grew up, and puzzled me greatly. It seemed to me that if one were to see things, they should be of a fantastical or bizarre nature, like row upon upon row of seaside chalets on the dark side of the moon, or perambulators scuttling around on spider's legs while mothers encased in tortoise shells tried vainly to catch after them – weird things such as that. But my flashes were of the most banal nature, and all took place in locations which were instantly recognisable to me. It as though as though I were going mad in a tiresomely ordinary fashion – a double blow to my pride.”

“One day, I was sitting on the couch reading an adventure of Torrace Manning, the Spy with the X-Ray Eyes, when suddenly the panel which I reading – in which Torrace was eyeing Esther St Claire, and saying “DON'T ASK HOW I KNOW, ESTHER, BUT MONDRAGOON IS ON HIS WAY UP THE STAIRS AS WE SPEAK – WITH SALINGER'S MANSCRIPT IN ONE-HAND AND A PISTOL IN THE OTHER” - vanished, and I saw my own face looking back at me from the bathroom mirror. So I ran up and went a banging on the bathroom door, and sure enough, Morris opens it and goes: “By Christ, I thought you were MONDRAGOON coming up with the stairs with his revolver!” Well, the mystery was solved. Morris, as it transpired, had also been having the flashes, and when we compared notes, it was readily apparent at our mental wires were crossed at brief, sporadic intervalssuch that we would see through the other's eyes for little fleeting moments here and there.And this was a very special thing, a secret bond between us, ever after. Oh, we had our rows and so forth, but there was always that thing between us – that our minds were interconnected, directly, without words - that they were, even if only for little flashes, not alone, not burrowed up inside the skull and needing stuttering words to try to dredge them out. When we were apart, we were always together in a sense, and when we were together, we'd have little jokes and knowing comments about the flashes. Women's hindquarters were the most frequent thing I'd see in the flashes, because Morris was a fierce divil who believed as an article of faith that a woman's legs and backside in ambulatory motion was the only thing on earth that justified the ways of God to man! He had a skill, sir, such that he would allow his shoelace to become untied, so as to crouch down at precisely the opportune moment to get an eyeful! The Gentleman's Periscope, he called it!”

The dealer laughed and slapped his thigh as this recollection of his twin's incorrigible piehawking.

“And the years went by, he used to complain to me that whenever he got flashes they were always of dull books, of yon Plato and so forth. Anyway, one day, Morris was standing at the Long Corner, talking to Michael Hobart and the Michelin Man, and he had a stroke. He was dead, sir, on arrival at the hospital. The Lord giveth and He taketh away, or so they say. I would say He might be less generous in the giving, or less capricious in the taking away, but such is not my place to say. Though we were so intertwined, I had no premonition or awareness of what had happened to Morris, until they came and told me in the shop. I couldn't believe them – I thought they were speaking in a foreign language, or just some figurines from a dream. And I was in such a shock and a panic that I couldn't even look at Morris to make the identification. I was down at the mortuary with my friend Peter and some guards and other fellas, but I kept getting feint and shaky, and eventually the guard puts me lying down and gets me to close my eyes, and he says: “Yes, it's him”, and that's how they made the identification. So I didn't actually get to see Morris until he was laid out for the removal, and I'll take this to my own grave, sir. I walked up towards the coffin, in that hushed little room, and I had the trepidations and fear, but I knew I had to look at him and say goodbye, so I kept going. And I got to the coffin, sir, and looked into it, and would you believe I saw the last person on earth I was expecting to see: myself!”

“You mean you saw your brother?”

“No, sir, I mean precisely what I said: I saw myself.”

“But he was identical to you...”

“Yes, but what I mean to say is that when I looked down, I didn't see yon fellow below in the coffin with his eyes closed, but rather I saw a fellow with his eyes open, squinting like a badger, looking down at me from above: it was myself I saw, sir, through Morris's eyes, looking down at himself!”

“I think that the stress...you became disorientated...”

“No, sir, not at all. It was the last of our flashes, clear as day. I looked up at my myself, looking down at myself, with the look of timid fear and shock on my face, and I said to myself: “My god, this is what I look like. This is what I have looked like all along.” And then the flash faded, sir, and my face became Morris's, down below in the coffin, eyes shut tight and not a stir on him.”

We fell silent then for a few seconds, and I heard the swing of the grandfather pendulum and the other clocks ticking, and ticking, the hushed flow of the river and of distant traffic, and in my imagination these sounds, and our voices before them, tickled the leaves of trees scattered across the city like tiny fingers striking piano keys.

“Have you had any flashes since?”

“I've seen things, sir, yes. But I can no longer be certain whether they are flashes from Morris, or just stirring of my own imagination, remembrances of dreams, and so forth.”

His face darkened palpably for an instant, and then resumed its former buoyancy.

“Well, sir, here is your Pusey. It has been a pleasure indeed, and if you'd permit me a parting piece of advice, I would say to thee that, when reading on this book, if you do begin to have some intimation of an awful fact hidden craftilyin the prose, or even the mapping of the way to yon Door to the supernal realm outside of space and time, I would say, sir, simply put the book away, and cease reading on it! Mayhap the world of buttocks and brambles and Brussels sprouts and briers be the ultimate reality, after all, and all such contrary notions as the philosophers and sages avow are only a kind of mist or spume cast off by the churning turbulence of their brains; a misty spume, sir, wherein one might lose oneself and never find shore again; such is perhaps the true danger of such allegedly cursed books, sir, and the reality underlying the tales of disappearance that surround them.”

He eyed me in a peculiar and disquieting manner as he spoke, a look both conspiratorial and accusatory, like a kind of nod of recognition between two old war criminals which chance had reunited by a butcher's counter.  

Continued shortly.

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Infomercials of the Uncanny: Time-Life's "Mysteries of the Unknown."

September 27, 2015, 1:30 pm

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"Mysteries of the Unknown" was a highly successful series of books dealing with paranormal subjects which Time-Life Books published from 1987 to 1991.  The format and presentation was similar to previous paranormal periodicals published in Britain in the 70s and early 80s, such as the legendary Man, Myth and Magic and the Unexplained magazine:

This irresistible 1988 commercial for the series captures the surreal joy of yesterday's mass market esotericism:

This other spot is less memorable, and probably only notable for an early Julianne Moore appearance: 

Images: 

Mysteries of the Unknown from ODDS AND THENS

The Unexplained from THE TEAROOM OF DESPAIR.

&More Again.

September 29, 2015, 12:16 pm

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Michael Mann's Heat (1995).

December 25, 2015, 8:42 am

≫ Next: The Last Will and Testament of Tillinghast Nebula (Part 1).

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To mark the 20th Anniversary of Heat, a re-posting of an essay I wrote back in 2009, originally here.)

Part 1: Both Sides of the Law.

While he was directing his debut Thief, and later producing Miami Vice and Crime Story for television, Michael Mann conducted on-going and in-depth research into the private and professional lives of law enforcement officers and criminals. As he put it himself: "I like to move through a subculture until I feel the colors and patterns and tones and rhythms of the lives of the people and place." Mann's hands on approach brought experienced operators from both sides of the law into the acting fold: Dennis Farina and John Santucci both had small parts in Thief, and larger roles in Crime Story. Farina had been a Chicago cop for eighteen years, and Santucci a skilled jewel thief. It was within this extended fraternization with the law's enforcers and truants that Mann discovered the genesis for Heat. Chuck Adamson, another veteran police officer, was an old friend of Mann whose experiences on the beat formed much of the template for Crime Story. During the sixties, Adamson had shared a coffee with a thief named McCauley; the pair enjoyed one another's company, despite an acute awareness that an encounter under different circumstances could prove fatal for one of the two men. Later on in '63, Adamson was called to the scene of an armed robbery, and shot McCauley six times.

This simple enough anecdote, an insight into the shades of grey that inevitably inhere into even the most adversarial relationships, seemed to haunt Mann, and gradually developed in his mind into what is for many people the quintessential Mann narrative: the story of two lonely, driven men who occupy opposing sides of the law, and who, despite extraordinary differences of character and temperament, recognise in one another both a mutual dependence and an essential similitude. Contrary to the interpretation of Heat frequently espoused by the critic David Thompson, the purpose of this dynamic was by no means to suggest an moral equivalence between the two characters, or even to suggest that they are particularly alike in most respects. Rather, as Mann said himself: "I heard that the detective had some kind of rapport with McCauley, and that was the kernel of the movie. It would be trite to say that they were the flip side of the same coin. McCauley and Hanna share a singularity of intelligence and drivennes, but everything else about their lives is different."Heat was thus about a rapport, an empathy, and a respect between two adversaries, predicated on a shared, perhaps emotionally debilitating commitment to their perspective vocations.

Again, as with Frank in Thief, we can read these characters in variety of ways. They share with Frank the same contradictory mixture of intense self-affirmation and self-abnegation and defeat. We can read them as expressions of the perennial American myth of rugged masculine individualism, transposed onto the complex, impersonal urban architecture of the postmodern world. We can see them as cops and robbers proxies for the experience of the artistic vocation, in a manner which explores the inherent alienation of artists and others who possess a particularly intense absorption in their work, and the close proximity of this absorption to forms of obsessive compulsion and autism. Mann has referred to McCauley as a "highly-organized sociopath", and Hanna as "extremely dysfunctional". Their relationship in Heat is a battle of prowess, a cat and mouse game, and, as Sergio Leone described Once Upon a Time in the West, a long and stately "dance of death."

Mann is known for working slowly and spending a long time in research, but of all his projects, Heat probably had the longest period of gestation. Some form of the script seems to have existed since 1986. In 1989, Mann shot a compressed version of the script in two weeks as the low budget television movie L.A. Takedown; it was a proposed pilot for an NBC series which never materialised. (I can never bring myself to watch L.A. Takedown, since it has been so thoroughly bettered by its later incarnation. The Al Pacino role is played by an actor called Scott Plank, who apparently gives a pretty decent performance, despite possessing the most unfortunate surname imaginable for a thespian.) The precise details of how the script evolved are unknown to me, but by the time it reached the big screen in 1995, Heat had blossomed into arguably Mann's most complex, ambitious, and nuanced script. Working within an elegantly precise three-act structure, Mann had branched out around his two central protagonists, weaving a complex tapestry of secondary characters and domestic sub-plots. He had done a stunning job of fleshing out close to twenty characters, and turning the typical prioritization of genre cinema towards plot mechanics and action on its head. In Mann's script, the characterization, the interaction of the secondary characters, and the languorous, contemplative moments, were as crucial as the action set-pieces, and the final film attains an extraordinary fluidity in the way it moves between alternately romantic, melancholy, and kinetically violent registers.

In its journey from NBC to Hollywood, Heat had also acquired an immense ensemble cast, and orchestrated an unprecedented casting coup: the first together on-screen pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The significance of this was two-fold. For movie lovers, De Niro and Pacino were emblematic, iconic figures of the extraordinary creativity and artistic integrity which had characterised the New Hollywood movement of the seventies. American cinema experienced something truly remarkable in that decade, which each successive generation has only served to render more unprecedented, and more worthy of our rueful nostalgia. Establishing themselves in roughly the same years as Nicholson, Hackman, Hoffman, Beatty, and Warren Oates, De Niro and Pacino had nevetheless carved out the greatest niche in the mythos of naturalistic American movie actors since Brando created the template in the fifties.

Pacino was a lean, slight, cherub-faced kid with an air of street-savvy; back then, he was as comfortable with composure and austerity (The Godfather Part 2) as he was with demonstrative physicality (Dog Day Afternoon). De Niro was harder to pin down. In his early years he appeared as a blank slate whose only common denominator was a certain air of purpose and drivenness in performance. He could do a kind of weedy klutziness very well, and also a quality of power, of suppressed ferocity, with an equal faculty. He combined these contradictory qualities as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, in what remains his most shattering performance. As the seventies passed into the eighties, he had gathered about himself a fearsome legend of obsessive dedication, of physical plasticity and protean disappearance into character. His stock-in-trade, as with the young Brando, became playing volatile, insecure, inarticulate men.

Also, as De Niro and Pacino possessed a special resonance to American cinema in its last truly robust and artistically rigorous period, they had also developed a mythic stature within the crime genre. A fresh-faced Pacino had played a hipster cop fresh out of the academy in Serpico (1973), and laterly the more wizened, world-weary variety in Sea of Love (1989). On the other side of the law, he had played Brian de Palma's cartoonish Cuban ubermench Tony Montana in Scarface, and his older, more contemplative and soulful Hispanic cousin in the same director's Carlito's Way. De Niro, unlike the majority of major American movie stars, tended to steer towards flawed, if not pungently unpleasant characters, and thus spent most of his time on the wrong side of the law. In the seventies, his star took flight as the small-time hoodlum and eternal hustler Johnny Boy in Mean Streets; he played a virile, brill-creamed Vito Corleone for Coppola, a paunchy, petulant Al Capone for de Palma, and also took the lead in Scorsese's nineties crime epics Goodfellas and Casino.

For these reasons, it was particularly apt that these two actors should embody Mann's battle of prowess between two aging, obsessive, and preeminent professionals. It added a charge to the eventual encounter in the diner which had a rich resonance outside the drama of the movie. As their characters circle around one throughout Heat, De Niro and Pacino had hovered about one another for years, both in terms of professional stature, and iconic roles in American cops and robbers movies. The eighties and the nineties were to a large degree a twilight of the idols for the seventies auteurs. When De Niro and Pacino made Heat, their titanic stature was still more or less intact, but both, also, were on the slide: Pacino into exaggerated self-parody, and De Niro into a perhaps more lamentable condition of sheer disinterest. The sly sparring and defiant expressions of dedication to vocation expressed in the diner scene are thus both "a mythic moment", as David Denby asserted, and a sad reminder of the many years yet to come between these great actors and the height of their prowess.

Part 2: Emotion and Detachment.

The Opening.

One the main pleasures of repeated viewings of Heat is the discovery of a variety of smaller, unobtrusive moments throughout the movie which possess a significance or beauty which was not apparent in an initial viewing. The movie's opening thirty seconds are a good case in point. On the face of it, there's very little to write home about. Eliot Goldenthal's haunting, ambient score wafts in very quietly over the studio title. We see a static shot of an incoming train moving slowly through a smoggy landscape of smoke, neon, and steel. (This is, of course, the same rail system which would provide Tom Cruise with his metaphor for the disconnectedness of LA life in Collateral, and later the scene of his own demise.) Over a black background, the movie's cool, minimalist title card shimmers into view. We are then introduced to DeNiro's character Neil as he alights from the train, both in a long and close shot.

It doesn't seem like much at all, but in actuality this short passage, by a mixture of composition, design, and scoring, establishes the whole tone of the movie, which might be best described as a mood of precision and detachment, with a deep undercurrent of melancholy and longing playing at its lower frequencies. Instrumental in achieving this effect is Goldenthal's theme: it is a perfect aural expression of a subtle, but no less intense longing for emotional spontaneity and connection in a landscape which is cold, metallic, and geometrically precise.

The physical landscape in which Heat takes place is Los Angeles, which Mann and his cinematographer Dante Spinotti evoke with an otherworldly, almost sci-fi ambience recalling Blade Runner. According to Empire's Ian Nathan, “this is an urban milieu almost space-age in its abstract beauty, but emotionally desolate, a blank canvass against which the dispossessed act out their desperate dreams. Nothing anchors people – all the houses are stunningly angular, magnificent architectural vacuums free of personality.” Jean-Baptiste Therot provides a brilliant description of Mann's mise en scene in his essay The Aquarium Syndrome, which is worth quoting at length:

“Today, Mann is one of those rare filmmakers whose films succeed in delivering a vision of modern, urban America: those impersonal places, the freeways, suburbs, uninterrupted traffic, the America that Baudrillard calls magnificent and sidereal. This is a world of railway yards, neon signs that flicker night and day, a world that seems resigned to the omnipresence of glass and concrete. Mann renews from film to film, with a rare obstinacy, this cold, blue, geometric aesthetic, although it is sometimes broken up by an unusual graininess, or lack of order that creeps into the system. Predominant here is the transformation of spaces into “no-places”: hospitals, hotel rooms, roadside cafes, vacant lots, airports, warehouses, empty apartments, are all subject to a sort of hyper-geometrization of the frame, inherited from the Don Siegel of The Killers (1964) and Dirty Harry (1972), and the formal experiments of Antonioni in Red Desert (1964) and Zabriskie Point (1970).”

Case Study House 22, Los Angeles, 1960, photograhed by Julius Shulman.

To Therot's astute allusions to Baudrillard and Antonioni, you could also add the cold modernist sheen of J.G. Ballard's dystopian novels. With Antonioni and Ballard, Mann shares a deep-rooted attraction/repulsion towards the reflective surfaces and straight lines of contemporary urban architecture; with Baudrillard, a fascination with the contradictory qualities of artificiality and hyperrealism. (Mann's repeated foregrounding of transitory places and channels of conveyance, such as hospitals, hotels, warehouses, etc, reaches a greater extreme in Miami Vice, and is echoed in Olivier Assaya's criminally underrated Boarding Gate(2007), a film I would recommend for enthusiasts of Mann's films.) Later in The Aquarium Syndrome, Therot asks What kind of people live in these places? The answer provided by Heat's intro is Neil McCauley, and again after repeated viewing you begin to realize how much of Neil's character is already sketched out with remarkable economy in the opening.

Alighting from the train, DeNiro's body language expresses the essentials of McCauley's character. We see a figure that is polished, precise, methodical, and interior; a perfectly austere master criminal in the mould of Jean Pierre Melville. (Later we learn that the extent of his spartan fastidiousness; his minimalist apartment is barely furnished.) In this regard, McCauley seems perfectly attuned to the steely, impersonal terrain in which he moves; however, his expression in close-up, accentuated by the soundtrack, suggests a degree of weariness and sorrow. McCauley later describes himself as “alone, but not lonely”, a description which seems, in the light of his courtship of Eady, only partially true. In the course of the movie, Hanna is forced to acknowledge that he cannot lead a meaningful life outside of his work. McCauley, on the other hand, has reached a point where persistent vigilance and personal vocation are no longer meaningful; like Jeff in Melville's Le Samouri, and Cruise's similar assassin in Collateral, he has the air of a weary ghost in the shell.

Before leaving the intro, it is worth considering briefly the title itself: heat. Heat refers most explicitly to law enforcement, to the perennial threat around the corner in McCauley's oft quoted credo. But the word also evokes passion, heightened emotion, and the complications of the emotional life; things which, in Mann's noir-tinted world, almost invariably prove as fatal as bullets. Much of Heat's time is given over to the difficulty of maintaining relationships, or, in McCauley's case, the difficulty of being without one. As Mann puts it, once McCauley encounters Eady, he is “out there with the rest of us, in the realm where emotions become complex and motivation isn't simple.” The empathy between McCauley and Hanna is in part derived from the fact that they have both avoided the messy complications of emotional commitment throughout their lives, McCauley by way of spartan discipline, and Hanna by bulldozing his way through three marriages. Between themselves, they occupy a purely masculine order which eschews emotional complexity and vulnerability, but is nevertheless a cold world, characterised by conflict, fatalism, and dead bodies.

Choices.

Anna Dzenis has called Heat an “epic crime film about two tribes and three couples.” Throughout its duration, Heat explores both the similarities, and conflicting demands, between membership of tribal and familial units. McCauley, for example, shows an interest in tight, cohesive family units when talking to Eady, and exercises a patriarchal role within his crew, being particularly paternal towards Chris (Val Kilmer). Hanna, on the other hand, succeeds in saving his step-daughter from an attempted suicide attempt. It is characteristic of him, however, that his proficiency is in precisely this kind of life-threatening crisis situation, the kind he encounters in work, but not in the everyday domestic activities of fatherhood. His allegiance is tribal, and orientated towards hunting, and the rest, as Diane Verona observes, “is the mess you leave behind as you pass through.”

In so far as Mann conceived Heat as a drama rather than a genre piece, its most dramatically significant moments are those in which the characters make choices. Some of the choices made in Heat are long meditated over, and clearly signposted as significant moments; others are brisk, spur of the moment, and not immediately resonant in a first viewing. In the first category, you think immediately of Hanna's decision, effectively the end of his third marriage, to answer the call in the hospital, or the split second pause later on when McCauley looks from Eady to Hanna coming around the corner. (This is the most mythically heightened moment in Heat, when McCauley looks in stunned disbelief at what had been an abstract code become a reality in every detail.) McCauley's real undoing occurs earlier, however, with a different choice. Driving away from the heist scot-free, he is informed by Nate that Waingro is still alive. According to Mann, this is the point where the action moves from probability to determinism. McCauley has his dream within his grasp, but also the opportunity to settle everything neatly, to avenge his crew. The car lurches under a tunnel, and for a split second the whole screen is bathed in a bluish white incandescence. He turns back. (The lighting effect was apparently accidental, but edited brilliantly to capture the lightening speed with which McCauley seals his fate.)

It is also worth noting the choices of some of the secondary characters. The storyline involving driver Donald Breeden (Dennis Haysbert) has significantly less screen time than most of the other characters, but it is movingly evoked and acted. Breeden's relationship, along with McCauley's, is one of the few in the movie which isn't deteriorating, and you really feel for his attempts to build a modest, stable existence away from criminality. Later on, McCauley appears unexpectedly at the diner where he works, and offers him a quick escape from the petty frustrations and small, incremental victories of the “normal-type” life. Once again, a lightning fast decision is made, and a few hours later, Breeden is dead.

One of my very favourite of Heat's smaller, more intimate moments is the last scene between Chris (Val Kilmer) and Charlene (Ashley Judd). At this point, their relationship seems all but over, and Charlene has been put in a position where betraying Chris to the police is an almost unavoidable moral imperative. When the moment comes, however, she finds to her own surprise that she cannot betray whatever tie remains between them. She makes a very slight gesture with her hand to indicate the trap. Kilmer's initial expression of exhilarated happiness becomes clouded and dazed, and without fully seeming to register what has has happened, he becomes, like so many other Mann protagonists, a solitary figure disappearing forever into the far distance. The scene is wonderfully played; the ability of Charlene to communicate something so succinctly with a gesture, and of Chris to respond so quickly and instinctively, tells you everything you need to know about the world they inhabit. It is also the sweetest, most hopeful moment in Heat's otherwise leaden atmosphere of steadily encroaching doom. Heat is often interpreted as a story of men who eschew emotional commitment to women in favour of masculine camaraderie, and games of skill and prowess which ultimately prove fatal and destructive to all connected with them. However, Chris' assertion “For me, the sun rises and sets with her” is a counter-argument, a rejection, of McCauley's credo of non-attachment: “Do not have anything in your life that you are not prepared to walk away from in thirty seconds flat, if you feel the heat around the corner.” In the end, it seems justified since theirs is the only relationship with any potential “future” after the end of the movie. (Of course, whether they do have a future together or not is rendered academic by the strange magic of cinematic closure. I love the scene precisely because this wordless, ambiguous exchange is the end of their story.)

Closing.

“Heat is awash with death and a sense of pathos from the very start. It is as if the end is already enacted at the beginning, and the characters are like ghosts that walk through this dream world.”

Anna Dzenis.

One of the things I admire most about Heat, and about Mann's work in general, is its particular sensitivity to mood and tone; its ability to create, by a combination of scoring, mise en scene, dialogue and performance, a very specific filmic world or universe. Anna Dzenis comments on this quality with relation to Heat:“Heat is more than just a crime story. It is a dreamscape – a poetically rendered world.” This remains the most intriguing paradox about Mann's films – the obsession with realism, verisimilitude, and research, as against the sense, particularly in his crime films, that one is in, as Dzenis puts it, “a poetically rendered world.” This is particularly evident in Diane Verona's speech in Heat: “You don't live with me. You live among the remains of dead people. You sift through the detritus. You read the terrain. You search for signs of passing, for the scent of your prey, and then you hunt them down. That's the only thing you're really committed to. The rest is the mess you leave behind as you pass through.” There is little attempt to capture the cadence of actual speech here; rather, the effect is poetic, and almost akin a piece of musical score, in way it contributes to/articulates the tone and mood of the film.

As much as Heat draws from real events, and specific, concrete things which Mann encountered in research, the movie is also a carefully modulated tone poem, an exploration of the perennial male anxiety with regard to emotional commitment; a noir world in which the heat around the corner is always complex, difficult emotions, and the real danger is perhaps derived from the unavoidable necessity to open one's self up, to become vulnerable, to acquire something in life that you cannot abandon, no matter what the consequences. Thematically and tonally, Heat moves between opposing poles of emotion and detachment, as all of Mann's major characters seem caught between the alternate pull of heat (passion, connection, life-force) and coldness (sterility, conflict, detachment, the dead bodies that haunt Hanna's dreams).

This dichotomy cuts through the whole of Heat; it is evident in the movie's tendency to view landscape from a wide, abstract vantage, and human faces and bodies in extreme, intimate close-up; in Mann's attitude towards his characters, which is at once one of complete emotional engagement, and cerebral detachment. Heat's conclusion, heavily redolent in its action of the similar airport chase that concludes Peter Yates's Bullitt, is no exception. McCauley and Hanna, both unable to attain the more rewarding existence offered by their domestic attachments, are finally drawn to their inevitable duel, to the testing of the principals each expressed earlier in the cafe scene. More than this, they are reabsorbed into the movie's steely, geometric terrain, McCauley back into the landscape from which he emerged at the beginning of the film. As foreshadowed in Diane Verona's speech, he is betrayed by a shadow cast by floodlights, a trace or a “sign of passing” rather than his own person. It is an overwhelmingly hollow victory for Hanna; for him, as for McCauley's crew, the “action is the juice”, the end an abstraction that facilitates the thrill of the chase. As J.A. Lindstrom points out in a fine essay Heat: Work and Genre, the ending of Heat leaves the quintessential Mann dichotomy between work and domesticity without any hope of resolution:

“The film's resolution offers us the grim notion that work requires abandoning those we care about; and then it will probably kill us. Choosing not to sacrifice home life will not, however, insulate a relationship from harm. Thus the accommodation to the status quo that the genre film normally offers to its audience is a bitter pill in Heat: work rules fatally, and proclaiming the importance of our personal lives will not rescue us from professional demands.”

If Heatrefuses its audience a neat resolution to its thematic concerns, however, it attains near perfection in terms of aesthetic resolution. The final shot, echoing the first, is wide, equisitely composed shot of Hanna holding Vincent's hand, tempering the potential melodrama of the moment by viewing them from behind, in a pictorial, almost impersonal framing. The brilliant inclusion of Moby's God Moving Over the Face of the Waters feels like a final release of all the emotion that had been pent-up and submerged beneath Heat's polished and precise exterior; as an ending it is both melancholy and strangely exhilarating, such is its fine balance between emotive outpouring and abstract formal precision.

The Last Will and Testament of Tillinghast Nebula (Part 1).

January 31, 2016, 10:42 am

≫ Next: The Last Will and Testament of Tillinghast Nebula (Part 2).

≪ Previous: Michael Mann's Heat (1995).

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It would be one of those years where nobody could imagine what was going to happen next. There was a certain eeriness infusing everything, owing to the conjunction of two events, on the surface unrelated to one-another: the death of the Mars astronaut Gabriel Summers, and the sudden return from obscurity and subsequent death of the glam rock icon Tillinghast Nebula. These events we imagined to be unrelated on any kind of literal level; in a subterranean logic of symbol and coincidence, however, the conjunction was bizarre, and pregnant with troubling resonances. Tillinghast Nebula's first big hit Mission Command (Radio Silence from the American Capsule) was a moon-landing novelty record about a doomed astronaut. In fact, when the Martian mission fell apart, and it first became apparent that Gabriel Summers would be stranded alone on the Red Planet, many people evoked the memory of Mission Command and its powerful depiction of a sympathetic, almost umbilical connection between humanity and the astronaut which they are powerless to save.

The connections went deeper, however, as Tillinghast had always presented himself to some degree as an alien marooned on ourplanet, as isolated in his own way as Summers' was in the arid desolation and radio silence of Mars. Tillinghast, though he had referenced many cosmic locations, real and imaginary, during his sci-fi glam rock phase, would always be associated primarily with the Red Planet. Then there was the timing of the events. Elor Summers, the venture capitalist and space entrepreneur announced in August that the Mars colonisation project had suffered a series of tragic set-backs, which resulted in the death of fourteen of the colonialists, leaving only his own son Gabriel alive. It was surely around this time that rumours first began to circulate on Noosfeed that Tillinghast Nebula was emerging from nearly a decade of seclusion, putting the finishing touches to a new record that would be released early in the coming year.

All through September and October, the world watched Gabriel Summers, the loneliest man in the solar system, via the video feed from TOTO, the robot rover that followed his every move, beaming back his daily struggles to millions of tablets and phones across the earth. The signal was one way; owing to the disastrous malfunction of Elor Summers' experimental technologies, we could not communicate with Gabriel. We could not tell him how much love we had for him, how ardently we hoped that he would persevere, and find some measure of happiness and reward in his isolated existence on the Red Planet. We could only watch the TOTO feed, hoping perhaps, by the same implicit belief in sympathetic magic which prompts people to cheer at athletes on a television screen, that the global force of our emotional investment and concentration, the perfect synchronisation of our hopes and desires, might somehow travel the vast distance between earth and Mars, another signal bouncing invisibly across the blackness.

How was it that our emotional lives had became so entwined with the fortunes of the lonely astronaut? For years, it seems to me, all our minds had been blurring together, ever since Noosfeed superseded all the previous search engines and social networks, and gradually we spent more and more of our days scrolling through this vast, fragmentary hive mind. Though few of us cared to acknowledge it, we no longer consumed books, magazines, or news in any conventional sense of the term; rather we contributed our share to an endless stream of transitory points of emotional engagement that were always moving downstream, a ceaseless flow of ironic hieroglyphics, Pavlovian arguments, and conspiratorial rumours that moulded our minds, and melded them together until all experience seemed vacuous unless it could be shared on Noosfeed, and our private consciousness felt either valueless, or something precious which we could no longer regain. In this fashion, our minds had ebbed together in a communal retreat from a world which seemed beyond our ability to understand or exert any control over; a world which we all felt intuitively was falling apart and coming undone while we shared our piecemeal, opiated Noosfeed dreams.

It was a natural, then, that our emotional lives, already concretized as a single, amalgamated entity by Noosfeed, could become affixed to that of the lonely astronaut. Feeling subconsciously that society and culture had reached a dead-end spiral on planet earth, we could look to Gabriel Summers as an embodiment of our collective hope that mankind might perhaps succeed elsewhere in the universe. That we could start afresh; that we would not renew the same mistakes, the same interminable tragedies, which had marred our earthly cradle, and sapped our great promise. This was the scale of the burden we placed on the astronaut's shoulders; we had made him an every-man figure whose great ill-fortune and sufferings would be a test by which the whole worth of the species might be judged. Just as our own lives had become increasingly artificial and untethered from tangible reality, Gabriel Summers existed in world of hyper-reality: in the brooding, blasted landscape of the dead planet, and the daily struggle to survive and remain sane, there was no distraction of any kind from the sheer facts of his existence.

We watched him as he worked on the terraformed pavilion which would provide food when his supply of protein pills ran out. We shared his appalling loneliness, the deep troughs of his despair, the moments when he contemplated suicide. Our moods followed precisely after his in their every ebb and flow; you could feel it in the air when Gabriel smiled at TOTO, and faced the chores of his day with courage and equanimity. Market fluctuations, crime and suicide rates, the fashions and sexual currents of big cities, everything on earth became entwined with the distant activities of the lonely astronaut, with subtle nuances in the language of his space-suited body, with rocks and patterns glimpsed in the ochre dust of the dead planet. When Gabriel began to speak of a presence encountered out there in the brooding Martian valleys and desert expanses, even the world's most ardent atheists thrilled privately with the notion of experiencing the emergence of a new religious gnosis, specific to the Martian environment. The night that he told TOTO that Mars was thronged with ghosts, we wondered if his sanity was slipping away again.

In those same days when Gabriel Summers spoke in halting whispers of a host of Martian ghosts, the world was also stirring with the rumoured return of Tillinghast Nebula, the decadent glam rock icon from the Golden Age of Pop. Tillinghast had all but vanished for a decade; no records, no tours, even his sporadic acting career had dried up. Nevertheless, the mystique of the ageing pop star grew if anything more palpable in the years of his absence. The myths of his youth were renewed, and we almost began to believe again that he might really be an alien. Born in the same year as the flying saucer, and finding his first flush of fame in the shadow of the Apollo moon-landing, Nebula would always be identified with the complex web of anxieties and desires surrounding the figure of the extraterrestrial. Early on in his career, he found some happy serendipity in the double-meaning of the word star: the distant luminescences of the night sky, and the new type of humanity created by the mass media. The star in the sky was a vast thing rendered tiny by great gulfs of interstellar space; the star in the media landscape was a relatively insignificant thing (a person like any other) magnified to giant proportions by some alchemy of technology and fantasy.

Just as the journey to the stars had been regarded as an apotheosis in outer space, Tillinghast reasoned that the ascension to the status of an icon in the media age could be an apotheosis of inner space. The surrealists dreamed of collapsing the distinction between the unconscious and the world of everyday reality; the star achieved this by reifying his private fantasies, and making them the communal fantasy of his audience. Tillinghast was particularly obsessed with the archetypal story of a being who descends, either voluntarily or by misadventure, from a higher realm to a lower one. In the lower realm, he is a messianic figure, a teacher, and a subversive disruptor of social mores and conventions. Like all mystically-minded rockers, Tillinghast was particularly enamoured of the figure of Dionysus, the exotic outsider-god who foments an ecstatic, underground gnosis in woodland groves and hidden places, a new mystery cult whose sacraments are irresistible to women, hysterics, and other figures marginalized by the dominant society. In the twentieth century, this fallen god had to be an extraterrestrial; Superman had proved that. So Tillinghast created an image which was androgynous like Dionysus, but also bizarre and otherworldly, like a fashion-spread from some other dimension, normally only accessible via magic mushrooms or psychotic episode. The image was repellent and absurd to the middle-aged gate-keepers of dystopian orthodoxy, but held a instant, talismanic power over the still protean adolescents. 

For Tillinghast, the story of the rock star as alien messiah could only end in one of two ways. In some versions, the alien is destroyed by his own fans, dismembered and consumed as a transubstantiated body, a host or plasmate of some indecipherable future sexuality. In the other version, he is destroyed by his own ego, having become tainted by the lures and deceptions of the lower world. Lost in a stupor of satiation and boredom, he gazes forlornly at the stars he has lost, never to be regained. Working around variations of this basic mythic template, Nebula created a dizzying variety of science fictional personae during the height of his fame: Technical Tilly the Erotic Scientist from the Crab Nebula, Apollo Elsewhere and the Venusian Teddy Boys, the Diamond Android Geisha, and so on. After the glam boom faded, an increasingly cocaine-frazzled Tillinghast went through his “Germanic phase”, a period marked by his obsession with Wilhelm Reich, the “Odic Force” theorized by Baron Carl von Reichenback, Nazi occultism, and the so-called “Berlin school” of experimental electronic music. In a notoriously erratic Melody Maker interview, Nebula declared that the Apollo 11 Lunar Module was “clearly an Orgone Accumulator, part of some Masonic rite.”

In the late 70s, Nebula hired a crack team of Philadelphia soul session musicians to record The Unmoved Mover on the Dance Floor, a concept album that boldly mixed earthy disco grooves with Scholastic metaphysics. On that record, his persona was a mysterious Gatsby-like figure who haunts various discotheques, elegant but aloof, dancing without passion and seemingly enslaved by an elusive memory. Occasionally, he brings revellers back to an LA mansion where sombre cheetahs lounge by the swimming pool, and a sinister valet, stationed in the rest room, spooks revellers by declaiming in a neutral voice: “Welcome to the Villa of Ormen.” When the guests enquire as the whereabouts of the host, he replies: “You've swallowed it.” 

In the 80s, tapping into the new Zeitgeist of conspicuous consumption, Nebula reinvented himself once again as the Thin White Speculator (or the Tycoon Who Sold the World to Off-World Interests). A sinister, bespectacled figure clad in Armani, the Speculator amassed his vast fortune through a series of technologically advanced patents which transformed the world: a 3D Projector Hi-Fi System that rendered the Pop Star obsolete; Aseity, the lucid dreaming aid/anti-depressant drug that replaced film, television, video games, and even politics to a large extent; Impolex R, the new synthetic fabric whose colour changes in tandem with the mood of the wearer, leading to a post-privacy era in which monogamy is obsolete due to the immediate blatancy of sexual arousal. In this anaesthetized new culture inaugurated by the Speculator, everybody wears skin-tight Impolex R onesies, transforming the streets into an impressionistic riot of fluctuating mood-tones; people engage in open sexual encounters in office cubicles and sub-way trains, before retiring to the seclusion of their conapts, where they drift away on ultra-vivid Aseity trips, complex Choose Your Adventurepsychodramas aided by New Age music and 3D Hi Fi visualizations.

The Speculator himself continues to wear Armani (on the few occasions where he had worn an Impolex R onesie, it remained stationary in an unearthly shade of deep purple, suggesting the presence of an emotion unknown and utterly indecipherable to other human beings.) He plays the market without passion, and sits at restaurant terraces, watching the sand fall through an hourglass which he carries at all times in his briefcase. Like all Nebula's latter personae, there is an air of abstraction and aloofness, a suggestion of an alien who has completed a fact-finding mission, and now longs to be repatriated back to his homeland. Earth time, however, is much slower, and the memory of his homeland is diminishing, day by day, becoming fragmentary, dreamlike, the subject for a work of art or a tremulous religious faith. At the end of the album, Tillinghast has come full-circle; the Speculator has resolved to become a cosmic glam rock star, in order to shake humanity out of the glazed stupor his off-world technologies have inaugurated, and to provide for himself a mythic record of his homeland which will survive his own forgetfulness.

Of all the personae Nebula adopted, perhaps the most bizarre and uncharacteristic was David Jones, the timid, unfulfilled working class youth he played in his film debut Looking Glass (1975). Written by Nebula in collaboration with its director, the ill-fated Kenneth Anger associate Chris Arlington, Looking Glass wasa mediation on the nature of fame and the perennial theme of the doppelgänger. David Jones is the polar opposite of Tillinghast Nebula: a shy and repressed young Londoner who works as a night porter in a slightly seedy East End hotel called the Sheldrake Inn. David was raised by his over-bearing mother Janis (Diana Dors), his father having died in WW2. He has an older brother who has been hospitalized for some unspecified illness, probably schizophrenia, a tragedy which hovers unspoken over David's relationship with Janis.

At the start of the movie, David is twenty-six years old. He has just separated from his wife and young child, for reasons never clearly specified, although Janis harangues him for “not being a bloody man.” Becoming alienated from his boisterous, going nowhere friends, and crippled by shyness towards the opposite sex, David begins to slide into a depression. Suffering from insomnia, he works by night in the hotel, and by day walks the streets aimlessly, brooding over the apparently unending litany of humiliations that his life has become. One day, he wanders on a whim into an antique and curio store. Inside the shop, he pauses to look at his reflection in an art-Deco mirror. The image that greets him, though clearly that of his own face, is a completely different person in every other regard: a glamorous, otherworldly and androgynous figure, with long hair, elaborate make-up, and an expression of self-confidence bordering on mockery.

Alarmed by the apparition in the mirror, which seems to manifest his own latent potentialities and submerged desires, David runs out into the street, and finds himself in a London somehow different from the one he is familiar with. Hair and clothing styles have changed; news-paper headlines adopt a peculiar tone, and the billboards advertise unrecognisable products that appeal to desires more commonly suppressed. Many people stop and stare at David, and soon he realizes why: there are posters everywhere for the androgynous double he saw the mirror, who seems to be some kind of pop-star called Tillinghast Nebula. The attention from the pedestrians becomes more intense, and he hears their whispering voices amplified like the drone of an angry beehive:

“Is that him?”

“It can't be him, he looks normal.”

“It must be him, look at his eyes.”

“The hair is completely different.”

“He must be in disguise.”

“They do that sometimes, to see if they get noticed.”

“Tillinghast...is that you?”

“He was a bloody poof on Top of the Tops.”

“It is him.”

“Tilly, over here!”

“Over here, Tilly!

Panicked, David starts running, and a sequence of rapid, jagged cuts suggest a nervous breakdown of some kind. He comes to back in the antique shop, looking at the mirror again, but now his reflection has returned to normal. The proprietor, a tall, elderly gentleman with a kindly, if distracted, expression, addresses him from the counter: “I check the looking glass myself, Sir, from time to time, just to make sure I haven't gone anywhere since the last time I looked! But there I be, always looking back at myself. You'd have to be quick on the draw, Sir, to beat the man in the mirror! It's a queer life for him, though, no? First thing in the morning and last thing at night, grooming and washing and shaving and squeezing spots and scrubbing and looking, Sir, looking very intently, as though either of you knew any better who the other really was. How does he occupy himself in-between times, that's what I wonder. Does he simply sleep all day, in a quiet, empty mirror world? Or does he have his freedom, Sir, while you're not at the mirror, his freedom to wander around in a empty world, all the while perhaps wondering why you get to live in the real world, and he only in the looking glass one? It occurs to me, Sir, that the man in the mirror must resent us bitterly, we who he must imitate in all our private moments, in our vanities and insecurities. It seems to me that sometimes people change, abruptly, without any apparent cause. Well, Sir, might it not be that their reflection found a way to take a hold of them, and swap places? What would a reflection do, I wonder, given autonomy over a real body? I think about these kinds of things, Sir, when the shop is quiet.”

A few years pass. David starts working as a clerk for a legal firm, and marries again, this time to art teacher Sara (Jane Asher). Bored and frustrated by his work, however, he continues to brood over a sense of missed opportunities and life passing him by. “I was meant to do something,” he tries to explain to Sara, “something else, and I was meant to be somebody else, but I missed the boat, somehow.” Sara, meanwhile, growing resentful of his passive, reclusive nature, begins an affair with older PE teacher Reggie (Stanley Baker). 

One day, while David is waiting to cross the street, an immaculate limousine pulls up alongside. The window rolls down, and once again he is presented with his double. The androgyne, looking frailer than before, is clad in a tuxedo, and rests his chin on a cane, cradled in brittle, twitching hands. He is accompanied by two women: an African with sharp cheekbones and large, limpid eyes, and a voluptuous red-head in witchy bohemian rags. The women point at David and laugh, but the androgyne regards him with a peculiar, quizzical expression. The window rolls back up, and the limo drifts out of view.

Over the course of the following weeks, he begins to see the androgyne more frequently. Passing by an art gallery with an all-glass facade, he sees his double holding court, surrounded by Japanese conceptual artists and beautiful, vacuum-eyed pleasure seekers. On another occasion, he chances on the androgyne scurrying with a group of revellers from a taxi to the foyer of a once elegant hotel. This time, he is disguised as a mime, and his entourage a boisterous group of medieval mummers; they sprint into the hotel like nocturnal creatures startled by the daylight. Each time their eyes met, the double regards him with the same puzzling expression: a look not quite of recognition, but more of one grappling with the elusive meaning of some anomalous presentiment like a deja vu. Bizarrely, the locations in which these encounters take place – the art gallery, the hotel, an apartment block – can never be found again, suggesting some kind of fleeting intersection between the real London and a phantasmal reflection of the city, a double like his own, alike and yet subject to an alternate destiny.

David returns to the antique shop where the first apparition of the double took place. “Yes, I remember you, Sir, indeed I do. You were quite taken with a looking glass, Sir, and stared into it for such a long while, as though you were are at the pictures! Where is the mirror now, Sir? Well, it was actually sold not long after the very day you yourself were admiring it, if you can believe that. One of my most esteemed customers, a visitor, Sir, a foreigner with very refined and unusual tastes.”

At this point, David's life is at its lowest ebb. His first wife is happily re-married, and his son, now six, barely recognises him. His own marriage is disintegrating into a nightmare of silence and recrimination. To add to his increasingly tenuous grip on his identity, Janis has started to confuse him with his mentally-ill older brother; “You should be more like your brother David,” she keeps telling him. While his own life falls apart, he becomes increasingly fixated on his double, and the idea that it is the mysterious androgyne who has stolen all the opportunities which should by right have been his. His double gets to live out all his dreams – his fantasies of sexual indulgence and wealth, fame, beauty and brilliance – while he is forced to endure only the grey daylight, the drudgery and disappointment by which such flights of appetite and imagination acquire their full lustre and intensity. He becomes obsessed by the notion that he must kill his double, and destroy the thief, the imposter, who had stolen his destiny.

One morning, David is seated at a bench in Hyde Park, and Tillinghast Nebula joins him, the pair sitting in silence for a moment before Tillinghast speaks:

“I first saw you many years ago, when my career was just taking off. I was on acid and made the terrible mistake of just wandering off down the street without anybody to mind me. People were staring at me, of course, and recognising me, and that felt good at first. But after awhile I started to hear their thoughts, buzzing in my head, and it was driving me crazy. Some of them wanted to fuck me and some of them wanted to be me and some of them wanted to kill me and some of them just wanted the frisson of interacting with a famous person. I had this utterly depressing realization that I was nobody, and the reason they reacted to me in that way had more to do with their own lives – with how some awful Machinery had narrowed the horizons of most people's lives down to such an extent that the celebrity – any celebrity - became a focal point for all their emotions, their fetishes, the commodity dreams that the Machinery had been beaming into their brains since they were children.”

“I had a panic attack, and I think I started running. When I came back to my senses, I'd taken refuge in an antique shop. I wandered over to this mirror, and when I looked in, I saw you, not myself, and yet I knew you were myself. I knew it was real, too, not the acid. So a few days later, I bought the mirror, because I knew it wasn't any ordinary mirror. Among dealers of antiques and rare books, you see, there are sometimes magicians, who hide magical objects among everyday things – cursed books, music boxes that induce somnambulism, puzzle boxes that summon demons, things like that – knowing that certain sensitive people will be drawn to them. That mirror, I eventually learned, was a gateway between worlds. You needed to position it in different places, and eventually you would notice one detail in the reflection that was different, one tiny detail that told you that you were looking into a different world. In time, you developed the capacity to pass through the looking glass, into the other world, taking parts of your world with you. But we had seen each other– that's why our different worlds became intertwined.”

“When you pass through the looking glass, you learn that there are a multitude of different worlds, each of which is essentially the same, but each of which actualizes different possibilities. In each of those worlds, there is a different you, experiencing an alternate destiny. All your dreams, nightmares, strange fugitive memories, sensations of deja vu, are all fragments of the other lives you are living concurrently in different dimensions. Another you endures your worst fears; another enjoys your keenest fantasies. There is a kind of economy, a balance, of destinies and desires, gratuities of fortune and grief, ranging across an infinity of forking paths and permutations. You and I make one-another, you see; I am a creature of your longings and fantasies, and you are a creature of my fears an insecurities. The star and his public. I know you feel that I have taken something from you, but in reality, we only give to one another. We weren't brought together to kill the other, but to take one-another's place.”

It transpires that Nebula had been dreaming for years of a perfect escape from the chaotic and insular world he'd created around himself. Having become one of the most recognisable faces on his world, he grew obsessed with the now exotic and unattainable quality of anonymity. To walk down a street without exciting the drama and burden of people's expectations, projections and fantasies was a distant memory, an act of impossible magic like some conjuring trick he once knew but could never re-learn. Everything he'd achieved, in the end, had imprisoned him: consigned him for life to a cloistered world of sycophants and acolytes, mind-numbing and life-threatening indulgences, fame and drugs making his mind into an all-enveloping fishbowl, a mansion with sprawling, maddening corridors, mirrored walls, and no exit.

David returns to his wife, and tells her that he needs to go away for a short while to clear his head. He promises that things will be better when he returns. He visits Janis, joining her on the balcony of her flat. “I'm going away for a little while,” he says. “You'll not go anywhere”, she laughs, “too fragile you are, afraid of everything. You'll not go five metres from the door without needing somebody to hold your hand. You should be more like your brother David, you should.” He had Tillinghast then adjourn to a decrepit, shadowy Kensington town house, and we watch in a long, ingeniously edited sequence as they swap identities, David becoming the glam rock icon, and Tillignhast the shy, melancholy clerk and cuckold.

It's dawn when they've finished, and Tillinghast begins experimenting with the mirror, positioning it in different parts of the room. Finally placing it at a slant on front of the fireplace, his eyes dart rapidly from the reflection back to the room itself. “There we are,” he says finally, “look.” In the mirror, he shows David a narrow tracery of cracks on the reflected ceiling that aren't present on the ceiling above. “Focus on that detail,” he instructs, “look at it very carefully, and then look at your own reflection. If you do it properly you'll start to feel like you're actually in the mirror, not out here. Once that happens, it will be time to go through.” After performing this meditative exercise for some time, David begins to experience the vertiginous sensation of his point of view shifting from outside to inside the mirror; one moment he is looking at the reflection, and the next at Tillinghast and himself as though through a window from the outside. Eventually, he feels as though he has morphed fully into a reflection, a pristine creature of light that only attends upon a physical body. Tillinghast has his arms on his shoulders now, nudging him gently through the looking glass. “It's a little disorientating at first”, he whispers, “but there's only one way to learn how to swim.”

Through the looking glass, David Jones (now Tillinghast Nebula) experienced all his fantasies in a giddy rush, and died shortly thereafter, a glorious rock n' roll suicide. The real Tillinghast Nebula retired into the seclusion and anonymity of David Jones' life, eventually raising a family with Sara and living to old age. As he got older, the memory of his hedonistic adventures as the glam rock icon began to fade, remaining only as fragments of an otherworldly carnival, a free festival which he'd attended only his dreams, his youthful dreams of a golden age when high technology made stars and rockets, and new gospels that were written in radio signals and received by television antennas.

 

Late in November, the tragedy struck, throwing a pall over the world. Millions were watching the TOTO feed as Gabriel drove the Mars Buggy at a brisk clip along the edge of a very steep, rocky slope, faithful TOTO hurtling after him. Many people subsequently claimed that they felt a palpable tension, even before Gabriel parked the Mars Buggy, but I suspect that this was only with the benefit of hindsight. Why did the lonely astronaut stop the Buggy, and start clambering up the slope? We will never know. The most common theory is that he saw a metallic object glinting up there, and went to explore. Others have argued that the flickering light source on the slope is merely a camera artefact. Whatever the explanation, his behaviour becomes peculiarly rash. TOTO cranes his head upward, and we watch Gabriel clambering almost frantically up the cliff-face. He pauses from time to time to look back, and we can only read our own interpretations into the expression of the tiny, pixillated face in the space helmet. 

Then everything falls apart. A foothold crumbles beneath his feet, and Gabriel is tumbling back down in a hail of dust and stones, his arms failing and clutching the air. The millions watch, frozen, hapless. They are telling themselves that Gabriel will be okay, that he will pick himself off the ground and make some self-deprecating joke. When he is about half way down, however, we hear a sickening crack; his space helmet has struck a boulder. We hear those fast, heavy breaths; those dying breaths that filled the world, and haunt it ever after. Now he is on the ground, crawling towards the Buggy, a desperate bid to get to the spare breathing apparatus. He gets so close to salvation, so close it is almost a miracle. TOTO observes the struggle with a detachment that seems preternatural. Gabriel reaches the Buggy, but by then it is all over. He slumps against the vehicle, positioning himself so that his body, arms outstretched like a saviour, faces TOTO, and the eyes of the world. TOTO, following his programme to keep Gabriel in his sights at all times, has not moved since. Nobody wants to look, but nobody can turn their eyes away. We tuned in on a nightly basis, charting the rapid decay of our idol, the symbol of our hope. The scene was one of utter stillness, interrupted only now and then by older Martian rovers that sauntered eerily by, carrying out the functions of obsolete reconnaissance missions, programmes they would follow until their circuitry finally burns itself out. In that vast, lonely backdrop, we watched Gabriel's beautiful face become shrunken and discoloured.

One day, we tuned in, and the transformation was complete: only the skull remained inside the space helmet. The image was complete now, like a painting or a religious icon, which conjoined in the one crumpled figure the dream of the stars and end of all dreaming flesh. 

Continued shortly.

 

The Last Will and Testament of Tillinghast Nebula (Part 2).

February 14, 2016, 2:16 pm

≫ Next: A House is a Machine for Living In: A Warm-up for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (Part 1).

≪ Previous: The Last Will and Testament of Tillinghast Nebula (Part 1).

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2.

That was how the old year ended, and the new began: with the image of the dead astronaut presiding over everything, its myriad associative meanings reflected in every surface, and every joy an overwrought fleeing from its grim determinism. In my head, occupying its own habitually strange environs, the danger was that Gabriel Summers’ corpse would become the symbol of the new century, a sort of capstone and negation of every dream of the previous one. It had the scope to be more than a symbol, to evolve into an entire mythology. Elor Summers had been for us the kind of aspirational icon that the rock star or film actor had been to our parents: the innovative entrepreneur with galaxy-spanning dreams; the youthful billionaire who’d sealed his fortune writing code in a dorm-room; the dynamic CEO who stirred his creatives to dreams of the future like generals sent soldiers to the imagined glories of a battlefield. Now he was a squat, broken figure, forever to be remembered as the man who sent his son to another world, never to return and never to be resurrected.

Even prior the Martian tragedy, however, our dreams had turned to orbit nightly around the themes of death and technology. Our lives had become rudderless, uncertain things: with job security a thing of the past, we were office nomads, working one and two month contracts in a dizzying succession of companies whose actual business we were no longer cognisant of; rents escalated so rapidly that urban-dwellers often carried their entire life-possessions around in ruck-sacks, using real-time trackers to monitor the ever-fluctuating geography of affordable rental zones. With all these assaults on our stability, all this narrowing of our aspirational horizons, one might have expected violence, revolution, or some degree of discontent to be the order of the day. In actuality, we were the most passive, anaesthetized generation imaginable. As though being led drugged over a precipice, our lives in this time of upheaval were dominated by algorithms and entertainment. The image of Gabriel Summers seemed on some level to echo our own – the image of a dead thing encased in a technological shell. The emergence of some upstart theology was surely required to rouse us from the peculiar condition of somnambulism which attended upon the early years of the new century.

Perhaps it was this yearning which had infused the imminent return of Tillinghast Nebula which such a weight of expectation. As with many of his contemporaries, the 80s had not been kind to the star's reputation and carefully cultivated mystique. The gods of the post-war youth explosion – those who'd made it through the other side – washed up on the shorelines of the 80s as middle-aged men, like a group of huddled revellers whom daylight had finally discovered, the joys and wayward, fleeting enthusiasms of their long night laid bare. The ultimate currency of their youth was gone, and popular music had shifted from the Dionysian mode to something like the regulated marching anthems of Plato's ideal autocratic regime. To have been iconic representations of youth in an era of unbridled youthfulness, their destiny was now to fall to the earth of middle-years with crushing velocity, and the 80s mowed through the dreams constellated around them like the Reaper with his scythe, revealing in high relief the comedy of all our lives, the parodies of ourselves that we will one day became, the nostalgias we will feel for an irretrievable zeitgeist.

Healthy, happily married, and having abandoned the chronic drug-use that somehow achieved an effect of synaesthesia between his own identity and the personae of his songs, Tillinghast was now a regular human being, after all. He flirted with world music and stadium rock, participated in several of the then popular live telecasts in support of global benevolence, and spoke wryly of his youthful misadventures on the chat show circuit. It was the beginning of a gradual retreat from the public eye which was all but complete by the late 90s.

He now lived with his family in a penthouse suite in New York's ill-omened Dakota Building, with public appearances as fleeting and inconclusive as those of UFOs. Various rumours regarding his mental condition were circulated by Mission Command, a Nebula fansite which was also steeped in the popular conspirative which held that entertainment superstars were divided between the mind-controlled proxies of secret political cabals (themselves the representatives of sinister Off World Interests), and a counter-force of insurgents who utilize the sorcery of mass media for benevolent means. Some said that Nebula was haunted by the re-emergence of his erstwhile alien personae, and the suspicion that the real life of an artist is an insubstantial shadow cast off by the more vivid existence of his creations. Others claimed that the star had become almost catatonic, and spent long, bedridden days in contemplation of a series of film props which he had accumulated over the years, and arranged in a puzzling tableau. This tableau was said to include the mirror from his own film Looking Glass (1975), the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the buckskin shirt worn by Alan Ladd in Shane (1953).

What this particular juxtaposition of objects meant to the ageing star, we were not given to know. Perhaps in contemplating them, his mind journeyed through some archetypal landscape of deep-rooted personal significance – a notional Death Valley where Brandon deWilde's plaintive boy-cries still echoed after the receding image of the gunslinger; where Dorothy, Toto (here morphed by the errant logic of dreams into a Martian rover), the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man still follow the Yellow Brick Road, past solitary cowpokes who strum their lullabies to dying fires and lost loves, onward to an Emerald City which has been replaced by the austere form of the Monolith, around which sanguine chimps play games of checkers and watch the sand sift to the bottom of hourglasses, as though waiting to witness some transformation denied to their species, something incalculable that resides far beyond wit, courage or heart.

It was also possible, of course, that Tillinghast was merely leading the life of a more or less typical husband and father, away from the prying eyes of the media, and a public who couldn't help but mythologise him, and couldn't concede that it had been only a performance, and a trick of the times.

3.

Other winds of paranoia were blowing through the ether that January. On the 6^th, a spoiler dropped on Noosfeed for the season 2 finale of Angel Investor. It was a catastrophe – people were so demoralized that they instantly shared it, figuring to spread the misery or something. After a couple of days, the spoiler was everywhere, not just on Noosfeed, but spilling out into the real world like a contagious and vindictive Tourette's . Various hitherto quote unquote normal people, seemingly unhinged by the effects of the reveal, were shouting it in the streets. Some bitter case hired a aeroplane to tow around a banner with the spoiler summarised until the authorities interceded. One friend of mine saw it tattooed on the shoulder of an elegant young Japanese neo-punk – another written in the sand on a beach, washed away by the tide an instant later.

So far I'd been inexplicably lucky. I hadn't got caught yet, but it meant I had to stay off Noosfeed, and walk around the streets in a hyper-alert paranoiac state. Whenever I went out, I listened to Tillinghast Nebula music on my head-phones, and tried to maintain a state of awareness whereby I wouldn't drift automatically into reading any text, or even lose my concentration sufficiently that some troll, aware of my head-phones, might somehow physically act out the spoil in a way that was instantly comprehensible to me. I may have been losing my mind a little, but it was interesting.

Having to avoid Noosfeed put me in a pickle, though, going beyond standard withdrawal symptoms. I'm a freelance entertainment/conspirative journalist. I contribute content to various 'Feed nodes and click-holes. I wanted to do some digging into the source of the spoiler itself. Most people think that major spoiler drops come from rival streamers, but that's just the beginning of it. Chinese hackers and Russian psi's have been probing the secrets of Western long-form narrative television for years, dropping spoilers through proxies as a form of destabilizing psychological warfare. Without Noosfeed, I was going to have to carry out my investigation in the Deeper Web.

It's a testament the success of the Deeper Web that not a great many people are aware of its existence. The problem with the Deep Web was that you just couldn't hide anything on it from the real specialists. No matter how many layers of encryption buried under, or how sophisticated the overlay network, government agencies had classified super-computing tech that opened it up as easy as clicking on a regular 'Feed node. As soon as any information is stored digitally, no matter how far from the beaten path, it is instantly available to intelligence agencies, many of whom have already gone further off the grid than you could imagine. So to move forward, the architects of the Deeper Web turned full-circle: they resolved that the only way to exchange information freely and safely was to restore an oral culture. The Deeper Web was a group of individuals – they called them USB Bards – who had elected to become the repositories and brokers of vast stores of contraband information. The USB Bards had undertaken an in-depth study of long lost mnemonic techniques going back to ancient Greece. Each Bard had their own virtual city which operated as a visual data base. Their powers of visualization were so intense that many of them were said to spend idle, opiated hours wandering the streets of their own notional principalities, and in the Deepest Web of all, the Bards shared notes amongst themselves on mysterious encounters they'd had therein.

Not only had the Bards mastered the ancient art of memory retention, but they also evolved entirely new techniques that made them equally adept at forgetting. Using the visual iconography of long outmoded desktop computers, the Bards could move memories into a Recycle Bin, and even permanently delete them, making them impervious to all forms of enhanced interrogation. It is widely believed that the peculiarly ascetic and neutral character of the USB Bard was a by-product of the fact that they edited their personal memories, removing traumatic emotional complexes in the manner of the system adumbrated in Hubbard's Dianetics, making themselves spectral and robotic in the process.

USB Bards exercise a series of different functions for clients, while ultimately following their own inscrutable agenda at all times. They carried insurance data dumps for whistle-blowers and sold credit details to carders; they saved a thousand things screamed by psychotics and whispered by dreamers in their sleep that otherwise would be lost forever; they sometimes acted as pornographers, recounting ten minute vignettes of amateur porn in an elevated poetic meter of their own creation, in performances which were prized as eerily erotic by connoisseurs; they stored film scripts, manuscripts of novels, philosophical treatises, lewd limericks and haikuwhich were deemed to have dangerous or subversive content; they saved things that people thought while they were shaving or emptying their bowels, fusing them into a single mosaic of transient impressions which was like a vast Joycean novel; they had created an index of plausibility for conspiratives, and shared information with low-level journalists like myself, again serving their own elusive long-term ends.

I had arranged a meet with my USB Bard, who called himself Malcolm, through the usual Whisperer, and an encryption code that utilized billboards, news-paper headlines, and the tilt of a high-street store mannequin's pelvis. I took a bus out into the mountains, and as soon I disembark, the otherness of the natural world hits me all at once. I feel like I've been in the city and staring at a screen too long, maybe, too long in the porous, schizophrenic, hectoring ambience of the street and the 'Feed. The hedgerows and the fields, the crows wheeling above and the cows with cautious, sluggish eyes, all seem to recognise me as an unwelcome intrusion. After trudging along for about ten minutes, I see the USB Bard standing by a rusty meadow gate, his form almost lost in a dense ticket of brambles. He wears a Burberry macintosh, navy pinstripe suit and bowler hat. He has an umbrella to complete the look. His skin is translucently pale, gleaming in the setting evening sun. When he speaks, it is the sound of a half-forgotten decade, an early morning before you were born.

“The most plausible conspiratives suggest the Angel Investorspoiler is Russian in origin....but the purpose of the release is not disruptive, but more in the line of a fact-finding exercise.”

“To find out facts about what, exactly?”

“I don't have any reliable conspirative to answer that. But bear certain things in mind: the character of the show's titular angel investor, Tyrone Crest, is believed to be modelled on Elor Summer. Conspiratives of moderate plausibility suggest that the failure of the Martian mission was due to sabotage.”

“Sabotage by whom? US government?”

“Unlikely to be US acting autonomously, more probably at the behest of a transnational, such as the GFAB.”

The Global Fiscal Advisory Board is an international think tank which meets under considerable secrecy and security every four years. It's stated purpose is to provide policy suggestions to ensure proper co-ordination in the economic strategies of the various transnational conglomerates: the IMF, World Bank, European Union, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and so on. The GFAB was believed to be involved in the trading of insider information with a certain Off World Cartel, speculators on an interplanetary exchange index whose stocks and currencies are levels of sentient misery in different quadrants of the galaxy.

“Several moderately plausible conspiratives suggest that the plot of Angel Investor is a clearing-house for a mixture of genuine inside intelligence and carefully seeded disinformation. Hence, it seems likely that the Russians have dropped the spoiler in response to the possible sabotage of the Summers Mars mission, as a means to probe the attitude of the GFAB towards private-sector space exploration.”

“What the fuck is going on here?”

“I don't have any reliable conspirative to answer that. But consider this: a highly plausible conspirative suggests that Noostream have re-written the season finale episode, so that the spoiler is no longer strictly accurate. A question remains, however: if the spoiler was originally correct, but no longer, is it still a spoiler?”

The Bard looked at me with a peculiar intensity, as though matters of great import hinged on the solution to this abstruse problem.

“Some more information which may prove relevant. The name of Tillinghast Nebula's forthcoming album is Dog Star Lazarus Lounge Lizard. A highly plausible conspirative suggests that Nebula is dying, and intends the album – or some document associated with the album– to be his last will and testament.” 

Continued shortly.

A House is a Machine for Living In: A Warm-up for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (Part 1).

February 29, 2016, 11:37 am

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1. Architecture or Revolution?

In the new beginning that dates from Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, the machine occupied a central place: its austerity, its economy, its geometric cleanness was claimed almost the sole virtue of the new architecture. Thus the kitchen became a laboratory, and the bathroom took on the characteristics of a surgical operating room; while the other parts of the house, for a decade or so, achieved excellence almost to the degree that they, too, were white, cleanable, empty of human content.

Lewis Mumford, The Case Against “Modern Architecture”, 1962.

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise, 1975.

The high-rise apartment or office tower is a perennial icon and symbol of the modern world. It embodies the primary characteristics of high modernist architecture: the rejection of ornamentation in favour of cool, minimalist function, and organic complexity in favour of an austere rectilinear geometry; the omnipresence of glass facades and curtain walling, which prompted Lewis Mumford to pithily observe that glass was the only material modern architects were unable to see through. In its clean, uniform character, it evokes the age of the machine and of mass production; in its scale and elevation, the dream of conquering gravity which presided over the twentieth century in a myriad forms. Most of all, the high rise represents the dream of a fully rational, mathematically simple and predictable landscape in which the wilder vagaries of the natural world, and human nature, have been ousted. 

A vertical village in which nobody knows anybody else, the high-rise embodies many of the contradictions of urban life: the close physical proximity and emotional distance of its inhabitants, the merging of their public and private space in its tiers of balconies, corridors and stairwells, allows the high-rise to serve as a model for the city's peculiar conjunction of populousness and alienation. As a symbol of modernity and urbanism, the high-rise carries a variety of different meanings and resonances, and provokes antithetical responses of considerable emotional intensity. An ambiguous entity, it embodies both the utopian and dystopian characteristics of modern life. On the one hand, the high-rise tower block makes us think of the disastrous structures that urban councils built to house (and segregate) the urban poor in the 60s and 70s, with all the morass of crime, deprivation, and hopelessness that resulted. On the other, we think of the luxury high-rise blocks favoured by middle and upper middle-class dwellers as the embodiment of a certain kind of sleek urban elegance - a living space somewhere between home and hotel, safely cloistered in the upper air from the clamour of the streets below.

Apartment Building, Ramat Gran, Israel, 1960-65, (Alfred Neumann, Zvi Hecker and Eldar Sharon) Fuck Yeah Brutalism

Hiliard Center, Chicago, 1964, (Bertrand Goldberg)Fuck Yeah Brutalism

Orange County Government Center, Goshen, New York, 1971, (Paul Rudolph)Fuck Yeah Brutalism

Parish Church for the Resurrection of Christ, Melaten, Germany, 1964-70 (Gottfried Bohm)  Fuck Yeah Brutalism.

Modernist architecture has always been hugely divisive. For some, it has embodied all the failings, aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual, of modernity itself. A common idea (or ideology) underlying modernity was that it represented a point of total historical novelty in which a new awareness or mode of consciousness was born, wholly unconnected to and unencumbered by the past. This is the essence of modernity conceived as a utopian project: a Manichean conflict between the past, envisioned in a wholly negative light, and the salvation offered by the novelty of the present moment, which contains in utero a future of continual improvement and progress. Modernist architecture was keenly informed by this sense of a radical break with the past, and as such its towers and monuments arose with a brash disregard for their predecessors in time and surroundings in space, serving for some as the harbingers of a new aesthetic order, and others as a crude effacement of the historical continuity of the urban landscape, the city in time which is a living record of its own history.

In the late 1960s and 70s, modernist architecture and urban planning were undergoing a particularly sustained backlash. This perhaps provides a partial explanation for the striking coincidence of two works of art which appeared in 1975: JG Ballard's novel High-Rise and David Cronenberg's feature debut Shivers (They Came from Within.) High-Rise and Shivers are so similar in theme and basic outline that I'd always assumed one must have influenced the other, until I realized that they came out in the same year. 

Both are apocalypses of the middle-class in which the denizens of luxury modernist high rise towers cumulatively descend (or perhaps ascend) into total anarchy and violence. In Ballard's version, a series of small, petty acrimonies gradually escalate into sectarian violence, tribalism, and eventually a total reversion to nomadic primitivism. In Cronenberg's more explicitly psychosexual vision of the high-rise apocalypse, our location is Starliner Towers, a self-contained high-modernist Montreal community where “day to day living becomes a luxury cruise.” Starliner's placid middle-class seclusion is shattered by the spread of an invasive parasite, however, which turns its residents into polymorphously perverse zombies.

Ballard's novel concerns class-warfare and the effective collapse of society, while Cronenberg's movie presents the sexual revolution in fast-forward as a claustrophobic George Romero freak-out. Both works hinge on the same basic set of ironic contrasts: between the sterility of the environment and the eventual anarchy of its inhabitants, between the geometry of modern urban architecture and the disorder which both artists present as seething under the surface of its human residents, or, more succinctly, between the utopian aspirations of modernist urban planning, and the apocalypses which Ballard and Cronenberg stage, both with a distinct gusto, within the confines of its iconic signifier, the high-rise. In this essay, I’m going to look at Shivers and High Rise as critiques of Modernist utopianism which both express Freudian ideas regarding the fragility of civilisation in the form of ambiguous, darkly comic middle-class apocalypses.

In a broad historical sense, the word modern denotes the whole panoply of changes which engulfed society, culture and human identity between the 17^thand 20^thcenturies: the rapid development of the physical sciences, industrialisation, mechanisation, increasing urbanisation, the questioning of traditional values and sources of authority, the emergence of state bureaucracies, and so on. In his study of modernity All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman quotes (and derives his title from) Karl Marx's poetic evocation of the profound sense of upheaval engendered by modernity:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face....the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”

In a climate of such accelerated change and radical uncertainty, new faiths and foundations were required to replace the old, and a faith in the idea of modernity itself would become increasingly powerful by the twentieth century. This was the belief that all human problems were best served, and could indeed potentially be solved, by the application of scientific, rationalistic, and technocratic means. The world was no longer a conflict between good and evil so much as one between the Utopian promise of the modern present and the dank, superstitious follies of the past.

Lewis Mumford argued that a belief in mechanical progress was the central underlying assumption of modern architecture: “Concealed within this notion was the assumption that human improvement would come about more rapidly, indeed almost automatically, through devoting all our energies to the expansion of scientific knowledge and to technological inventions; that traditional knowledge and experience, traditional forms and values, acted as a brake upon such expansion and invention, and that since the order embodied by the machine was the highest type of order, no brakes of any kind were desirable.” In a similar vein, James C. Scott, writing in Seeing Like a State, describes the high-modernist faith as “a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialisation in Western Europe and in North America from roughly 1830 until World War I. At its centre was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.”

  Futurist architecture by Antonio Casa Sant'Elia (via wikipedia and rust' n' concrete)

                                                            Futurist art by Tullio Crali.

Among the most extreme of the modernist utopians were the Italian Futurists, an avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century whose work expressed an unqualified rejection of the past, and an altogether rhapsodic mania for the powers unleashed by the industrial age: “Comrades, we tell you now that that the triumphant progress of science makes changes in humanity inevitable, changes that are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of tradition and us free moderns who are confident in the radiant splendour of our future.” (Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910, F.T. Marinetti.) Everybody was excited to some degree or another by the sweeping march of the modern world; the Futurists were stone drunk on it. Their intoxication focussed on images and themes which would become uniquely expressive of the 20^th century, and the youth culture which began to flourish after the wars: the automobile, the airplane, the industrial city, youth, speed and violence. (These same signifiers become hugely prominent in J.G. Ballard’s fiction, albeit viewed from a far more ambiguous perspective.)

The first great modernist Utopian in the architectural sphere was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Grist, an extraordinary man of Swiss-French extraction whom the world came to know by the pseudonym le Corbusier. An indefatigable architect, painter, author, urban planner and visionary, the range of le Corbusier’s talents was amply matched by the hubristic scale of his ambitions. Like the Futurists, le Corbusier had been intoxicated by the sense of immense power embodied in the technological world. In L’Urbanisme(The City of Tomorrow, 1924), le Corbusier describes a kind of “conversion” experience to the faith of modernism. The author is taking an evening stroll on the Champs Elysées, and begins his narrative in a mood of stereotypical alienation from the sound and fury of the modern city. Intimidated by the speeding cars, he broods over the loss of the era of the pedestrian, a quieter, idealized world which moved to a statelier tempo.

An abrupt and total change of heart overtakes him, however; he begins to conceive of the modern world as a tidal wave of energy which the individual can participate in, experiencing almost a theophany of technological animism:

“On the 1^st of October, 1924, I was assisting in the titanic rebirth of a new phenomenon….traffic. Cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized, filled with enthusiasm, with joy…the joy of power. The simple and naïve pleasure of being in the midst of power, of strength. One participates in it. One takes part in this society that is just dawning. One has confidence in this new society: it will find a magnificent expression of its power. One believes in it (cited in All That is Solid Melts into Air). ”

Le Corbusier sought to create the architecture of this bold new society, and his project is suffused with all the galvanizing energy, as well as the unsettling autocratic undertones, of the above passage. He becomes the theorist, prophet and practitioner of a new Machine Age design aesthetic, with his hugely influential 1923 manifesto Towards a New Architecture providing the iconic slogan “A House is a Machine for Living In.” His dreams are grandiose in scale, requiring the construction of whole cities from scratch. The Ville Contemoraine, an unrealized project from 1920, encapsulates many of Le Corbusier’s ideas about urbanism, and is a quintessential example of the Utopian mega-city of the future which would become the dystopian backdrop of science fiction like Judge Dredd and Blade Runner. Designed to house three million inhabitants, the focal-point of the Ville was its 24 imposing, glass curtain-walled cruciform apartment/office blocks, “towers in a park” which formed the commercial district, separated by rectangular green-belts from the residential and industrial areas. The plan shows Le Corbusier’s extreme commitment to functionalism in urban design: a network of buses, trains, high-ways, and even roof-top airports makes the intervening spaces almost redundant. The city is divided very strictly into residential and work spaces, with the traditional city’s tendency to produce bricolages of mixed function and purpose eliminated by wide open spaces, traversed by the modern miracle of rapid transportation.

Sketches for the Ville Contemporaine, via FONDATION LE CORBUSIER.

In 1925, Le Corbusier proposed demolishing two square miles of the north bank of the Seine in order to facilitate a smaller version of the ideas embodied in the Ville Contemoraine. His description of the proposed development (Plan Voisin) is typically lyrical and rhapsodic, transforming the office towers into weightless, almost spiritual entities:

“I shall ask my readers to imagine they are walking in this new city, and have begun to acclimatize themselves to its untraditional advantages. You are under the shade of trees, vast lawns spread all round you. The air is clear and pure; there is hardly any noise. What, you cannot see where the buildings are ? Look through the charmingly diapered arabesques of branches out into the sky towards those widely-spaced crystal towers which soar higher than any pinnacle on earth. These translucent prisms that seem to float in the air without anchorage to the ground - flashing in summer sunshine, softly gleaming under grey winter skies, magically glittering at nightfall - are huge blocks of offices.”

Most of Le Corbusier's grander schemes remained unrealized (the closest he got to working on such a vast scale were his contributions to the planned city of Chandigrarh in the north of India.) On more modest terms, however, we find his ideas realized in the Unitéd'habitation residential block in Marseille which is often called the Citéradieuse (Radiant City). Built in béton brut (rough-cast concrete) because of post-war steel frame shortages, the Citéradieuse formed the inspiration for the confrontational Brutalist school of architecture which Wheatley and his designers seem to have adopted for Anthony Royal's buildings in the High-Risemovie. Suspended on large piloti containing 237 apartments over 12 floors, it is a fascinating, ugly/beautiful monolith of a building. Also incorporating shops, restaurants, medical and sporting facilities, even a hotel open to the public, the Unitéd'habitation provides us the classic model of the self-contained, utopian “city in the sky” which we find satirised in Shivers and High-Rise.

                   Photos by Paul Koslowski, viaFONDATION LE CORBUSIER.

What Le Corbusier and like-mined modernists sought to combat most of all was the normal organic evolution of cities. Traditionally, cities and urban settlements developed in an unplanned fashion, following the changing needs of their citizenry. For the modernists, infused by a passion for idealized mathematical order, this produced only a chaos, a detestable hodgepodge. The city street is noteworthy for its randomness: it leads us to chance encounters, unexpected detours, and the experience of various street theatres of public exhibitionism and desperation, pathos and comedy. This was unacceptable to the modernists; they sought in a very real sense to destroy the street. This was because they had a keen appreciation of what is today called pyschogeography, allied to an ideology of muscle-bound modernism.

The environment in which we live and work is not merely a series of functional or aesthetically pleasing locations that we use and enjoy in the course of our daily activities. Rather, the environment is an intrinsic part of our total experience. Like the food that we eat and the books that we read, it becomes a part of us, and has a profound, though often quite subliminal effect on our mental lives. As a corollary to the general mystery surrounding how the mental and physical interact with one another, place and mind are intertwined in various subtle ways. Le Corbusier and his disciples were not only aware of this, but they believed that urban planning was explicitly a form of social planning and control. Le Corbusier believed that there was a Plan, as unique and precise as the solution to an equation, for the design of urban settlements, which, once instigated, would inevitably yield a perfectly harmonious society. This was the meaning of his polemical slogan/question Architecture or Revolution? Environments are no longer to be determined by the unpredictable behaviour of people and history; rather this situation is reversed, so that a centrally planned and controlled environment begins to determine the behaviour of people and history.

This was why the modernists dreamed of razing vast areas of existing cities, and building new ones from scratch. Like contemporary neoliberal economists, they saw no room to gradually implement change; the world had to be remade in the image of their ideology. It is reductive, however, to view le Corbusier and early modernist architecture exclusively in the light of its dubious political underpinnings, and the ultimate failure of modernist urban planning. To do so, at any rate, overlooks his brilliance as an artist, and the fact that his buildings, viewed in isolation from his troubling manifestos, were often striking, even beautiful creations. Nevertheless, by the late sixties, the modernist ethos of urbanism was increasingly being viewed as a failure. Jane Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was an influential critique, and a powerful argument for the spontaneity and ecological intelligence of the organic street over the mono-functional blocks of the modernist dream. In the waning fortunes of the high-rise in Great Britain, we find probably the most direct influence on Ballard's High-Rise: Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower. Goldfinger was a six-foot tall, taciturn Hungarian-born architect who moved to London in the '30s. He occupies a somewhat comical place in pop culture history: Ian Fleming found his architecture and general character disagreeable enough to christen the quintessential James Bond villain in his honour. When Goldfinger threatened legal action, a farcical clash between the two ensued, with Fleming threatening to change the name to Goldprick before the matter was settled out of court.

Commissioned by the London Council in 1966 for social housing in North Kensington, the 98 metre concrete behemoth of Trellick Tower is today regarded as a fashionable London icon. In its early years, however, it was nick-named the “Tower of Terror,” having acquired a reputation for litter, mechanical failure, and an epidemic of serious crimes and sexual assaults.

Top photograph by Andy Spain.  Bottom image found at London From the Rooftops.

Continued shortly.

A House is a Machine for Living In: A Warm-up for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (Part 2).

March 20, 2016, 6:21 pm

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2. Civilisation and its Discontents.

Something in all men profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.

Jean Baudrillard.

When considering this possibility, we come up against a contention that is so astonishing that we will dwell on it for awhile. It is contended that much of the blame for our misery lies with what we call our civilisation, and that we should be far happier if we were to abandon it and revert to primitive conditions.

Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents.

In the previous part of this essay, we looked at how influential modernist architects like Le Corbusier believed that a radical new architecture and urban design could produce a stable, happy community of people whose behaviour ultimately emulates the harmonious mathematical order of the buildings in which they live. In Shivers and High-Rise, however, we find the opposite happening. The residents of Starliner apartments (in Cronenberg's film) and Anthony Royal's high-rise (in Ballard novel) do not replicate the mathematical balance of their environments; rather they surrender to the inherent disorder and chaos of their deepest instincts and most primal impulses. There is a double irony at work here: we observe not only anarchy breaking out in a built environment of idealized mathematical simplicity, but also a kind of atavistic reversion taking place in an architecture which was designed to embody the modern, and act as the incubator of the individual and community of the utopian future. Here is the ultimate riposte to the modernist utopia: instead of going boldly into the idealized tomorrow, the residents of the high-rise are regressing back, to the infantile stages of human identity and civilisation. With a vengeance.

We also argued in the previous section that modernity signalled a radical new juncture in how we perceive time. Previous epochs were often enthralled by the myth of the Golden Age – the belief that the past was infinitely better – nobler, more elevated in manner and wisdom – than the present. The present, in this view, was a failing away or degeneration from a prior, more exalted civilisation, destined either to be lost forever or to come back again according to some grand historical cycle. The return of the past is thus something to be welcomed. In the modern era, all this was reversed. Once we conceive of the present as the pinnacle of civilisation, and the future as the potential Golden Age, the return of the past becomes a danger, a creeping menace. We begin to conceive of modern civilisation as a grand albeit precarious achievement, constantly imperilled by the threat of some kind of reversion back to its well-springs in the primitive and barbaric. This attitude developed from a variety of sources: not only the modernist utopianism which we discussed in the previous chapter, but also from a climate of fierce chauvinism and belief in the superiority of western civilisation which flourished in the Victorian period.

The Victorian period in particular was characterised by a widespread anxiety regarding the stability and permanence of civilisation and the hard-won fruits of progress – a fear of the ‘resurgent atavism’ in cultural terms. In biology, an atavism is a throwback, an ancestral trait or characteristic which returns in individual cases after it has been lost for several generations by the species. It is the anomalous return of some characteristic of a prior stage of evolution and form of existence. The concept of the atavism has enjoyed a rich life in the cultural sphere as a metaphor for the sudden resurgence of primitive forms of thought and behaviour in the context of modern civilisation. In its inception, this concept was often aligned with ideologies of social Darwinism and racism; in time though, it has also come to express ambiguous attitudes towards the value and validity of rationalistic modern civilisation. In Shivers and High-Rise, we find a breakout of resurgent primitivism in the modern apartment complex: in Shivers, a return to a greedy, unbounded infantile sexuality, and in High-Rise to both the prior infantile forms of the individual and of human society in general. To contextualise both works, we will look at the theories of Sigmund Freud, a considerable influence on both artists, and in particular his 1929 essay Civilisation and its Discontents. 

Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur (“The Uneasiness in Civilisation”) was written in the aftermath of World War I, which had been to many a profound blow to the notion of human progress and rational civilisation. What is interesting about the particular unease with civilisation which Freud posits in this essay is that it was not – as in the case of traditional fears of the resurgent atavism – something extrinsic to civilisation. It was not something which civilisation had progressed beyond, something external and alien which might still be observed in the customs of the “less developed” cultures. Rather, Freud argued that a conflict between the primitive and the civilised might be an intrinsic part of the very relationship between the individual and civilisation itself. For Freud, civilisation offered the individual something like a Faustian bargain in reverse. The traditional Faustian bargain offers its recipient the capacity to indulge themselves to the maximal degree – to have no limits placed on their capacity for self-indulgence and self-expression.

Civilisation, on the other hand, offers the following bargain. You will enjoy ever greater levels of security, comfort, hygiene and health. The bounty of intellectual and aesthetic “high” culture – art, philosophy, the sciences – will be yours to enjoy. Your home will be warm and the provision of your food require no foraging, hunting, or sowing. For the greater part of your life, you will be shielded from physical privation, violence and mortal threats. These are the fruits of civilisation. However, in order to maintain them, we have to give something in return: a great measure of our freedom and individuality must be sacrificed. Most crucially for Freud, our instinctual being – our naturally unbounded desires for the gratification of our sexuality and our individual will – must be repressed:

“Thirdly – and this seems the most important point – it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built up on renunciation, how much it presupposes the non-satisfaction of powerful drives – ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large sphere of inter-personal relations; as we already know, it is the cause of the hostility that all civilisations have to contend with.”

To understand Freud’s view of this tension between the individual and his society, we need to briefly sketch out his well-known structural model of the psyche. Freud saw the outward social individual as the mediation between two conflicting forces: the Id and the superego. In this instance, the Id is the atavism: it is the throwback to our infantile stage as an individual, and pre-civilized state as a species. A confluence of our instinctual desires and urges, the Id desires only instant pleasure and gratification, and recognises no law, no limit, no reason or compromise:

“It is the dark, inaccessible part of your personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of Dreamwork and of course the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations…It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principal.”

The id is held in check by the superego which is the voice of conscience, the authority of the father, the police force of the individual psyche. Out of some kind of compromise between the clamour of our instinctual desires, and the authoritarian stop-brake of our superego, our public, social persona, or ego, emerges. However, as Freud saw it, this compromise, particularly under the demands of advanced civilisation, is rarely satisfactory for the individual. Inside every humble, self-effacing bourgeois lies a violent, priapic barbarian waiting to claw its way out. Inside each of us, like a buried archaeological stratum of private and evolutionary history, resides an infant and a primitive, a creature of unfettered appetite that swells and seethes with every compromise and accommodation to the adult, civilized world.

In this regard, we can see that there is a neat parallelism between Freud's conception of the individual psyche and civilisation as whole. In terms of mass civilisation, the superego corresponds to the coercive forces by which a society maintains its ideological equilibrium and order – not only the physical force represented by military and police, but also the more crucial invisible forms of psychological coercion and conformism which lead individuals to police their own behaviour. The ego corresponds to the outward appearance of society as a smoothly functioning, cohesive whole whose various parts are content with their societal roles and the overall moral structure of their society. Under the surface, however, there remains the society's id – the seething cauldron of individual discontent, of repressed but unvanquished instinctual drives, which constantly threatens the stability of the society from within.

The marvelous lithographic illustrations for Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature) - via Wikipedia.

Freud's ideas in this regard were influenced by the recapitulation theoryof the German biologist and polymath Ernst Haeckel. This theory, roughly stated, holds that the embryonic development of the individual contains within it and repeats in its individual growth the various evolutionary developmental stages of the species – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, ontogeny referring the development of the individual, and phylogeny the collective evolution of the species. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argues for a similar conception of the psyche, using the metaphor of an imaginary Rome whose entire history remains permanently present in its current form:

“Now let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist alongside the most recent.”

Though discredited as biology, the recapitulation theory has as a certain elegant, resonant quality: the individual organisation becomes a fractal of the species as a whole, and a living museum of its own vast evolutionary history. The idea clearly fascinated Ballard; in The Drowned World he utilized as a “literary device” the notion of the spinal column as a vessel containing “the details of the entire evolutionary development of the human race”:

“I tell how human beings likewise regress into the past. In a certain sense, they climb down their own spinal column. They traverse down the thoracic vertebrae, from the point at which they are air-breathing mammals, to the lumbar region, to the point at which they are they are amphibious reptiles. Finally they reach the absolute past, which on one hand represents the birth of life itself in the hot womb of the primeval jungle, and which in another sense represents their own origins and birthplace in the mother's womb.”

Whether strictly accurate or no, Freud's conjoined notion of the psyche and society as a placid veneer or facade, perpetually threatened by atavistic impulses and instincts that remain perfectly preserved below the surface, was perhaps the most enduring and influential of his ideas throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. It is certainly this central idea informs the narratives of both Shiversand High Rise. Partially funded by the Canadian Film Board and apparently shot in just 15 days, Shivers remains the most extreme, forceful – and “Cronenbergian” - of all Cronenberg flicks. Its first five minutes, in fact, are so gruellingly warped and unsettling that it was almost as though the auteur was trying to instantly jettison any viewers who weren't in it for keeps. The rest of the film is a sustained assault on every orifice the film's bodies and the viewer's mind has to offer – it isn't every film that features a faecal-phallic parasite as its antagonist – perhaps for the best.

Cronenberg's early films have a unique atmosphere which derive partially from the imperfections and artefacts of their production milieu. Shot cheaply with actors of variable ability, and shot through with a chilly, insular Canadian quality, they have a kind of sinister sterility which is increased rather than off-set by soundtracks of gentle, lullaby-like library music. They feel like mutant public information films. It is interesting that Cronenberg's early cinema often focuses on medical scientists whose well-intentioned experiments produce horrifying consequences. In the 50s and 60s, the well-intentioned monster D. Ewen Cameron carried out a series of appalling experiments in psychological conditioning (under the auspices of the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme) in Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. Some years before, an estimated 20,000 orphaned children (the Duplessis Orphans) had been falsely certified as mentally ill as part of a scheme in Quebec and confined to psychiatric units. Whether a conscious influence or otherwise, these events make Canada an apt location for the emergence of a chilly, medical variety of horror.

The first of Cronenberg's messianic dabblers is Dr Emil Hobbes in Shivers. Like Freud, Hobbes believes that civilisation creates a fundamental cleavage between humans and their natural and instinctual being; he describes man as “an animal who thinks too much” and “an over-rational animal that's lost touch with its body and its instincts.” However, whereas Freud believed that the repression of the instinctual drives was a worthwhile and necessary sacrifice to make in order to maintain civilisation, Hobbes is a libidinal anarchist who believes that western civilisation is itself a mass neurosis that must be cured at all costs. To this end, he develops an artificial parasite which is a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease. This parasite, he hopes, will unleash the libidinal id on a mass scale, and transform the world into “one beautiful mindless orgy.” In this sense, Hobbes follows in a strain of sexual anarchism which developed out of conventional Freudian theory. The first of these outlaws was the equal parts brilliant and demented Wilhelm Reich, whose championing of orgiastic potency as a cure for neurosis lead to him being labelled the “prophet of the better orgasm” and the “founder of a genital utopia.” 

Since Cronenberg is making a horror film, Hobbes' plan to initiate a genital utopia goes Horribly Wrong– as plans which involve the creation of artificial venereal parasites are wont to. On the surface, it might appear that Cronenberg's film expresses an essentially conservative viewpoint: unleash the id, and you open a Pandora's Box of uncontrollable violence and chaos. This was how Robin Wood, a trenchant early critic of Cronenberg, interpreted the film when he saw it at the Edinburgh film festival: “It's derivation is from Invasion of the Body Snatchers via Night of the Living Dead, but the source of its intensity is quite distinct: all the horror is based on extreme sexual disgust.” To take such a view, however, is to misread the very ambiguous nature of Cronenberg's sexual apocalypse in Shivers. The director has often said that he identifies more with the characters afterthey have been infected – which is to say that a world of sexual anarchy, violence and wanton destruction is somehow preferable to the dull, routinised existence of the middle-class professional. 

Although our modern connotative sense of the word apocalypse is a negative image of total destruction, the literal meaning of the word is a disclosure, an unveiling; a revelation of the true nature of the world. “Something in all men,” Jean Baudrillard wrote, “profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.” Cronenberg is by intellectual temperament very much a modernist, but he rejoices in seeing the orderly and antiseptic world of the urban bourgeois thorn asunder. For him, the parasite simply unveils the true animal nature of the high-rise dwellers; like the car crash in Ballard's fictions, it reconnects them to their bodies, to the rich, precarious corporeal existence from which they have become disengaged. In Crashand Shivers, disgust in an intrinsic part of the body and sexuality. This idea is expressed in Shivers by Nurse Forsythe (played by ethereal exploitation movie queen Lynn Lowry):

Roger, I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble you see, because he's old... and dying... and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.

Continued shortly.

---

Chelou - Halfway to Nowhere.

January 18, 2017, 2:19 pm

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This video is pretty cool:

Intermundia Airport (Chapter 1).

February 9, 2017, 3:40 pm

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By a route obscure and lonely,

Haunted by ill angels only,

Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,

On a black throne reigns upright,

I have reached these lands but newly

From an ultimate Dim Thule-

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

Out of SPACE – Out of TIME.

Edgar Allen Poe, Dream-Land.

Chapter 1.

He woke up and found himself huddled on a bench in a busy airport terminal. If he hadn't been so drowsy he would probably have been alarmed, for he had no memories of anything prior to the intense disorientation of his dreams. He couldn't remember his name, or anything that had ever happened to him, before waking up in that airport terminal.

Holding his nerves at bay, he attempted to get his bearings. He sat up on the bench, and looked around. The terminal was a vast, ovoid-shaped structure, with its latticed ceiling curving high above the activity on the floor. Every surface was white, gleaming and reflective, and through the curving lattice work of the ceiling, and glass walls broken into cubes by white frames, he saw a pure, pulsating blue sky.

In contrast to the sharp clarity of the terminal's appearance, its sound was distant and diffuse, like the low, steady hum of a hidden machinery. Feet clacked on the tiled floor, the walkers becoming upturned shadows that arced across its polished sheen. Their voices coalesced into a happy, bee-like static that ebbed and swelled in waves across the terminal. Behind this sound, a woman's voice rose intermittently to make announcements on a tinny intercom. Her language and accent were so unfamiliar to him, and the effect of her voice so mysterious, that he could only picture her hidden behind a musky black veil, fingering the beads of some forgotten heresy as she made her muffled announcements.

He marvelled at the hive-like bustle of the terminal, its suggestion of a factory that produced steady, minute permutations in the global pattern of human dispersal, and in the private, intangible allotment of human destinies. People moved this way and that, across the busy floor, up escalators and away out of view on mobile walkways. They were all charged with the mingled anxiety and giddy excitement of imminent departure. Here and there, he saw other individuals who appeared, like himself, blear-eyed and disorientated, as though they had just awoken in an unfamiliar skin. He was struck abruptly by an oddity in the whole scene: nobody was carrying luggage of any kind.

Taking all this in, it occurred to him that he had a perfectly adequate memory of the most generalized things. He know what airports were. He knew what airplanes, taxies and buses were. In the broadest strokes, he know what the world was, and how one functioned in it. What he lacked completely was a memory of particular things. This extended beyond his own identity. He tried to remember what year it was, and found he was uncertain which decade. When he tried to remember who was the president of America, no particular president emerged, only a kind of composite image: an energetic, middle-aged man in a suit with a gleaming smile. This happened, again and again, with popular music, fashion and technology. His mind seemed to possess only rough templates, or an awareness of the precursors of things, rather than their present, living instances.

Growing more troubled, he turned his attention back to the terminal. The benches were arranged in rows that faced the terminal's massive electronic display, a black rectangle affixed to the downward curvature of the ceiling. Some of the destinations were immediately familiar to him, evoking second-hand memories of famous landmarks, cliches and stereotypes. Others, he was certain, he had never encountered before, and their names affected him like pieces of music or passages of recondite poetry.

At the bottom centre of the display, a smaller screen was tuned to what he assumed was a news channel. This news channel, however, was subject to an instantly notable and deeply alienating peculiarly: there were no people in it. It alternated between long, static shots of a studio in which two empty chairs regarded the viewer portentously, and wide, rapidly cutting shots of urban locations equally devoid of human presence. When the news programme broke for commercials, he was initially relived to find that these, at least, contained people. However, just as the news reportage lacked its crucial human element, the advertisements were rendered stark by the absence of the objects which were their chief subject. The beaming actors mimed the various pleasures and satisfactions of absent, notional consumer products, producing an effect which he found almost as forlorn as the empty spaces of the news programme.

Turning back to the people milling about beneath the display, he began to notice other things. There were, as far as he could see, no children in the terminal. He estimated that the average age was somewhere between forty and sixty. He saw one teenager, and some who were in their twenties, but they were outliers. Their clothing had the same indefinite quality which characterized his memories. Most of it was impossible to pin down to any specific decade. Where the clothing did evoke a particular period, it did so in an unconvincing fashion, like a much later recreation for a television show or magazine spread. Finding nothing in the scene to place the terminal in either time or space, he resolved that he had to speak to somebody.

Standing up, he found himself initially dizzy and nauseous. The use of his body felt peculiar, as though his mind floated in a jittery, pliant suit of rubber. After a few steps, however, his body gradually regained its sense of solidity and continuity. The queues to the check-in desks were far too long, so he decided to accost the first person that crossed his path. This turned out to be a women whom he guessed to be in her mid-forties. She had the general appearance of an academic or solicitor: a small, stoutish figure, short brown hair and a round, kindly bespectacled face.

“Excuse me,” he said, “please, pardon me, do you speak English?” She paused. “Yes, yes I do.” A French accent, he thought. “This will seem like a really strange question. Could you tell me the name of this airport?” She was smiling indulgently: “This is the Intermundia Airport. Or one of them, at any rate.” She was beginning to move away again. “But, I'm sorry, I really don't know where I am. That name doesn't mean anything to me. What country are we in?” She touched his shoulder gently. “We aren't in any country, really. Look. I can tell that you are new. All this is very....disorientating and overwhelming at first. But it's okay, you will get used to it. You need to relax, take a deep breath. I assume that you haven't seen your case officer yet?”

“My what?”, he enquired, becoming impatient despite himself. “Your case officer. Have you had a session with your case officer yet?” He could only shake his head. “Well, you'll be called very soon, to have a meeting with them. They will explain everything to you. Really, it's okay, they'll explain everything.” Her kindly, owlish face was beginning to drift back into the crowd. He looked at her imploringly. She patted his shoulder again. “I can't help you now. Butdon't worry. Just wait for the meeting. Things will be clearer.” She turned, and walked away.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to stave off his mounting anxiety. He was troubled now by two things. First of all, he was suffering from extreme amnesia. Perhaps worse still, however, his memory was still sufficient to emphasize that his current situation was utterly bizarre and even sinister. Was he dreaming? Though the most desirable solution, he ruled this out almost instantly. He had no doubt that his perceptions were veridical – had he been dreaming, his awareness of the wrongness of everything would have nudged him to wakefulness long ago. Was he going mad? Again, though this might have been an almost reassuring explanation, it seemed untenable. His reasoning felt completely lucid and clear-sighted. What troubled him more than any temporary foible or malfunction of his brain was the conviction that everything around him was real. His amnesia, and the unnerving oddities of the airport terminal, were a related phenomenon.

Was he a political prisoner of some kind? The woman's reference to a case officer suggested that he had fallen under the jurisdiction of some bureaucracy or other. He couldn't persuade himself, however, that the situation was merely political. The airport's unnerving air of insularity and timelessness suggested an order that existed aloof from politics, operating in a place untouched by the world's fluctuating values and fortunes. His suspicion was that something had been done to his mind to render it as neutral and indistinct as the airport itself.

He turned to make his way back to the bench and discovered that the precise location where he had been sleeping was now occupied by an elderly woman. She too was curled up asleep, her face obscured by wan, diaphanous hands clenched as though in prayer. He had to get out of the terminal, and far away and fast. To the right of the benches, through the milling crowds, he saw a row of automatic exit doors bathed in sunlight gleam. He ambled towards them, trying not to let his pace betray his urgency.

Outside in the glare, he found only a vaster sense of confinement. The airport was marooned in an aesthetically spartan landscape of transport hubs, served by a wide, teaming motorway. People were disembarking from taxies and busies at a ramp, and again he noted that none of them carried luggage. Squinting airport staff wheeled empty luggage trolleys along the concourse, imparting a peculiar sense of theatre or ritual. Across the motorway, accessible by an overpass, there was a long, five-story concrete structure, composed of a lattice of narrow conservatory balconies. Elevated above the roof, large unlit neon letters identified the building as the “I  N  T E  R  M  U  N  D  I  A     O  V  E R  N  I  G  H  T.” The conservatory rooms contained identical furnishing: a two-seater couch and wicker-table facing the glass, and a bureau facing the wall. A painting hung over the bureaus; though he couldn't make out the details, it was clearly the same study in each room.

Even from that distance, through the gasoline haze of the motorway, everything in the little conservatories seemed faded, decrepit and somehow mortally dispiriting. Though he had no precise memory of any other, he felt certain that the Intermundia Overnight was among the least welcoming of all hostelries. Many of the conservatories were occupied. The distribution of those who sat facing the glass, and those with their backs turned at the bureaus, formed an eerie binary code. He felt as though the people seated at the wicker-tables watched him with the kind of unwavering intensity of individuals who have been brutalized by a regime of boredom to the point of cultivating cerebral, highly specialized homicidal tendencies. Beyond the Overnight, there was a vast parking lot, and after that what appeared to be an exact facsimile of the terminal he had just exited. The harsh concrete terrain of motorway, overpasses and expansive parking lots stretched as far as his eyes could register. Trying to escape on foot was pointless.

Up to that point, a kind of premonitory anxiety had kept his attention focused on the surrounding buildings. Now he looked fully into the blue sky, and his brain reeled. The pulsating quality he had earlier noted was a result of the exhaust fumes of a staggering volume of airplanes. The sky was full of them: the nearer ones like flocks of birds, and those further off like swarms of locusts. Their flight paths seemed to extend indefinitely into the horizon, becoming at the limits of visibility like tiny evening stars. It was a beautiful and terrifying spectacle, a dance of metal fuselages becoming liquid and molten in the sunlight, rising like scattered motes against the crisp, boundless blue.

The Weird, Haunting Art of Graszka Paulska.

February 26, 2017, 3:47 pm

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Graszka Paulska is a Polish artist based in Warsaw.  Her work is very striking and brilliantly executed:

More at EMPTY KINGDOM.

Intermundia Airport (Chapter 2).

March 16, 2017, 11:43 am

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Chapter 1 here

 

Back inside the terminal, he knew his next move would have to be to find a bathroom and take a proper look at his features. He lacked a mental image of his face, and this blank space where his thoughts were lodged unnerved him so much that he was reluctant even to touch it. But he had to look – if anything at all could jog his memory, it was surely his face.

Nothing, it turned out, was easily found in the peculiar geometry of the terminal. The persistent curvature of its design made him feel like an infant orbiting a new kind of womb which had been designed by mathematicians and sculptors. All its lines were curvilinear, and all its structures nestled neatly into the whole in a manner which suggested an aesthetic abstraction of the beehive or wasp's nest. Here and there, long corridors branched off from the main building. Their carpets were a rich, fleshy red, and the smooth, white arch of the ceilings gave the whole the appearance of a whale or shark's famished gullet, through which the people moved like snacks fleeing the digestive track.

Finally, in the atrium of one of these corridors, he found a bathroom. The bathroom was long and narrow, and smelled of a citrus disinfectant. The people at the basins all seemed to pause in their ablutions, and regard their reflections with a melancholy warmth, as though the images in the mirror were people to whom they were bidding a fond farewell, after long, tumultuous shared adventures. A jaunty, repetitious melody was piped into the bathroom, but he found that there was a peculiar sense of irresolution or absence in the culmination of the figure, such that the melody created in his mind the looping image of a beautiful face slowly brighten to a wide smile, only at the last to reveal a toothless and cankerous mouth.

Having paused for some time at the cubicles, he edged nervously to one of the wash-hand basins, and regarded his appearance in the mirror. He was, he guessed, about thirty-five. He had brown curly hair, short and untidy, and large blue eyes which he thought were the colour of a declining evening sky, reflected in cold water. Besides the slightly piercing quality of the eyes, his appearance struck him as unremarkable. He was pale and slender, with the look of one of those introverts who strike most people as passive and emotionally neutral, an impression owing not to a lack of passion but rather a certain waxen, inexpressive quality about the physicality. He knew that type of person vaguely in his own memories: the type who smiled detachedly and kept their own counsel, having seemingly resolved that life was a boisterous party at which they knew nobody.

It was not mere disappointment in his looks, however, which troubled him so sorely. It was that his reflection stirred neither the slightest memory, nor inspired in him any discernible emotion whatever. He knew that the reflection in the mirror was his own, that the appearance which returned his searching looks was in some vital sense himself, only by a logical necessity of spatial correlation. Beyond that, his physical body was a stranger to him, and looking at his face elicited no greater connection than that of a passer-by on a busy street. Had his reflection abruptly turned its back, and proceeded towards the door of the bathroom, it would have had engendered no great shock of dissociation.

This estrangement from his body filled him with a sorrow which felt unprecedented to his dim recollections. They had taken everything from him – his entire past, and any connection to his physical selfhood, was utterly lost. All that he had to hold onto were his present stream of thoughts, knotted as they were in the unravelling of a pervasive nightmare logic. In the mirror, his body was convulsing slightly, and tears streamed down its face. An elderly Japanese man, dressed in a funereal suit, patted his shoulder gently – that gesture again. He turned and glared at him.

He made his way up to to one of the elevated footbridges that spanned the perimeter of the terminal. Observing the scene from this particular vantage point, it was clear that the crowd broke down into two separate groups. There was a smaller minority of people like himself whom he called “New Arrivals.” The New Arrivals all exhibited varying symptoms of extreme disorientation and anxiety. He had to assume that they were all in the same position – that their memories had been wiped and they had no idea where they were. The second group he called the “Departees” and the “Comforters.” The Departees had come to be at peace with the circumstances of their abduction and were now leaving Intermundia Airport – back to their old lives? They all had that peculiar, almost mystic placidity which they tried to impart on the New Arrivals, by way of reassuring glances and that insufferable petting.

Clearly, there was some kind of process at work whereby frightened New Arrivals were gradually transformed into contented Departees. Their minds were first wiped clean, and then remade so as to completely acquiesce to the process whereby their identities had been stolen, and remoulded as self-effacing model citizens. Perhaps Intermundia Airport was a kind of re-education camp were everyday people were indoctrinated, and then sent back into the world as the hidden operatives of an ideology or agenda so vast and esoteric that their activities went everywhere unnoticed. Whatever the case, he had now at least acquired a goal and a purpose: to resist this process with every fibre of his being. They had made him forget everything, and that fact alone he would not forget. To have found a goal and a provisional plan, even one composed entirely of rage and opposition, brought on a mild cessation of his churning nerves. A fire which had blazed in his nervous system cooled to to a more patient simmer.

He then felt yet another pat on his shoulder, this time with a considerably less friendly import. Turning from the railing, he found that he was accosted by two security guards. The guards were an odd couple indeed. One was middle-aged, small and paunchy; the other youthful, tall and lean. The middle-aged guard was balding, with grey, wet-looking hair. The sides had been scrupulously combed back, and the remainder on top formed a near perfect rectangular peak at the dead-centre of his forehead. His face, closely-shaven and filmed with perspiration, was plump, boyish, frog-like and endearing. He had the air of a perpetually harried yet good-humoured uncle.

The younger man had a shaved head, tanned complexion and handsome Latin features. He looked sleepy and arrogant. They stood facing him for a moment, the older shifting nervously, the younger man's body immobile, his eyelids flickering as though he was falling asleep.

'Hello, sir', the older one finally began, 'if you'll excuse me, sir. My name is Eddie. This is my colleague Giacomo. Your case officer, sir, would like to see you now, and it is our privilege to accompany you to his office.'

'What if I don't want to go?'

Giacomo edged closer to him, his manner more languorous than insistent.

'You'll see your case officer,' he said, 'one way or another. Don't want to go now is fine with us. We get to take an hour off. You wanna make life difficult for yourself, and easier for us, you're welcome to.'

Eddie cast a reproachful glance at Giacomo.

'What my colleague means to say is that you can see your case officer any time you please! There's no obligation, none whatever. It's up to you! The thing is, though, it's really better – better for you– if you see him sooner rather than later. It's like – like the dentist! Nobody really wants to go to the dentist. They put if off! And the rotten tooth, the pain, you see, it just gets worse. So eventually they have to go. And then – just a little prick, a bit of yank, and all the pain is gone! And then they're kicking themselves, saying “I should have to the dentist ages ago!”'

'I don't have a toothache.'

Giacomo seemed to approve of this remark. He looked at Eddie with a smirk.

'You see? He doesn't have a toothache. Why would he want to go to a dentist?'

'That's not the point. I didn't say he should go to a dentist, I was simply drawing an analogy - '

'You and your analogies, you're just confusing the issue! The man is disorientated, he needs to get his bearings, and you're telling him he has a rotten tooth, he needs to go to the dentist - '

Eddie turned away from Giacomo, and looked at him imploringly.

'You see what he's trying to do? He doesn't want you to go! He just wants to take an hour off. I'm only trying to give you good advice! I have your feelings at heart. He just wants to have a drink.'

Eddie and Giacomo continued to bicker in this farcical manner, eventually wearing his patience to the point where he submitted to attend the interview. Eddie beamed. Giacomo shrugged and gave a little yawn. They sauntered off briskly and he followed them down the steps. They seemed to forget about him instantly, becoming absorbed in their own conversation.

'Did you know,' Eddie was saying, 'that dentists have the highest rate of suicide among all the professions?'

Giacomo shrugged.

'They do. Its a very strange thing, if you think about about it. I mean, it's a respectable middle-class profession, well-paid, secure, steady. Not as respected as the doctor, but less pressure! The dentist never has to tell anybody they've got a month to live, or that they'll never walk again. So why do they do it?'

Eddie glared at him.

'Do what?'

'Kill themselves!'

'All the bad breath seeps into their brains?'

'You make a joke out of everything, but it's an interesting conundrum. I have a theory about the whole thing. There is something, I suspect, in the mouth, that only dentists see. Think about it, how often do you actually look into the inside of your mouth? Nobody does! It's like this undiscovered country, you know, that we carry around inside our faces, this landscape of pink flesh and naked bone and rotting chunks of grizzle and the calcified residuum of an endless stream of words, a lifetime of words that flow profusely out like bile but never really say anything at all. And nobody looks into this world for any sustained length of time, nobody except the dentist. But he looks! Day in and day out, he wrestles with the ungovernable tongue and probes the private parts of a thousand faces, until humanity becomes in his dreams a single gaping mouth! What does he see in there?'

They were passing the bench where he had woken up. The old woman was awake now, sitting up and shaking with a piteous expression of terror on her face. Two other New Arrivals, a man and woman, sat either side. The woman cradled the older woman in her arms like a child, and whispered close to her ear. The man looked like he had suppressed his fear in deference to the older woman's worse plight, but his eyes, wide and bird-like, darted frantically. Both looked at him suspiciously as he passed with Eddie and Giacomo. It occurred to him that he must already look more acclimatized to Intermundia Airport, a change in his appearance perhaps brought about by his first concession to the security guards.

Giacomo regarded Eddie with a look half indulgent and half exasperated.

'Do you say this shit to your wife?'

'No, no, of course not. She's a wise woman in her own way, but not intellectual. She likes her creature comforts, and no noise or stress. That's wiser than most women, I can tell you. But this stuff would be far too deep for her. I only share this stuff with you, Giacomo, because I sense that there are deep, deep currents hidden beneath your boorish veneer.'

'Nope, no currents here. Please don't.'

They turned into one of the corridors that branched off from the main terminal. The corridor was empty, and its peculiar acoustics seemed to amplify the absurd conversation of the security guards.

'There are currents, yes, I can tell. You are a thoughtful man. Now – where was I? Yes, what is it that the dentists see? It seems to me that there could be something in the mouth – some hideous asymmetry – that points to a greater truth about the human condition. Perhaps the mark – the scrawled initials – of a cruel or senile creator. And the dentist, by virtue of the nature of his profession, is forced to face this mortally dispiriting truth every day of his professional life, along with a rouge's gallery of misshapen and rotten molars, swimming in a dank miasma of the halitosis. It drives him to despair, you see. He begins to question the whole premise of his profession – that one should fix that which was designed, after all, only to give pain and yield to decay.'

Giacomo snorted.

'Your brain is a hideous asymmetry.'

'Did I ever tell you my theory about why plumbers and pipe-layers tend to be extremely fertile?'

'Please don't.'

They paused at a stairwell. Eddie turned to him. “We're going out to the Central Command Complex, so we have to get a train.” They proceeded down the first of several stairwells. A crowd started to mill around them again, like a tumbling stream. He glanced at the posters on the wall while they descended. They were advertisements composed of a mishmash of religious, historical and commercial iconography. A jolly, rotund Oriental sage demonstrated the virtues of a water-resistant wrist watch. A benevolent, bearded youth enjoyed a carbonated beverage after he had been scourged by a group of soldiers. A collapsing tower emphasized the importance of comprehensive life insurance. Others suggested political and militaristic themes: mobilization of war efforts and nationalistic projects, fomentation of xenophobic panics, evocations of the transcendent power of vast crowds, or a single, abstracted fist clenched in the manic idolatry of an idea. Some of the posters were more abstract or elusive in intention. “TODAY IS TOMORROW'S YESTERDAY” announced one, over an image of a family of skeletons enjoying a summer picnic.

Finally, they arrived at the concourse of a vast underground rail network. As they descended a stately granite staircase, his senses were once again overwhelmed by the scope and bustle of Intermundia Airport. There were five separate train tracks, linked by a system of overpasses. People ascended to the footbridges on escalators, and were then carried smoothly across on mobile walkways, giving the overpasses the appearance of relentless conveyor belts. The tracks moved to a similarly breakneck pace: it seemed as though there was always a train either departing or arriving at each track, producing a vertiginous feeling of panic like that of the old variety show gimmick of spinning plates. He noticed with a kind of sickening jolt that a huge percentage of the crowd was made up of New Arrivals accompanied by one or two security guards. They were hundreds, perhaps thousands of these groups in the underground.

He was momentarily stunned. 'Are all those...?'

Eddie nodded, grinning with fond awe. 'Yes, all new-comers, just like yourself. It never stops. The turn-over is amazing.'

Giacomo regarded him smugly.

'Not so special now, eh?' 

Continued shortly.

Intermundia Airport (Chapter 3).

June 13, 2017, 4:14 pm

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Chapters 1 and 2.

They were sitting on a bench in a large plaza adjacent to the platforms.

'Did you work out the route last night?' Giacomo asked Eddie. Eddie looked sheepish. 'I thought it was your turn.' Giacomo growled. 'Every time, every single time!' They took out notepads and started scribbling furiously, their eyes darting from the platform sign to the route display. He looked at the platform sign and noticed something peculiar: the number seemed to be changing at a regular interval.

'What's going on?' he asked.

Eddie looked up from his notepad. 'The system is....a little complicated. The number of the platform changes every twenty seconds. So, platform 1 changes to platform 2, and so on, and the whole system of stops moves like a wave, back and forth throughout the day. Now, the problem is that the number of the trains also change, every thirty seconds. So the train you get on will be a completely different train, with different stops, by the time you get to your destination.'

'And your destination will have a completely different name by the time you get there,' Giacomo interjected.

'So you have to run two different sets of calculations, to insure that the train you get on will stop at the platform that your destination has become by the time you get there.'

They returned to their scribbling and bickering.

'Platform 4b will be platform 2b at 4.15p.m., right?' Eddie was saying. 'If we take the 25C train at 4.15, we should get to Central Command at 6.30. So at 6.30, the 25C will be the 48A, and Central Command will be Terminal 123B, right? Does the 48A stop at 123B?' 

Who could have composed such a tortuously bewildering and perverse method of organising rail schedules? And to what end? It made him nauseous just to look at the security guards with their furrowed brows, poring over endlessly revised diagrams that floated in a sea of scribbled computation. Was this how Intermundia Airport controlled its workers? By insulating them from the rest of world, and brow-beating them with a system of absurdities that made the simplest thing an ordeal? Did they really pass their entire existences here, in this hub of ceaseless motion, still points fixed in a sea of transience? He felt almost sorry for them, if that were the case. They seemed like rodents, or some other poor beasts, that eked out their living on the interstices of a teeming motorway. No scavenging rat or fox could comprehend the meaning of cars and trucks, or fathom who had built them and what function they served. Yet the system of the motorway enclosed their entire being, imprinting itself in the seat of their instincts and reflexes. They lived off the scraps of this system, which never ceased its motion, and was as inscrutable to them as nature is to us. 

'We've got it!' Eddie said with a bright smile. 'And a few minutes to spare as well. Are you hungry?' He went off to a little kiosk to buy coffee, pastries and a newspaper. The Moroccan in the kiosk seemed to know him well. They made jokes about their wives, and the general dissatisfactions of existence. 'Yesterday it finally happened,' the Moroccan said, 'I am fatter than my wife. That was the only thing I ever had over her!' Giocomo passed the time by glancing at women with a lazy, non-committal gleam of lust. He had trained his facial muscles to hover on the periphery of a smile that never quite appeared, a sly apparition haunting his eyes and the edge of his mouth. 

Eddie came back with breakfast. He refused a pastry but excepted a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The cup was branded with an image of two crudely anthropomorphized coffee beans, a male and female. The male, with large, bulging eyeballs, was accosting the female: “I'VE GOT A CRUSH ON YOU”, he was saying. 'We better get moving,' Giacomo announced, and they took off briskly through the plaza, weaving around its maze of stalls, kiosks and terraces. The people who staffed the kiosks were from all over the world: Europeans, Asians, Africans, South Americans. The majority, he noted, carried out their work with quiet, disengaged patience, and seemed to glance at intervals to the left of their peripheral vision, as though something hidden were progressing behind the ordinariness of their lives, and the routinised bustle of the station. 

As they got closer to the platforms, the roar of the trains drowned out every other sound, and the whole scene assumed a distant quality, as though it were underwater. The vendors and their costumers communicated adroitly with hand signals. He had gulped back his coffee greedily, and the caffeine and sugar hit him in a sudden, ecstatic rush. For the briefest instant, he felt rapturously happy and alive. In that moment, the lack of a past was a blessing that rooted him firmly in the present instant like a virgin seed. Similarly, the absurdity of his situation felt like a kind of liberation: in a world without reason, he was free to exist fully in each instant, without hopes or expectations of any kind, only the neutral purity of his sensations. The world was alive with the power, the speed and the sound of the trains, hurtling off in unimaginable directions.

That wondrous sensation evaporated in a flash, leaving him only with a image: he saw himself, lead by Eddie and Giacomo through the crowd, suddenly become incandescent, as though some ray of the sun had pierced through the vast fortress of steel and concrete overhead, and turned his body into a brief avatar of the stellar heavens. Then he was returned to the jittery awareness of a living nightmare. Eddie motioned towards a train. Sleek, gunmetal grey, the design of its front carriage resembled the snout of a bloodhound or shark, some metallic predator that strained against the brief stasis imposed by the stop. They embarked, and the doors snapped after them as though to nip at their heels.

They took their seats at a table. In contrast to the train's gleaming and vigorous outer shell, the interior reminded him of the mournful decrepitude of the Intermundia Overnight. The materials of the seating, the fabric and designs of the carpet and cushions all shared that sad quality of a thing which had never been new, a place prematurely soiled by cigarette smoke and the intestinal anxiety of endless bad dinners and portentous appointments. It had the ambience of a hospital cafeteria, of the blanched aesthetics of a failed bureaucratic regime whose utopian dreams lingered on only as an ancestral spirit that whispered hollowly in the bite of the wind. He was lost for a moment in a reverie of such a world: a wintry city of concrete geometry and faded furniture, where the people had, over generations of perpetual paranoid vigilance, evolved into silent, industrious and inscrutable masks, working and eating and bearing their children like automatons. Inside each of them there must have been fugitive dreams and fantasies, imaginative worlds vast and discontinuous as their public lives were solid and circumscribed, luxurious desires that far outstripped the cold formalism of their marriages, heresies, hymns and obscenities sung beneath the affectless composure of their visible lives. And yet none could ever know for sure if they alone possessed these riotous inner kingdoms, and all others were precisely as they appeared on the outside, such were they all subject to the perpetual fear of a vigilant bureaucracy which might, for all they knew, have ceased to exist many generations ago, for there was no outwardly discernible difference between the total success of the regime, and its complete absence.

Eddie looked relived. 'Well, we're on the right train anyway, look - ' he said, pointing in the direction of a table towards the rear of the carriage. The table seated four individuals – two men and two women – who were clearly distinguishable from the rest of the crowd by virtue of their dress and bearing. The women and one of the men were Caucasian, with the fourth having an African appearance. They were all tall and lean, with beautifully symmetrical features and a kind of coltish quality that suggested superior breeding. They wore sober, finely tailored business clothes, the women with blouses of a lustrous, delicate silk, and the men with crisp suits that looked fresh from the rack. The group weren't speaking, and the two that faced him had lazy, slight grins fixed on their faces, as though savouring a private joke.

There was something unnerving about this group which was difficult to pin-point. As he watched, it occurred to him that they didn't seem to make the slightest movement – they were as still as a photograph against the rushing terrain of the window. It was as though they had fallen asleep with their eyes open and alert. Their detached, patrician bearing suggested beings who inhabited their bodies with the evanescent casualness of tourists.

'They're technocrats,' Eddie explained, 'on their way to Central, no doubt.'

'Are they case officers?' he asked.

'No, the case officers tend to be a little older. I would imagine that they are traffic controllers, or some lower functionaries of the technocrat class.'

He was thinking again that it was surely all a dream. It didn't feel like a dream, but was that not after all the nature of dreams? It was supremely comforting to entertain the fantasy that he would soon be waking up in his own bed, luxuriating in that keen sense of relief that often comes in the wake of a disagreeable dream. Would he be married? Rich or poor? Happy or miserable? Perhaps in his real life he knew Eddie and Giacomo, or some or other of the technocrats, in an altered guise. It was almost blissful, for a moment, to imagine the whole situation vanish abruptly like a swollen soap bubble, and become no more than a fragmentary riddle he would carry around for a day or so.

The train passed through a monotonous expanse of concrete tunnel illuminated by large yellow and orange sodium lamps. Occasionally, they passed an embankment where crews of workers toiled on construction sites, welding large iron girders and wheeling concrete blocks about. After longer intervals, they arrived at various stops, and the personnel of the carriage morphed rapidly, with the exception of the technocrats, who remained poised in their seats with their strange half-smiles. Each of the stops had its own distinct architectural style, as though belonging to a different country or temporal period. The passage of time and distance became difficult to gauge. He felt that they were going deeper underground.

'How long have you guys been working together?' he asked, to break the silence.

'Well,' Eddie replied, 'that's a difficult one to answer. How long is a piece of string?'

This seemed to set Giacomo off again.

'I hate that one!,' he growled.

'What one?'

'That expression “How long is a piece of string.”'

'What's wrong with it?'

'Well, show me the piece of string!'

'What?'

'Show me the piece of string, and I'll tell you how long it is.'

'That's not the point. There is no piece of string.'

'Then why ask how long it is?'

'It's a figure of speech. It's not a specific piece of string, it's a notional piece of string. It's any piece of string. How long is any piece of string? Who knows?'

They were both getting red-faced.

'There is no such thing as any piece of string, there are only specific pieces of string. And if there is a specific piece of string, it can be measured. It's the easiest thing in the world to measure.'

Eddie looked away from Giacomo with resignation:

'You want to know how long we've been working together? An eternity. That's how long we've been working together. Aneternity!'

Giacomo shrugged. Eddie, perhaps aware that he was becoming weary of their endless bickering, passed him the newspaper. 'You can read this if you like,' he said, 'to pass the time. It's always good to stay informed.”

The paper was called the Intermundia Chronicle. The masthead featured an image of an airplane ascending diagonally in a circle, and the slogan: “BEASTS ASK FOR MERE FOOD AND SHELTER; MEN ASK “WHAT NEWS?” In lieu of a date, the paper was simply designated TODAY'S EDITION. He read the lead article:

Mankind's Moment of Triumph Turns to Eerie Tragedy: Returning Astronauts Replaced by Lifeless Mannequins.

Drake Space Centre, Cape Canaveral, Florida– We all watched in awe and suspense as the American astronauts Mike Summers and Budd 'Slingshot' McGinty became the first men to walk on the surface of the moon. On the day that the world was due to welcome back the heroic Mithras 5 crew – Summers, McGinty and Command Module pilot Frank Logan – the assembled world press discovered only grief, confusion and macabre horror. We knew that 3 days ago (July 23) the command module Mercury splashed down near the Utirik Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, where it was met by the recovery vessel USS Philadelphia.

Then came the silence – and the rumours. For two successive days, the press men who had gathered on Florida's Space Coast were kept in the dark about the circumstances of the Mercury's re-entry and splashdown. During today's sombre press conference, chaired by USAF General Tyrone McClinton and Mithras 5 CAPCOM Duke Toynbee, the world finally learned the truth.

As journalists assembled in the Drake auditorium, audible gasps were heard. The seats reserved for the heroic astronauts were occupied by an eerie trio of store-front mannequins. General McClinton explained that Mission Control had lost radio contact with the Mercury Module some 14 minutes before the scheduled splashdown. “We weren't too alarmed, and felt that things would go according to plan without further communication at that point,” Toynbee added. However, when divers from the Philadelphia investigated the floating capsule in the early hours of July 23^rd, they noted that Summers, McGinty and Logan had been replaced by the mannequins present at the conference. According to McClinton: “The men who made this grim discovery are still in a distraught condition. Whether or not they will return to active duty, it is unlikely that they will ever be able to pass a department store without experiencing extreme distress.”

Next, Florida state pathologist and noted ethnomusicologist Lonnie Vargas spoke briefly about his examination of the mannequins carried out with the assistance of a Sears and Roebuck window dresser. “The figurines themselves are quite unremarkable. They are constructed of a terrestrial wax and plaster composite which is standard for the industry. As you can see, no attempt has been made to mimic the actual appearances of Summers, McGinty and Logan. Rather, they have the unnerving, doll-like quality common to the mannequin – I would call it the suggestion of a distant, anaesthetized happiness. In lieu of genitals, they have the smooth, rounded protuberance common to the dummy.”

Investigation of the phenomenon is advancing on two principal lines of enquiry: scientific explanation, or possible sabotage by the Russian Comrades. Toynbee explained: “At the present time, we know of no conceivable naturalistic mechanism as to how the flight to the moon and subsequent re-entry might cause the transformation of living human tissue into plaster-based lifeless simulacra.” General McClinton suggested that the uncanny mystery bore the imprimatur of the Kremlin: “This is precisely the kind of transformation the Comrades would gladly enforce on the entire planet – turning free men into standardized dummies!” He added, however, that there was at present no plausible scenario for how the Comrades could have made the switch in the available timeline.

The mannequins were dressed in checkered wool flannel shirts and half wool cashmere slacks, a sneak preview of the Sears and Roebuck autumn catalogue. Pipes had been provided to complete the rugged, rustic look. Despite the intensely sombre and portentous nature of the occasion, all agreed that the ensembles were quite becoming. General McClinton praised the versatility of the new line, noting that “everybody would feel comfortable in these, from college Johnny to retiree Joe!”

Puzzled by how such a blatant flight of fancy could be presented as an item of factual journalism, he scanned some of the other headlines:

Department of Health Warning: Physical Acts of Intimacy May Be Catalyst for Invasion of Little People – Home Office: “First they take Your Identity – Eventually they will Bury You” - Conservative MP: “The Little People are Inculcating the Ethos of the Welfare State in Every Home.”

'But this is nonsense,' he finally blurted, pushing the newspaper away.

Giacomo sneered. 'Sorry, Einstein.'

Eddie seemed upset. 'The Chronicle has a superb reputation, I can assure you.'

'This paper has a reputation - '

'Yes, yes, the Chronicle is really above reproach. Their diligence is outstanding.'

'Their diligence - '

'I wouldn't mislead you, sir. They have excellent fact checkers, really tireless.'

'Fact checkers?'

'Absolutely. If they discover that any factual content has crept into a story, sir, they immediately issue a retraction. That happens very, very rarely – but whenever it does, I can assure you, the offending content is retracted immediately.'

'But – newspapers are supposed to be factual!'

Eddie and Giacomo regarded him as though he were drunk.

'Where did you get that idea from?'

'Well – I don't know – I can't remember – you mean that they're pure fantasy?'

'What else would they be?'

'But – don't people want to know what's happening - what's going on around them?'

Eddie look at him incredulously, and then sighed: 'Well, why would they want to? Nothing happens here, nothing at all really. People arrive, and then they go away'– he moved his hand from side to side – 'arrive, then away. What kind of news would that be? It would be the same paper, every single edition: “Yesterday, Some People Arrived in Intermundia Airport, and Some Others Departed from It.” Not very simulating news, is it? Not very edifying work, either for the journalist or the reader. But delusions and flights of fantasy – well, sir, they need not be so static and predictable.'

A look of mournful longing came over Eddie's face as he continued:

'Well, for most people, I suppose they would. They say, sir, that the average chimpanzee who is taken from the wilderness to the zoo soon forgets the forest, and dreams only of the bars of his cage. And that's the way it is for most of us. But the journalist is an exceptional creature – he has somehow cultivated the temperature of his imagination, so that it is a hothouse where strange, luxuriant things blossom.'

Giacomo nodded at Eddie with a look of sardonic cruelty:

'He wanted to be a journalist when he was younger!'

'I did – I still do. But – oh, it's too late now. Too late. I wouldn't even get a job as a stenographer in one of the papers now. But what a life – what a wonderful life! The journalist doesn't sleep much at night. What does he do? Well, I imagine he wanders about, talking to the people who work the night-shift, looking at the planes in the night sky, having adventures in a world that the rest of us don't see. The journalist, you see, must be awake and active while most of us are dreaming. This allows him to dream while while the rest of us toil away in the workaday world. The busy news office is a work environment like no other. It is make up of rows of hammocks, which serve as the journalists' desks. And when the reporter clocks in to work in the morning, he lays himself out on his hammock. It is considered professional to wear pyjamas or perhaps a dressing gown, but the occasional maverick arrives to work fully clothed. There are hookahs positioned by the hammocks, and some of the journalists consume narcotics to insure a greater accuracy in their work. Imagine it! Everywhere else, there is noise and bustle and busyness. But in the newspaper office, a blissful silence, a languor, a porous, dreamy atmosphere, plumes of smoke swirling into evanescent patterns above the recumbent workers, the Sandman lulling softly to sleep those strenuous, invisible weavers who knit our thoughts together into rational and coherent sentences. The journalist, you see, in order to file his stories, must drift into a trance-like state, neither fully conscious or asleep. A place between the two states – an airport, if you like, which is not really one country or another, where the point of departure and the destination are blurred together. And when he becomes thus inspired, the journalist begins to speak in a low whisper. Crouched at a little desk beneath the hammock, his head aslant so that his ear is close to the whispering mouth, the stenographer records each journalist's dream, editing factual and biographical material out as he goes. What a strange place – a gaggle of hushed voices, distant and unfamiliar, and keys clacking to catch them in ink before they vanish forever – the place where the daily news is made!'

Eddie had an awestruck, faraway expression as he contemplated the life of the journalist. Giacomo continued to goad him:

'But you tried, didn't you? You tried to be a journalist - '

'Oh, shut up Giacomo - '

'But when you lay down on the hammock, and drifted off into your trance - '

'SHUT UP!'

'The only news stories you could come up were events from your own life - '

In low voice: 'Only the bars of my cage...'

'Trivial little episodes – broken hearts and roast dinners - '

'Only the bars.....'

' - that the stenographers instantly edited away into nothing.'

The pair fell silent, Giacomo apparently satisfied at having humiliated Eddie. Nothing happened for a long time, and he felt an unbearable tension, as though one of them would soon have to become hysterical or violent. Then Eddie's face brightened.

'I think we're here at long last!' he said.

The train was stopping. Eddie and Giacomo got up briskly from their seats and headed in the direction of the doors. He followed then reluctantly, becoming aware that his nerves were mounting again now that the journey was completed. Stepping out on the platform was the most awesome shock he had yet experienced in Intermundia Airport. The station was a vast cyclopean enclosure, more redolent of an ancient temple or mausoleum than a train stop. The structure's brooding air of antiquity and scale, so incongruently juxtaposed with the poised, illuminated train, took his breathe away. He had that quiet, eerie perturbation of soul that a person experiences when they cast a rock into a dim abyss, and only a prolonged silence follows. The technocrats glided away, the clack of the women's heels echoing through the vast space like tumbling pebbles. Then the train took off again, departing into a tunnel so small and dim that it seemed to simply pass through the stone wall. Its sound died away slowly and a profound silence filled the cavern, like a vigilant animal resuming its habitual watchfulness having just swallowed the last morsel of a meal. 

Eddie and Giacomo remained immobile, leaving him a moment to take in his surroundings. The outer walls were constructed with huge, misshapen limestone boulders, fitted together in a haphazard fashion which made him recall – for some obscure reason – Eddie's earlier discussion of a putative asymmetry in the human mouth which implied senility or malice on the part of the creator. Nearer the tracks, a series of pillars, terminating in cornices at the roof of the cavern, suggested a later, more sophisticated addition. The pillars were carved with abstract decorative figures of a sensibility so obscure that it felt almost impious to contemplate them in the harsh light of the orange sodium lamps.

Finally, Eddie nudged him gently.

'Your case officer is over there.'

He turned and followed Eddie's pointing finger. High up above the tunnels where the train had just departed, a massive, brooding face was carved into the limestone where the wall met the roof of the cavern. Indistinct in terms both of race and sex, the features were austere and expressionless with the exception of the eyes, which were fixed with fierce concentration on the platform floor. It was, he thought, the perfect epitome of a primitive ruler of infinite power and eternal, implacable judgement, a ruler whose silence and immobility contained the clap and the rent of thunder. He became conscious of Eddie and Giacomo's bodies shaking behind him. Turning, he found that they were laughing silently.

'Sorry,' Eddie said, red-faced, 'sorry – I can never resist that one. Parts of this underground are very old. Who knows who that fella is up yonder? He wouldn't make much of a case officer though.'

Giacomo was sniggering. 'We're going this way,' Eddie said, having composed himself, and they made off away from the platform. As they neared the far wall, he noticed that there was a single kiosk in the gloom. The kiosk sold pretzels, pastries, coffee and newspapers. A wizened, heavily made-up woman with a sullen expression sat inside smoking a cigarette. A good half of the cigarette was untipped ash that seemed always on the point of falling away. 

'Busy today Maria?' Eddie enquired as they passed. The woman in the kiosk extracted the cigarette from the side of her mouth in a distasteful manner, as though it were a thermometer. She grunted, rolled her eyes slightly, and returned the cigarette. Her bulging eyes and rhythmic inhalations reminded him of a fish in a tank.

'She's one of those women who can smoke an entire cigarette without tipping it once,' Eddie said, 'it's a skill that the older generation have. I used to watch my grandmother doing it.'

'I had an uncle,' Giacomo interjected, 'who could smoke an entire cigarette without exhaling any smoke! I was fascinated by this as a child, and I asked my father where the smoke went. He told me that my uncle farted all the smoke out of his asshole like a chimney before he went to bed. To this day, I still want to know where all that smoke went!'

They reached the far wall. The lichen-mottled stone had been excavated, and a modern structure built into the wall. Eddie opened the glass door, and they entered what appeared to be an abandoned work station of some kind. It was a dingy complex that branched off into offices, store-rooms and a canteen where a fluorescent lamp flickered and buzzed. Tools, hard-hats, Styrofoam cups and old newspapers were scattered on the floor, and a thick smell of kerosene and disinfectant hung in the hair. 

'This place,' Giacomo said sourly. They walked through dimly lit corridors for what seemed like an age. Occasionally, they encountered other security guards escorting New Arrivals back through the complex from Central Command. The New Arrivals had haunted, perplexed expressions, and appeared dissociated from their surroundings. He was troubled by the awareness that this situation would be reversed in a short time – he would be returning, and encountering others on-route. Finally, they arrived in the main electrical distribution room, and Eddie typed a code into a steel door behind a row of switchboards. He was smiling. 'I hope you're ready for some exercise.' The three men entered a narrow, dark metallic shaft. Giacomo shone a pen-sized torch, revealing a steel ladder fixed to the wall. 'We have to climb,' Eddie said, 'I'll go first, and you can go in the middle. That way, if you fall, Giacomo's thick skull should cushion you.' Giacomo grunted.

He looked up, but it was impossible to determine the extent of the shaft in the darkness. 'Is it high?' he whispered. 'It's not too bad', Eddie said, 'just take it one step at a time.' Eddie started climbing, and when his feet were a few rungs above his head, Giacomo nudged him to begin. He felt strangely powerless and fixed his hands on the railing. Soon all three were ascending the ladder at a deliberate pace. The darkness of the shaft became nearly complete, and he orientated himself by means of Eddie's heavy panting above, and the sound of Giacomo's feet below. His arms became fatigued, but whenever his pace slackened, Giacomo's head butted brusquely against his feet. His hands were slick with perspiration. He wanted to tell them to stop, to turn back, but his mouth was dry, and he seemed to have lost all volition in the arduousness of the climb. 

'We should sing a song,' Eddie said above, 'Giacomo, would you like to sing a few bars of something?' Giacomo grunted. 'Well, I suppose I better sing one.' They continued climbing. Eddie started to sing a lullaby in a strange, affected lilt which was completely unlike his speaking voice:

Train whistle blowin',

Makes a sleepy noise,

Underneath their blankets

Go all the girls and boys.

Rockin', rollin', ridin',

Out along the bay,

All bound for Morningtown

Many miles away.

Eddie paused, and his breaths came in thick, wheezing gasps. 'Come on gang, join in', he said finally, and continued:

Driver at the engine,

Fireman rings a bell,

Sandman swings the lantern

To show that all is well.

Giacomo joined in the second chorus, and the combination of their discordant and poorly synchronized voices was eerie and terrifying:

Rockin', rollin', ridin',

Out along the bay,

All bound for Morningtown,

Many miles away.

He was getting more exhausted and faint-headed, and his mind entertained grimly elaborate conceits. Perhaps the stern stone visage had really been his case officer after all. Perhaps it had, in that instant, judged him for sins that he would never remember, and consigned him to this punishment: to climb the darkened shaft for all eternity, trapped between two madmen, perpetually on the brink of total exhaustion. Above, Eddie continued to sing:

Somewhere there is sunshine,

Somewhere there is day,

Somewhere there is Morningtown,

Many miles away.

After another bout of choked spluttering, Eddie stopped climbing. 'Slow down a bit there!', he shouted. He struggled for a moment with a latch, then lifted himself up. There was a heavy clang, and then white daylight coursed through the shaft, like water through a sluice. With the light came brisk, revivifying fresh air, and a gentle sound that stirred something in his memories. Eddie had clambered out of the shaft, and he followed with a sudden burst of energy, lifting himself over the edge of a steel trap-door, and rolling over soft ground to lie on his back. 

He was looking up at the blue sky through a dense canopy of coiling branches and fluttering leaves. They were in a forest. His senses were ravished by this first encounter with nature since arriving in Intermundia. He inhaled deeply the scent of soil, grass and bark. He knew them so intimately that they were like a childhood memory, or the memory of childhood itself, come back to him. He stood up, and his eyes delighted in the colours and forms of the forest, so vivid and alive after his journey through the steel and concrete landscape of the terminals, runways and underground.

Giacomo was emerging nonchalantly from the shaft. Eddie sat against a tree stump, wiping sweat from his brow and smiling boyishly. 'It's easier going back down,' he said. 

 "Morningtown Ride", lyrics by Malvina Reynolds.  Continued shortly.