Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Latter

I sigh to notice how many of my hotlinks are on the blink. I wonder if I'll ever have time to tend to my previous blog entries and tidy them up. I hardly even have time for this review. As you all know, we have recently been celebrating Christmas, and I have received a number of books as presents. However, the book that I am about to review (briefly) was not my present, but someone else's. I have been reading it keenly despite this fact. It is called Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? and it is by Steve Lowe and Alan Mcarthur. You can take a look at it here.

Now, from the title, I expected it to be a mere stocking-filler, a book of that kind of fatuous, smug cynicism in which we British specialise, written by someone afraid to make known his alleigances, and, ultimately, shallow. There are many such books about. However, I read it and was surprised to find it had real bite, and real commitment in it. The authors do not seem to be cynical just for the sake of it, or for the sake of being clever, but unerringly pick deserving targets for their bile. In fact, they seem almost earnest.

Here's a example entry in this encyclopaedia of all that is loathsome:

"Product, the word
'What products do you use?'
'Oh, you know... pens, ballbearings, all sorts.'
'No, I mean beauty products.'
'Oh, sorry. You needed to be more specific. And less of a fucking twat.'"

Yes, basically, the book lists encyclopaedically all those people who deserve to be slaughtered, but whom, unfortunately, we are not allowed to beat to death with their own severed forearms. It is verbal assassination. I admire it greatly and lament that this is the closest we can get to actual assassination.

Some of the deserving targets are Tony Blair, Ben Elton, global warming sceptics, homophobic christians, U2, Beyonce Knowles, Jimmy Carr and Tracey Emin.

On Science

Regular readers of this blog will probably be aware that I am not entirely enamoured of science. I think that science needs critics who are NOT religious fundamentalists. I hope that, in my small way, I can fulfil such a role. Science looks to me very much like a sociopathic form of autism that is able to organise itself into a culture the way that ants or termites do. But I have to sigh when I realise that even such an opinion is expressed in terms that have been made available to us by science. Science is in many ways the art of definition, and it seems to define our modern life in many ways. Perhaps for that reason, I feel a kind of duty to know a little about it - as well as a kind of morbid curiosity - and I read the journal The New Scientist whenever I have the time to do so.

Often, just looking at the cover of The New Scientist, or more accurately, reading the headlines of the stories within, is enough to send me into a black mood for the whole day. How to get rid of unwanted memories. Upgrade your brain to the new super-smart. These are not verbatim, but they are, in fact, the substance of some of the headlines. Reading such as these, I feel like they might as well be saying, "How to annihilate the few remaining traces of your humanity in three easy stages."



Is science all bad? People want to know that you're being fair and balanced. Very well - science is good in so far as it has helped us escape some of the tyrannies of religion, and in so far as it might help us to deal with global warming. However, science has its own tyrannies, and its squabbles with religion are really the squabbles of evil brothers - squabbles I would rather not take sides in. And as for global warming - I think we should remember that it is science that has created the problem in the first place, especially in its alliance with capitalism (yes, science is oh-so-impartial).

One of the latest headlines on the cover of The New Scientist is as follows:

"Vice Buster - one pill to stop you smoking, drinking and getting fat."

For some reason, when I read this headline, the following words popped into my head:

"One pill to rule them all and in the darkness bind them."

I am beginning to see science as the truest form of black magic. Newton himself was a practitioner of the dark arts.

On Unreality

I've been Christmas shopping, though I'm not sure I really approve of the activity, and I recently bought a copy of Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths for someone I hope does not read this blog. I feel that Borges has been an influence upon me, even though I have not re-read his work that much, and last read something by him, I believe, some years ago. Anyway, it's a very attractive Penguin edition, and I decided to dip into the work of the great man again. Actually, before I continue, perhaps I should repeat something I have said before - that the very title of this blog owes itself to a quote from a story by Borges. The tale in question is called 'The Shape of the Sword' and is the story of an Irishman called John Vincent Moon. The quote runs as follows:

"He had studied with fervour and with vanity nearly every page of Lord knows what Communist manual; he made use of dialectical materialism to put an end to any discussion whatever. The reasons one can have for hating another man, or for loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe to a sordid economic struggle. He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive..."

The story I dipped into, however, was not this, but one entitled, 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'. This, in fact, was the first story by Borges that I had ever read, and it had impressed me from the beginning as the work of a true original, at once strange and familiar, presenting new ideas as if they are your own, merely remembered, or perhaps the other way around. I was particularly struck this time by an incidental description:

"In his lifetime he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead he is not even the ghost he was then."

Unreality - somehow Borges has caught the esssence of the English disease. I too am a sufferer, so I feel I know the disease intimately. In fact, I am probably quite an extreme case in some ways, my situation only ameliorated somewhat by the fact I acknowledge my disease and know its symptoms. But I certainly cannot describe my ailment any more succinctly than Borges has - it is unreality. Yes, I do feel like a ghost even as I live. It is an image that returns to me again and again - a ghost trapped in the world of the living with no means of communication - and no doubt I shall write a story about it if I do not evapourate like smoke into the further unreality of death before I have the chance.

But what exactly is it that causes this ailment in the English? I do not think it is unique to England, though it is virulent here. I believe that it is a disease of modernism, and, even more so, of post-modernism, and can be seen in any country where people shop at supermarkets and watch television. Perhaps it goes back much further than the modern and post-modern ages, but I am not sure I can trace it to its very source. I can, however, make a few mental links.



I had a conversation recently about money. "Do you know what's written on the American dollar?" I believe that was the question I was asked. Of course, I did know. "In God we trust." To have such a phrase printed on one's national currency is so grotesque that I hardly think I need to point out the irony of the situation or attempt some kind of satire. But then came the question of what is on our English money. I pulled out the ten pound note in my pocket. On it there was a portrait of Charles Darwin. Suddenly this seemed as grotesque as the statement on the American dollar. Evolution. The survival of the fittest. The law of the stock market. You could almost say that the dollar and the pound showed two sides of the same coin.



Before we had Darwin on our money we had Newton. Gravity and evolution. These are some of the things that we English have brought the world in our quest for the ground beneath our feet, our dogged search for reality. Ours has been a search for something concrete, and so we have made a concrete world. But reality, living reality, is precisely what the concrete has buried, and from which we have cut ourselves off.