Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

What do you think of Western civilisation?

I feel like most of what I write, if not all of it, is some form of attack on what is generally known as civilisation. The irony here - which even commenters on Youtube are able to see - is that to criticise civilisation I use the tools of civilisation, such as the computer, the printed word and so on. Let's assume for a moment that what I desire is the end of civilisation, and also assume that my wish can come true - if it does, then that also means everything I have ever written, and really everything I have done so far in my life, must be jettisoned with the civilisation of which it was a part. I don't mind that idea as much as I might, but it does make me feel like what I'm doing at the moment is essentially empty and pointless, since, for instance, in writing books and making entries on my blog, I am part of what I hate, and what I believe is unsustainable and MUST END. I have occasionally toyed with the idea of only working in the oral medium, as a story-teller or poet, but have to admit that this idea has not got any further than the idea stage.



It's not just the media I use that are part of civilisation, though. My stories rest upon a whole tradition of literature that is part of the history of civilisation, and are full of references and concerns that will mean nothing when civilisation comes to an end. I rely on people who are part of what I hate to be able to read and understand these things in order to give my life meaning. That sentence may be shortened to, "I rely on what I hate to give my life meaning." And that is the hollow heart of my existence.

Last night I watched another episode - I think it may be the final one - of Bruce Parry's programme, Tribe. In this episode, he was spending four weeks with the Penan, a hunter-gatherer people who live on the island of Borneo. I almost always find these programmes about pre-industrial societies (many of them pre-agricultural), deeply moving. If I ask myself why, the answer is very simple. These people are human. We are not. We have lost our humanity. We lost it a long time ago. Perhaps that seems like a simplification. Nonetheless, that is how I feel. If I am almost constantly consumed by incredible rage and hatred, and sunk in depression, it's because I live in a society where everything that is important (including human beings themselves) has become invisible. In every programme I have seen, Bruce Parry is welcomed into the tribe he is visiting, given of all the tribe possess and treated almost - often completely - like a family member. This is called community. We don't have that anymore. I certainly don't feel a part of my own society in the way that these people make Bruce a part of theirs. This makes me unspeakably angry. To me, civilisation means violence, exploitation, deception, greed and spiritual bankruptcy.

During the programme last night, it emerged that the entire way of life of the Penan is under threat because of the logging industry, which is destroying the primary forest which is the Penan's home. The areas of forest that have been decimated are largely being replaced by palm oil crops, which do not support the kind of complex eco-system of the forest, which hardly support anything at all, apparently. The palm oil is used in products such as soap, shampoo and biscuits for the rich, civilised countries of the world. To me, the contrast was marked. The Penan welcomed Parry from the civilised world, let him live with them, fed him, and so on. The civilised world, on the other hand, has given the Penan nothing, but only taken and destroyed.

I truly hope that this will be one case in which evil does not prevail, as it seems to all too often. I am writing this largely to play my small part in making the cause of the Penan known.



As to what we should do about 'civilisation', I don't really know. I have a few random thoughts on the subject, such as, er... kill Jeremy Clarkson. Hmmm. Well, let me try to be a little more sober about this. First of all, there are too many people in the world, WITHOUT A DOUBT. Having children is NOT A RIGHT, it is a privilege. Secondly, although I am a person who, to use a dismissive psychobabble phrase 'has a lot of anger', I suppose I should say that I would not like my own anger immediately associated with and ascribed to the Penan. When Bruce Parry asked them at the end of the programme what it was they most wanted, one of them spoke of how the Penan were in no way against progress, but what they wanted was real progress. The first thing he gave as an example of real progress was land rights.

This brings up the question of what real progress is, of course, and, I suppose, no matter what my own desires might be, we're not going to magically return to some pre-industrial, pre-agricultural world. The only thing I can think of at the moment is that we simply have to rediscover what is important in life, regain our lost humanity, and let that guide us. Some things are not so important. If there are sacrifices to be made, then the likes of biscuits and shampoo should be among the first things to go.

The Beasthouse is Dreaming

I have just been introduced to the online diary of writer Lawrence Miles. He was born in the same year as me, is a writer of Doctor Who novels (which I've considered doing), and is also... er... and was born in Middlesex, where I am currently resident. Anyway, his diary makes fantastic reading. Surely this is the kind of thing for which the Internet was made - an intelligent person rambling on about whatever comes into his head without any interfering editors. It's like Notes From Underground all over again.

Anyway, the last post on the diary says:

This journal won't be here much longer. Please take this opportunity to copy the best bits, paste them into a Word file with a possible view to using them as sig-files one day, then store it in your "unused porn that seemed much more interesting eight months ago" folder and see how long it stays there before you forget what the file called "beast.doc" is and have to open it just to make sure it's not what it sounds like.

That was dated August the 27th, so it's possible he's forgotten to demolish it, depending on what he meant by "much longer". Perhaps it will come down tomorrow. I'm going to take his advice, in a way, by cutting and pasting my favourite part (so far) from the journal into this blog entry. I would like to encourage others to do the same. Anyway, my favourite part of Lawrence Miles' online diary so far:

On Growing Up Stupid

Today: why am I clever?

No, another question first. When did contestants on University Challenge stop “reading” and start “studying”? There was a time when the use of the word “reading” was as much a part of the programme’s catchphrase-arsenal as “starter for ten” and “no conferring”. Every contestant would, from behind the twin safety-barriers of the studio desk and his own spectacles, introduce himself according to the formula “Martin Spatula from Northampton, reading microbiology” / “Tony Nabisco from Aberdeen, reading anthropology” / “Blackie Lawless from Wolverhampton, reading particle physics”. But now they’re studying these subjects rather than reading them, and if this is the case, then it can only mean that there’s been a conscious decision by the programme-makers to change the formula. Why? Presumably it isn’t because BBC producers have a problem with reading, or because they’re worried that it might subconsciously prod people to switch off the television and pick up a book instead, or because they don’t want members of the Open University to feel self-conscious. And yet…

…and yet even when I was a child, the word “reading” seemed peculiar, in this context. I never heard anyone in the real world use it that way, although admittedly, I didn’t know many university graduates when I was eight. These days, producers tend to have a problem with words which seem awkward, obscure, or just too elaborate for the lowest rung of the audience. This isn’t confined to television, either: I once had an editor who always made me replace the words “in retrospect” with the words “with hindsight”, apparently on the grounds that he thought “retrospect” might be too confusing for some of the readers. Is this the reason for the University Challenge change, I wonder? Did somebody look at the format of the programme and worry that the unexpected use of a verb might disturb viewers enough to make them switch channels? It sounds unlikely, especially since anyone who has trouble with unexpected verbs isn’t likely to be watching University Challenge in the first place, but television is known for the amount of pointless meddling that goes on there.

This presents us with another great bugbear of early-twenty-first-century Britain, somewhere just down the list from “Chavs” and “Americans” (the two natural enemies of the modern nation, one internal and one external). I speak, of course, of “dumbing down”. This is an argument that’s usually presented in terms of either class or out-and-out elitism, as if it’s a clash between Oxbridge-educated Old Boys who spend their days memorising poems in Latin and people whose idea of education is the ability to know when to say “bank”.

But I don’t think I know anyone over the age of thirty who doesn’t believe, either rationally or instinctively, that people are intrinsically stupider than they used to be. Why is this? True, most teachers will tell you that the education system went to pieces after the 1970s, but this doesn’t ring true as an all-round explanation. I don’t seem to be stupid, at least not in any sense but the social one, and yet I can say in all honesty that school never taught me a bleeding thing. So I’m amused by the current “anti-poverty” advertisement which insists that as well as food and healthcare, ‘every child has the right to go to school’. To me, school means bigotry, ignorance, terror, repression, savagery, and teachers whose idea of moral training seems to owe more to Jim Davidson than Mahatma Gandhi, so this is one of the many “rights” in our culture which I feel we could probably do without.

Then where did I get my smarts from, if indeed I can be said to have them? From my family? It seems doubtful: none of them ever tried to teach me anything at all, apart from my Stalinist granddad, and he was such a nuisance that I generally ignored anything he said. From reading, then? The usual assumption is that anyone literate must have learned everything they know from books, but I was never a big reader, and I used paperbacks to build castles more often than I tried looking inside them. From playing with Lego, possibly...? It sounds fatuous, but it did give me a keen sense of object-manipulation, and construction toys do have a proven effect on the minds of the young. And yet I didn’t spend that much time playing with Lego. Which leaves… television?

Yes. I did watch a huge amount of television. I’d certainly say that most of the “hard” knowledge I have about the world – knowledge of things and people and places, knowledge made up of solid facts rather than odd experiences – has come from television, not from the written word. Today, this sounds like the admission of someone with the intellectual faculties of either a footballer’s wife or a Dancing on Ice contestant, but the truth is… I think I’m part of the last generation in Britain which could realistically claim that TV makes you smarter. Before the 1980s, the BBC genuinely believed itself to be a public service, rather than just using the phrase “public service” as an excuse to draw in the licence fee. The gulf between BBC TV and the commercial channels was wider then, and I was brought up in a household that barely ever watched ITV. In those days, television was supposed to teach you things, it was supposed to take you places you’d never heard of and make you ask questions about the world. In effect, I’m the embodiment of BBC Man: middle-class and literate, but with no university background and educated almost entirely by my own sense of curiosity. This used to be seen as a kind of ideal, and perhaps the thing which bothers me most about the modern media is the knowledge that if I’d been born twenty-five years later, then I almost certainly would have grown up stupid. I, Claudius was no more historically accurate than a Mel Gibson movie, yet thousands of people felt compelled to find out more about ancient Rome after it was broadcast. The programmes Johnny Ball made for children’s television were basically just science lessons with jokes and big props that occasionally went “zzzoom” or “woop” or “ka-bang”, yet we went straight home after school and watched this stuff of our own free will. Is there any populist programme now, on any channel, that even considers the notion of “finding out”? Even documentary series like Horizon come across as soundbite versions of the subject matter, rather than trying to get the viewers genuinely involved.

(Actually, the only modern programme I can think of which ostensibly tries to rouse the intellectual curiosity of the audience is Q.I., despite the offensive host and the rule which seems to demand that one panellist per week will be utterly unbearable. There’s a risk of repeating myself here, so I’ll simply say that in a programme that’s meant to be about strange and interesting facts, repeatedly hiring Jo Brand to sit on the panel and shout ‘who cares?’ is like hiring someone to stand behind the chair on Mastermind and make farting noises whenever the contestant tries to answer a question.)

I said, just a few days ago, that marketing has done more damage to our culture than anything else in the Western world. What they call “dumbing down” is part of the same process: a universal blanding-out, a system of removing all the awkward, unexpected details in order to get the widest possible audience response. But generation by generation, this just makes the audience stupider. You end up clever if there are things in your environment that make you want to find out how the world works. You end up stupid if you’ve got no reason to even ask questions. Remove the interesting crinkles, take away the awkward spiky bits, and… yes, you probably do get a better audience appreciation index. You also get a society full of dullards.

I don’t know whether they really did change University Challenge because they thought “reading” might confuse the audience. But the point remains that intelligence has got nothing to do with how much you know, and everything to do with your ability to contextualise. When someone tells you they’re reading microbiology, you instinctively know that “reading” means “studying”, because nothing else would make sense in that context. Changing it seems like an admission that the viewers might not be able to work it out for themselves. So if the two words essentially mean the same thing in this context, then why should I think “reading” is preferable…? Quite simply because it does come across as a bit odd, because the curious, almost-archaic sound of it made the English language seem slightly more interesting, even if it didn’t exactly liven up the programme. Now things are slightly less interesting, which is what “dumbing down” really means.

Slaughterhouse, supercluster, vortex, and gross domestic happiness

I sometimes wonder why I don't write about on my blog the kinds of things that catch my interest in daily life, and which I might mention in e-mails to the one or two people who keep in touch with me. I think it's because I generally neglect my blog until the pressure of frustration overflows, so that I usually end up posting some species of rant. It's not really that I don't mean what I say so much as... I don't know what it is, actually. Maybe I feel like I'm imprisoning myself in a very limited persona or something. Anyway, I thought I'd briefly mention some of the things that have caught my attention recently. Then again, I feel like I really want to keep anything 'positive' to myself. I think that is a kind of misanthropy, actually - it's a misanthropy that can be understood by analysis of the word 'unspoilt'. An unspoilt region is generally a region with not many people, and preferably none at all. The irony with which we should all be familiar by now is that when human beings, in their longing for the unspoilt, try and go there, it is no longer unspoilt; they have spoilt it, by definition, with their own rancid presence. I suppose this touches on my feelings about writing generally. I feel like writing is an essence to capture the unspoilt. But if it is published, especially on the Internet, then it is exposed to the spoiling gaze of Youtube Yahoos.

Not all of the below is to do with the 'unspoilt', but some of it is. And maybe the rest is to do with it by implication.



First of all, I would like to urge people to watch this documentary, called The Task of Blood, which deals with life (and death) in a slaughterhouse in Northern England. I discovered the link through Interbreeding, where it is promised that analysis of the documentary is to follow. I don't really have much to say about the documentary, and hope that it speaks for itself. The narrator frames the programme with a quote along the lines of, "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian." The Interbreeding angle is more concerned with the culture of working class British males.

Next, I don't know how long this link will be up, but I always find these kind of space pictures very beautiful and fascinating. I suppose it's the ultimate in the unspoilt, in a way, and a reminder of how very local human 'spoiling' is. Looking at this kind of this, I feel like nothing really matters, anyway. The only real shame is that I personally was burdened with existence (can't speak for anyone else there). It's a curious feeling, or cycle of feelings. First I wish the world were a better place, then I become hopeless, because of the state of humanity, then I'm glad that the human race is so pitiful and limited, then I'm resentful that existence is imposed on us at all in a universe where we're obviously of no importance, then I wish the world were a better place... Incidentally, I was quite awestruck to learn recently about superclusters. There's definitely something inspiring in the idea of a supercluster to me. They seem related to something else that fasicnates me - fractals.



Penultimately, I also learned, more recently still, of the Pacific Trash Vortex. This is an accumulation of plastic waste the size of Texas, which ocean currents have brought together in the middle of the Pacific.

And finally, last night I watched a programme about Bhutan, an area of the world of which I previously knew next to nothing. I must say, it was pretty much love at first sight for me. Bhutan is, apparently, close to Tibet, both geographically and culturally, and I have long felt there to be something special about the atmosphere and aesthetic of Tibet, although I only know of it second-hand. Bhutan shared that atmosphere. The Wikipedia entry on Bhutan tells us that: "Bhutan is one of the most isolated and least developed nation in the world. Nonetheless, it is the happiest least developed country on earth." And they even have a citation to back up this assertion. I was interested to note the following:

In a response to accusations in 1987 by a journalist from UK's Financial Times that the pace of development in Bhutan was slow, the King said that "Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product." This statement appears to have presaged recent findings by western economic psychologists, including 2002 Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, that question the link between levels of income and happiness. The statement signaled his commitment to building an economy that is appropriate for Bhutan's unique culture, based on Buddhist spiritual values, and has served as a unifying vision for the economy. In addition, the policy seems to be reaping the desired results: in a recent survey organized by the University of Leicester in the UK, Bhutan was ranked as the planet's 8th happiest place.

This is in part interesting to me because I basically despise the role that my own country plays in the world - the role of materialistic expansion. It's easy to be cynical about what the King of Bhutan's motives might have been in making the statement he did - not knowing his motivation, I will not comment except to say that I'm just glad that some leader on some country on Earth feels capable to express sentiments that do not put the economy before all else.



I had a strange sensation watching the programme. I certainly wanted to chop wood on those mountain slopes with Laya girls, and drink fungus caterpiller whiskey with some old geezer in a knitted tent, and see blue sheep(?) in the snow. But I also felt regret that television cameras were being taken there at all. I feel like saying, please don't go to Bhutan, now that I've said it looks great. I know I'd love to.

Labels: Bhutan, slaughterhouses, superclusters, trash vortex

The Sanctimoniousness of Oprah Winfrey

Don't read James fucking Frey, read Chomu!

I'm being lazy and constructing a blog entry out of bits and pieces I have lying around. Someone sent me this link, about the 'writer' James Frey. It deals with the fact that James Frey is now treated with suspicion because his book, A Million Little Pieces, supposedly a memoir of his recovery from drug addiction, was found to be (at least in parts) a fabrication; apparently he hadn't had some of the experiences that he claimed to. Frey has now written a new book, and there is speculation as to whether people and publishers will be interested in it or not, in light of the fact that he lied about his first book. Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham says:

The point is he's written a great novel, and by summer of 2008 people will be able to approach James Frey with a clearer mind. Time will have passed.

An unnamed editor from a 'commercial house', responds to this, thus:

I don't like the tone of that. It suggests that it is the 'people' who have the problem, i.e. they need a 'clearer mind' in order to see the true value of James Frey's writing. The man is a liar and a fake. He may be a good writer—it's not like you have a be a good person to be a good writer. Actually, most writers are horrible people. At the same time, I would have felt icky about paying someone that shady 7 figures. Does morality have any place in a bottom-line business? I'm not sure anymore.

I felt sufficiently provoked by the whole thing to write a comment, which may or may not actually be posted on the site in question. Anyway, I shall paste it here. This is what I wrote:

I think people are really missing the point about this whole James Frey thing. It only goes to show what a minuscule number of human beings actually understand what writing is. There's no such thing as a 'true story'. A story is A STORY. It's an interpretation of reality, and the point is not whether or not something 'really happened' (that only matters in law courts), the point is what it means to you as you read it.

So, the real question is, is James Frey a good writer? I really doubt it. I've read some excerpts of his 'prose', which was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. There was no precision there at all, it was all "you will be impressed by this!!!" And that's why he got the readers he deserved - readers who take everything literally - and why he has ended up with egg on his face.

As for the 'one editor at a commercial house', I'd like to put to him the question that is posed at the end of the film The Mission, "Is this just the way the world is, or is this the way we have made it?"

He asks, "Does morality have any place in a bottom-line business?"

I very much suspect the answer is, "No, thanks to people like you."

Well, I wrote that comment quite hastily, so I didn't really have time to go into why James Frey is a bad writer. Apparently his book became a best-seller after he was recommended by Oprah Winfrey. She obviously has no idea what good writing is. It didn't take me long to discover that I hate Frey's writing. I even hate the title of his book. A Million Little Pieces. What is he trying to convey? "It was a really bad experience. It was so bad that, er, that it broke me in pieces. Yeah, that's right. It was really, really, really bad. So bad that I screamed and vomited and stuff like that, and I was literally broken into a million pieces. Well, not literally, but metaphorically, but you know what I mean. And drugs are bad, by the way, so don't do drugs. I've done them, because I'm tough and bad, but I've stopped doing them now, but it was really bad, and so am I, because I did them, but now I've stopped doing them, so I'm good, and bad, and tough."

That is my rendition of James Frey. I'll excerpt from the actual book here, and see if you can spot the difference:

I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them and I look around and I'm in the back of a plane and there's no one near me. I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood. I reach for the call button and I find it and I push it and I wait and thirty seconds later an
Attendant arrives.
How can I help you?
Where am I going?
You don't know?
No.
You're going to Chicago, Sir.
How did I get here?
A Doctor and two men brought you on.
They say anything?
They talked to the Captain, Sir. We were told to let you sleep.
How long till we land?
About twenty minutes.
Thank you.
Although I never look up, I know she smiles and feels sorry for me. She shouldn't.

Some people (I can only deduce this from the fact that Oprah Winfrey championed this guy and he became a bestseller) actually read this shit and thought, "Wow, this is some writer." I suppose they think that a book should be a 'roller-coaster ride', or something like that. If you want a roller-coaster ride, visit a fairground. Now, I'm not saying that books can't be exciting. What I'm saying is, I wish people who were after buying and selling simple sensationalist thrills would not ruin the whole publishing scene by promoting the idea that that is what a book should be. A book is not a roller-coaster, and anyone who thinks it is is clearly showing their ignorance on the subject of writing. James Frey was writing books for people who know nothing about books, and was promoted by someone (Oprah) who clearly knows nothing about books, and so, when they discovered that the book wasn't real, he got what was coming to him. Any decent writer knows that books aren't real. Frey thought he could make money by duping people who know nothing about books into thinking it was real - believing it was real was the only way they could get the vulgar little roller-coaster ride they wanted. They were angry when they discovered the movement of the roller-coaster was all simulated.

Afterwards, it seems, Oprah Winfrey wanted to crucify Frey on her show for lying (lying is what writers are paid for, for God's sake!). I don't feel sorry for Frey. If you play by the rules of an idiot game, this is what happens. And, because he played by those rules, he is also a bad writer. If only he had thrown the rules of the game back in the faces of those who had read his book and told them how stupid they were to believe it in the first place, perhaps the world would have been a slightly better place for us writers, but apparently he remains servile, undoubtedly for financial reasons.

Anyway, there is an alternative to Frey and Oprah.

Don't read Frey, read Chomu.

Don't waste your time watching The Bourne Ultimatum, read Chomu.

Some futurescape of strangeness

In the summer I was wandering in Kew Botanical Gardens with a friend, when we came across a rather intriguing piece of stone. Upon closer examination, we found it to be a wounded angel. Strangely moved, as at a fragment of timelessness that had fallen from the vault of a crumbling heaven, I took out my camera and recorded the image.



Later, flicking through the pages of New Scientist, I discovered something that I recognised, though I had not seen it before. The name on the page in the magazine was Emily Young. I seemed to remember it. And then the memory of the wounded angel in the botanical gardens came back to me.

Labels: Emily Young

Sylvia, it was really nothing.

Recently, I watched the entire film Sylvia, in installments, on Youtube. You can do the same, if you wish, starting here. The film, for those who have not heard of it, is about the relationship between the two poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. (Incidentally, I once met Ted Hughes, but that's another story.) I'm not going to give a review of the film. Briefly, I thought it was very thin. I suppose it's a 'slice of life', but I feel like the slice could be a little thicker. Maybe this impression was also something to do with the fact that I was watching it in a tiny frame on a computer screen. (In case you're wondering, my new prescription sunglasses seemd to be helping greatly with my use of computer.) Also, I don't like Gwyneth Paltrow. I believe that her mask of winsomeness hides a howling and voracious ambition. But let's put that to one side. The film was at least good enough to make me watch the whole thing on Youtube, which can't be bad. What's more, the ending had quite an effect on me, even though I knew what was coming, and it has helped me to define or reaffirm some of my basic feelings about life.

I first encountered Sylvia Plath as a teenager. If I haven't mentioned her much, for instance on this blog, that is probably for two reasons. First of all, she really is the kind of poet you 'encounter as a teenager', who embodies all the kind of teenage angst that is the reason so many people become interested in poetry in their adolescent (and why so many people later forget about poetry altogether when they've settled down in a good job with a steady partner). Secondly, I think I did not quite get her poetry. I knew there was something there, but it wasn't straightforward, kitchen sink kind of angst. There was something a little bit surreal about it, and surreal in a way that I found opaque rather than translucent. All the colours in her landscape were somehow wrong. Philip Larkin once reviewed her poetry, and, though impressed, found her world a little too horrific. He wondered whether she were representing life as she actually experienced it every day, or whether she somehow had to work herself up into the right mood to write this kind of thing. If it was the former, he concluded, "then the reader and Ms Plath must sadly part company." (I'm afraid I don't have all my books with me now, so this is from memory and probably inaccurate.) He also noted somewhere that when Plath describes, in one of her poems, how her piano teacher had found her touch, though technically good, "strangely wooden", that he felt he knew what the teacher meant. And so do I.



I don't want to give the wrong impression. Plath has certainly meant something to me (and I have read a considerable amount of her work, including The Bell Jar and the collection of short stories, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams), but I'm hard-pressed to say exactly what. I feel as if I connect with her partly because she spent some time in the part of the world where I grew up, which is to say, in North Devon. Thinking about this simple fact makes me feel strangely close to Plath, almost as if I could have met her. She once wrote a poem called 'Blackberrying', and the moment I saw the title, I knew she had written it about an experience of being in North Devon. I feel I should also mention that the name of the band I was in for five years - The Dead Bell - came from a poem (two poems, in fact), by Sylvia Plath. Myself and Pete Black were trawling through the pages of poetry collections to find a random, inspiring phrase, and we eventually fixed on 'the dead bell, from the poem 'Berck-Plage', although the phrase also appears in 'Death and Co.'.

I don't intend to recapitulate here the entire story of Sylvia Plath. What I want to talk about specifically is the effect that the film had on me. For those who do not know, Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty by gassing herself. She had made at least two previous attempts at suicide. Plath's poetry is generally considered dark and haunting, but I had never really related the poetry to the chronology of her life. It had always existed out of time for me - dark poems by the famous poet Sylvia Plath. Of course, they were written in time, in the specific context of an unfolding life, and Plath could not ever have thought of herself in quite the way she was known to me - as the timeless, famous, canonical poet. Her life was a struggle to become that thing, and it seems that she did not truly become 'Sylvia Plath', as the world knows her, until after her death.

I did not find the film especially dark, however, until somewhere past the halfway point. When I thought about it, it did not take me long to realise that there was a certain scene after which the whole thing had become almost unbearable. The scene in question is one in which Al Alvarez is concerned about Plath's mental welfare, and tries to persuade her not to commit suicide (presumably he suspects this is on her mind). He says the following: "Look, one thing I do know about death is it is not a reunion or a homecoming. There's no... Your life doesn't flash before you and the missing piece of you clicks into place. It's just... there's just fuck all. There's nothing." His is the stoical, pragmatic, English approach (as Burroughs said of someone else, "one of those very English types who takes a dim view of existence: 'Life after death? I'm afraid not.'") that when your life "just keeps getting worse", you "just keep going".

It was from this point that it seemed to me that Plath's suicide was inevitable.

I don't know how things really were in Plath's life, or even how Paltrow was intending to play the role, but I could feel the psychology of the situation inside myself. At first, to some people, the idea that after death there is just 'fuck all', might seem like the ulitmate reason not to kill yourself. Who would prefer nothing to something, however bad the something? And Alvarez must have known something of the psychology of suicide, to have attempted it. And yet, he did not know enough. He did not save Plath. There is a certain kind of psychology, which I understand intimately, that he was unable to address. If there really is 'fuck all', then that nothingness feeds backwards into life itself, and life itself becomes 'fuck all'. And when life itself is fuck all, there seems to be nothing left to do except say, "Fuck all of you" and fuck off. Which is what Plath did, in effect. Alvarez had unwittingly, with his statement of 'fuck all', narrowed Plath's vision down to a tunnel vision fixed on the vanishing point of 'fuck all', which was all that was left. And that tunnel leading to fuck all was exactly how the rest of the film felt to me.

Alvarez was no doubt right to sense that Plath was seeking some kind of reassurance in the idea of death, but he was clearly wrong if he thought that taking away that reassurance would prevent her from killing herself. This is something hard to explain to someone who has never been in such a place, there's there's a flipping over that happens when a person contemplating suicide is put off by the thought of mere nothingness. That mere nothingness, after all, comes from the world outside, from strangers who insist that they know this or that thing about the universe, in complete contradiction to one's own inner experience. That nothingness is an attempt to cancel the person's interior experience. Now a rebellion of the utterly abject takes place, a complete rejection of the exterior for completely rejecting the interior. And this is suicide. In his novel No Longer Human, the writer Dazai explains this with striking simplicity:

I decided as a last resort, my last hope of escaping the inferno, to write a long letter to my father in which I confessed my circumstances fully and accurately (with the exception, of course, of my relations with women). If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.

Here we see suicide as a version of Pascal's wager: In this case, if life is 'fuck all' (and if we apply the maxim that 'all's well that ends well' in reverse, to arrive at 'all's ill that ends ill', or simply, 'all's ill that ends', then this is certainly true of an existence in which there is fuck all waiting after death), then we lose nothing by disposing of it, but if there is something waiting after death, then we have not only had our revenge on the hated faux-nothingness of life, but we have made the gains that we longed for all the sooner. We can see the same feelings expressed in other places, for instance, the song Asleep, by The Smiths, which seems to be a kind of suicide note from someone who has just taken an overdose, ends with the lines: "There is another world/There is a better world/Well, there must be." Why "must be"? The answer is simple; This world is so unspeakably vile that it is impossible for there not to be another world. This is precisely the 'flipping over' that I have attempted to describe, the complete rebellion against an external world that claims to be all there is and therefore cancels out your internal world entirely.

But I'm getting ahead of myself just a little. I was struck by the way that Alvarez claimed to know what death was like. It is this 'knowing' that gives the entire power and momentum to the horror with which the film, and Plath's life, closes. The knowing is ex nihilo. Like God, who had no previous God to create him, this knowledge is based on nothing whatsoever, no prior knowledge has given birth to it. And yet it seems to say, "This alone cannot be questioned." It is a powerful rune of forbidding. Without that rune, the tunnel into which Plath is forced would fall apart. Let me at least ask here, exactly how does Alvarez know the things he knows about death? Is his knowledge supernatural, permeating the boundary between life and death? If so, then he has already contradicted himself. I am especially intrigued because I have never known anything, EVER. And yet I am surrounded by human beings who claim to know things all the time. I wonder what it must feel like, or how they know these things. It's a mystery to me. These days, whenever I hear someone who claims to know something, I immediately feel resentement. "Here's another self-styled sensible adult," I think, "trying to exercise authority over me by laying claim to knowledge." I have a fundamental loathing of authority, but have never been able really to express my anger. I believe that Sylvia Plath was the same. Alvarez told her, in effect, that her life was meaningless, and she felt unable to challenge him. What she could do, however, even if she couldn't speak her anger at the assumptions of authority, was to kill herself. (Again, I'm not saying that this was how things really happened, but talking in terms of the psychology of the story presented in the film.)

I myself have lived in that black tunnel leading to death, which is what the end of the film depicts. Throughout my entire third decade, there was not a moment of my waking existence that was not taken up with thoughts of death. No one seemed to notice. In fact, one of the upsetting things about the film was that fact that it reaffirmed to me how alone we all are. No one stopped Plath from killing herself. No one. Apparently there were people who cared about her. There were people who knew she was talented. She had two children. Weren't there people who thought she was worth saving? Presumably there were such people. But not a single one of them did anything to stope her killing herself. And I think this is fundamentally how human life is. For some reason, people rarely even notice the existence of other people, except as a presence that either gives pain or pleasure. And even if they do notice another person, it seems basically impossible for a person to step out of their own life and into the life of another and thereby save them. I realised in my twenties that talking with people would never solve anything, that no one could help me. I would have to go it alone in all fundamental emotional, spiritual ways, though I'm grateful for the material help that I have received and for people who have given me their time. In simple terms, I know very well that, if it came to it, no one would or could stop me from killing myself. That's what it comes down to. And that's what the film reminded me of. And if I must be alone in this way, then I'd certainly appreciate it if people who can't and don't want to step out of their life into mine would at least stop fucking around by imposing their own 'knowing' on my inner experience.



Let's say, however, that Alvarez is right, and that there is fuck all waiting for us after death. After all, since I actually know nothing, I certainly don't know this to be false. Not only is this an idea I have lived with (really live with) for many years, it's an idea I take on again and again, and took on from the very moment that Alvarez claimed to 'know' it, in the film. Therefore, for me, Plath's death in the film was not sad. It could not be sad, as that suggests some kind of comforting catharsis. It was simply horrifying. Her last moments were, in effect, her whole life (all's well that ends well, remember?), and no amount of poetry and posthumous fame can sublimate away that horror. In fact, that horror is, in the end, all that there is. Larkin was wrong. The reader cannot part company with Ms. Plath. We are all already living in the same world of horror with her, in a landscape where all the colours are wrong.

A while back, in an earlier blog entry, I spoke about Ligotti's latest work, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I made some comments about that work on Ligotti Online. I described the work, humourously, as "a long philosophical treatise on why human life is inexcusably horrible". I suppose my humour here was a way of distancing myself from the content of the essay. Although Ligotti's position is not (and could not be) mine one hundred percent, since reading that essay, I have become confirmed, however, in certain feelings about human existence. While it's true that no one really knows whether there is fuck all after death or not, no one really knows whether there is something more life-affirming waiting there, either. I think, for me, life really has come down to a very simple question. Do we know that there is some satisfactory mode of existence after death? At the moment the answer is no. Therefore, we must cease to procreate. If we do not, then all we are doing is spreading the horror that was embodied in the end of Plath's life.

I haven't quite finished this post, however. I suppose I want to say a few words on how I have managed to stay alive, or something like that. I'm aware that my position might seem contradictory in a way, but, I'm just in the middle of the mess known as life, and trying to make sense of it. I don't even pretend to have settled anything. The 'contradiction' might appear in the fact that I am proposing that it would be better if the human race were to gently wind itself down into non-existence, but that I am also suggesting that I am not an atheist, and... I suppose suggesting that there might be something like a meaning to life.

Alvarez's 'knowing' is the basis of atheism. Yes, atheism is strangely gnostic. This knowing seems almost a moral imperative (from where?), and constitutes an ultimate injunction never to think outside of the box of materialism. This is, I believe, the box that Burroughs refers to when he says that scientists are "cowering in the toilet of eternity". I never chose not to be atheist. I simply came to realise by degrees that my thoughts were, of themselves, straying from that box, into all sorts of forbidden regions. As a result, the walls of the tunnel which leads to death (an extended form of the box), have disappeared, and I find myself able to breathe a little easier. Not so very much easier, but a little easier, anyway. This, I am afraid, never happened for Plath. At the end of the film, as Plath is gassing herself, some lines from her poem, 'The Arrival of the Bee Box' are quoted:

The box is locked, it is dangerous...
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

Interestingly, just before she kills herself, there's a moment where she's lingering on the landing, and her neighbour sees her and asks if something's wrong. She is confused, but replies, "I just had the most beautiful dream." It's hardly surprising that, in the face of impending 'fuck all', she would have a beautiful dream, hardly surprising at all. Try to push it down, and the dream comes back somewhere else. The materialists try to destroy it, but how, exactly, do you destroy a dream?



I wonder what I would have said to Sylvia, if, somehow, I had been able to meet her blackberrying in the lanes of North Devon, ten years or more before I was born, and knew that she was thinking of killing herself. I don't think there's anything wrong, once you are born, with thinking outside of the box, with finding meaning in your own dreams, with trusting your inner experience over the 'knowing' of strangers. I don't know what I could have said to her, really. I hope that I would have been able to say something, although now, of course, her death and the horror of her death is irrecoverable, beyond anyone's reach. I certainly would not have told her what Alvarez did. Maybe I would have said that there was no reason to value external things over the internal. But I'm groping a bit, and I don't know if that would have helped. "You will have a beautiful dream. That is enough. Others will not understand. They will try to destroy it. They will even think they are helping you by doing so. They cannot destroy it." Something like that? "And you know that thing that Alvarez said about it all ending in 'nothing'? That thing he said - that too, was really nothing."

Labels: Sylvia Plath